Femke Herregraven (b. 1982, Nijmegen) is interested in the increasingly blurry boundaries between material and digital realities and the consequences for human existence resulting from this fusion. She draws on a systematic meta-narrative that accompanies her research and production at all times. It concerns complex structures and the rules of international finance, the processes of which are for the most part non-material despite demanding a material infrastructure, which they in turn shape and influence in sustained ways. Femke Herregraven’s first institutional solo show “A reversal of what is expected” at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster will be governed by two great supra-individual anxieties of our present-day world. According to Herregraven, these very fears are braided around the financial sector and ecological questions. She considers these two fields to be interconnected due to our reactions to them: we actually expect catastrophe (deriving from our experience), we school ourselves in predictions and speculation and ultimately try to save ourselves by taking out insurance policies that sometimes bet on and invest in those very catastrophes, that is to say, their speculative outcomes and consequences.
Curated by Kristina Scepanski.
Photos: LWL/Anne Neier and Thorsten Arendt