June 2021 – Daily Lazy

the many faced god·dess
with Nils Alix-Tabeling, Sabrina Röthlisberger Belkacem, Bye Bye Binary, Ivan Cheng, Claude Eigan, Cédric Esturillo, Brandon Gercara, Tarek Lakhrissi, Élodie Petit, the Queer Ancestor Project, Sin Wai Kin (fka Victoria Sin), Simon Brossard & Julie Villard.

curated by Thomas Conchou

May 19 – July 10, 2021

Maison Populaire
9 bis rue Dombasle
93100 Montreuil, France

While borrowing its title to the faceless, avenging deity of Game of Thrones, the many faced god·dess draws inspiration from the influence of impersonation practices on queer theory and contemporary artistic practices, amongst which drag appears paramount. From the original observations of drag performances leading to Judith Butler’s seminal book Gender Trouble to Elizabeth Freeman’s temporal drag concept, investigating the pull of the past on the present through practices of retrogression, genealogy and memory, drag practices and their sister-practices (cosplay, fandom, comedy, performance, theatricality) create a strategic, politic and reflexive stage, engaging not only with how bodies are constructed but also inhabited and interpreted. But also with how chronopolitics come to play with them : allowing to perform

a critical and historical genealogy. The exhibition will gather artistic and amateur practices around the ideas of mask- wearing, summoning ancestors and mythological beings, as well as performing strategic and fractal identities, and will channel a multitude of historical, fictional or contemporary characters, stressing the multiplicity of our belongings, the impermanence of our identities, and the power of our transformations.

Thomas Conchou (born in 1989, based in Paris) is co-founder of the curatorial collective Syndicat Magnifique and curator for the New Patrons program of Fondation de France within Societies, a non-profit space working at the intersection of visual arts and social action. He is also engaged in an independent curatorial research focusing on queer relationalities and contemporary queer practices.

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Pongo mi pie desnudo en el umbral / Christian García Bello

June 16 – July 22, 2021

Appleton

Rua Acácio Paiva nº27 r/c

1700-004 Lisboa, Portugal

«Pongo mi pie desnudo en el umbral» is the last chapter of a project by Christian García Bello (Galicia, 1986) for Appleton (Lisbon, PT) and Fundación DIDAC (Santiago de Compostela, ES) curated by David Barro. This exhibition is based on a short story written by the artist which is the tale of a discovery: the travel diaries of a woman named Dirse who made a pilgrimage from Antwerp (Flanders, Belgium) to A Guarda (Galicia, Spain) sometime between the 16th and 17th centuries and who spent her last days on the Monte de Santa Trega, looking at the route and the mouth of the river Miño, the natural threshold that separates Galicia from Portugal.The title —a verse by the Galician poet José Ángel Valente— leads us to think of a story that begins, that advances by walking, touching, stepping, as happens in the story that forms the backbone of the exhibition.This exhibition is presented as a collection of fragmented and overlapping views on the history of Dirse that punctuate the room and articulate a spatial narrative around the landscape, spirituality, ritualism and architecture, articulating the sanity of vernacular forms with the austerity of materials to build complex, poetic and sophisticated devices. The main twist of this second exhibition is the incorporation of a number of variations on my own pieces.

Photo credits: Bruno Lopes

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Raphaela Vogel / My Appropriation of Her Hoæly Hollowness

Curated by Juliette Desorgues

June 11 – August 22, 2021

Confort Moderne
185 rue du Faubourg du Pont-Neuf
86000 Poitiers

Photography: Pierre Antoine

Confort Moderne presents My Appropriation of Her Holy Hollowness, the first institutional solo exhibition in France by Berlin-based artist RaphaelaVogel. Her distinct artistic language interlaces monumental sculptures with paintings on leather or fabric and video-sculptures, from which emanate hypnotic, at times screeching sounds, creating unsettling constellations. Gender, violence, death and humour are explored throughout Vogel’s work and form the basis of her inquiry into the assumed binary relationships between humanity and nature, technology and biology, fantasy and reality.

My Appropriation of Her Holy Hollowness comprises recent and new works across three gallery spaces. A new series of seven large-scale sound sculptures, which gives the exhibition its name, dominates the central space. Casts of lions made of polyurethane are mounted on metallic poles, fixed and suspended in rows from the ceiling. Round-shaped speakers adorn the tips of the sculptures’ tails and hover tentatively above the floor. They emit the soft tune of a German song, the first from Austrian romantic composer Franz Schubert’s series Winter Journey titled ‘Good Night’ (1828) that deals with the pain of lost love. Played and sung by Vogel herself, the song’s lyrics, originally written by German poet Wilhelm Müller, are replaced by extracts taken from angrily written letters exchanged by the artist with a former lover whereby both quarrel over the claim and access to cultural spaces following their separation.

The installation becomes an intimate biographical portrait, a melancholic elegiac musical score presented in form through the rigid regularity both of the sculptures that follows the rhythm of the sound and of the speakers that act as notes. The traditional symbolism of power and masculinity associated with the lion is abstracted through the porous drip of the casting process, and further undermined by the sound of the artist’ voice which permeates the space. Hybrid, skeletal forms emerge and serve as a macabre reminder of the violent mechanisation of the farming industry. It also offers a reflection on the disintegration of the today’s socio-political system, which Schubert addresses metaphorically in his Winter Journey series within the context of 19th century Germany.

As the sound ebbs and flows throughout the gallery spaces, it serves as the score to a film presented silently in an adjoining room. This new work presents itself as a baroque yet sombre collage of kaleidoscopic imagery and text, the latter transcribing the lyrics heard throughout gallery spaces. Filmed in a circular room filled with cameras, the imagery echoes the formal hollowness, as stated in the title, of the lions presented in the gallery. A new painting on leather adorned with a skeletal tail titled Defenders of the Faith (2021) is presented on a back wall in the main space. Referencing both art history and popular culture – namely a 1904 painting by Adolf Mossa titled Circé and Judas Priest’s album cover Defenders of the Faith from 1984 – its title offers a humorous defence of art’s role within society.

It echoes the hybrid forms and violent quality of the main installation and creates a formal dialogue with a recent installation titled The (Missed) Education of Miss Vogel, 2021 presented in the back gallery. Seventeen leather paintings hang like animal cadavers in a slaughterhouse from two circular metallic structures. The installation creates a complex rhizomatic mind map of the artist’ own interests and references spanning music, literature, philosophy and popular culture from Karl Marx and Pierre Bourdieu, to dressage and jazz music. The work addresses how – Eurocentric – canonical systems of knowledge are created and contribute to the formation of subjectivity. In echoing the aesthetic language of so-called ‘Outsider Art’, such systems are questioned and undermined.

A tension is formed, creating a dizzying landscape through a play of scale and materiality, circling between opulence and scarcity, a holy hollowness, that serves to reflect on the relationship between the personal and universal, the symbolic and science, the reified and mass production.

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Kin-ting Li / Chimera

June 17 – July 24, 2021

South Parade
Enclave 9, 50 Resolution Way
London, SE8 4AL

Photo credit: Corey Bartle Sanderson

Situated between imagination and reality, Li creates evolving organic and inorganic structures that suggest both the microscopic and the astronomical. Li’s paintings synthesise departure points from daily life which range from observations of nature to literature and architecture. The dry and grainy accumulation of paint with which Li likes to work, creates a viscosity and friction that elicits new and unexpected forms. The protean renderings which shift and flow, make size and location uncertain and destabilise interpretation. By working on more than one canvas at a time, these magnified or reduced creations may be the interior or exterior of other paintings. The titles of each work reflect and dilate the space in which Li creates his work.

Kin-ting Li (b.1991, Hong Kong) lives and works in London and graduated from The Slade School of Fine Art (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Sky-blue and green, VO Curations (London, 2020) and Just as when the night, Light Eye Mind (London, 2019).

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Jan S. Hansen

Pas Partu

May 1 – August 28, 2021

Kunsthal NORD

KjellerupsTorv 5

Aalborg, Denmark

Prisma (Past Presents Future), 2021, steel, mannequin, mirror, hammer, suitcases

Prisma (Past Presents Future), 2021, steel, mannequin, mirror, hammer, suitcases, detail

Detail, Prisma (Past Presents Future), 2021, steel, mannequin, mirror, hammer, suitcases, detail

Installation view

Intermodular Habitat, 2021, 65 x 90 x 120 cm, steel, MDF, faucet, drain, miniature telescope

Intermodular Habitat, 2021, 65 x 90 x 120 cm, steel, MDF, faucet, drain, miniature telescope, detail

Intermodular Habitat, 2021, 65 x 90 x 120 cm, steel, MDF, doorbell, laser cut gecko

Intermodular Habitat, 2021, 65 x 90 x 120 cm, steel, MDF, doorbell, laser cut gecko, detail

Intermodular Habitat, 2021, 65 x 90 x 120 cm, steel, MDF, sockets, bulbs

Intermodular Habitat, 2021, 65 x 90 x 120 cm, steel, MDF, sockets, bulbs, detail

Installation view

Pas Partu, 2021, 13 x 33 x 43 cm, laser cut catalog, epoxy resin

Installation view

Claustrum (Warped Model of Consciousness in the Cyber Space Age), 2021, 18 x 32 x 100 cm, steel, SLA
3D print

Retrograde (New Morning Star), 2021, dia 130 cm, lamp, locusts, epoxy resin

Installation view

Census, 2021, 50 x 65 cm, steel, glazed stoneware

Mask (Omni), 2021, 18 x 37 cm, glazed stoneware

Mask (Rhizome), 2021, 18 x 35 cm, glazed stoneware

Mask (Rhizome), 2021, 19 x 33 cm, glazed stoneware

Mask (Alter) 2021, 16 x 34 cm, glazed stoneware

Mask (Screen), 2021, 18 x 34 cm, glazed stoneware

Mask (Rhizome), 2021, 20 x 30 cm, glazed stoneware

Mask (Void), 2021, 19 x 35 cm, glazed stoneware

Mask (Xeno), 2021, 20 x 36 cm, glazed stoneware

Mask (Rhizome), 2021, 17 x 37 cm, glazed stoneware

Mask (Omni), 2021, 17 x 35 cm, glazed stoneware

All images courtesy and copyright of Jan S. Hansen and Kunsthal NORD.

Territories of consciousness

By Nina Wöhlk

Cosmologies are human’s image of the World in its totality. Through the ages, they have changed in the
wake of the achievements of a given time, enforcing development and change. The transformed, external
surroundings have influenced beliefs and the sciences, which has helped to frame the everyday life and our
understanding of the World. Through the development of new cosmologies, attempts have been made to
find meaning in the World-altering shifts.

The mental and physical dimensions of the human consciousness, which the recent, accelerating time has
expanded, is the focal point of the investigations in Jan S. Hansen’s exhibition Pas Partu. The exhibition
presents a number of condensed understandings of our present time, connecting around the fact that they
are all influenced by new technological and neuroscientific discoveries in the world community, defined as
“The Cyber Space Age”. Online or away from the keyboard, the Internet’s expansion of our physical and
mental reach almost becomes tangible to us when solidarity is found in online communities, and when the
mobilisation of movements takes place globally. Our presence has stretched out into the Universe over the
last half century, and this expanded spatiality is continuously manifesting itself in our everyday lives. A new
hyperreality presents itself, where we, as an example, can observe mediated representations of Mars´
landscapes through screens in the form of photographs, videos and sound clips.

With his exhibition, Jan S. Hansen reflects on the state of things by creating a noticeable silence, giving the
impression that the exhibition rooms exist outside of time. This is done by matting the glass in the windows, only letting diffused light enter, while a gray fabric separates the entrance of Kunsthal NORD from the
exhibition rooms. Despite the significant industrial traces of the kunsthalle in the form of ventilation pipes,
steel beams, and factory glass, the transformation gives the audience the experience of entering another
world.

Centrally positioned in the high-ceilinged gallery space is the artwork series “Intermodular Habitat”, which
consists of three elements that look like architectural models. The miniatures each appear with few, to the
scale, disproportionately large installations; like a spout on a faucet; a gecko divided in two by a partition wall
and luminous bulbs placed in rows. As surreal models for human’s ability to calibrate themselves to live in
different habitats, the artwork series speaks to a mental and physical readiness for change. In the adjoining
room, a fractal star with locusts hangs from the ceiling. The star is a so-called “Herrnhuter Star”, used by the
Christian congregation “Brødremenigheden” as a symbol of the city Christiansfeld, near Hansen’s own
birthplace. The locusts bring to mind the ten plagues of the Old Testament and set out to see how the
Universe has previously and primarily been the domain of religions as well as inspired religious motifs and
creation myths. In the work “Retrograde (New Morning Star)”, Hansen draws our attention to parts of the
dynamics in the construction of human narratives and worldviews as well as how scientific discoveries
challenge one of the territories of religions.

The exhibition contains memory cells of the eye-opening moments of the accelerating time, which alternate
between the personal and the collective. With a laser cutter, a small square has been cut out of the middle of
the front cover of a Whole Earth Catalog from 1970, picturing one of NASA’s “Blue Marble” photographs of
the Earth, as seen from outer space. The catalog is encapsulated in a thick seal of resin and placed on the
floor under the title “Pas Partu”. The Whole Earth Catalog was an iconic catalog within “Do It Yourself”,
alternative education, and ecology and is said to be a forerunner to the Internet. It can be compared to the
free Internet-based encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which is continuously rewritten through the collaborative effort
of a global community of users. The work “Pas Partu” points to the double presence of humans in The Cyber
Space Age; a double-position, which becomes evident in the recording of new territories. From NASA’s
recent mapping and geologic records of past ecosystems and their impact on today’s climate change and the
development of new landscapes in the online that allow virtual communities that transcend hierarchies, class
and physical affiliations to bodies that live in these landscapes and inhabit the physical and virtual worlds.
Human’s conflicted position holds a complexity that was first conceptualized in the map-territory relation, a
theory by Alfred Korzybski, where the map is easily confused with the landscape it represents. In other words,
the map is a picture of the landscape, but also controls how we read it. Changing times and cultures have
always believed that the maps they drew and navigated were objective and transparent. But all maps are
always subjective and grounded in a given time and cultural worldview. The work “Pas Partu” shares its title
with the exhibition and refers to the passepartout as a symbol of how we develop and frame a subjective
image of our time. The title also points to the additional etymological meaning of the word, as a universal key, and thus further covers an underlying drive in human development and science’s search for ways to
unlock the riddles that have yet to be uncovered.

An inner, mental key crystallises itself in the artwork “Claustrum (Warped Model of Consciousness in The
Cyber Space Age)” in the farthest room of the kunsthalle, that shows a reproduction of the, purportedly,
human center for consciousness which is situated in two symmetrical sheet-like structures of gray matter in
the brain, and until recently has been inaccessible to researchers1
. Through a dialogue with a team of
scientists from Atatürk University in Turkey, Hansen has been granted access to work with 3D-files of the brain
structure. With a frozen donor, the research team has been able to laser cut a human body into millimetre
thin slices and subsequently scan the body to make 3D renderings of the two claustrums. Hansen uses the
generated data and files to create artistically modified versions of these in correspondingly millimetre thin
layers, rebuilt with 3D printing. In an artistic adaption, Hansen has enlarged and stretched the proportions of
the organ lengthwise and materialised a container for consciousness that spatializes the idea of past, present,
and future. In this way, the artwork attaches itself to the exhibition’s installations and sculptures, which in
pendulum-like movement sway between new and older rejected positions and examine the interplay
between body and consciousness, and how they in a cyclical rhythm continuously uncover and (re)discover
new grounds.

