Taking its cue from Bertolt Brecht’s theory of radio, the exhibition “Radio-Activity” turns the spotlight on aesthetic-political collectives that launched their own publications and charted new channels of communication. Starting in the late 1960s, Brecht’s theory of radio sparked a vigorous debate. The concern at the heart of his critique had lost none of its urgency: Who determines how a society makes sense of the world? Who speaks, and who is spoken to? The utopian vision of boundless communication untainted by relations of power was electrifying. The exhibition puts the focus on projects from the 1920s–30s and the 1960s–70s, when various collectives emerged that, instead of accepting language and the existing social order as givens, aimed to rethink them and pioneer forms of anti-national and international communication.
