String Figures / Fadenspiele

Group exhibition, Museum Tinguely, Basel.

"Stretched between eight fingers and two thumbs, sometimes between teeth and toes, loops of string make shapes. String figures can do many things: they tell stories, they pass the time, they make the unsayable showable, they connect people. As one of humanity’s oldest cultural practices, they have inspired artists, performers, ethnologists, and theorists. String figures have been studied as an aesthetic practice, collected as artifacts, and considered as a non-Western way of thinking.

For instance, experimental film pioneer Maya Deren filmed Marcel Duchamp making string figures, just after he had used up kilometers of string in his surrealist exhibition design. Maureen Lander, in turn, decolonized Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise by repackaging his famous small suitcase museum with photographs of Māori String Figures. Andy Warhol captured the string-playing Harry Smith, a border crosser between folklore and art, in one of his Screen Tests. And Alaskan engineer David Ket’acik Nicolai presents the figures he learned from his grandmother on TikTok as Yu’pik Dave.

In anthropology, string figures were long regarded a universal game. As a body practice that can be found in many places of this world, it fed the epistemological fantasies of a universal cultural comparison throughout the 20th century. As early as 1888, Franz Boas described the string figures of the Kwakiutl. Subsequently, European-American (often female) ethnologists ‘collected’ string figures, mounted them on cardboard or made drawings and photographs. However, such media do not provide any information about the making of the figures, which is why complex notation systems have been developed. Ethnologists have also made films of string figures and their makers in order to do justice to the processuality, performativity and physicality of the practice. Some of these films can be found in the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, which aimed to collect the world on celluloid and preserve it according to the principles of Salvage Anthropology.

In recent years, string figures have gained prominence in cultural theory. Donna Haraway promotes string figures as a method of interdisciplinary and interspecies thinking and collaboration. Unlike the technicist metaphor of the network, Haraway’s string figures provide a playful, process-oriented, embodied (and non-Western) way of thinking, emphasizing responsibility.

This exhibition brings together these diverse strands of art, anthropology, and theory, fostering connections among people from different regions of the world and exploring ways of playing together on the ruins of our history.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated English-language catalogue (265 pages) with articles by Paul Basu, Mareile Flitsch, Ute Holl, Ines Kleesattel, Adam Piron and many others, published by Diaphanes in February 2025, available in the museum shop and bookshops for CHF 40.

Curated by Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül, co-curator Andres Pardey"

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