Indebtedness: Die Haftung der Geschenknehmenden marks the first exhibition project by Stoney and manifests as an expanded writing practice and an exercise in non-linear story-telling as well as vernacular idioms and idiosyncrasies to explore subjective, inter-generational and gendered historiography. Text, photography, sculpture and sound here tangibly negotiate fine lines between nostalgia, critical historicity and attempts to reinstate alternative models of reality for the present and future.

The title of the exhibition encompasses the double-meaning of indebtedness as interdependencies that are both culturally and economically rooted. It aims at a growing immobility between classes that is incited particularly sinisterly in the United Kingdom, although an expanding culture of debts can be experienced throughout the European mainland. Indebtedness also points to an intersectional self-reflection of being part of a diaspora as well as to the phantom limb of inherited family traumas, that are both deeply personal but also intergenerationally and historically ingrained.
Departing from Scunthorpe Correspondences, a dialogue between Stoney and Tom Glencross, a UK-based writer and friend, that was conceived and published in the given framework, this exhibition is set alongside the struggles of the working-class in Scunthorpe, where both authors grew up. Once a symbol for prosperity and wealth, the town in northern England now faces widespread precarity and disenchantment due to the decline of the steel industry and deregulating, globalizing processes. This conversation interrelates Stoney’s family’s trajectory with larger colonial histories of the UK and the Partition of Pakistan and India in 1947.