As a kind of museum for the future, Hansen takes a look at our contemporary history from an outside
position. As found, processed, and made objects, the artworks of the exhibition serve as a container for
different beliefs and circumstances of the times, where human’s image of themselves and their surroundings
was in accordance with the changing industrial progress and existential views. Thus, the exhibition can be
seen as a social scientific collection where different times collapse into one another. An expanded notion of
time is introduced, where Hansen’s research of the plasticity of the human consciousness appears. This is
illustrated in the way the exhibition invites us, through its “passepartout”, to see the objects from a coherent
and larger perspective. Further, this “passepartout” creates a space for reflection, where we can look at the
actions and values of our time and contemporary history, expanding our consciousness.

____________________________

¹In this context, “Claustrum” refers to its Latin etymology, namely “enclosure”, “to shut” or “cloister”

Jan S. Hansen (1980, Haderslev, Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. MFA, 2010, the Royal
Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Visual Arts, Copenhagen. Exhibitions include Overgaden Institute of
Contemporary Art and Huset for Kunst og Design. He is co-director of Simian, an exhibition space for
contemporary art in Copenhagen.

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Alvin Baltrop

April 30 – July 3, 2021

Galerie Buchholz

Fasanenstraße 30

Berlin, Germany

Installation view

“The Navy (coastline)”, n.d.
(1969-1972)

silver gelatin print
image

size: 12.5 x 18.5 cm

paper size: 28 x 35 cm

“The Navy (feet on deck)”, n.d.
(1969-1972)

silver gelatin print

12.5 x 18.6 cm

“The Navy (man lying on deck)”, n.d.
(1969-1972)

silver gelatin print

12 x 17 cm

“The Navy (man under blanket)”, n.d.
(1969-1972)

silver gelatin print

11.5 x 17 cm

Installation view

“The Navy (men on deck)”, n.d.
(1969-1972)

silver gelatin print

12.5 x 19 cm

“The Navy (man in bunk)”, n.d.
(1969-1972)

silver gelatin print

11.7 x 17.1 cm

“The Navy (man at table)”, n.d.
(1969-1972)

c-print

20 x 25.2 cm

“Back of head”, n.d.

silver gelatin print

8.6 x 13.7 cm

Installation view

“The Piers (man sitting on
windowsill)”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

11.8 x 17.2 cm

Installation view

“The Piers (man wearing jockstrap)”,
n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

image size: 32.4 x 19 cm

paper size: 35.6 x 27.9 cm

“The Piers (man wearing jockstrap)”,
n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

image size: 18 x 11.5 cm

paper size: 25.5 x 20.5 cm

“The Piers (man wearing jockstrap)”,
n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

16.5 x 11.3 cm

“The Piers (man wearing jockstrap,
holding shorts)”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

16.9 x 11 cm

“The Piers (man wearing jockstrap,
holding shorts, walking)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

9.2 x 8.9 cm

Installation view

“The Piers (man wearing shorts)”,
n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

17.5 x 11.5 cm

“The Piers (man in jeans)”, n.d.
(1975-1984)

silver gelatin print
image

size: 17 x 12 cm

paper size: 25.3 x 20.4 cm

“The Piers (man undressing)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

17.8 x 11.4 cm

“The Piers (man undressing)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

17.8 x 11.4 cm

“The Piers (two men)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

13.1 x 10.7 cm

Installation view

“The Piers (figure in hallway)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

c-print

image size: 9 x 14 cm

paper size: 10 x 15 cm

“The Piers (man on second level of
warehouse)”, n.d. (1975-1986)

c-print
image size: 14 x 9 cm

paper size: 15 x 10.1 cm

Installation view

“The Piers (exterior with four
figures)”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

15.9 x 23.5 cm

“The Piers (exterior view)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

11.3 x 17.7 cm

“The Piers (exterior view)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

17.8 x 11.4 cm

p
“The Piers (exterior view with
figures)”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

image size: 16.8 x 24.8 cm

paper size: 20.3 x 25.4 cm

Installation view

“The Piers (man leaning)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

32.1 x 20.5 cm

“The Piers (Tava from back)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

11.4 x 17.2 cm

“The Piers (Tava from behind)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

11.5 x 17 cm

Installation view

“The Piers (man holding pants)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)
silver gelatin print
24.8 x 20.3 cm

“The Piers (man leaning)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)
silver gelatin print
17.1 x 11.4 cm

“The Piers (man going through
clothing)”, n.d. (1975-1986)
silver gelatin print
18.8 x 28.5 cm

“The Piers (man sitting, looking
down)”, n.d. (1975-1986)
silver gelatin print
23.8 x 19 cm

“The Piers (man sitting and
smoking)”, n.d. (1975-1986)
silver gelatin print
16.8 x 11.4 cm

Installation view

Instalation view

“The Piers (two men sitting)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

19.7 x 24.8 cm

“The Piers (warehouse interior)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

16.5 x 24.8 cm

“The Piers (warehouse interior)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

15.2 x 24.1 cm

Installation view

“The Piers (broken window)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

18.3 x 12.8 cm

Installation view

“Mark”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

image size: 12 x 17 cm

paper size: 12.5 x 20.2 cm

“The Piers (man looking in window)”,
n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

image size 17 x 12 cm

paper size 25.5 x 20.5 cm

“The Piers (exterior view)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

25 x 19.6 cm

“The Piers (man lying in room)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

11.4 x 20 cm

Installation view

“The Piers (body under cloth)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)
silver gelatin print
11.4 x 16.8 cm

“The Piers (body under cloth,
umbrella)”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

11.8 x 16.8 cm

“The Piers (warehouse interior)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

14 x 25 cm

“The Piers (warehouse interior)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

11.5 x 16.7 cm

“The Piers (body under cloth)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

17.8 x 11.4 cm

Installation view

“The Piers (man seen through
window)”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

6.4 x 6.4 cm

“The Piers (group lying down)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

10.8 x 17.2 cm

“The Piers (two men squatting,
handjob)”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

16.5 x 11.3 cm

“The Piers (man in handcuffs)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

11.4 x 17.2 cm

“The Piers (three men on dock)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

image size: 15 x 22.5 cm

paper size: 20.2 x 25.2 cm

Installation view

“The Piers (man walking in
wreckage)”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

15.9 x 10.5 cm

“The Piers (collapsed warehouse)”,
n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

24 x 18 cm

“The Piers (smoking pier)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

25.2 x 20 cm

“The Piers (building collapsing)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

11.7 x 16.4 cm

“The Piers (warehouse and
demolition truck)”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

10.5 x 16.5 cm

Installation view

“The Piers (wreckage)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

17 x 11.5 cm

“The Piers (Hudson River)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

c-print

14.9 x 10.1 cm

“The Piers (man with two dogs,
looking across water)”, n.d.
(1975-1984)

silver gelatin print

11.3 x 19.6 cm

Installion view

“World Trade Center at Night
(Westside Ghost)”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print (vintage print)

image size: 21.5 x 32.5 cm

paper size: 27.6 x 34 cm

“Truck with motorcycle, elevated
west side highway”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

11.6 x 17 cm

“Pier façade with World Trade
Center”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

image size: 11 x 17.8 cm

paper size: 20.3 x 25 cm

“West Side Highway and pier
façade”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

11.5 x 17 cm

“Jimmy Carter”, 1976

silver gelatin print

11.5 x 16.7cm

Installion view

“The Piers (collapsed architecture)”,
n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

image size: 11.7 x 18 cm

paper size: 20.2 x 25.3 cm

“The Piers (collapsed architecture
with figure)”, n.d. (1975-1986)
silver gelatin print
image size: 11.7 x 18 cm
paper size: 20.1 x 25.3 cm

“Rick”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

16.5 x 11.4 cm

“The Piers (man with roller skates)”,
n.d. (1975-1986)

c-print

image size: 14 x 9 cm

paper size: 15 x 10.1 cm

“Dog by water”, n.d.

c-print

12.5 x 17.6 cm

Installation view

“The Piers (man sitting)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

17 x 11 cm

“The Piers (man sitting with leg
extended)”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

7 x 10.8 cm

“The Piers (portrait of young man
from behind)”, n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

17 x 11.4 cm

“The Piers (man from behind)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

image size: 33 x 21.5 cm

paper size: 35.3 x 27.8 cm

“The Piers (man sitting on ledge)”,
n.d. (1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

image size: 11.1 x 7.3 cm

paper size: 12.7 x 10.2 cm

“The Piers (man from below)”, n.d.
(1975-1986)

silver gelatin print

16.8 x 11.5 cm

“Cat on rocks”, n.d.

silver gelatin print on artist’s matte

25.7 x 26 cm

Alvin Baltrop
“Seated figure at The Cloisters”,
1965

silver gelatin print on cardboard

19.8 x 26.5 cm

All images courtesy and copyright of Galerie Buchholz.

Galerie Buchholz is proud to present an exhibition of photographs by Alvin Baltrop (1948-2004) at our Berlin gallery. Coinciding with Gallery Weekend Berlin, this exhibition is the second solo exhibition of the artist with Galerie Buchholz.

The gallery was first introduced to the work of Alvin Baltrop through the art historian and cultural critic Douglas Crimp (1944-2019). Crimp was instrumental in making Baltrop’s work more widely known through his writing and curating, beginning with his Artforum cover story for Baltrop in 2008, and then through the exhibitions “Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970 – present” (curated with Lynne Cooke, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2010) and “Greater New York” (MoMA PS1, 2015). The gallery’s first times exhibiting Baltrop were in the context of shows organized together with Crimp, first in Berlin (“Pictures, Before and After”, 2014) and then in New York (“Before Pictures: New York City, 1967-1977”, 2016). Crimp then introduced us to the Alvin Baltrop Trust, which is run by Randal Wilcox and Yona Backer of Third Streaming. In 2017 we presented our first Baltrop solo exhibition, which was curated by Douglas Crimp, and for which he also wrote an introductory text. In 2019 The Bronx Museum of the Arts presented the first comprehensive exhibition and catalogue of Alvin Baltrop, curated by Antonio Sergio Bessa.

The largest group of photographs left behind by Baltrop depict Manhattan’s dilapidated West Side Piers and the surrounding area from 1975 to 1986, when it was the city’s epicenter of gay social and sexual experimentation. Baltrop’s photography poetically documents the excitement and danger of this moment. This May, the Whitney Museum in New York is commemorating the history of this neighborhood through a new public art installation by David Hammons. Titled “Day’s End” in reference to Gordon Matta-Clark’s famous architectural interventions into Pier 52, which Baltrop photographed and which Crimp wrote about in his memoir “Before Pictures”, Hammons’s sculpture reconstructs the outline of the most notorious Pier. In tandem with the project’s realization, the Whitney presented “Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970-1986”, an exhibition which featured artworks that relate to the pier, including works by Baltrop from the Whitney’s collection.

Alvin Baltrop’s posthumous legacy is indebted first and foremost to Randal Wilcox, an artist, friend of Baltrop in his lifetime, and a trustee of The Alvin Baltrop Trust. In 2012 he published a biographical text on Baltrop in the journal Atlántica. The below text is a selected adaptation of that text.

Alvin Jerome Baltrop was born in the Bronx, New York, on December 11, 1948, shortly after Dorothy Mae Baltrop, his mother, moved to the North from Virginia along with her oldest son, James. Alvin’s first exposure to art was James’s drawings; the younger Baltrop picked up a Yashica-C camera in order to respond to his older brother. Baltrop began his career as a teenager shooting on the streets of New York. Early on he also photographed the patrons of the Stonewall Inn, New York’s famous gay bar, to which he and other gay teenage friends gained entry by lying about their age, prior to the famous Stonewall Riots of 1969. The energy of this downtown community clearly had an effect on Baltrop, as he would later move to the East Village and live there for nearly three decades.

Unfortunately his mother, Dorothy Mae Baltrop, who was a devout Jehovah’s Witness and was often in conflict with Baltrop over his homosexuality, destroyed most of her son’s early photographs and negatives. One surviving print from this period is a photograph from 1965 [included in the present show], depicting a seated elderly woman reading a book at The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park. This print anticipates many qualities that Baltrop would explore in his later photography. Baltrop frequently captured people engaged in looking or someone or something else. The act of viewing is therefore compounded and overlapping.

In 1969, Baltrop entered the US Navy, where he continued photographing at sea. He later recalled:

“I was just being sent to boot camp when they had the riots at Stonewall. My friends were sending clippings about it. We all used to hang out there, and now I was seeing my friends in the newspaper. I couldn’t tell anyone else about it, but after my first year in the Navy I learned that I could be a whole person… I was a medic. They called me W.D. – witch doctor. I built my developing trays out of medic trays in the sick bay; I built my own enlarger. I took notes about exposures, practiced techniques, and just kept going. I think I perfected my lighting skills there.”

In 1972, Baltrop received an honorable discharge from the Navy and returned to the Bronx. Following his brother’s example, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts the following year on the G.I. Bill. In 1975, he began working as a taxi driver. As Weegee had done decades earlier, Baltrop used a police radio, which he hid in the vehicle, to locate crimes throughout the City that he could photograph during his breaks. It was during this time that he began to visit and take photographs at the West Side Piers.

In 1975, New York City was bankrupt. President Gerald Ford’s rejection of loan guarantees to the city was immortalized in the frontpage headline of the Daily News on October 30, 1975: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” New York now had a vast supply of abandoned properties that it couldn’t even afford to tear down. The piers and their adjacent warehouses were adopted by New Yorkers for a variety of purposes. Some went there to sunbathe. Others went to engage in sexual activity. Teenage runaways, the homeless, and mentally ill went there because they had nowhere else to go. Thieves and murderes also went there looking for prey. An increasing number of artists also ventured there to make art.

Eventually, Baltrop quit his job as a taxi driver and purchased a van that he used in his new profession as a mover. Loading his van with cameras, film, food, wine, joints, and a handgun, Baltrop would stay at the piers for days on end, using his vehicle as a place to change clothes, eat, and sleep. In 1975, he dropped out of SVA because he could no longer juggle school, work, and his art. It was at this point that Baltrop fully committed to capturing the piers.

In 1986, the West Side Piers were finally demolished by the city, citing public health and safety concerns.

In the 1990s, Alvin Baltrop conducted interviews with people he knew from the piers to capture their memories of that time on tape. Two of these interviews are featured in the exhibition, with Rick and Mark, whose portraits by Baltrop are both in the show.

On the occasion of this exhibition, the renowned American science fiction author Samuel R. Delany, currently living in Philadelphia, wrote a new text, entitled “Looking Through Two Books of Alvin Baltrop’s with My Computer to Help”, reflecting on his time in New York and his memories of this specific area of the city. Delany has also written about this in his autobiographical books “The Motion of Light in Water” and “Dark Reflections”, as well as in “The Real Joe Dicostanzo”.

The photographs of Alvin Baltrop (1948-2004) were virtually unknown during the artist’s lifetime. A working-class African American, many of whose photographs are sexually explicit, Baltrop encountered only rejection. In the past decade his work has belatedly begun to be exhibited, including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, MoMA/PS1 in New York City, and Third Streaming in New York, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston. By far the largest cache of Baltrop’s extant photographs depicts the scene at the dilapidated Hudson River piers adjacent to Greenwich Village and the Meat Packing District. During the 1970s and into the 1980s, when Baltrop photographed there, the piers were a site of pleasure and danger for men seeking sex, sunbathing, making a provisional home, or just hanging out and taking in the splendor of the industrial ruins. More nefarious deeds also took place: theft, gay-bashing, even murder.

