What are we in now?

What are we in now? is the investigative title chosen by the collective The Wig (founded in Berlin in 2021) for their work shown at Ruhr Ding: Schlaf. The artists Angharad Williams, Richard Sides, and curator Gianmaria Andreetta, have spent extended periods of time on site researching the infrastructural, social and material conditions of the Makroscope venue, as well as the museum and its collection, the Museum für Fotokopie M.F.F. The group presents an architectural intervention in the form of an immersive installation of video, sculpture, archive materials, and sounds that respond to the multifarious nature of this environment. In a publication conceived with artist Andreas Selg, The Wig will also reflect on the artistic research carried out at the M.F.F. and the encounter with documentation and its tools (e.g. the recording and copy device).

This integration and opening up of institutional and infrastructural environments can be described as a recurring process in the group’s projects. It can be said to be at the intersection of artistic and curatorial practice, questioning the frame of reference that determines the value we place on objects, their uniqueness and diversity as works of art and as everyday objects. What is the relationship between these objects and the people who make, keep and use them? In the 1980s, Michel de Certeau introduced these considerations in his book The Practice of Everyday Life – following a change in the culture and landscape of labour that allowed for a different organisation of time at work – under the term ‘la perruque’ (the wig). ‘Practising the wig’ establishes a reference to anything that is supposedly done under the guise of work in the broadest sense.

In 2020, Angharad Williams was artist-in-residence of the programme Zu Gast bei Urbane Künste Ruhr in Essen.