15 – 17 August 2018

Contractual Situations We Live By is an ongoing itinerant series that considers how artists utilize legal contracts to intervene in the transactional structures, property relations, and labor conditions that artistic production operates within. Contract-specific actions that respond to the increasingly conflicted relationship between artistic works and producing a livelihood in the art field necessarily engage struggles over legal property and contract labor in the broader political economy today. By intervening in the actual legal-economic mechanisms that govern our encounter with art, artists are not solely asserting their rights as artistic interests and practical needs, but are also resisting an expansive legal order that codifies what dominant economic authority has qualified as justice. At the Kunsthalle Bern, this series emphasizes distinct long-term efforts by artists to initiate contractual situations and implement legal agreements that challenge the law as a neutral framework of conduct, redefine working conditions, and oppose predominant relations of ownership, exchange, and accumulation. With contributions by Jaya Klara Brekke, Maria Eichhorn, Adam Linder, Cameron Rowland, and Ramaya Tegegne

Laws that govern artists’ works remain entangled in settled expectations of property speculation and unpaid labor. The resulting presumption of exclusion and exploitation, so deeply entrenched in histories of race, gender, and class domination, is inculcated by the vast majority of individuals and institutions commissioning, acquiring, exhibiting, loaning, and selling art today. Beyond art itself as legal property consistently produced under the most precarious working conditions, the greater field of art is a global political economy that deploys, retrenches, disposes of, and redevelops property and its attendant labor. These legislatively ratified practices of monetary extraction and deprivation evidence an art field that is not merely coexistent with the continued history of subjugating economic regimes, but that actively reproduces these regimes. Indeed, despite persistent characterizations of an art world dissociated from “real world” problems, it is widely known that by relying on property speculation, exploited labor, tax avoidance, abusive loans, and insuperable debt, the field of art is yet another site in everyday life where legally legitimated and socially accepted economic violence is prevalent.

Jaya Klara Brekke discusses the politics and ethics of “smart contracts”-legal agreements written directly into source-code housed on networked servers and implemented through a distributed ledger platform (i.e. blockchain). Brekke questions how this technology, in rendering a legal agreement as a computerized transaction protocol, can substantiate claims that decentralization, neutrality, and immutability are features guaranteed by the protocol alone.
Wednesday, August 15 / 19.00-20.00

Maria Eichhorn displays an informational placard and her video, Shares in the Kunsthalle Bern (2005), at the newly built Kunsthalle Bar to promote her ongoing initiative that makes unlimited shares of equity capital in the Kunsthalle Bern Association available for purchase. Eichhorn’s re-issuing of Association share certificates-initiated as a central component of the artist’s 2001 exhibition Money at the Kunsthalle Bern –continues to raise significant questions today about the legal-economic structure of the Kunsthalle and its constituent relations.
Wednesday, August, 15-Friday, August 17, Placard and Single-channel video, Die Anteilscheine der Kunsthalle Bern/Shares in the Kunsthalle Bern (4:3, color, sound, 6 min., 2005) permanently on view

Adam Linder presents Footnote Service: Some Trade, a performance work hired by the Kunsthalle Bern, and discusses a bartering, or trade-exchange, contract he drafted that governs terms and conditions of non-monetary exchange in the hiring of Some Trade. Linder reflects on how specifically his contractual agreement with the Kunsthalle Bern complicates settled expectations of contract labor in service-based economies.
Thursday, August, 16 / 17.00-22.00 Performance ongoing with Sam Gendel, Justin F Kennedy, Brooke Stamp, Stephen Thompson
Friday, August 17 / 20.30-21.30 Discussion with the artist

Cameron Rowland discusses his use of a rental contract that establishes the temporary possession of his artworks by an individual collector or collecting institution. Rowland’s critical project of the rental contract realizes how art can be wrested from the expectations of property ownership, while it also evidences the racially encrypted and everyday absolute right of property to exclude.
Friday, August 17 / 19.00-20.30

Ramaya Tegegne convenes a working group to review and propose amendments to the Kunsthalle Bern’s policies that affect artist fee agreements and racialized and gendered representation within the institution. Tegegne works collaboratively to reconsider the divergent and intersecting relations between labor conditions for artists and wider social struggles created by legal-economic exclusion in the Swiss context.
Friday, August 17 / 13.00-16.00 Open working group session led by the artist with Noémi Michel (Senior Lecturer in political theory, University of Geneva) and Rohit Jain (Social Anthropologist, University of Zurich, Institute New Switzerland INES)

Contractual Situations We Live By wird organisiert von Eric Golo Stone mit Valérie Knoll / Kunsthalle Bern.

Jaya Klara Brekke’s lecture is presented in collaboration with the Sommerakademie Paul Klee. With gratitude to Tirdad Zolghadr (Director Sommerakademie Paul Klee) the Sommerakademie Paul Klee 2017-19 Fellows.

Maria Eichhorn’s Shares in The Kunsthalle Bern (2005) courtesy of the Kunsthalle Bern Foundation and the Kunstmuseum Bern.

The performance work by Adam Linder, with Sam Gendel, Justin F Kennedy, Brooke Stamp, and Stephen Thompson, courtesy of Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, was hired in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Bern and Dampfzentrale Bern as part of République Géniale.

Text: Eric Golo Stone

Image: Meme from Local 2110’s #WeAreMoMA campaign, courtesy Local 2110