IAN CLEWE & LEON FILTER: BIOGRAPHIE DES SUSPECTS

Presentation by Ian Clewe and Leon Filter, introducing their residency at Bulegoa z/b as invited artists in residency.

BIOGRAPHIE DES SUSPECTS
1848, shortly after finishing the Communist Manifesto, Karl and Jenny Marx are imprisoned in Brussels, accused of arming the workers. In fear of the revolution, a drama unfurls, leading to their expulsion from Belgium. The surveillance records produced in the lead-up to these events picture the infrastructure around the production of the Manifesto and incite us to lay out the conditions that made its production possible.

Working through historical documents such as police surveillance reports, diary entries, letters and newspaper articles, Ian Clewe and Leon Filter take these historical narratives and counter-narratives as their point of departure to propose re-reading the Communist Manifesto towards its social and material production conditions.

The presentation of Biographie des Suspects initiates a reading room at Bulegoa z/b that aims to bind together historical events with a shared present. Re-reading the Manifesto, we pose the questions: where can we find ourselves within this revolutionary effort? And how do we make new contributions under current conditions?

Leon Filter (1988) works as an artist around forms of pedagogy, the cinematic and unfitness, primarily in performative readings, video and publications. A continuously accompanying practice is the Listening Group (www.listeninggroup.info), which initiates communal conversations and inquiries on selected texts and films. He presented his work among others with KW Berlin, Van Abbe Museum, Sonsbeek 20→24, August Verlag Berlin and soon with his Artist book MUMMYTHEDADDY with Edition Malade, and was supported by DAAD, Mondriaan fonds, Akademie der Künste and Akademie Schloss Solitude. He studied Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute and Artistic Research and Film/Video at Merz Akademie.

Ian Clewe works as an artist, researcher and publisher, individually and in collaborations with others. Often gravitating between sculptural and painterly means and photographic ends, his multilayered practice is informed by pictorial and social discourses surrounding the still life genre and the conceptual strategies of the readymade. His work was supported by, amongst others, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Woonstad Rotterdam, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Ministry of Science, Research and Art Baden-Württemberg and the Erasmus+ teaching mobility program. Since 2018 he has been teaching at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany, where he directs the first-year program in Art, Design and Media.

The research was supported by ¡REMEDIATE! and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.