The Oldenburg Gleaners Society Club

“Gleaning” traditionally refers to the practice of collecting surplus crops following a harvest and redistributing them to people in need. The act of gleaning was common from biblical times up until the eighteenth century. It was a strategy of survival and resourcefulness, essential to those marginalized by the emerging forces of capitalism: widows and orphans, the poor and the expropriated, newcomers and exiles. The Oldenburg Gleaners Society Club,curated by Sebastian Cichocki – building on his experience curating the 40th EVA International, Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art – extends this idea of “gleaning,” which alternately serves as an artistic subject, a metaphor, and a curatorial methodology.   

Artistic practices informed by degrowth philosophies – focused on daily chores, the unheroic and unspectacular, and which do not always produce tangible works of art – often escape the institutional radar. In other words, they migrate, whether of their own desire or due to necessity, beyond the art world. They land in other fields, such as political activism, protest, and pedagogy, or experimental farming. Inspired by the work of the Irish visual artist and shepherd Orla Barry, the exhibition in Oldenburg moves fluidly between the farm and the gallery, searching for “post-pastoral” artistic practice.

The Oldenburg Gleaners Society Club also reconsiders the writings of the Polish theoretician and art critic Jerzy Ludwiński, who in the 1970s assumed that we were living in a “post-artistic” era. Ludwiński emphasises the osmosis between art and other disciplines, and his premise was that the art of his time had escaped the confines of language and the institutional apparatus at its disposal. As he wrote in 1971:

“It is very likely that we are no longer involved with art today. We have simply overlooked the moment when art turned into something quite different, something that we are no longer able to put a name to. What is certain, however, is that what we are engaged in today has greater potential.”

With works by: Orla Barry, Kim Beom, Kasper Bosmans, Jeamin Cha, Mitsutoshi Hanaga, Tamás Kaszás, Krisztián Kristóf, and The Randomroutines, Eustachy Kossakowski, Sharon Lockhart, Deirdre O’Mahony, Peter Nadin & Natsuko Uchino & Aimée Toledano, Rory Pilgrim, Iza Tarasewicz, Natsuko Uchino, Jennifer Walshe.

Curated by Sebastian Cichocki, Senior Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.