grazerkunstverein

(Exhibition)

Fevers

James Richards

26/06 - 30/08/2025, opening 25/06, 18:00

Sometimes, there is a fever to perception—a heat that builds when an image lingers too long, when a sound worms its way beneath language. Nothing is stable here, only fragments: half-memories, soft violence, quiet ecstasies. Images stutter, flare, recede. Looking does not lead to clarity but a kind of exposure. Fever, after all, is not an illness but a response—a regulated shift in the body’s set point, an internal decision to raise the heat. In fever, the body’s own systems intensify, working to defend and to heal, but also to open and purge—turning inward and outward at once.

Fever is the body’s rebellion, an insistence on its own agency. It signals not just intrusion or injury, but the body’s refusal to remain neutral—to stay cool and contained. In the heightened temperature of fever, the senses sharpen. Colors burn brighter, sounds penetrate deeper. Periphery becomes urgency, each sensation a small blaze. In the heat, we glimpse not just what threatens us, but what quickens us—what makes us feel most alive.

All this while we wait for it to break. The fever dream continues to hum, thick with the half-light of unsteady revelations. There is no stillness here, only a restless unfolding, the strange rupture of thresholds dissolving and reforming in endless succession. In a fevered state, the air seems to shiver, each breath a flicker of something not quite nameable. The fever does not so much end as recede, leaving in its wake a landscape of outlines—edges that glow, ripple, and refuse to fade. In the fever’s morning residue, the world leans closer, more alive in its fractures and flux.

Fevers is an exhibition by James Richards presenting recent and newly commissioned work in sound and image. It is curated by Tom Engels and will be accompanied by a publication by Grazer Kunstverein, designed by Julie Peeters, to be released later this year.

The exhibition is supported by ifa—Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.

JAMES RICHARDS (b. 1983, Cardiff) works and lives in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Our Friends in the Audience at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2024); Workers in Song (with Billy Bultheel) at WIELS, Brussels; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Batalha Centro de Cinema, Porto; and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2023–24); Internal Litter at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin (2022); When We Were Monsters at Haus Mödrath – Räume für Kunst, Kerpen (2021); Alms for the Birds at Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2020); SPEED 2 (with Leslie Thornton) at Malmö Konsthall (2019); and SPEED (with Leslie Thornton) at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2018).

Richards has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Focus: Recent Videos from the Museion Collection, Museion, Bolzano (2025); Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty at Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris (2024); Prologue to the 15th Baltic Triennial: Remain in Zero, Lithuanian National Drama Theatre/Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2023); signals… storms and patterns at Para Site, Hong Kong (2023); Full Burn: Video from the Hammer Contemporary Collection at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Penumbra at Fondazione In Between Art Film, Venice (2022); and Ghost 2565: Live Without Dead Time in Bangkok (2022).

He has recently curated film and performance programs, including A Map of the Pit (with Alvin Li) at Tate Modern, London (2025), and Novel Pleasure (with Fatima Hellberg) at Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2024). A sustained dialogue with Tolia Astakhishvili has led to their collaborative works being shown in several of Astakhishvili’s exhibition projects: to love and devour at Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, Venice (2025); Between Father and Mother at SculptureCenter, New York (2024); and The First Finger at Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, and Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2023–24).

In 2024, Richards was awarded the Preis der Nationalgalerie at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. He represented Wales at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2014. Richards returns to the Grazer Kunstverein following his earlier participation in the Ars Viva 2014/15 prize exhibition.

01James Richards, 2025
02James Richards, 2025