Baltrop claimed to be terrified of the place initially, but also intrigued; he began taking photographs, he said, as a voyeur. Eventually he became a denizen of the piers, at times living nearby in his moving van, which also provided his source of income. His rapport with certain of the pier’s users is clear enough in the straightforward portraits he made there, and is even clearer in photographs of men removing their clothes to pose for Baltrop. Some photographs are so intimate as to suggest that the sex they depict is staged for his camera – or, indeed, that photographing was part of the action.

Baltrop seems to have wanted above all to portray the environment in which these activities took place, the piers themselves. Sometimes you have to look closely even to locate people within the disintegrating remains of the pier sheds, much less see what they’re up to; and in any case they might simply be sitting on a window ledge or standing on a mooring. Or, more disquieting, they might be prone bodies covered with blankets, presumably sleeping. In many cases, there are no figures at all; Baltrop’s subject is simply the architecture in its vastness and melancholy.

Baltrop printed the majority of his photographs small, no more than 5 x 7 inches (approx. 13 x 18 cm), although he printed a few images considerably larger. There are variant sizes and crops of a few pictures. Because of the small size and density of information in many of the photographs, especially those of one pier taken from the distance of another, adjacent pier, you have to get very close to the picture to really see it. It has been noted that Baltrop’s pier photographs constitute a significant record of a lost era of New York industrial landscape and gay culture’s pre-AIDS history. There is truth in that view, but it suggests that Baltrop’s project was essentially documentary in nature, whereas the intimacy of the pictures, their studied compositions, their attention to the play of light and shadow testify to a wider ambition.

Douglas Crimp

Looking Through Two Books of Alvin Baltrop’s with My Computer to Help

by Samuel R. Delany

My firsthand knowledge of the docks and the sexual action that went on there under the highway and among the docks was about over when Alvin Baltrop’s photographs begin. One book, in which over 170 of his images are entombed, begins with Douglas Crimp’s observation, “In December 1973, a highway repair truck, laden with asphalt, crashed through the elevated West Side highway between Little West 12th St. and Gansevoort St., closing forever the section of the highway south of the collapse.” By that time, I had abandoned New York – and the kind of activity I wrote about both in The Motion of Light in Water, which took in many trips from east to west and hamburgers and coffee at the Silver Dollar 24-hour breakfast place on Christopher St., of which my meetings with Bill Stribling and Joe Soley were the most memorable, and a very uncharacteristic account in my memoir, The Real Joe Dicostanzo, which occurred shortly after the breakup of my music group Heavenly Breakfast and the murder of Martin Luther King on April 4th, 1968, by James Earl Ray. I doubt I ever stepped foot on or in Pier 52, but the kind of images Baltrop was able to spy on during daylight were commonplaces of the night under the highway during the 1960s. One picture of a particularly well-hung Scandinavian (page 143) brings back a comment made to me by the writer Judith Merril that particularly well-hung men have a certain cockiness to their walk. Myself, I was never particularly aware of it, nor is cocky the feel I take away from the photograph, but I do remember her saying it.

It takes texts such as Wojnarowicz’s Memories that Smell like Gasoline or my own Mad Man or Times Square Red/Blue to show those illicit moments Baltrop’s sometimes captured from a distance, sometimes from close up, and that white photographers such as David Hurle or my own fictive photographer Joe Salieri (in Dark Reflections) plumbed for the phallic profusion available during this or that passage of time, in that or this fragment of social space.

What strikes me most about Baltrop’s pictures is the comparative isolation of the subjects. Probably that is a factor of the fact that it was day.

The city locations are insistently marginal.

The sense of ruin is both romantic and oppressive and throws one back to the 18th century when, in Europe, after the Franco-Prussian war, the ruin itself became a symbol of romance. The etymology of a word like “pornographic” is both troubling and problematic: the writing of and by prostitutes. In a society such as ours, there are often men who feel that the exchange of money takes the focus off desire per se. An old adage that I first heard while I was still a teenager returns to mind: “Today’s rough trade is tomorrow’s competition” – not that I particularly found it to be true. In the case of most of Baltrop’s photographs, one is not sure whether these are people who have been caught in the act, who don’t care if they were caught in the act or not, or were caught just before or just after an act that may be as simple as removing one’s clothes for a sunbath; a few, however, suggest that a moment of commercial exchange is what the photographer’s attention and lens have fallen on.

The nude or the naked offers – in various climates – an entire sartorial critique that, again, goes back to William Blake and his wife sunbathing nude in their gardens, not to mention the somewhat notorious nudism of the great 20th-century-short-story master, Theodore Sturgeon.

Eventually, color takes over for a brief while, between pages 201 and 217, in the larger Baltrop volume, and at much the same time, a viewer paging through becomes far more aware of death and cats . . .

All such collections as they are framed in a gallery or in a book, accompanied by more or less informed, more or less accurate texts, are also being tamed: their separation from the place and time they were taken is being emphasized. There is little way to escape it. Baltrop died at age 55 from cancer; often we see him with the coffin nail between his fingers that took my own father at age 54, when I was nineteen. Page 11 of The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop shows a foreshortened picture of the dockside bar Badlands I was in perhaps once under that name on a Gay Pride Day – which one I don’t remember – but, years before in the ’60s, when it was known as Dirty Dick’s, I wrote about it in some detail. By the time Baltrop photographed it, it was up from a place called The Ram Rod, whose sign is visible in his photograph. When I was there, there was another bar, I believe, called Hudson’s (but I may have it wrong), which was across the street, in which the photographer is pretty clearly standing for the picture I’m talking about. It catered to S&M (that’s three syllables) and did not particularly interest me in the Dirty Dick’s days.

Eventually, Dirty Dick’s/Badlands ceased to be a bar altogether and became a peepshow venue and which, as of 2019, was still standing with a “Store for Lease” sign on it, according to Google Maps. Somehow, these continuities, whether captured by a Baltrop photo or a glance out the window when being driven down West Street on some trip to the city or even a glimpse this morning in Google Maps, are reassuring in some way through their continuity.

Philadelphia, PA, April 12, 2021

¹By comparison with Baltrop’s work, the Peter Hujar photo of a day-time moment on the piers (p 56) looks incredibly coy, in a way it would not if the two central figures were simply naked.

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Weltaneignung
Lotta Bartoschewski and Sophia Domagala

28.05. – 13.06.2021

AD/AD

Deisterstr 13

30449 Hannover

Images courtesy the artist and AD/AD

Photos: Samuel Henne

Weltaneignung (World Appropriation)

We have essentially overtaken everything. Everything is “post”—that is, already

afterward. Post-internet, post-capitalism, post-modernism. Were we too slow? Are

we only able to face a world that we think is spinning faster and faster by becoming

faster and faster ourselves? By processing things even more efficiently and

rigorously? Only by growing can we survive, cries the unfettered neoliberal market

that surrounds us. “If acceleration is the problem, then resonance may be the

solution,” proclaims Hartmut Rosa, however, in his book Resonance—A Sociology of

our Relationship to the World. He postulates the hypothesis that “an aimless and

interminable compulsion to increase […] ultimately leads to a problematic, even

pathological relationship to the world […].”[1] For where should we position ourselves once we realize that higher, faster, and further are no longer attractive categories? The artists Lotta Bartoschewski and Sophia Domagala explore Hartmut Rosa’s concept of “world appropriation” in their exhibition of the same name, Weltaneignung. After all, every work of art is always an attempt to situate ourselves

in the world and to determine the exact coordinates between which we operate. At the same time, we appropriate the world through art, through the fact that we are producing something, and evade this aforementioned urge for more—because the things that are being produced here are not subject to any market-inherent logic. Lotta Bartoschewski often uses objects that are not only unconstrained by any market-inherent logic, but also those that we would otherwise reject: one-cent coins

that we have been collecting forever, only to never get round to taking them to the bank, old newspapers with yesterday’s news.

Here in Hanover, an isosceles triangle seems to float above the ground. It invites

visitors to react to it—makes them, even. Because the triangle is placed in the

middle of the space, they have to respond to it: Do they walk around it? Do they step

over it? This narrative opens up a reciprocal game between body and space. The

surfaces of the plaster sculptures, made especially for the space, reveal the negative

imprints of the molds, whose interior Bartoschewski painted and lined. The plaster

records everything, accurately reproducing all the information fed to it previously.

What is then depicted in the plaster is the mirrored trace of human activity. Every

fingerprint, every fiber is visible. One-cent coins are gathered on the structure like

jewelry; through the images imprinted on the coins, they tell their own stories of the

circulation of value and the meanings attributed to them. Another sculpture, a

rectangular frame leaning in a recessed alcove, features imprints of newspaper

clippings. Their raison d’être is no longer drawn from the news they proclaim, but

from the fact that they can be used in a different way. They, too, are only

recognizable in their mirrored form due to the printing process. Bartoschewski places

them in a different context and gives them a new purpose, one that is no longer

linked to usefulness and efficiency.

Sophia Domagala’s striped paintings are positioned differently. They are an endless

sequence of repetitions and the same gestures, softened only by small

discontinuities. The line is the simplest and most universal form, yet also the greatest

and most radical challenge. For no freely painted line will ever be perfect; even the

attempt is doomed to fail. They act like a grid through which a window to the world

emerges. Something that frames the main action and offers it a stage. The space in

between becomes an infinitely expandable resonating body. Domagala contemplates

each stripe thoroughly, like a word. While there was sometimes writing in her work in

the past, it has given way to stripes here, which now take on the task of

corresponding with the viewer. For isn’t writing ultimately stripes and lines strung

together? Domagala systematically explores the vertical line in various states: laid

over a newspaper clipping, as a wall painting, or on canvas. In each instance they

establish new spaces and enter into direct correspondence with the viewer. In each

stripe lies a new chance, a new attempt. All are the same yet each one is different.

While Bartoschewski’s work is established in the space and urges action in a

playfully inviting gesture, space is revealed in Domagala’s work through repetition.

The works of both artists function here as a resonance space in which we can relate

to the world. That is precisely why it is interesting to look at them together. If you

wanted to break it down, you could say: Bartoschewski works disruptively, Domagala

repetitively. According to Rosa, art “keeps your mind open to the fact […] that

another relationship to the world is possible.”[2 ]We thus learn the different ways in

which we can appropriate this world, how we can encounter it, and how we can enter

into correspondence with it. Without any acceleration, only the ability to immerse

ourselves in contemplation. Because when Nas asks, “Whose world is this?”, the

only correct answer is one that Rosa would also like: “The world is yours, the world is

yours—It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine.”[3]

Laura Helena Wurth: “Weltaneignung (World Appropriation)”, on occasion of the

exhibition

“Lotta Bartoschewski/ Sophia Domagala – WELTANEIGNUNG”, ad/ad – Project

Space, Hannover, 2021

Laura Helena Wurth is an author. She lives and works in Berlin.

[1] See Hartmut Rosa, “Resonanz—Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung” (Suhrkamp

Verlag: Berlin, 2016), p.14

[2] Rosa, “Resonanz”, p. 495

[3] See Nas, “The World Is Yours,” by Nasir Jones, Illmatic (Columbia, 1994), LP.

Text by Laura Helena Wurth

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looking in to look out

Waèl Allouche, Vicente Baeza, Tash Keddy, Sam Marshall Lockyer, Rodrigo Red Sandoval

initiated by Àngels Miralda

16 – 27 June, 2021

PuntWG

WG Plein, Amsterdam

It hits you like a roaring crash. The first step taken beyond the dunes is met with topples and dives and collisions. It carries coarse sand particles that whip your cheeks and pounce like thick brown snakes towards their unsuspecting prey. An ecosystem of marine life, shells, algal blooms, oyster sperm, schools of fish and bleached driftwood enter through every cavity, hole, every porous element of exposed skin. A smell in the air, salt burns eyes and tastes dry on the inside of red glowing cheeks. Retreating from fierce elements behind a dune, a world appears. A patch of moss, mites, molecules, birth and death and everything that lies between. A shared moment is enough to create a community in this large mess called universe, galaxy, planet earth, island coast, a small area behind the shelter of a natural dune next to the windswept path leading to a quicksand reservoir, a tidal pool, a vast expanse.

The exhibiting artists came together in April 2021 during a visit to Texel island. The trip was not an official residency and therefore acts as a provocation to question traditional formats of residencies and communal experiences. A event on the 26th of June will be led by Hugo Palmar, organising member of airWG, in order to connect the recent programming of airWG, the current parallel exhibition initiated by resident artist Mire Lee, and the questions facing established organisations as we emerge from recent conditions. The works of the exhibiting artists are connected by an event rather than themes, but can be interpreted through topics of hosting, intimacy, scale, and the poetics of materiality.

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HANG ON, WARTE!

Monika Brandmeier, Miguel Angel Fernandez, Miriam Jonas, Marion Orfila, Benedikt Terwiel, Johannes Tassilo Walter, Andrea Winkler, Michaela Zimmer

19.06. – 27.06.2021

Sat/Sun 2 – 8 pm and on request

SPOILER — Aktionsraum Moabit, Quitzowstraße 108a 10551 Berlin

Andrea Winkler

Michaela Zimmer, Andrea Winkler

Benedikt Terwiel

Johannes Tassilo

Miriam Jonas, Marion Orfila

Miguel Angel Fernandez

Miriam Jonas

Monika Brandmeier

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Malak El Zanaty Varichon / De l’autre côté du ciel avec eux sous les étoiles
curated by Cocotte & Mona Varichon.

May 22 – July 3, 2021

Cocotte
2 rue Ignace Dumergue
19260 Treignac
France

video : https://vimeo.com/539748637/9a5b29722c

A comme s’arrêter regarder pour voir
B comme ces impressions dans la réserve de l’œil en sommeil C comme un jeu, la mémoire de l’œil
D comme des images encore vivantes, engourdies
E comme le souvenir des gourmandises
F comme vision éphémère d’un espace en mouvement
G comme rétine bobine
H comme cinéma l’œil d’hier
I comme images fragments d’aujourd’hui
J comme caméra intérieure du temps qui passe
K comme si elle voulait ressortir et s’imprimer ailleurs
L comme la source et l’eau
M comme le désir encore
N comme et si cela revenait ?
O comme des couleurs ordonnées aimées
P comme peinture mémoire en tulle du présent
Q comme des bouts d’ici de là-bas
R comme les doigts qui glissent sur le papier
S comme la durée sans heures sans minutes
T comme Toi Toi mon Toît…
U comme tendre est la toile avec moi
V comme voler l’eau à la mer et devenir air…
W comme labourer la terre du bout des doigts et la lune aussi…
X faire comme si c’était possible de capturer l’éphémère
Y souffler les couleurs du vent, planter les dunes et les lumières
Z fermer les yeux et savourer mmmmm

À vous après le Bip ***** Paris Juin 2011 / Mai 2021

—

Malak El Zanaty Varichon (born 1952 in Giza, Egypt) lives and works in Paris. Since 1990, she has been leading art workshops with the non-profit Art-Éveil in kindergarten and elementary schools in Paris and its surrounding areas, for adults, disabled or socially marginalized audiences, and at the Atelier des Enfants of the Centre Georges Pompidou. During her years in this beloved place she delighted in the back-and-forth course between the Atelier, the works in the museum, and the windows to the city, which allowed her to share, with visitors from all walks of life, a knowledge of the world, and of oneself, through looking, speaking and doing. Over time and its detours, she has been developing her own artistic practice within the folds of her professional and family life.

