Loose Ends Don’t Tie at PS120 / Berlin

The Way Things Run
(Der Lauf der Dinge)
Part 1: Loose Ends
Don’t Tie

Participating Artists: Alvaro Barrington, Tom Burr, Renee Green, Iman Issa, Mirak Jamal, Joan Jonas, Tarik Kiswanson, Olu Ogunnaike, Zac Langdon-Pole, Rosemarie Trockel

PS 120
Potsdamer Straße 120
10785 Berlin


Tarik Kiswanson

Rosemarie Trockel



Iman Issa 



Zac Langdon-Pole




Olu Ogunnaike




Renee Green


Tom Burr


Rosemarie Trockel


Mirak Jamal




 Olu Ogunnaike



Tom Burr



Alvaro Barrington

 Olu Ogunnaike



 

Joan Jonas

Olu Ogunnaike


Exhibition Text written
by curator Jeppe Ugelvig
“In this context,
uprooting can work toward identity, and exile can be seen as beneficial, when
these are experienced as a search for the Other (through circular nomadism)
rather than as an expansion of territory (an arrow-like nomadism). Totality’s
imaginary allows the detours that lead away from anything totalitarian.”
(Glissant 1990)
The migration of people, objects, and images is a condition of
contemporary global society. Moving transforms people, culture, and ideas to
exist in multiple, dyssynchronous states, producing new narratives of belonging
and of displacement. As things move, they are re-coded and re-formed, spurring
material and psychic palimpsests that unfold in both overt and subtle ways— in
objects, images, and bodies. Art is one cultural form where these movements not
only can garner representation, but where such representations can be
problematized, subverted, and re-imagined.
The artists featured in Loose
Ends Don’t Tie
, the first part of the trilogy of exhibitions The Way Things Run, evade any
identitarian or geo-political categorization in order to instead examine the
very material manifestation of spatial and psychic displacement, and the
cultural hybridity it produces. Envisaged as an open-ended discussion across
generations, territories, and contexts, the show sets out to investigate the
shared, often violent histories that formulate our integrated, globalised modes
of living and working, and the way that these manifest as material traces,
overt as well as opaque. Asking what things are made of, where, by whom, and to
what ends, may succinctly reveal systems of power and oppression, but also of
radical self-determination. In either case, the artists in the exhibition
suggest that a study of identity is also one of the very matter than
constitutes it.
Several of the artist included take production and its location
as a conceptual framework, drawing out how these are always affected by power
relations grounded in geographies. Starting in 1987, Rosemarie Trockel released
a number of interior floor carpets with Equator Productions, woven by Tibetan
artisans. Incorporating well-known industrial symbols from the Western garment
manufacturing industry into her designs, Trockel commented on the ambivalent
space that craft upholds not only in art but in Western industrial
mass-production, as a form of labor typically outsourced and done by women—but
nonetheless one producing highly sought-after and luxurious commodities. More recently, Olu
Ogunnaike has engaged wood as an industrial commodity circulating in
contemporary global society. His series of sheet sculptures make use of
charcoal and the engineered lumber known as Oriented Strand Board (OSB), an
increasingly ubiquitous material in the West. Tracing the highly specific
global processes of resource extraction and labor—manual and industrial—that
realize these materials, Ogunnaike draws out the ways in which identification
happens through systems of material production, and asks to which extent these
commodities can serve as representations in their own right.
To rather different ends, Swedish-Palestinian artist Tarik
Kiswanson marks histories of displaced origin through production as he produces
copper sculptures welded with heirloom silver, melted down from his
grandparents’ silverware after their exile from Jerusalem. Here, material
remnants of locales produce new modes of nomadic relationality while serving as
relics of displacement. Similarly, Venezuelan-born Alvaro Barrington’s
painterly practice reflects on the way personal and collective identification,
often highly romanticized, happens through displaced materials and objects, and
investigates how the improvisatory juxtaposition of cultural forms might result
in new productive hybridities of affinity. His ongoing postcard series sees generic postcards with pristine motifs
violently incised by thick, textural sewing threads. Mirak Jamal produces
abstract emotional representations of a notion of ‘home’ in constant flux,
particularly in incorporating his own drawings from his nomadic childhood
between Iran, the USSR, Germany, the US, and Canada. These contrasting and
often contradictory elements question the stability of the image and its
signification of “place” as it circulates through different hands and contexts.
In his Mammal Board, American artist
Tom Burr compiles black-and-white photographs of animals and subliminally hints
at the way human identification takes place through found and often highly
arbitrary imagery.
Shaped by systems of control and violence, migratory meeting
points of history can nonetheless produce lyrical and mythical relationships
between things, subjectivities, and cultural motifs, their “original”
narratives often partially lost or forgotten. Joan Jonas’ video works
complicate representations of identity by undoing standardized distinctions the
image and the mediatized self, producing new fantastical associations.
These
conceptual practices of the 1970s are precursors to the equally lyrical work of
Renée Green. Her
video
Come Closer
diaristically moves between Lisbon, San Francisco and Brazil to weave an
intimate map of relations in the modern Lusophone world.
Narrated in Portuguese with some conversational excerpts in English, Come Closer shows with poetic complexity how our
past melds with our present.
This too is felt in the work of Zac
Langdon-Pole, whose wallpapers reflects on how the loss of information during
cultural exchange (transposing, translating) can itself be a process of
formation. In her series Heritage Studies,
Iman Issa poetically renterprets historical objects on an intimate scale by
reimagining museum artifacts as sculptures still placed alongside labels
detailing the original relics.
Ultimately, the works in the exhibition problematize “origin” as
a cultural mythology while embracing diasporic identification as a way to
understand the world around us. It gives space to what Glissant has defined as
called A Poetics of Relation; not
only between people, but between objects, images, and places, real and
imagined. Here, connection and familiarity may take place not in a place, but
instead, in the dye of a textile, in the motif of a postcard, or the subtlety
of a bodily movement.