Lombardi—Kargl presents some notes…(barely written out), Thomas Locher’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery. Since the 1990s, the artist has been exploring themes such as law and justice. Thomas Locher’s artistic strategy is a conceptualism, whose methods of text-image-montage practices are essentially fed by deconstructive considerations and belong to an expanded understanding of institutional critique.
In his works, the artist negotiates the role that law plays in the construction of society, community, and history. In doing so, he explores the question of how the institution of law shapes its subjects and why this does not always work. In the exhibition, more recent works and one earlier work are placed in relation to each other. A frame functions as a presentation system, as a boundary marker, as an enclosure, a border.
Articles 1, 4, 6, 8, and 11 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which came into force in 1989 and to which 196 states have acceded to date, define the child as a human being – to name just one aspect. The Convention aims to protect children and safeguard their interests. Above all, its main objective is to guarantee their life (and survival), promote their development, and
prevent any discrimination. In five new works, Convention on the Rights of the Child, Locher continues his work on aspects of human rights. Using the method of commentary and specific questions (above all in a non-legal sense), the various articles are questioned as to their possible language and meaning, the content of the postulates, the effectiveness of the Convention, and its political and ethical meaning. Article 1 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child is on view at Schleifmühlgasse 5a together with an arrangement of children’s chairs, the Round Table (children’s version).
Subjektivierungen is an older work that goes back to the 1980s in terms of motifs. In these works, Thomas Locher addressed the normative nature of grammar (correct speech), but also the beauty of analytics. Grammatical rules accompany the subjects throughout their lives – they create a linguistic community (i.e. us) – and, alongside the various institutions through which the subjects pass, form a kind of continuous subordination regime.
The Indeterminate Norm and the Human Community, a new series of text-image combinations, deal with questions of law, the possibility and impossibility of community (including legal communities), and the possibility and impossibility of their representation, as well as questions of justice and violence. The visual backgrounds of the works are reproductions of images from European art history – they are secular representations of jurisdiction, juridical, truth-finding, or narratives of right and wrong political action. They show an artistic and political interest in the question of legal representability and the development and formation of law. The reproductions originate from various European cultural and historical periods, were predominantly commissioned works, and are assigned to the genre of the ‘image of justice’.  In combining the historical background and the commentaries, Thomas Locher is concerned with creating a vivid, stretched, and differential space of meaning, which is dedicated less to the expedient and more to the processual and to what has not yet been decided and is possibly undecidable.