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Antonin Giroud-Delorme / Eupepsia

curated by Eliott Paquet

June 17 – June 27, 2021

Placement Produit,
60 rue de la Commune de Paris,
93300 Aubervilliers, France

Antonin Giroud-Delorme revels in optics, yet shuns the superficial. He is a vessel, offering combustions of invented icons, exquisite emblems. One is challenged with new languages via frustrated aggregations. The Natural translates the synthetic, and vice versa. In “Eupepsia” Giroud-Delorme’s transmutations proliferate throughout the space, inviting poesis and imaginal play. His constructions are atemporal, suspended in perturbations, riddled with obfuscations. What is moving here is the utter lack of movement. The viewer lies in wait, per the artist’s instructions. One plants his feet squarely and denies inertia, leaving the body to do work while mired in liminality.

Perhaps less about direct ingression, more about expansiveness.

A new baroque, rhizomatizing experience, connection, aesthetic, ethics.

Shattering a “harmonious, homogenous, and thoroughly knowable”1 Nature in favor of infinitudes.

Dreams of discovery and innovation are not resigned to modernist thought, there is a fissure in the cynic’s logic.

Screen, image, interface, and the results of iconoclasm.

Behold Giroud-Delorme’s open cosmologies.

Giroud-Delorme’s work gestures towards processes of amalgamation and a series of disturbances. With unexpected assemblages and spatial configurations, the sculptures seep and expand into broad horizons. The artist revels in new topologies via interfaces between unlike materials such as Burgundy red wine and cornstarch, mechanical clock fragments and natural hemp. The results are beautiful, if not a little grotesque- with distinct parts serving as means to ends. Here the viewer is left to his own devices, brushing up against themes of domesticity, spatial mapping, bodily mutations, politics, and intimacy.

Through careful deconstruction and recombination, he is reaching towards some essential spirit.

Reilly Davidson

—

Antonin Giroud-Delorme (1985, Chenôve) lives in Amsterdam and works between the Netherlands and France.

He graduated with a Master’s degree in visual arts at ENSA Dijon, and has joined a second MFA at the Sandberg Instituut (NL) for the 2016-2018 session.

His work has been exhibited in Saint-Etienne (Les Limbes), Lyon (Bikini), Leipzig, Berlin, Buenos Aires (CCRojas – cur. Alicia Herrero), Gwan- gju (Barim & Fonds Art Council Korea), Amsterdam (De Appel – cur. Jerszy Seymour / Staircase Project – cur. Filippo Tocchi x MRZB collective) and for AAC#5 in Liège. He is currently working on a series of duo exhibitions with Swedish artist Josefina Anjou, this project is curated by Jules Van Den Langenberg and will be shown in Amsterdam and Stockholm respectively next year. He is preparing a new chapter of his long-term project The Nameless Healer for 2022 in The Hague, the solo exhibition will be developed in collaboration with an intervention by the Amsterdam-based Korean choreographer and performer Mami Kang.

He regularly organizes off-site collective events hacking into certain privatized corporate services as a natural context for exhibition.

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Christian Quin Newell / Earth altar

June 2 – July 3, 2021

PUBLIC
91 Middlesex St
London
E1 7DA

PUBLIC Gallery is pleased to present Earth altar, the debut solo exhibition of Christian Quin Newell. Bringing together a new series of large-scale paintings, drawings and miniatures, the exhibition expands on Newell’s distinct iconography of archetypal images, transhistorical characters and multilayered plots within a sequence of dreamscapes.

Newell’s visual language draws on his own lived experience, as well as a myriad of references from art history, mysticism, alchemy and psychology, resulting in a personal mythology populated by an amalgamation of symbols and avatars. Anchored around a semi-autobiographical protagonist, the works in this exhibition contribute to Newell’s exploration into the multivalent facets of the ‘self’, revealing a cyclical journey into past, present and future lives.

Traversing time and space, the mutable image of the exhibition’s central figure appears throughout taking on a variety of forms and identities, both bodily and spiritual. In the miniatures and charcoal drawings we see stoic portraits of this character as an archetypal warrior or mystic, accompanied by a circular form evoking a sun with rays. This solar symbol is present in many of the works, acting as a window into the ‘self’ or gateway into other selves. In Memory Palace, a large scale diptych we see this shape surrounded by floating faces recalling Japanese Kabuki masks which appear in varying states of focus, alluding to the ‘persona’ or mask we present to society and our inner ‘shadow’ formed of repressed desires and animalistic instincts.

Newell’s interest in the multiple aspects of the ‘self’ or the existence of many selves is rooted in his study of Buddhism, tarot cards and the archetypal psychology developed by Carl Jung. Inspired by the universal dualities central to these subjects of interest, Newell’s main characters are often portrayed as the archetypal hero or anti-hero, yin and yang. In Chamber of Reflections they can be seen shrouded in both light and dark at the foot of the canvas, studying an ephemeral scene of archers practising the Ancient Japanese tradition of Kyudo, literally meaning ‘way of the bow’.

Considered a discipline that will lead to moral and spiritual advancement, Kyudo is central to Newell’s conception of the epic at hand, which sees its protagonist face a series of external and internal battles as they seek self-realization or enlightenment. This ritualistic practice, alongside many of the inspirations behind and concepts explored within his work, also links to Newell’s process of creation which engages practices of mindfulness and seated meditation to achieve ‘single-pointed concentration’––a level of focus that allows the materials or tools to work through him leading to a heightened awareness of the nuances in texture, colour, tone and light.

There is visual coherence to the overall group of works on view, both in their similar palettes and tones utilising underpainting techniques of the Venetian Renaissance, as well as in recurring characters and motifs, the striking use of light and illusory treatment of scale which often defies perspective alluding to different time zones or planes of existence. Ruminating on concepts of rebirth, karma, morality, and the act of storytelling itself, Newell’s work becomes a strategy of fantastical autobiography and a unique way of seeing––looking closely at both the external world and deeply within oneself.

Christian Quin Newell (b. 1991, Latisana, Italy) lives and works in London, UK. He holds a BA from Camberwell College of Arts, London, UK. Recent exhibitions include APOTHEOSIS, WT Foundation, Kyiv, Ukraine (2021) and 100 Drawings from Now, The Drawing Center, New York, USA (2020). He completed an invitational residency at the WT Foundation, Kyiv, Ukraine at the beginning of the year and was the artist in residence at The Fores Project, London, UK, May 2021.

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Guendalina Cerruti / Wasted Dreams

June 2 – July 3, 2021

PUBLIC
91 Middlesex St
London
E1 7DA

PUBLIC Gallery is pleased to present Wasted Dreams, the debut UK solo exhibition of Italian, London based artist Guendalina Cerruti. Through an expansive installation that combines assemblage-based sculpture, LED art, mixed media wall and floor-based works, Cerruti explores the relationship between life, dreams and contemporaneity.

Influenced by domestic spaces, home decor, architecture and the urban landscape, Cerruti’s artmaking acts as a cathartic pursuit to process the world around her––both the interior world of emotion, thoughts, memories and the exterior world of popular culture and society. In this exhibition, Cerruti transforms the gallery space into a domestic interior blending London’s urban landscape with childhood bedrooms to ruminate on the notion of youthful aspirations––hopes that we had for our lives, but which have been forbidden, changed or faded away over time.

Within this nostalgic setting, Cerruti’s customised furniture forms a materialistic micro-universe reflective of stimuli that shapes our capitalist society and desires. Inspired by the streets of central London where one is constantly exposed to consumerist aspirations through street advertisements and wealthy neighbourhoods, we see a chest of drawers mutate into a regency style town house complete with parking space for luxury cars, while a rocking chair imitates a Porsche design boasting the eccentric colours and surfaces seen in sports cars that rev through the city.

Cerruti’s use of different decorating techniques to achieve a variety of textures within each piece evokes a range of visceral emotions and conceptual contexts. In contrast to the ostentatious display of monetary success so often equated with aspiration seen in the bright marble-esque painted townhouse and shiny sparkle induced sports cars, we see a wooden cradle transform into a London underground train coated in a layer of fake dirt and dust. For Cerruti, the old train covered in muck represents a more grounded setting of self-reflection––a collective resting place for the wasted dreams of its daily commuters.

In the center of the space, a monumental decoupage book evoking a teenage diary of dreams stands tall. Entitled Wasted Dreams, this work exemplifies the combination of youthful aspirations informed by both personal whims and society at large present throughout the exhibition. Tapping into the aesthetics, trends and lifestyle of new generations in which social media shapes so much of one’s goals and aspirations, the bright colourful pages full of glitter and confetti are layered with cut out images, from Justin Bieber to the sunset skyline of Los Angeles, symbolising the prevalent force of celebrity influencer culture in shaping our desires.

Part fictional, part autobiographical Cerruti’s installation brings together collections of narratives, micro-universes dense with sentiment, sarcasm and candour. Like the inhibited dreams of youth there is a sense of the fantastical throughout the works on display, where anything is possible, and nothing is quite as it seems.

Guendalina Cerruti (b. 1992, Milan, Italy) lives and works in London, UK. She holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, UK and BA from the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, Italy. Solo exhibitions include Love you, Bye, Studiolo, Milan, Italy (2018) and Guendalina, Studiolo, Milan, Italy (2015). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Old Friends, New Friends, Collective Ending HQ, London, UK (2020); Vivace, Balcony Gallery, Lisbon (2019); Playful Aggressions, Greengrassi, London, UK (2019); Il disegno politico Italiano, A Plus A, Venice, Italy (2018); That’s IT, MAMO, Museum of Modern Art, Bologna, Italy (2018).

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squeezebox
with Niccolo Binda, Lucas Dupuy, Clark Keatley, Anna Gonzalez Noguchi, Eleni Papazoglou, Jinia Tasnin.

Organised by Elliot Fox, Ted Le Swer & Georgia Stephenson.

June 5 – July 3, 2021

Collective Ending HQ
3 Creekside
London SE8 4SA

squeezebox presents the work of six artists within an ambitious concertina-like architectural intervention erected within the Collective Ending HQ gallery space.

The structure is designed by the curators and constructed mostly from polystyrene which is commonly used for construction work and mould-making; where it operates as an inner tissue of sorts. Its malleable and speculative properties offer a range of ways in which it can interact with the artworks. In this, squeezebox attempts to offer an alternative mode for the presentation of artworks.

The selected artists take forgotten or neglected iconography, symbology and language, and archive them within their pieces, often applying fresh meanings and sometimes prospects for the future. Much of this cataloguing is drawn from the artists’ impression of the street. So naturally, memory and shared public space are key themes in the exhibition – exploring how architecture is interpreted by collective consciousness and vice versa.

The selection of the works presents a purely conjectural and borderline dystopian, urban landscape. Much like the experience of existence during an ongoing global crisis, time exists within the squeezebox vacuum but appears delinear, disorientating and distorted.

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Authority Incorporeal

curated by Adomas Narkevičius

artists: Juta Čeičytė; Flaka Haliti; Karol Radziszewski; Rachel McIntosh, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Miša Skalskis & Stephen Webb; Žilvinas Dobilas & Jonas Zagorskas; Virgilijus Šonta

5 June – 4 July 2021

Rupert

Vaidilutes g. 79

Vilnius 10100, Lithuania

Part of the Baltic Triennial 14, ‘Authority Incorporeal’ is an international group exhibition that focuses on several works of art that have, over recent decades, sensed and continue to think through the relationship between secular and spiritual agency, daily referred to as power, on other occasions, affect or empowerment. Stemming from the malleable region of Central Eastern Europe, they are markers of different traditions, social milieu and moments in time as much as they are particular forms of knowing that slip out of them. The corporeal, material or otherwise felt presence of all these artworks suggests how murky the inner workings and distinctions between ‘justified beliefs’, commonly called knowledge, and beliefs lacking such qualifications, can be. In art history, the art world, as much as politics more broadly, the figure and idea of authority, supposedly self-explanatory, are awkward to legitimise using reason alone. As such, they occupy the gap between ‘the imaginary’ – desiring, paranoid, hopeful – inclinations and ‘the factual’ – necessary, inevitable, accepted – convictions.

The artworks of Juta Čeičytė (Lithuania); Flaka Haliti (Kosovo/Germany); Karol Radziszewski (Poland); Rachel McIntosh (US/Finland), Jaakko Pallasvuo (Finland), Miša Skalskis (Lithuania) & Stephen Webb (US/Finland); Žilvinas Dobilas & Jonas Zagorskas (Lithuania); Virgilijus Šonta (Lithuania) dwell in this interstice, making their own particular addresses through form and colour, as well as what and how they elect to represent. They allude to the continual yet not entirely predictable relation between art histories of the region and wider geo- and socio-political processes. Dwelling between the power of belief and the jurisdiction of knowledge, their aesthetic structures reorder entrenched historical and social relationships without issuing orders, all with the soft authority of something that has simply been made and perseveres towards the future.

‘Authority Incorporeal’ intends not so much to once again call the factual into question or further haphazardly conflate the two realms but rather to acknowledge the existence of this subtle transitional space, between that which was and is quelled as ‘irrelevant fantasy’, ‘superstition’ or simply ‘bad art’, and that which was and is authorised as ‘the only viable reality’, joining what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called reparative work. Alongside the artworks themselves, the exhibition wonders: how can we address this authoritative forgetfulness, an ongoing psychosocial repression – at times our own, of unreasonable, untimely and otherwise illegitimate beliefs, ideas and lifeworlds?

Never entirely incorporeal and absent, nor fully incorporated, the apparition of authority punctuates past and present in its new temporary embodiments – poking fun at us or itself looking silly in the process. In this particular locality, a magisterial apparition in its latest form tells tales of the young who do not remember; who, thus, now live in a way that is ‘healthy’, ‘wholesome’ and entirely ‘Western’. If this holds true, they, as it were, gave up the ghost. However, as Flaka Haliti’s artwork ‘Concerned by the ghost without being bothered’, which welcomes visitors suggests, a certain retention – being okay to feel things that are not entirely okay – in time might be more emancipatory than forgetfulness.

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je n’entends plus aucune voix

Angélique Aubrit, Ludovic Beillard

April 24 – July 12, 2021

Centre d’art contemporain-la synagogue de Delme, Delme,
France

Photography : Ludovic Beillard

Artists Angélique Aubrit and Ludovic Beillard do not regard themselves as a duo, preferring

to see their occasional collaborations as “discussions” lead- ing to common works. Angélique

Aubrit’s works are very often made of textile— following DIY principles—as much from

necessity as for the resulting aesthetic. Her creations depict the narratives of vacillating,

present or absent characters affected by disappointing, even desperate social situations.

Inspired by genre cinema and recent philosophy, her dark narrative arcs take shape in

formless, liquified or slumped creations. A soft destruction appears in their cheap, shiny silk

fabrics, which seem to have come straight out of the kitsch interior of a middle-class

American pavilion of the 1970s. There reigns a neurotic psychological state that approaches

madness, but does not allow itself to be observed from the outside, since it concerns the

observer no less than the observed. The artist does not keep visitors at a distance in her

environments, she rather includes them as participants in the sense of uneasiness, as if each

work seemed to say to the person who encounters it: “this could be you…”. Yet Angélique

Aubrit rejects all pessimism, and in this work, it is a matter of accepting a state of

civilisation, a reality, in order to write its new forms of collective release.

Ludovic Beillard’s art leads towards a universe where stories, legends, theatre of the absurd,

and medieval imaginary worlds combine with our contemporary era at its most brutal and

hazy: among his contemporaries, the artist researches the evolution and externalisation of the

cases of people seeking to get away from society, the way recluses and Franciscan monks

once did, and visionnary figures do today, mole-men living in city basements, etc. He more

particularly examines how these people construct their living environment according to

their means, creating veritable theatre scenery for which they alone are the audience.

