Stephan Blumenschein 

Upon arrival and during our stay; leaving, leaving and leaving again

The Space Conductors Are Among Us – Part 3

6 September – 11 October 2020

P/////AKT

Amsterdam

You’re
right there, literally right where I last saw you. You refer to it as
being in ‘the other room’, even though we know it’s all the
same house. Sometimes it’s mine, sometimes it’s yours. We both of
us always feel like it’s ours, and ‘ours’ is something we have
only ‘our’ own interpretation of, which involves neither you nor
me. And yet I can’t help but want it to. I think of the room we
shared in Greece, the dark part with the bed in the kitchen, the
sound of your watermelon smashing on the counter, the fridge door,
the light part with the balcony and the bougainvillea that grow so
well there, big gangly wooden doors coming too far out onto the tiny
terrace. Forgetting the keys. BIGGEST MISTAKE OF MY LIFE. Or one of
them, and then I went somewhere without doors, took a boat then too,
listening to the DRIVE soundtrack, only tents with flaps, sleeping
under an olive tree. Told to think hard and well on where I wanted to
sleep. And now, I know you’re somewhere here, and there is as
always no locked door between us. That’s the driver’s seat, and
we neither of us are in it. To just think that if I ate my words,
then you’d really get it. Like, I wouldn’t give them to you, and
then you say my words, at least when you’re on ‘my side’, if
you thought I did it right, if I got you into the mood, when it’s
‘our side’. So I ‘look’ the part, and you’d see that none
of this is unreal, only unnatural and real. Or didn’t you hear,
I’ve started to think about what is real? As in, this is real, or,
be real with me. Of course, I understand you have your whole idea of
that too and I’m working hard to learn about it and respect it, and
I’m very frightened, but much less than before. With all these
references, like, why we both get that Erykah Badu making an album in
a week with her ex-husband about freedom is real. Or doors, how we
fucking love it when they close, softly, swooshingly. That we
actually get into the thing you and I keep dancing around. I can beat
you to the punch here, I get this is abstract, but you know what I’m
saying. Maybe they’d be wet. The doors. We could go out back? Take
a boat ride together forever, and not say anything. Watch people
saying things to each other. Ok, so I am aware, but it doesn’t mean
you didn’t have a part in it. It’s for you, and me. And well,
it’s just a sample, a record spinning in a room without walls, I’m
committed but I’m not sure how much I want you to know that. The
outlet is too close to a glass of water, a structure that fits my
opening or doesn’t or wants to, not the other way around, a system
that moves me to believe that there is a lack and it could be
feminist. There’s nowhere to sit, or nowhere I’m comfortable.
Anyway, it’s something I want to get inside because I see the
missing part that is also everything. Please wait. The doors will
open. Or they were once, weren’t they?

Text
by Janine Armin

In
his first solo show in the Netherlands, Stephan Blumenschein (NL/AT)
continues his study of the exhibition space at the site of its
opening. Set up as three situations in and around P////AKT, the
artist observes how visitors move, structured by moments of suspense
and rest: gathering at a sliding door at the entry before it opens;
listening to a record inside with a few others; being read to on a
boat as it drifts along the canal in the rear. Blumenschein asks
visitors to read through movement just as one listens to a song with
a tune and a rhythm. The space in this exhibition is one of waiting,
maybe even of giving. It wants to be a space to appear, in which a
politics could happen. Yet it is also fabricated. If waiting is a
tool, it can open doors, adjust the volume depending on one’s
desire for intimacy.

Stephan
Blumenschein (1983) is an Amsterdam-based visual artist. He questions
thinking with and making exhibitions through the spatial and temporal
organisation of the opening. His works are an ongoing attempt to
manoeuvre and locate himself within the politics of the contemporary
exhibition space. Recent work with architectural intervention, text
and music includes Moving
across and through, evening gaze (exhibition
with Janine Schranz and Maike Hemmers, New Jörg, Vienna, 2020), In
Repetition and Hesitation
(text published in
contemporary matters, Vienna, 2020) and Protocols
1, 2 and 3 for exhibition documentation (published
in Kunstlicht, on view at Plat, Amsterdam and stolen while on view at
P////AKT, 2020) and his series We
are listening to a record (2019
– ongoing) in which records selected by guests are played in full
for a small group. He is a graduate of the Dutch Art Institute.

Note
to the editors

Exhibition
credits

—Exhibition
dramaturg, writer and editor
Janine Armin

—Graphic
design
Bram van den Berg

—Performers
Frederique
Pisuisse, Marek van de Watering

—Musicians
Susanna
Gartmayer, David Schweighart, Christoph Hehn

—Recording
and sound
Manuel Mitterhuber

—Documentation
Baha
Görkem Yalim, Jacob Dwyer, Charlott Markus

—Seatings
Clara
Amaral, Nicola Arthen, Franz and Annemarie Blumenschein, Bastien
Gachet, Leonie Kuipers, Simon Lindell, Stefan Rois, Finbar van Wijk,
Maia Sorensen and Mirko Lazovic, Nienke Vijlbrief and Rob van de
Werdt, Flora Woudstra.