Declined Declinations

<p>Over the past decade, Bea Schlingelhoff has become increasingly known for producing site-responsive and situationally-specific exhibition projects that test institutional capacity for exposure work. Schlingelhoff’s exhibitions often initiate or accelerate an internal reflexive process of uncovering, divulging, and repairing historical trauma present within the immediate context of exhibiting institutions that hire the artist. For Schlingelhoff, tasking institutional representatives with this behind-the- scenes work of confrontational exposure and reparative justice is an artistic position-taking—a means by which the artist as a short-term contracted worker attempts to maintain safe distance from the deeply unsafe social conditions inherent to all institutions, and particularly with respect to transitional institutions claiming to be committed to structural change. Anticipating real danger when the freighted memory, identity, and legacy of an institution is unsettled, Schlingelhoff calls on institutional representatives to respond to this induced stress test. In doing so, the artist’s exhibitions consistently gauge institutional responsibility by asking: what capacity to respond do representatives have on behalf of their unsettling institutions?</p>