Gildar
Gallery presents Alien Linguistic Lab, the US solo debut of
Berlin-based artist Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld. Schönfeld’s broad practice encompassing
sculpture, performance, installation, and photography is informed as much by
indigenous perspectivism as the spiritual dimension of science and technology.
In this
exhibition, Schönfeld offers a series of treatments for our current state of anxiety
and alienation in a globalized society, specifically focussing on the
techno-sociological conclusion that UFO’s are manifestations of nuclear angst,
a thesis which gained prominence in the 1950s. Schönfeld suggests that this
manifestation of stress could be understood as imbalance in the spirit world
and mental health issues alike. She examines several methods to escape,
eliminate, include and defend these spirits or disease by comparing strategies
like pharmacology, shamanism, psychotherapy, magic rituals, space travel,
mythology and their different dimensions and potentialities.
Within
the exhibition a variously related bodies of work come together to form the
laboratory. Flying Sorcerer is an open workshop, an actualization of
several medieval European and older South American traditions of intentionally
destroying pottery, used in wedding and funeral rituals to scare bad spirits.
Schönfeld re-appropriates and customizes this technique inviting the audience
to throw saucers against the gallery wall in the exhibition. Using gravity as a
controlled way of flying and crashing, the shivers (shiver meaning both “to
tremble” and a piece of pottery) that have been shattered will be reassembled
on site in an act of instant archaeology. These reformed objects will be
listened to using a record player and a Morse App. The act of throwing objects
as a domestic “reenactment” of the UFO phantasm, is supposed to
enable us to get over the shiver and decode to the message of alienation. The
complete product, now fractured, opens room for the metaphysical interpretation
throughout its gaps.
This
workshop is embedded in a presentation of imaginary tools and oracles, works
developed by Schönfeld in recent years. In her series Shamanistic Space
Travel Equipment, organic textures and cosmic imagery fuse into a single
complex surface. Imagery from popular science-fiction films along with actual
scientific images from NASA printed onto cowhide combine frontier mythologies
in a process of physical alchemy. This altered traditional ritual-wear becomes
a surface of both cosmic-scientific gnosis and blockbuster entertainment —
helping spirits merge with technology. In the results from Schönfeld’s
Pharmaceutical Cosmology Lab, the artist chemically transmogrifies a
variety of anti-anxiety drugs to create visually hypnotising portraits. Forging
the photo chemical surface of the negative with these psychoactive medications,
the resulting photographic reactions appear as glowing planets of induced
calm. Both of these series refer to the translation of cosmological
metaphors of inner and outer space, as François Bucher puts it:
“These
new radio telescopes can only show us what they heard and saw by way of their
own theater of artificial color-coded images, catered pedagogically for our human
perceptual apparatus. So in a sense those images are yet another story, another
mythology fabricated in order to hint at something that is essentially
incomprehensible.”
Schönfeld’s
choice of materials reflects the eclecticism of late-stage capitalism, where
boundaries must be crossed to face complexity and the question of culture and
nature has to be examined once more. In each of her works unexpected materials
are playfully melded into specific perceptual treatments. With formal subtlety,
the viewer’s senses are jostled until disciplinary boundaries selectively
dissolve into conceptual portals, where loose threads cross, unsnarl, blend
into new insights.