If You Can’t Open It, You Don’t Own It

Matthias Ramon Graefenstein, Soya Arakawa, Anne Pöhlmann, Alyce Hubbard Ford, Manuel Graf, David Mackaay, Christoph Westermeier, Franca Scholz

Info: Professor Rita McBride’s teaching career has spanned four decades, shaping a multigenerational and multinational community of artists. As she prepares to conclude her institutional teaching practice in 2025, an initiative titled Odyssey, not as a retrospective but as a living archive, emerges. This initiative is an ever-changing, evolving dialogue on knowledge transmission, artistic practice, and education beyond institutional structures. Through a variety of venues and various platforms, Odyssey will intersect space, time, and artistic exchange, revealing critical engagement across generations. If You Can’t Open It, You Don’t Own It: This April, ThisThat Gallery presents a group exhibition exploring the act of opening – not just as a physical gesture but as an epistemological commitment. To open is to question, to reveal, to transform. Ownership, in this sense, is not mere possession but an engagement with what lies beneath the surface. Originating from the open-source movement, this phrase extends beyond technology to challenge systems of access, authorship, and materiality. Each artist will interpret it through their own lens – whether through deconstruction, abstraction, or metaphor – forming a constellation of ideas on access, control, and transformation. The gallery becomes a space of inquiry rather than resolution, inviting artists to dismantle, interrogate, and open. The meaning of ownership, here, is not static but a process – achieved only through the act of opening.