Art Taaalkssss: Ingo Niermann

Ingo Niermann, The Monadic Age: Notes on the Coming Social Order, Sternberg Press, 2024

Ingo Niermann’s most recent book, The Monadic Age: Notes on the Coming Social Order (Sternberg Press, 2024), will be the focus of the inaugural session of the fall 2024 Art Taaalkssss at Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, a program curated by Filipa Ramos, who recently took over Elise Lammer’s curatorial duties.

In The Monadic Age, Niermann investigates how a new social paradigm, which he calls monadism, compromises the liberal order and asks for a radical reinvention of basic institutions like nation, democracy, welfare, and privacy. In The Monadic Age, he observes two contrasting drives in our times. On one side, people aim at a more harmonious community with each other and with the natural world, and on the other side, people are more and more isolated within their safe spaces, identities and belongings, which often unfold virtually. The book is divided in 33 monadic chapters that are grouped around seven major topics that describe a fundamental mutation of the social order of the Western world. These are: identity, game, home, freedom, anxiety, death, and love.

During this evening, Niermann will introduce and discuss his conceptualization of The Monadic Age and the implications of monadism for our present-future.

Ingo Niermann is a German writer known for his speculative novels and non-fiction as well as his forays into contemporary art. His meticulous and playful utopias – such as those of Army of Love and The Monadic Age – defy established certainties across all ideological camps. Together with the artist Erik Niedling, Niermann runs the Documentation Center Thuringia. He lives in Basel and is a lecturer at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.