PATRIARCHY FADES, THE FUTURE RISES

PATRIARCHY FADES, THE FUTURE RISES presents, in the most literal sense, Markus Keibel doing what Markus Keibel has always done: taking structures that present themselves as fixed, whether the Enlightenment’s faith in reason, the philosophical canon, or scripture as it’s been visually handed down, and demonstrating, patiently and from the inside, that each was assembled rather than given, and so can be taken apart and rearranged. Walking into what for centuries was considered a locked room, he discovers it was never actually locked, the door was just heavy, dusty, and clogged enough to make the whole neighborhood assume a battering ram, or a professional locksmith, was required. The steel plates that reconfigure into a thousand different paintings, the circle whose line is dismantled and laid flat for visitors to walk across, the editing of Doré down to a single, deliberate selection, are all the same gesture in different materials, showing that something everyone had agreed to treat as permanent was actually made of separable, swappable parts.