Toni Ehrhardt

To the rottenness I say you are my father. And to the worms my sister and my brother.

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Exhibition from April 11th - April 25th, 2025

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Preludial Performances:

April 5th & April 6th

Starting: 20:30 

Multiple acts throughout the night

 

 

Performance: Josepha Merz, Lena Düspohl

Sound: Esther Adam

OutSide Eye: Renen Itzhaki

Philosophical & technical Support: Julian Schakal

Plakat: Irina Pereira

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Is history just a collection of archaeological speculations?

 

And how did human beings ever find it plausible that the world is neatly riven by an ontological divide?

 

In the work “To the rottenness I say you are my father. And to the worms my sister and my brother.” Toni Ehrhardt translates an ongoing research on the hierarchical relationship between humans and animals into an immersive performance, which is finally transferred into the exhibition. 

 

The artist invents a story in the past that meanders between the latest scientific discoveries about the language of animals and speculative fabulations about a prehistoric civilization. In doing so, he uses a method that populist influencers actually use to make themselves heard. What stories are we being told and what stories are we telling ourselves? 

 

But the seeds planted in the past only appear to be past and are only partly fake.

 

Through the performative language that Toni Ehrhardt uses in the project space, the content points to a future that can be shaped by all of us. It opens up perspectives that strive for a more hierarchy-free relationship with our animal relatives.

 

Central to the entire work are three ceramics, which feed the story as archaeological objects and are also the main elements of the exhibition. 

 

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In his multimedia works Toni Ehrhardt explores the symbiotic relationships between humans and the non-human environment. From the far future to speculative pasts, he takes a critical approach to the nature-human construct and processes his research in performances, paintings and installations. His works are fragments of a larger narrative. Toni Ehrhardt works in Bremen and Porto (PT) and has been realizing exhibitions and projects in Germany and abroad since 2018. Together with Katze Greeven and Esther Adam he works since 2020 in the performance collective “things like you & me”.