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 multiple planes circling above a crowded airport, ensuring they don’t collide. This symbolic scenario suggests themes of remote control, skill, and mastery; it evokes the intertwining of human destinies with technological circuits and touches on feelings of anticipation and fear, peril and safe arrival, as well as a sense of geometry, aesthetics, and even beauty.
What are the patterns that guide our lives? Do we create them ourselves, or are they written elsewhere, in dark zones that we can only glimpse but never in view? Holding Pattern presents a selection of international artists who explore the rituals, 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 - And Other Loops is the result of an invitation by Anne Hilde Neset (Oslo) to the award-winning writer Tom McCarthy to explore the themes of his books through contemporary art. In McCarthy's publications, human figures repeatedly appear, embedded in a kind of suspended state (or in loops) in the framework and circuits of techno-informatic systems.
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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