Therefore, in Ludovic Beillard’s work there is something of the anxiety-inducing mise-enscène,

of the grotesque attitude, of gloomy sounds, a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk1 that is less

flamboyant than in Wagner’s conception: in the artist’s work, the sensations are more telluric,

earthier, as if buried in the wet clay from which sculptures often arise. One does not find

flights of lyricism in the artist’s universe, but rather a reverse flight towards a psychotic

individualism vainly seeking an escape through itself. If his creations are total and generous,

caught in exhibitions operating as units in which each work acts as a poetic verse, they bury

things in a Kafkaesque burrow or cesspool, like those the artist views in Urbex2 videos.

Together, they share this taste for those universes, particularly for commedia dell’arte,

mime, puppet shows, different forms of popular theatre, as well as for emotional states,

depression, mourning, funereal atmospheres. On the occasion of their residency at Lindre-

Basse, the artists will develop what they see as an itinerant theatre, for which they will be the

directors, costume designers and prop team. They wish to take inspiration from the notion of

the “village” in the broad sense, in order to construct a refuge-chamber, where spectators will

be invited to come inside and discover a collection of characters and strange objects, haunted

by a troop of evanescent spirits.

1 A “total work of art”, that includes within itself all artistic disciplines, techniques and mediums.

2 Urbex means “urban exploration”, a practice consisting in visiting places built and abandoned by human beings.

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Nick Zedd

THERE WILL BE BLOOD, SHAME, PAIN AND ECSTASY

28th May – 11 th July, 2021

Open Thursday – Saturday 14H – 18H ( & rdv)

Goswell Road

22 Rue de l’Échiquier

Paris, France

All images courtesy and copyright of Nick Zedd and Goswell Road.

We violate the command and law that we bore audiences to death in rituals of circumlocution and propose to break all the taboos of our age by sinning as much as possible. There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed. Since there is no afterlife, the only hell is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many rules as you can. This act of courage is known as transgression. We propose transformation through transgression – to convert, transfigure and transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full of unknowing slaves.1

Goswell Road is proud to present the first solo exhibition of filmmaker Nick Zedd in Paris. Zedd is a self-exiled underground phenomenon, living in Mexico City since 2011, after selling his archives to Fales Library NYU for their ‘Downtown Collection’ and quitting New York – citing the end of counterculture due to market forces – the city he had called home since 1976.

Our movement achieved pariah status by virtue of our unrelenting attacks on dominant culture using the cheapest available tools. We proved that amateurs have more integrity than professionals and those who ape technical proficiency at the expense of authenticity show what pussies they are. That still pisses off a lot of people. Our work is exploitable to future generations immersed in the big simulation that passes for life on this prison planet.2

A fierce defender of the amateur and the founder of the Cinema of Transgression movement, Zedd published and edited the Underground Film Bulletin from 1984 to 1990 writing under various pseudonyms and publishing the self-penned manifesto that defined the movement of loose-knit like-minded filmmakers and artists using shock value and black humour in their work, including Kembra Pfahler, Richard Kern, Tessa Hughes Freeland, Lung Leg and Lydia Lunch.

The exhibition features a selection of Zedd’s films including Police State (1987), Why do you Exist (1998), Go to Hell (1984) and highlights the epic War is Menstrual Envy (1992), one of his most challenging films, banned in several countries, in its entirety, the audio soundtracking the exhibition.

A lot of the time the censorship was self-imposed by the people who ran the shows. They were terrified to show genitals or something… People that are afraid to take chances – that bothers me… In Oslo, Norway, when we showed my films I always had to make sure there was an exit in the projection booth, so we could climb down the fire escape in case the cops came to bust us.3

Step inside the perpetual exit sign, a space outside of time and place.

Nick Zedd makes violent, perverted art films from Hell- he’s my kind of director!4

–

1 Extract from ‘The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto’, written by Nick Zedd (under the pseudonym Orion Jericho), Underground Film Bulletin #4, 1985
2 Critical essay by Nick Zedd, ‘The Underground Film Bulletin & The Cinema of Transgression’, Printed Matter, Inc. site (https://www.printedmatter.org/programs/critical-essays/16-the-underground-film-bulletin-the-cinema-of-transgression)

3 Nick Zedd, ‘AN INTERVIEW WITH NICK ZEDD’, ‘Deathtripping, The Cinema of Transgression’, Jack Sargeant, Creation Books, London, 1995
4 John Waters, 1997

–

Nick Zedd (born 1956) is an American filmmaker and author based in Mexico City.

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Andrés Pereira Paz / Isabel (In the Warmi Pachakuti)

curated by Florencia Portocarrero

28 May – 17 July 2021

brunand brunand

Eisenbahnstraße 4

10997, Berlin

Photography by Dotgain/GRAYSC

In Isabel (in the Warmi Pachakuti), Andrés Pereira Paz takes as a starting point the life stories of the women in his family – a matriarchy in which the name Isabel has been inherited for three generations – to propose a constellation of four works that reflect upon the life-sustaining labor that in the context of the pandemic has been placed at the center of public debate.

Although since the Sixties feminism has shown that the most important subsidy of capitalism is the reproductive labor performed by millions of women from their homes, it was not until the present global health crisis that an awareness of its centrality spread widely. Today, as we confront death from an unpredictable virus amidst collapsed health systems as a result of decades of neoliberal austerity policies, it is essential to recognize the deep implications of life on Earth and the need to turn care work into a collective project.

In a recent conference entitled Resistances, insurgencies and struggles for life in times of extermination, the Bolivian feminist theorist and activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui highlighted the importance of the efforts made by women to mitigate the deadly effects of the patriarchal capitalist system. From pregnancy to breastfeeding, to caring for children and the elderly, among other labors mediated by love, women dedicate their bodies to the preserving of life on a daily basis. According to Rivera Cusicanqui, this historical experience in addition to the moral ruin of the economic system that was recently revealed by the pandemic, set the conditions for the arrival of what in the Andean world is known as a Warmi Pachakuti. This is an ethical and epistemic turn towards the feminine, which puts women and other feminized bodies in the first line of thought and action in the plight to overcome both present and future crisis.

Rivera Cusicanqui’s reflections form the backbone of Andrés’ project. In Isabel (in the Warmi Pachakuti) the artist vindicates the natural, the domestic and the biographical as spaces from which speaking out becomes more vital and effective than ever. Two of the works dismantle the imaginary that reduces nature to an inert and static economic resource. El despertar de la naturaleza (The awakening of nature) consists of a series of interventions on the homonymous painting by the twentieth century Bolivian painter and trade unionist Arturo Borda. In four copies of the original image – in which Borda represents nature as a naked and powerful woman as she awakens – Andrés has drawn different configurations of the kóa smoke emanating directly from the woman’s navel. By focusing on the navel, the artist recalls both the symbiotic unity with the mother, as well as the fundamental role of women in preserving human existence. On the other hand, Una propuesta de mural en homenaje al parlamento de las mujeres (A mural proposal in homage to the parliament of women) is a metal sculpture which reproduces the silhouettes of two flowers, the kantuta and the patujú, which symbolize the union and interculturality of Bolivian people in various national symbols. Intending to question the patriarchal and authoritarian core of national narratives, the artist conceived the piece as an insurrection of the flowers, this time rebelling to pay tribute to El parlamento de las mujeres (The parliament of women). Inspired by The Parliament of Bodies – Paul Preciado’s project for Documenta XIV (2019) in Athens – El parlamento de las mujeres was convoked by the anarchist and feminist collective Mujeres Creando in the face of the democratic crisis that Bolivia went through in 2019. While the streets of La Paz were militarized, a broad and diverse group of women came together to talk about what democracy meant to each of them, preventing the political conflict from taking total control of the social body.

The other two works of an autobiographical nature reveal the personal as deeply political. Retrato de Julia (Portrait of Julia) is a textile piece that reproduces the silhouette of a sculpture that for years decorated the artist’s home in La Paz. The constitutive elements of the work were decided upon in an extended dialogue with Julia, a domestic worker of indigenous origins, that raised Andrés and his siblings during their childhood. The Star of David represents her evangelical faith, the star of Guamán Poma de Ayala symbolizes her indigenous identity, and the chuño and the tunta – two types of dehydrated potatoes that have been especially important during the pandemic – represent her daily struggle for subsistence. The artist conceived the piece as a reflection on the “aguayo complex”, described by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui as an affective conflict experienced by Latin American middle and upper-class children, who are raised by an indigenous woman who they love as a mother, but at the same time, feel ashamed due to the prevailing racism. Finally, Isabel (in the Warmi Pachakuti) is an embroidery on jute of an octopus ornamented with a glass eye, pearls, paper, pitahaya and lemon peels. Taking as a metaphorical starting point the octopus – a mollusc whose specificity is to carry the brain in its tentacles – the piece pays homage to the multiple adaptive capacities of the “Isabel” of his family, women who have raised their children regardless of the absence of father figures in an openly macho society like Bolivia.

We are trapped in an inescapable web of reciprocity. The virus has shown that the boundaries of our individuality are porous, that our own health depends on the health of the all. The recognition of this physiological interdependence challenges the ideal of Western individualism which is reinforced by the neoliberal economy, highlighting the urgency of creating communities based on caring. From ritualistic and emotional perspectives rather than purely rational, in Isabel (in the Warmi Pachakuti), Andrés exposes this situation, paying tribute to the long history of women placing life at the center and claiming it as a pillar of the political imagination to come.

Florencia Portocarrero, May 2021

Translated by Luciana Molina Barragán

Andrés Pereira Paz (*1986 en La Paz. Lives and works in Berlin) has extensively exhibited across Latin America, USA and Europe. Recently his works have been featured at 11th Berlin Biennale; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; The Ryder Projects and Gasworks, London; Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga; Kinderhook & Caracas, Berlin; National Museum of Art, La Paz; Second Grand Tropical Biennale, San Juan de Puerto Rico, a.o. He is due to have a solo presentation at Statements in Art Basel with Isla Flotante (Arg) this Fall and is shortlisted for the 6th edition of the Future Generation Art Prize. Pereira Paz is being represented by brunand brunand in Berlin, and Isla Flotante in Buenos Aires.

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“Time & Life” / David Ostrowski, Magnus Frederik Clausen

28 May – 1 Aug, 2021

Spazio ORR
Via Cremona 115
Brescia, Italy

Photo credits: Spazio ORR and Mareike Tocha

© David Ostrowski
Courtesy Sprüth Magers
© Magnus Frederik Clausen
Courtesy Jir Sandel

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them.
Ursula K. Le Guin

It’s something unpredictable / But in the end it’s right / I hope you had the time of your life.
Green Day

At the end of first grade, my parents enrolled me in a four-week long summer camp in the Alps, not far from Brescia.
The camp was organised by the parish to which my great-aunt, a nun, was in those days attached. In suburban
Northern Italy, the church still plays a fundamental role in the community’s social life, with the “oratorio” acting as
the primus motus for a significant number of sports and cultural arrangements. Or, at least, this is how I remember it
from my childhood.

I was the youngest out of a large group of kids and teenagers, and although the minimum age to take part in the
trip was ten or so, my great-aunt had put in a good word for me, so that I could attend and leave my parents for a
probably much-needed break. School holidays in Italy are impossibly long, stretching from early June all the way to
mid-September, and my little sister had just come to the world.

I was very keen on a wristwatch I had recently received as a gift. It was red and white with two cute doll-like figures
as hands, a boy and a girl. Pity that I still could not read the clock: the other kids somehow found it out and started
repeatedly asking me what time it was. Within a matter of a few days, I had stopped wearing the watch.

Praying hour was scheduled each morning after breakfast and each afternoon before supper. The evening session
was the hardest, as it came after a long day out in the woods, usually spent on hikes that, in my memory, were
incredibly lengthy and physically exhausting. Once, we got caught by a hail storm on our way back, and we had to
run towards our refuge while pellets the size of ping-pong balls made the mountain slope so slippery, that we all got
home covered in mud.

The priest in charge of the colony was a towering man, with a thick reddish beard and a deep voice, wearing cargo
shorts in all weather conditions. His ribbed socks were a bright kind of light blue, and I soon realised that I could use
them to force myself to remain focussed, or even awake, while saying the rosary. Every time the verse “Our Father,
who art in heaven” came, I stared at them and imagined the priest as God, chilling in an infinite sky tinted with the
exact same shade of his knee-highs.

On my return, my grandma was curious to hear about my adventures. Was the food good? Were my fellows nice?
Had I learned something new? “Yes, I did!”, I shrieked with enthusiasm. I still recall her expression – a mix of terror
and entertainment – while she listened to me proudly singing a number of dirty rhymes, one after another, in a slang
between the Italian language and the Lombard dialect. The other kids used to sing them in the darkness of the
dormitory after bedtime or in the back seats of the tourist bus that would drive us to more distant destinations.

Her embarrassed chuckle and firm invitation to stop made me understand that something was wrong, but I wasn’t
provided with any further explanation. Only some years later did I come to discern the half-hidden sexual references
in the content of what, at the time, I had learned by heart and with no comprehension whatsoever.

The following summer, I could read the clock and lace my hiking boots (that was, during the previous year, my

other biggest distress: as I had not yet learned to bind a knot, I daily had to ask for help from my peers, who found it
amusing to tie the two laces of each shoe together).

Curiously enough, I don’t have strong memories from that second edition, almost as if it was a copy of the first, just
in a minor key. I developed a method to count out the days without being caught in the act of doing so, because I
feared it would have been seen as a sign of weakness and laughed at. For each day that had passed, I would draw a
flower instead of a tally mark; by the end of the camp, I had produced a picture of an idyllic flowery meadow, which,
once home, collected my parents’ praise and was framed. I believe it still hangs in my childhood bedroom, which
looks pretty much the same as it did thirty years ago.

Paola Paleari

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Carsten Becker & Willem Besselink / Continental Colors

28 May – 19 Jun 2021

HAUNT | Kluckstraße 23 A, 10785 Berlin

Carsten Becker

Willem Besselink

Carsten Becker

Willem Besselink

Carsten Becker

Continental Colors

The gaze is turned westward: the colours of Los Angeles, where the exhibition will be on view in 2022, mix into the continental European climate. In the exhibition Continental Colors, Carsten Becker looks at the implications of the German colour collection RAL and the American hue Olive Drab. Willem Besselink investigates the imaginary colours mentioned in the literature of the “Golden State” California.

For Renaissance artist Giorgio Vasari, colore was nothing without disegno, the concept. Becker’s and Besselink’s colours are based on the disegno of the civilizational: regulations, norms and systems. Both artists decontextualize colour from its historic, literary and emotional purpose, in search of the logics of these contexts. In their works, they make us experience how civilizational concepts interact with us.

Becker researches the German DIN catalogue of industrial standards and the RAL colour collection that standardize machine parts, materials, and colours since 1917 and 1925, respectively. Seemingly aiming at economic efficiency only, both DIN and RAL did have a great impact on the two World Wars. In times of war, when resources are scarce, standard parts provide advantages in both production and time. Standardized colours, like Dunkelgelb (Dark yellow), introduced in the German armed forces in 1943, and Olive Drab, the camouflage colour of the U.S. Army, shaped the war. During World War II, soldiers disguised in this way were facing each other in the deserts of Northern Africa.

In his series Romankleuren (Novel colours), Besselink processes colours mentioned in novels written and set in Los Angeles. He uses self-created sets of rules as vehicles to make them comprehensible and tangible, physically as well as visually. Thus, his drawings result into a coded network of coloured lines, whose angles change with each chapter. In his paintings Besselink translates the poetics of imaginary colours into quantifiable colour blocks. Finally, orange ribbons, derived from Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange (1997), span the exhibition space and superimpose the architectural system.

