Five things you can see.

Four things you can hear.

Three things you can feel.

Two things you can smell.

One thing you can taste.

And moreover, one thing that someone can witness to you.

Come to yourself.
Realize yourself.

A communication gap seems to have opened up. You try to rationalize it. Not a chance. Not without a counterpart. It seems familiar to you. But you don’t know why.

A phantasm arrives in a hurry and raises its hand in warning.

Everything has become twilight. Every light sent against the shadow has come back with three times the number of shadows, they have piled up and overlapped, overlaid each other, and then they have intoned a deafening echo of all answers, ever. Sometimes the something gets in the way of the echo and shoots silhouettes into their retinas. A final outside, an unknown, in every form known to light and horror.

A society that can better imagine the end of the world than the end of its own order has declared the present to be infinity and made infinity the organizing principle. A society of endless growth is inevitably a society without death. Conversely, those who cannot or do not want to choose immortality are simply denied death. Being able to deal with time as a limited resource – whether practically or theoretically – takes place outside of society in our culture, either through privilege or illness. In order to keep the endless growth going, we push death and darkness so far to the outside that we ourselves forget that we will die. Time is the class issue, but we talk about money, even though time is a real thing and money is a concept. But that makes everything that is human banal. And if culture doesn’t want to come to death, you have to bring death to culture. In the form of a thought experiment that sets the plot of the story and the exhibition itself in the future, in the hope of escaping the intrusive self-referential discourse of the present as part of the problem. In an intermedia science fiction exhibition piece about a present that expanded into infinity to such an extent that it had to absorb death itself. In a new adaptation for the Kunstverein Rhizom.

Laura Hatting was born in Leipzig in 1994. Canceled her language arts studies at the Angewandte, studied fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, works in trade fair construction and plays in black metal bands. Lives and works in Vienna. Current focus on genre literature and the abolition of the real in favor of “more productive” concepts by a capitalism that is running out of resources. Text “Only Death is Real”, written and performed by Laura Hatting, has been owned by the gottrekorder association since July 2024 under the artist’s existing right of use.

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