Holding Pattern - And Other Loops
15. March 2025 - 27. July 2025 Dortmunder U, Level 3
Image: Stefan Panhans, Andrea Winkler, „Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1", 2016, Videostill. Performerin: Ixchel Mendoza Hernandez.
Holding Pattern is the English term for the tactic used by air traffic controllers to keep several aeroplanes in the air above a busy airport without allowing them to crash. This symbolic scenario unfolds the motif of remote control and mastery: the sense that human destinies are closely interwoven with the circuits of technology - interwoven with expectation and fear, danger and rescue, as well as geometry, aesthetics and even beauty.
What are the patterns that guide our lives? Do we design them ourselves, or are they written elsewhere, in dark zones that we can only glimpse but never fully see? Holding Pattern presents a selection of international artists who explore the choreographies, rhythms and algorithms that characterise modern life, the ways in which data is embodied and how bodies are transformed into data.
The exhibition Holding Pattern is the result of an invitation from Anne Hilde Neset (Oslo) to the award-winning writer Tom McCarthy to explore the themes of his books through contemporary art. McCarthy's publications repeatedly feature human figures in a kind of limbo (or in loops), embedded in the circuits of techno-informatic systems.
Artists: Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Åke Hodell, Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler, Susan Philipsz, Elizabeth Price
The exhibition will be on display at the HMKV from 15 March to 27 July 2025. The opening will take place on Friday, 14 March 2025 at 19:00.
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