Becker and Besselink take history and literature, extract the colours and dissect their symbolic power. By arranging the colours into new forms and media, they offer an immediate visual access to the exhibited works and their inherent systematics. Sensory impressions and contexts, otherwise hardly separate in our perception, can thus be confronted with each other: The upright cardan joint no longer seems just that, after the colour Reinorange (Pure orange) has been identified as the corps colour of the military police Feldjäger, and the standardization of parts as having military purpose. In Besselink’s drawing, the optimistic radiance of golden lines turns brittle as soon as we realize that Ben H. Wintersʼ underlying novel Golden State (2018) is about a dystopian surveillance state.

Anika Reineke

Translation: Guus Vreeburg

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AEG (all energy gone)

Sara Rossi, Sarah Rosengarten, Maria Kremeti, Ivan Geddert, Burkhard Beschow and Felix Amerbacher

02.06. – 06.06.

Rathenau-Hallen, Oberschöneweide
Wilhelminenhofstraße 83-85, 12459 Berlin

Many thanks to +DEDE and Treptow-Ateliers for making Rathenau Halle accessible to us.

Felix Amerbacher

Sarah Rosengarten

Sara Rossi

Maria Kremeti

Burkhard Beschow

Ivan Geddert

Felix Amerbacher

Sarah Rosengarten

There is a special interest in the conditions of the venue which played an important part in putting the exhibition together. This includes questions on the development of industry and its literal mechanisms. The works enter a dialogue with the nowadays mostly functionless architecture of the Rathenau-Hallen, named after Emil Rathenau the founder of AEG.

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Athanasios Argianas / Hollowed Water

03.06.2021–31.08.2021

ARCH

5 Gkoura Street Athens 10558 Greece

Photo: Paris Tavitian

ARCH is proud to announce Hollowed Water, the second instalment of a major solo institutional exhibition by Athanasios Argianas (b. 1976, Athens), on view this June 3rd – August 31st, 2021. The exhibition was first presented last year at Camden Art Centre in London and consists of recent works in music, sculpture and video by Argianas.

Like much of Argianas’s work, Hollowed Water is an exhibition structured in layers.

On the ground, hybrid bodies of ceramic modules cast from human hips and legs, plants from the artist’s home, and six abstract elements alluding to joints and limbs (and reminiscent of crustaceans, exoskeletons or bauhaus costumes) are assembled into what resembles human hips in resting positions of sleep and recovery, or a hip-stretch exercise. Titled Tilebodies (sleepers), these assemblages occupy the gallery floor, with additional modules stacked around the periphery suggesting replacement, change, flux. Two Bronze Heads, both casts of binaural microphones designed in the 1970s to approximate the specificity of listening through a human head, are placed on the floor with an ear to the ground, their forms simultaneously alluding to constructivist and brancusi-esque tropes, as well as cycladic or art deco figurines.

In mid-air, a partly curved iron parallelogram occupies a whole other layer of the space – of air. Song Machine 20’s graphic frame floats diagonally, at head height, between ARCH’s adjacent gallery rooms, with pattern of thin brass ribbon-like strips draped upon it, elegant and weightful. They feature twenty meters of etched text, inviting a choreographed experience for the viewer who attempts to read descriptions of an object that seems vague and impossible, distant and familiar – intimating dimensions somehow larger than the room itself.

The third layer of Hollowed Water materialises only sometimes. It is sound, and specifically music – Pivoting Music (for strings and cat purr waveform in A), 2020 – a piece composed by Argianas for strings and a drone in A, made from a waveform of his cat Diamantis’s purr and written entirely in glissando, each note slurring into another, gliding in a downward pivoting motion. It is only there when activated by the viewer through a turntable located in the west corner of the gallery, heard through Principal and Metalique, two sculptures operating as speakers, both aberrations of the historical design accompanying the ondes martenot, a proto-synthesizer invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot.

The fourth layer of the exhibition resides in a different physical space and contains several in itself. ARCH’s library has been transformed into an immersive film installation projecting the homonymous work Hollowed Water (a gesture, 24 times), a three minute film comprised of the artist’s musical composition for harpsichord, voice and drum and a script enacted between the scale of the surface of a tiny bismuth crystal, the hand of the singer and an old Athenian river – repeated every eight bars, twenty-four times anew. The piece is a vortex-like repetition of a complex series of gestures through scales, and the scale of the projected image – a two and a half meter square which optically and sonically envelopes the viewer into place.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Species Counterpoint, the first comprehensive monograph on the polymorphous work of Argianas is produced by ARCH and published by Lenz Press, Milan. Alongside a generous range of illustrations, essays by three leading critics each highlight a different perspective on the artist’s work. Quinn Latimer taps into the use of language in all its varied forms within Argianas’s art, and the sonic formalities of his work; Jennifer Kabat anchors her essay in swimming, direct experience, memory and affect; and Dan Fox, from whose essay the book’s title is drawn, uses the format of fiction, animating the artworks through a back-and-forth historical and spatial time-travel, in a manner sympathetic to Argianas’s purposeful use of period style. The book concludes with an edited conversation between the artist and the critic Martin Herbert, providing insights into the methodology and intuition informing Argianas’s diverse practice, as well as its political and ethical underpinnings.

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Elsa Salonen / Distilling the Essence of the Seas

4 June – 4 July 2021

Ama Gallery

Rikhardinkatu 1

00130 Helsinki

Finland

Photography by J. Salonen / J. Clark

All the colour pigments of the exhibition have been gathered by Salonen and her friends from various natural sites around the world. She has made colours, for example, by

cooking algae and aquatic plants, as well as grinding seashells, plastic debris and pieces of dead corals drifted ashore. Through these materials and the places associated with them, Salonen studies the nature of the sea from the alchemist, animist, and scientific points of view.

The main work of the exhibition ‘Veden väelle’ is made with materials from the Baltic Sea and it is dedicated to its ancient water sprites. According to Finnish mythology, each

natural environment is guarded by its sprites, who affect its well-being and prosperity. To ensure good fishing fortune various offerings, such as silver, were brought to the mighty Water Sprites.

The series ‘Influence of the Moon on Bodies of Water’ is painted with materials found on the beaches, such as shells. Each work in the series is painted at a different stage of the lunar cycle; a painting depicting the full moon at the time of the full moon, a painting

depicting the new moon at the time of the new moon, etc. The moon controls the

movements of the tides, and in Finnish folklore, it also defined the lives of the people. The different stages of the lunar cycle influenced the choice of a favourable time to do different jobs.

In the first room of the gallery, a view of a bleaching coral reef in the middle of

microplastics depicts the current state of the seas. Painted with ochres and plastic debris collected from Colombian beaches, ‘I Dive in the Ocean as in a Prayer’ celebrates

underwater beauty while asking for strength to protect it. The last installation in the

exhibition ‘The Colour of Whale Fossils’ Songs’ consists of a marine blue copper patina of the Atacama Desert in Chile. The Atacama is the driest place in the world and – as a

former seabed – the richest marine mammal fossil habitat.

Medieval alchemists studied natural materials, from which they also made colours. Through the materials, they tried to understand the surrounding universe and at the same time the interconnectedness of everything, the role of the individual; oneself. One of the most important steps in alchemy was repeated distillation, which left the purest essence of the substance – and the alchemist – in the glass flask.

Elsa Salonen

Biography

Elsa Salonen (b. 1984 in Turku, Finland) graduated from the Italian academy of fine arts in Bologna in 2008. During the last decade, she has been mainly working in Berlin. Works by Salonen have been widely featured in many different institutions, including Schwartzsche Villa and Kunstverein Wiesbaden in Germany, Viborg art hall in Denmark, the Miguel

Urrutia art museum in Bogota, and the Lissone contemporary art museum in Milan. The solo exhibitions in 2021 include the Turku City Art Museum WAMx and the Jochen Hempel Gallery in Leipzig.

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Benjamin Edwin Slinger / A Medieval Choreography

May 19 – June 25, 2021

Karin Guenther
Admiralitätstr. 71
D – 20459 Hamburg

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Samuel Chochon / VMC

Curated by Margaux Bonopera

May 28th – June 23rd 2021

Atelier Myriam Boccara

86 rue de la Folie-Mericourt

75011 Paris

A CMV renews the air in a room by evacuating it to the outside. It is this same movement between inside and outside that articulates Samuel Chochon’s solo exhibition presented in Myriam Boccara’s studio.

The first instance of this movement is found in the very space of the project, visible from the glass façade of the studio overlooking the rue de la Folie Méricourt. The passer-by can thus distinguish some of the images present on the walls without being able to capture the entirety of the interior space. It is after having penetrated inside the exhibition, that one understands that the artist transformed the walls giving the impression that these last ones were dug and that it emerges from it these images to the varied formats.

Suspenseful if it is, thus transformed, the place of the exhibition becomes progressively a piece in its own right of the project.

For VMC, Samuel Chochon has chewed up his imagination and to understand its origin, its references and its construction it is necessary to look at the first drawing made by the artist which was the starting point of this exhibition project, Scene of domestic life, 2020. If the expression seems to recall Bergman’s series (1973), the scene that Samuel Chochon draws is that of a solitary episode. In this large drawing (3.10 x 1.50m), we see a man in his armchair, submerged in a liquid and vegetal world. The presence of a record player suggests that the individual is simply immersed in a state of auditory contemplation, which gives rise to the various images presented in the exhibition. When one knows that Samuel Chochon himself has realized the sound piece emanating from the large abstract sculptures, one can easily imagine the sensorial retranscription that he has operated through this character.

And this is how we find in all the drawings made in black and white a distortion of reality, a modification of perspectives and materials represented for the benefit of an aquatic, domestic, intimate and corporal imaginary. Here, the outside, it is the eyes of the visitors, your eyes, which try, by all the angles, turning in all the directions, to understand what the artist wanted to represent. For that, it would be enough without doubt only to listen to the piece that this last one realized specially for the occasion and to doubt, a few moments, of where is the inside and the outside, of the world and of our own body.

Margaux Bonopera

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Oscar / Wood (or how I learned to grow)

Umeå Academy of Fine Arts

Konstnärligt campus, Östra Strandgatan 30 B

903 33

Umeå

Photographs taken by Desiree Burenstrand.

Wood (or how I learned to grow) is Oscar Häggströms MA1 exhibition inspired by fantasy and rave-culture, which deals with themes surrounding meritocracy and the different mindsets it evokes.

“After days of wandering in the woods, our hero meets the witch of knowledge. Can she help our hero to turn to the right course of society?  Be a great example and at the top of the game.”

media:

website: oscar haggstrom

instagram: @oscarhaggstrom

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Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová / havoC, anaeMia, A tacticaL knoT, us

curated by Franz Thalmair and Gudrun Ratzinger

May 19 – June 25, 2021

Kunstraum Lakeside

Lakeside Science & Technology Park GmbH

Lakeside B02

9020 Klagenfurt

Austria

“How does time flow? Is the past pushing the future or is the future dragging the past?” Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová answer their own question with a neither-nor. “Forgotten memories become visions of the future,” say the artists, “while future minds and tomorrow’s hands create their own past.” They substantiate this inextricable entanglement of what was with what will come in captivating installative settings. The materials used, the processes applied, and the realized forms literally render time tangible.

At the beginning of their collaboration a good 20 years ago, the two artists explored the radical transformations taking place in society following 1989, the pivotal year of change for Eastern European countries. They investigated what it means when seemingly certain future scenarios are suddenly replaced by totally different promises—and when both the old and the new ones prove to be equally unfeasible on a personal level. More recently, Chişa and Tkáčová have expanded their perspective into pasts long before our civilization and into futures far after our present. They study a world that decidedly does not revolve just around human beings. New entities and species take the stage. Moreover, functions of art emerge on the horizon, which reside far beyond our current art industry. The artifacts compiled in the exhibition havoC, anaeMia, A tacticaL knoT, us seem to herald that the present social order will once be a thing of the past. What the end of this era looks like remains open. Hence, the presented mementos of the future have the potential to still fully unfold.

In Kunstraum Lakeside the artist duo combine already existing works with site-specific settings. Against the backdrop of looming environmental catastrophes and rapid virtualization, Things in Our Hands (2014) draws attention to the materiality of money. There are still bills made of paper and metal coins, which possess value on the basis of global agreements. But we can imagine not so distant futures where this is not the case: where money has lost its function as an exchange and store of value. What remains is the material. For Things in Our Hands Chişa and Tkáčová melted down Euro coins and used the resulting metal to make new forms with potential tangible functions. Resembling hand axes, these metal sculptures could serve as tools to cut, chop, scrape, or trowel. At the same time, their surfaces bear traces of hands. It seems as if soft metal had bulged between fingers or if it had filled cavities formed by the ball of a thumb—as if the nickel ore evoked the time when countless hands handled it. Things in Our Hands embody, according to the artists, “the state of before and after the existence of money in our world, they materialize the two end points of its trajectory”. Hence, the objects refer to both early history and a post-apocalyptic future in equal measure. They are “fossils from the future” that point to the long periods of time in human history in which there is no use for money.

The Reconciliation of Yes and No (2015) is an attempt to visualize multidimensionality. To this end, Chişa and Tkáčová resort to a material that is more associated with cult practices than scientific disciplines like mathematics and physics: the bones of small mammals and birds. Exemplary figures of multidimensionality, such as the tesseract, pentachoron, antiprismatic prisms, and other polychora, represent, in their bony materiality, a quest to a previously “untapped territory of the human brain”. With their spatial visualizations, the artists repudiate the assumption that humans are 3D beings, which are not able to apprehend another dimension. Through the use of a material that unites seemingly irreconcilable opposites—alive and dead, for instance—they reveal a chasm in which other dimensions become if not intuitively tangible then at least imaginable.

In The Prophecy of Things (2017–2018) the artist duo investigates the (im-)materiality of contemporary visual culture. Screens from smartphones serve as interfaces between people and professedly infinite image worlds. “Their transmaterial nature keeps them in a fundamental duality,” say Chişa and Tkáčová. “Screens are everywhere and are always material, yet they often (dis)appear as if they were immaterial.” Handwoven carpets depict the images produced when the devices break and no longer display the visual information they were intended to: abstract forms with captivating beauty. In the words of the artists: “The ‘emancipated’ machine creates free floating pixels, images liberated of intention, un-cerebral, unburdened, no strings attached.”

With their site-specific settings the artists transform Kunstraum Lakeside fundamentally: Soft displays form landscapes in which the existing works are presented, and a mineral sunscreen lotion is used to configure the window fronts. While Josef Dabernig’s original design of the exhibition space can be conceived as an over-affirmation of the economic-technological conditions for its existence, Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová defy these spatial parameters. havoC, anaeMia, A tacticaL knoT, us thereby joins the ranks of other exhibition projects by the two artists, whose exhibition titles since 2012 have usually been derived from an anagram of their names. The recombination of the letters into new units of meaning corresponds with their attempt to merge into a “third entity” in their collaborative projects. Although several octillions of alias names are potentially possible, the meticulous arrangement of available letter material in combination with the strategic use of coincidences generates word sequences that take on the form of pseudonyms. These “noms de guerres” prompt us to engage with these new units, which emerge when ascriptions and limitations are rejected and identities are no longer prescribed, but rather in constant flux. This invitation to us—the observers—equally applies to small-format works as to ephemeral settings, complete exhibitions, or also their titles: us—a tactical knot.

Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová have been collaborating since 2000.

They live and work in Prague and Vyhne.

www.chitka.info

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The Day Before the Fall, featuring artists Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Lucyfer Eclipsa, TRANSÄLIEN, Bruna Kury, Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos, and Vulcanica Pokaropa.

