Studio Martha Schwindling

In the eighteenth century, the term “revolution” came to designate a “violent overthrow of the existing political and social order,” a meaning fixed by the French Revolution. Before that time, astronomers had long used it to describe the orbits of the celestial bodies.

The essayistic group exhibition Genossin Sonne [Comrade Sun] is dedicated to works of art and artistic theories that connect the cosmos, and especially the sun – the most important provider of energy for life on earth – to social and political movements. The project inquires into the extent to which not just the natural environment on our earth but, on a grander scale, even the universe contributes to historical processes.

The exhibition design is a walk-in diorama, a landscape of platforms and hanging screens, in which the exhibited works appear as parts of a solar system. The undeniable artificiality of this constellation corresponds to the abstraction of the models and visualizations that have always shaped our understanding of the universe.