“Animacies” at Kunsthaus Merano Explores Matter as Living Archive

Key facts

• “Animacies” is a group exhibition at Kunsthaus Merano curated by Lucrezia Cippitelli and Simone Frangi.
• The show draws on Mel Y. Chen’s 2012 concept of animacy — the capacity to act, feel awareness, and move.
• It forms part of the triennial program The Invention of Europe. A Tricontinental Narrative (2024–2027).
• Shivanjani Lal’s Mere Provaj [I am Remembering] (2024) uses online-purchased sugar sacks, maternal hair, and family archival photographs to evoke the Girmitiya laborers deported by the British Empire to Fiji.
• The Vienna-based collective Mai Ling, founded in 2019, uses kudzu in Not Your Ornament (2023) to address Anne Anlin Cheng’s theory of ornamentalist exoticization of FLINTA Asian bodies.
• Ashfika Rahman’s embroidery Redeem (since 2020) stems from a collaborative project on religious conventions imposed on Bangladesh’s Santal and Oraon communities.
• Bekhbaatar Enkhtur’s zoomorphic sculptures in clay, straw, and beeswax are designed to deteriorate, rejecting Western permanence.
• Elia Nurvista’s site-specific mural from Long Hanging Fruits (since 2020) uses palm oil as pigment, tracing the plant’s Dutch colonial introduction to Indonesia.