Curated by Clarissa Aidar with the support of Apexart.

May 9 – June 6, 2021

Rua Conde de São Joaquim, 332

São Paulo, Brazil

For the interviews, perfomance documentation, online view, and brochure, please visit: apexart.org/aidar.php

The Day Before the Fall. Entrance.

The Day Before the Fall. Exhibition view.

Bruna Kury, Scorpionics from the series Scorpionics, 2020.

Digital image in methacrylate, dildo-knife (glass, resin, steel, dirt, plastic), Bible (Bible, silicone, wax), Dimensions variable.

Bruna Kury, Scorpionics from the series Scorpionics, 2020.

Digital image in methacrylate, dildo-knife (glass, resin, steel, dirt, plastic), Bible (Bible, silicone, wax), Dimensions variable.

Bruna Kury, Scorpionics from the series Scorpionics, 2020.

Digital image in methacrylate, dildo-knife (glass, resin, steel, dirt, plastic), Bible (Bible, silicone, wax), Dimensions variable.

Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Who are you to lay on my bed, 2020.

Bed, mattress, printed fabric, earth, salt, crystals, herbs, earthenware bowl, Dimensions variable.

Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Who are you to lay on my bed, 2020.

Bed, mattress, printed fabric, earth, salt, crystals, herbs, earthenware bowl, Dimensions variable.

Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Who are you to lay on my bed, 2020.

Bed, mattress, printed fabric, earth, salt, crystals, herbs, earthenware bowl, Dimensions variable.

Lucyfer Eclipsa, Anamneses: Dreams Distortions, 2020.

Nails, plush, plastic, resin, wool, Dimensions variable.

Lucyfer Eclipsa, Anamneses: Dreams Distortions, 2020.

Nails, plush, plastic, resin, wool, Dimensions variable.

Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos, so far, so close (A, B and C), 2020.

Three bathroom doors from the Bar and Cachaçaria Cuca Grande (Fabinho’s Bar), three mirror plates with geographical coordinates of the location, 82.6 x 24.4 x 2.75 in. (ea. door) , 1.5 x 9.8 in. (ea. plate).

Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos, so far, so close (A, B and C), 2020.

TRANSÄLIEN,TRANSVISION, 2020.

3D fine art print, ACM plaque, straw, peacock feathers, glitter, spray paint, gouache, cardboard, tulle, napkins, gelatin, and charcoal, Installation dimensions variable (Print size 37 x 37 in).

TRANSÄLIEN,TRANSVISION, 2020.

3D fine art print, ACM plaque, straw, peacock feathers, glitter, spray paint, gouache, cardboard, tulle, napkins, gelatin, and charcoal, Installation dimensions variable (Print size 37 x 37 in).

Vulcanica Pokaropa, Intercession, 2020.

Acrylic paint, hormone package insert, sacred images, wood, vine, seeds, razors, organic hair, fabric, candle, flowers, herbs, Dimensions variable.

Vulcanica Pokaropa, Intercession, 2020.

Acrylic paint, hormone package insert, sacred images, wood, vine, seeds, razors, organic hair, fabric, candle, flowers, herbs, Dimensions variable.

Vulcanica Pokaropa, Intercession, 2020.

Acrylic paint, hormone package insert, sacred images, wood, vine, seeds, razors, organic hair, fabric, candle, flowers, herbs, Dimensions variable.

The Day Before the Fall

“Travesti Spirituality is a catastrophe, a destruction. It’s what makes a tower fall, the cards of this collapse, the dusk emerging from the dust of debris and yet it will never be debris. We are not the rest of what was broken, but what has caused the break.”

– Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro¹

Soon, they will fall. Those who want to rule our bodies and imprison our imaginations, they will fall. Propelled inescapably into the abyss by their own destruction, it has never been so clear that this fall is just a matter of time. But how long can decay last? This exhibition is a site of rehearsal and speculation, gathering six new works that, by conjuring up worlds to come, accelerate the inevitable ruin of today’s structures.

Despite all featured artists recognizing themselves as travestis², the exhibition does not aspire to represent an identity or introduce a comprehensive translation of experiences. Instead, it emerges from the urgency to cultivate space for multiple and shifting existences to experiment and inhabit art strategically: sensing the cracks, holes, and routes within artistic production and reception. In this moment of transition, the artists articulate healthy possibilities of collectively inhabiting the unknown and unpredictable grounds of the future.

Unexpected openings arise from chance encounters which prompt a shifting in perception and a questioning of assumptions. Still, retaining evidence of those encounters is a struggle in a city obsessed with the new, immersed in the endless cacophony of demolition. To rescue what has been silenced, Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos’ project, so far, so close displays a set of three doors removed from the restroom of a downtown São Paulo bar. Symbols of a space rife with both harassment and intimacy, they intend to divide the public and the private, yet are saturated with signs that refute exactly what they stand for.

In her ongoing research, the artist explores the overlapping, non-linear layers of time scrawled in the anonymous messages that surface and fade away on these frontiers. Though the gentrification of this neighborhood brings with it familiar mechanisms of erasure, Mártis dos Anjos’ work reaffirms the resiliency of those crossings and their unavoidable traces—residues that appear familiar yet distant, absent and abundant, meaningful and incomprehensible.

Visibility is not a simple matter. Being looked at does not imply being seen, recognized, or accepted. In the deadliest country for trans people, where the average life expectancy is 35, a refusal to conform to gender norms means existing between invisibility and hypervisibility, where one is both silenced and surveilled. The same goes for anyone who is Black, Indigenous, or living in poverty. Their visibility often amounts to brutal images of oppression, functioning as an instrument of fear and further isolation. TRANSÄLIEN’s optical installation TRANSVISION departs from the power of belonging to contrast the national collapse with the prosperity of travestis.

Comprising a 3D canvas that shifts according to which of the two accompanying masks the viewer wears, TRANSVISION demonstrates that perception depends on the position from which one stands; better yet, it depends on the eyes one possesses. The function of the mask is not to hide its wearer. Instead, it’s an instrument of revelation that challenges the viewer’s impulse to categorize. Requiring the viewers to don a mask is also a reflection of the artist’s own existence: TRANSÄLIEN wears them regularly in an effort to liberate the popular imaginary from cisgender normativity, unveiling new aesthetic possibilities rooted in the comprehension that life is a process of continual transformation.

It’s a proposition that questions what might surface if our imaginations and bodies were freed from the unreachable and utterly tedious standards of appearance, behavior, and desire instilled in us since childhood. In their deviation from gendered expectations, trans bodies are often referred to as unnatural, or monstrous. In Anamnesis: Dream Distortions, Lucyfer Eclipsa investigates dreams and nightmares present in her childhood memories. Mixing soft and sharp materials, the artist explores the meanings of monstrosity by reexamining her own history. Converting traumas and wounds into prosthesis and extensions, she generates ambiguous creatures of a bio-political fantasy in which mutability and regeneration are to be celebrated. Though these ludic figures appear to be in a permanent state of metamorphosis, Eclipsa evokes the beauty of existing outside defined realms.

The narcissistic ideals that construct difference as pathology underpin a system that demonizes and yet exploits and consumes the “other.” In Bruna Kury’s work, the resistance against transphobic, racist and patriarchal violence is rooted in a commitment to her own vulnerability. Scorpionics features fabrications such as dildo-knives—objects that are simultaneously an ode to pleasure and a weapon for counterattack—a self-defense mechanism that deflects the castrating gaze and the objectification of dissident bodies.

The installation is accompanied by archival videos of performances in which Kury delves into the tensions between pleasure and power and their bodily implications, prompting reflections on gender-based violence, property, and care. Drawing on postporn³ practices complicated by her Latin-American transfeminist position, Kury reverses the passivity assigned to the feminine⁴ and confronts the desire to control disobedient bodies that fuels current genocidal politics, such as the dismantlement of public health systems, mass incarceration, incitement to hatred, and police violence.

Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, whose work also builds on care and life-affirming practices, maps the body in order to comprehend its sources of power. Grounded in this knowledge, the artist seeks to nurture reserves of creativity, sensuality, and courage exhausted by colonial violence so that Black and trans people can experience freedom and healing. Who are you to lay on my bed is a performative installation in which earth, crystals, and herbs are arrayed around a mattress, imprinted with a picture of the artist in a ritual of cleansing and balancing of the first (root) chakra, the focal point that grounds the body.

Who are you to lay on my bed is a fragment of a song sung to pombas giras: strong, astute and sensual feminine spiritual entities who lived defiant lives. Working through macumbaria,⁵ the artist penetrates into the invisible to understand how to fertilize the territories of existence. Exploring deep sources of energy, ephemeral places of chaos and clarity, fear and courage, the artist mobilizes ancestral wisdom to process the poisons of a sickened society.

As cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa notes, humans are taught to fear the supernatural: both the undivine, animal impulses such as sexuality and the unconscious, and the divine, the god in us.⁶ In Intercession, Vulcanica Pokaropa draws on her decade-long experience as a Christian to assemble an altar of sanctified travestis, not only acknowledging their inherent dignity, but affirming that theirs is a sacred community.

Mixing elements from Catholicism and symbols associated with the universe of travestis—such as razor blades, high heels and syringes—the altar unifies the profane and the divine into one single entity. By doing so, Pokaropa sacralizes historically-erased ancestors whose legacy forms the possibilities of the present and deposits faith on the future of dissident existences. Connecting temporalities, the artist recognizes how devotion forges promise, but inverts the racist principle that designates white men as the savior. According to Pokaropa, a future in Brazil disconnected from Christianity is unlikely, but if Jesus would come back today, it would be as a Black travesti.

The six installations build meanings intersected by the poetics of interdependence, appropriation and metamorphosis, intertwined by a collective struggle that shifts the structures, relations, and affects of power. It’s an open question whether this city—its fences and gates, empty buildings and ever-growing homeless population—can ever shape-shift into a place that, instead of obstructing, facilitates alliances such as those, especially when alliances necessitate the sharing of risks, resources, and a common ground.

While violence is a force of enclosure and constraint, resistance is an unfolding energy of openness, movement, and creation. Change is inevitable. By recognizing the potency gathered in this exhibition, we understand not only the proximity of the fall, but also how it announces the arrival of another time: one that does not proceed ahead, in the linear fashion of unceasing progress, but a future that shifts under, above, around, inside and before this one, a future that will certainly be the time of travestis.

Our enemies say: The fight has ended.

But we say: It has begun.

Our enemies say: The truth has been crushed.

But we say: We still know it.

Our enemies say: Even if the truth were still known,

It can no longer be spread.

But we still spread it.

It is the eve of the battle.

It is the forge of our squad.

It is the study of the battle plan.

It is the day before the fall

Of our enemies.

– Bertolt Brecht

Clarissa Aidar © apexart 2021

The Day Before the Fall is an apexart Open Call Exhibition.

Footnotes

1. Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, “Exú Tranca Rua das Almas,” Ehcho, 2020, bit.ly/3wjk5FU (Eng. Trans. for this publication by Clarissa Aidar).

2. A transfeminine gender identity rooted in Latin America. It carries implications of class struggle and marginalization, which often lead to compulsory sex work.

3. Postporn theory assembles different practices that challenge mainstream beauty, desire, and filming aesthetics. It is centered on bodies that are marginalized and fetishized by the pornography industry and first originated in Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera’s Post Porn Modernist Manifesto, 1989.

4. See Jota Mombaça’s Towards a Gender Disobedient & Anti-Colonial Redistribution of Violence, (Down and Out Distro, 2019), Accessed March 18, 2020, https://downandoutdistro.noblogs.org/files/2019/05/Redistribution-violence-1-1.pdf.

5. Afro-Brazilian religious practices.

6. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987).

7. Bertolt Brecht, “Unsere Feinde Sagen,” Gedichte 1926-1933, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990 (Eng. Trans. for this publication by Clarissa Aidar).

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Vis a siV / Pas une Orange

4th May – 13th June 2021

Pas une Orange

Trafalgar, 45

08010 Barcelona

Elena Alonso, Inma Herrera,

Christian Lagata, Almudena Lobera, Guillermo Mora, Álvaro Negro and An Wei.

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Body Snatchers

THE HOUSE

Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski, Benni Bosetto, Reilly Davidson, Giulia Essyad, Adham Faramawy, Cleo Fariselli, Chiara Fumai, Jason Gomez, Ellie Hunter, Uffe Isolotto , Gregory Kalliche, Lito Kattou,  Lucia Leuci , Aniara Omann, Catherine Parsonage, REPLICA (Simona Squadrito, Lisa Andreani, Chiara C. Siravo), Giuliana Rosso, Namsal Siedlecki , Oda Iselin Sønderland, Federico Tosi and Bruno Zhu.

THE CHURCH

Ed Atkins, Petra Cortright, Julie Grosche, Oliver Laric, Heather Phillipson, Laure Prouvost, Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Jala Wahid.

Curated by

Like A Little Disaster & Pane Project

April/July 2021

Like A Little Disaster and Chiesa di San Giuseppe
Via Cavour, 68
Polignano a Mare

Photo: L.A.L.D.

THE HOUSE

Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski,
Benni Bosetto, Reilly Davidson, Giulia Essyad, Adham Faramawy, Cleo
Fariselli, Chiara Fumai, Jason Gomez, Ellie Hunter, Uffe Isolotto ,
Gregory Kalliche, Lito Kattou,  Lucia Leuci , Aniara Omann,
Catherine Parsonage, REPLICA (Simona Squadrito, Lisa Andreani, Chiara
C. Siravo), Giuliana Rosso, Namsal Siedlecki , Oda Iselin
Sønderland, Federico Tosi and Bruno Zhu.

Only one person will be allowed
into the space at a time. The exhibition will be experienced in total
isolation. The gallery will have no staff and no physical interaction
is allowed. The exhibition experience is thus transformed: from an
otherwise ordinary social event to a private dimension in which the
vision becomes the space of self-reflection.

Monstrous, abnormal, deformed,
hybrid, supernatural; a sign sent by the gods, an omen – according to
Greek etymology (τέρας); warning (mŏnēre) and demonstration
(monstrāre) of desirable behaviour, in the Latin sense (monstrum),
but also prodigy, an exceptional fact happening and, in a sense,
standing out, as an exception, forcing people to question what is
otherwise ordinary.

In late antiquity and in the
Middle Ages, a monstrosity is no longer a prodigy; it becomes
associated with natural history, leaning towards the fantastic and
ending up, in our time, in the realm of horror and science fiction,
which outline the existence of alien and cyborg life forms. The
history of the word “monster” and of the constellation of
meanings that branches out from it through the succession of
historical eras up to our current era, in which, once its moral
undertone is accepted, we witness the “monsterrification” of
objects, individuals, groups, events. The idea of diversity generally
takes on a self-punishing value; bodies differing from the norm (or
normality), which, by deviating from impossible standards, set up
alternative ways in which corporeality presents itself, thus becoming
a violation of the norm. The prohibition becomes radical because it
is pervasive, crossing the fine line between the inherent antinomy
between a normal and an abnormal, monstrous, grotesque body. This
involves corporeality and physicality in their entirety, in the
present world, in the present era – in which an invisible,
parasitic microorganism becomes a threat to the survival of human
beings and makes any form of bodily interaction illegal, thus
radicalizing the measure of personal space and making the
contamination of such space an unavoidable pretext for punishment.

