Across three Thursday evenings, we gather at ROZENSTRAAT to read texts and literary references that amplify the videos, photographs, and drawings in Julika Rudelius’s solo exhibition The Seamless Real.
Throughout the exhibition, muscular cars and polished bodies appear as fascinating symbols of status. Rudelius directs our gaze toward ready-made poses, social codes, and manufactured desire. We see bodies performing scripts, mediated through acrylic nails and paparazzi flashes, golden chains glittering like stars, car engines that become both thrill and threat. Desire and control merge into a seamless surface: refined and excessive, banal and violent.
As the exhibition draws us into seductive layers of power, their allure is never neutral. On screen, a staged reality begins to appear inseparable from our own, exposing the tension between being perceived and wanting to be perceived. How might we untame the objects and machines that define social status? In a world where social scripts shape our realities, how might desire become more fragile, poetic, or improvised?
Our gatherings are collective moments of reflection, sharing insights on the literary material and wandering through questions of self-perception, fictional realities, and automated desire. No prior experience is needed, just curiosity. You can join for one evening or the full series.
Sign up by sending an email to info@rozenstraat.com
Session 2
Artificial partners, mediated desire, and statistical intimacy – Who is the character? Is my fiction an autobiography?
> Hannah Black, “Press for Service,” from Dark Pool Party
> Danielle Chelosky, Female Loneliness Epidemic
> Christian Nirvana Damato, Chapter 5: “Technologies of Stereotypes, Mutations, and Contradictions” from Digisexuality to Statistical Desire