Body snatchers (The House)
is a super private, perhaps purely speculative and phenomenological
project, which leads the visitor into a bubble which is both familiar
and alien. In a scenario which is at once pre and post human, the
visitor finds him/herself surrounded by numerous, presumably human
(but no one can say for sure, no one can confirm it – if there’s
no one else to ask) bodily presences. Bodies, their representations,
their performances, their transformations, their fragmentations, and,
of course, their absence, piling up. Are these bodies too made up,
too dismembered, and distorted, to be human? Are these fragments too
elusive to be simply skin and flesh? The visitor will be forced to
see themself in other people’s “non-body”, in the trace left
after they cross their boundaries and become distorted, dismembered
and with multiple limbs, like real forms or materials, but improved,
like a disassembled and reassembled collective and personal self. A
restructuring of meaning is permeated by an outstanding pars
destruens, which, in
turn, imposes its own urgency. Looking away is not allowed, nor is
turning away: the other side has the same characteristics and the
same urgency. The possibility of staying uneasy is unwavering since,
perhaps, it is not the bodies on display which are monstrous or in
transformation, but rather it is the visitor’s body itself. The
more we forbid ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the more possible
their interbreeding becomes.

When bodies cross their own
boundaries, or parts are separated from the whole, they become
something disturbingly different. This forces the viewer to
renegotiate the boundaries between the inside and the outside,
between the bodies themselves – fragmented, “distorted” –
and the source of their own anxieties and fears. Thus, the uncanny
reveals its duplicity, just like an object which, while unknown and
maybe unknowable, unintelligible, and therefore deadly, is at the
same time somewhat familiar. The borderline between nature and the
unnatural reveals its fleeting and vague character, giving rise to a
disorienting effect when reading and interpreting what we perceive,
which amounts to a sense of discomfort towards a body which is it not
possible to immediately discern whether it is alive or dead, real or
ghost; a three-dimensional and anthropomorphic body, that is, which
questions the certainties reality’s categories and ambiguously
mixes the opposite concepts of life and death, which are otherwise
necessarily experienced as binary, together.

Body Snatchers (The House)
– to be understood as a single collective work / experience –
lines up together speculations on reality and fiction, on
subjectivation but also on intersubjectivity, hierarchy and becoming,
the encounter with otherness, the relationship (interaction) between
different components / materials / realities and the negotiation
between the private and the public, I and We, I and the Other (and,
if it still exists, the other-body). As in Abel Ferrara’s
homonymous film, it is difficult to state what is real: you or them –
your body or theirs (and again, us or them – our body or theirs)? The
human body embraces and welcomes the non-human, the otherness, within
itself, harboring it and determining a presence / absence of bodies
in the making, evolving or reacting to something new and unexpected,
thus giving rise to a metamorphosis.

Corporeity is seen as stemming
from the relationship between the body and the organic, where the
organism is both a vital component and a structure, both a normal and
a normative organization. The aesthetics rooted in the states of
change and hybridization, of permanent transition, implies a
rethinking of these aporias with a view to an awareness of the
arbitrariness of the purity claim, of the adherence to the rules of
nature aimed at expelling and condemning diversity, of non-conform,
of abnormality accused of anomaly.

According to Gestalt theory, the
ways through which visual perception operates proceed from a sort of
overview that allows grasping the entirety of what is perceived.
Secondly, the original “holistic” approach is transmuted towards
an analytic understanding of the perceived data, operating a sort of
scanning of the single elements that compose it. Since «It
is at the same time true that the world is what
we see
and that, nonetheless, we must learn to see it»,
it is necessary to decline in a perspective sense our gaze on what
surrounds us, learn to relativize, suspend judgment and,
contextually, sharpen the critical sense. The sleep of reason
generates monsters, in the same way that the torpor of emotionality
generates inhumanity.

Body parts and flesh cuts not
always identifiable force the viewer to a visceral encounter with
both familiar and alien objects. A human corpse is not abject in
itself, but the encounter with it can certainly generate aberration.
But also attraction. A recalibration of one’s relationship to the
object involves the body while trying to assess whether the foreign
object is a source of threat or fascination, perhaps both,
co-belonging elements of a toxic soup that engenders seduction and
carnal interest in disgust, dystopian fantasies of voyeurism and
violence, visceral and sculptural allusions, imagined narratives of
bodily invasions; the rampant grotesque, with elastic, deformed or
monstrous bodies. The possibility of metamorphosing one’s own flesh
and image – of permeating its thresholds – is both intoxicating
and anxiogenic.

Body Snatchers
is a boundary creature that wanders between the edges of everything
that is familiar and conventional. It is eager for transformation, an
open mouth that invites us to descend into other worlds, into a space
of new ideas and ethical riddles. A ripe ground for the rooting of
perversions that push the boundaries dismissing the limits of any
legitimacy, freeing narratives dealing with infection and altered
states. Life is a constant change; we are eating the world, the world
is eating us. We are all mortal. We are all human. We are all flesh.
We cannot escape our inclinations nor our flesh and blood, their
decay and putrefaction. The next generation may also evolve into
cyborgs,while still remaining blood, guts and excrement… contagious
and virulent…

Shit and light.

THE CHURCH

Ed Atkins, Petra Cortright,
Julie Grosche, Oliver Laric, Heather Phillipson, Laure Prouvost,
Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Jala Wahid.

Only one person will be allowed
into the church at a time. The exhibition will be experienced only in
total isolation. The church will have no staff and no physical
interaction shall be allowed. The exhibition experience is thus
transformed: from a social and mundane event to a private dimension
in which the vision becomes the space of self-reflection.

The projection of each video
shall follow a random playlist following the order of the Canonical
Hours of the Catholic Church; the hours dedicated to communal and
collective prayer.

Liturgy of the Hours

Matins (before dawn)
Lauds (at dawn)
Prime (at 6 am)
Terce (at 9 am)
Sext (at noon)
Nones (at 3 pm)
Vespers (at sunset)
Compline (before bedtime)

The videos appear as visions, as
frescoes that come to life on the walls of the church, as candles lit
for a saint or as prayers. The projections work as large mirrors
through which the visitor can compare and reflect himself (as a
comparison, in the absence of any other human presence).

Body Snatchers (The Church)
takes place at a time when the rules of isolation and physical
distancing are in force, a radically self-reflective time in which
the body does not necessarily have to perform or materially manifest
itself to others – if not through or within an immaterial
dimension. The project becomes extra meaningful given the current
situation of social distancing and expansive digital communication.
As the longing for physical contact with all that’s left behind,
excluded from our intimate bubble, is growing, the confrontation with
flat images gets more painful. We just have to caress the screen and
accept the value of the non-material being.

The project is set within a space
intended to host the liturgical assembly, an aisle which commonly
hosts people who believe in the real existence of the body and blood
of Christ, but which now hosts a body forced to believe that the
others, their substance, and their physical presence still actually
exist. The church is also the place where the faithful believe that
the body (the incarnation of the Divine) is resurrected and returned
to life after death; a place of life and death, of passage between
the two, and of their mutual interchange.

In the Gospels, the empty tomb
and the resurrection are one and the same. Women and apostles never
see the resurrection as the reanimation of the dead body. They only
see the absence of the body and the apparitions in a new and
mysterious form, open to interpretations. It is the absence, the
emptiness, the substance of resurrection.

The dreamy, awaited, escaped and
untouchable body becomes the image of a reproduction which meets the
needs of desire. The lost body is really absent, loneliness becomes
the place of its abstract presence. So is abstraction itself nothing
but absence and pain or is it painful absence?

Waiting for others activates the
manipulation of the object of desire, giving it a body, a face, a
character, intentions, words, which almost never correspond to
reality. The object one waits for itself, the mass-centre of this
dynamic, can actually turn out to be nothing more than an imagined
object: what is this body if not the product of imagination? Isn’t it
an unreal, evanescent body you are actually waiting for? Is the
awaited body endowed with its own objectivity or is its image linked,
by its very nature, to the subjectivity of those who think it?

In a place whose very name
indicates the space dedicated to the community, the gatherings of the
faithful and the liturgical assembly, Body
snatchers (The Church)
speculates on the dimension of isolation, transformation,
presence/absence and on passing and crossing physical boundaries, as
well as on the concepts of nostalgia, loneliness, pain and grief.

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Claude Eigan / dandelion menace

June 5 – June 26, 2021

curated by Thomas Conchou

ARTEMIS FONTANA
1 passage de l’Asile
75011 Paris

dandelion menace est la première exposition monographique de Claude Eigan en France. Elle se déploie autour de présences végétales qui forment trois familles : les bouquets de poings, les boucliers-corolles, et les feuilles-pièges-à-loups, toutes liées à la figure centrale de la taraxacum, qui lui donne son titre. Communément appelée pissenlit en français, en hommage à ses capacités diurétiques, cette plante aux vertus dépuratives se nomme également dent-de-lion pour ses feuilles acérées et sa collerette jaune touffue. Les œuvres présentées chez Artemis Fontana tracent toutes, à leur manière, les coordonnées affectives de l’artiste. Les poings de ses ami·e·x·s et de ses proches composent les cornes d’abondance entrelacées de la série soft and stone and high, 2020, présences chimériques oscillant entrew le végétal et l’aquatique : tantôt plantes, tantôt sirènes. Les contours des pavés berlinois habitent la série under no kings, 2021, composée de pièces murales installées en formation défensive. Des lanières permettent de les porter au bras en brandissant des fleurs de lys blanches et mauves, disposées à l’envers dans un retournement de l’emblème royale et religieuse. Enfin, les coordonnées d’espaces de sociabilités LGBTQIA+ chers à l’artiste ornent les mâchoires rieuses des feuilles de pissenlit de la série pissed, 2021, aux côtés de slogans et de symboles communautaires.

Ici, les fleurs ont laissé leurs attitudes lascives et se sont acérées, prêtes à piquer, à défendre, à attaquer. Tout comme la stèle du code de Hammurabi consacrait l’adage “œil pour œil, dent pour dent” à Babylone, les œuvres de Claude Eigan s’approprient le célèbre “Bash Back!” des Pink Panthers Patrol : elles revendiquent la rage comme un espace politique, et travaillent le continuum de la menace, de la violence et de la rétribution à partir d’une position minoritaire. Ces fleurs de résilience viennent donner corps à un jardin d’auto-défense, où la dialectique entre la représentation de la violence et l’action violente se déploie comme les deux faces d’une labrys, cette hache à double tranchant utilisée par la civilisation Minoenne comme symbole religieux; historiquement associée aux amazones, elle fut adoptée dans les années 70 comme symbole par les mouvements féministes lesbiens.

La violence traîne autour de dandelion menace comme une menace feinte, résidant dans l’anticipation de sa mise en œuvre plutôt que dans son action. C’est cette menace désarmée et l’imminence d’un futur différent qui habite l’exposition de Claude Eigan. Du symbole solaire, royal, et masculin du lion, supposé honorer la plante lui ressemblant, Claude ne conserve rien, préférant les caractéristiques vivaces et urbaines du pissenlit : capable de pousser entre les fêlures du béton, les pavés des rues et au travers du goudron. Dans une perspective post-humaniste, l’exposition argue pour la définition de sujets politiques complexes, inclusifs et changeants, qui rendent compte de la vulnérabilité des corps, et appelle un futur où la rage, la violence et la colère ont lieu de pratiques culturelles historiques dont la nécessité s’est fanée.

Thomas Conchou

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On The Tip Of The Tongue

Participants
Discussants: Margarita Athanasiou, Helena Papadopoulos, Theofilos Tramboulis, Evita
Tsokanta, Despina Zefkili
Artists: Marina Miliou-Theocharaki, Kostas Roussakis
Sound Design: Dimitris Patsaros

22.05. – 18.06.2021

Enterprise Projects

Chalkidonos 56-58

11527 Athens

Images courtesy the artists and Enterprise Projects

Photos: Stathis Mamalakis

On the Tip of the Tongue

On December 18, 2020, Margarita Athanasiou, Helena Papadopoulos, Theofilos Tramboulis,

Evita Tsokanta, and Despina Zefkili met at Enterprise Projects, and discussed matters around

art publications and magazines in Greece, their position inside the realm of contemporary art,

their past, present and future, as well as language and translation. Five months after that

gathering, the audio documentation of the discussion fills Enterprise Project’s environment

once again, along with two new art commissions. Kostas Roussakis’s and Marina Miliou-

Theocharaki’s works are also conversing – through different channels and from different

starting points – with the space itself, negotiating the written and spoken word, its variations

and possibilities.

Kostas Roussakis’s sculptural installation creates space, more than just viewing and listening

conditions. Α space moving like a dry splash, challenging scale. A space being unfolded and at

the same time, unfolding emotional and corporeal states. A space disturbing its environment

and the viewer, yet, offering consolation. Roussakis shapes an environment of silent

communication for all those notions that we first sense and then discuss, for all those

identifications that we create between materials, memories, colors, emotions, and qualities.

The visitor is invited to inhabit the space and to follow a paradoxical movement, with a

disrupted focal point.

Oral Fixation (2021), Marina Miliou-Theocharaki’s sound installation, approaches voice,

speech, and their sensorial traces. With a text she wrote herself, serving as a score, the artist

employs different functions of the mouth as a material and a medium to initiate the visitor

into a unique bodily stimulation. Inhabiting the spectrum that expands from the mouth’s basic

survival functions to the ones that are purely devoted to pleasure, Miliou-Theocharaki’s

installation creates a new linguistic condition, one that pertains to the texture, intensity, and

mystery of the voice, beyond any language or translation.

On the Tip of the Tongue is a platform fostering the coexistence of different tools, forms, and

approaches that relate to the written and spoken word, what comes before it, and its

transmutations.

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“A soft sonnet is all the strength I have” / Camilla Salvatore

26 May – 9 June, 2021

MASSIMO
Via Degli Scipioni 7
20129 Milan

Photo credit: Salvatore Pastore.
Images courtesy of the artist and MASSIMO

A soft sonnet is all the strength I have is the name Camilla Salvatore reserved for her first solo show, which will open on May 26th at MASSIMO Milanese space at via degli Scipioni 7. On this occasion, the artist presents Permanent Exile (2020), a newly produced video work that features an approach of installation that diverges from her cinematographic background.

“The guilt of predecessors burdens their offspring, oppressing it – as the Erinyes imposed the atonement of fathers to sons and their sons.” This way the artist introduces Permanent Exile. The artwork discloses the story of a young woman into WITSEC, constantly dealing with the attempt of balancing her psychological condition and the acceptance of her background. Seeking refuge into a fictional ambiance, which comes both as pure simulacrum and reflection of a more thorough, in-depth reality, is what she defines as an act of resistance. Floating into this hyper-uranium, she is struggling to survive her present times. The video unveils the woman through her absence, drawing both from her personal remembrance and her inner space through a sequence of images, shadows

and reflections that outline a disjointed portrait.

“I’d like to be faultless. In this delusion of mine, I would put myself on a pedestal of perfection, as a war machine”.

Through this statement, the work focuses all the attention on a self-examination path where thoughts, fears and concerns show up along the way. From here, the viewer can unlock the innermost, recondite side of the character’s mind.

In MASSIMO, the artwork gradually reveals itself to the viewer. The sound fills the space, welcoming him into the exhibition. Each video frame is reflected by the mirrored surface of prisms designed by Martina Taranto and placed in front of a projection screen hidden from view. These elements fluctuate between the visible and the invisible, and their material substance is dissolved, revealing the surrounding environment. The video stands out on a suspended panel, within a dark space that

highlights an intimate dimension of the fruition.

The intimacy behind the project resonates in the exhibition’s title: A soft sonnet is all the strength I have – incipit of a poetry by Amelia Rosselli – is the work Camilla Salvatore dedicates to the woman she pictures, as a grateful sign for having shared her story. This significant gesture brings to a conclusion a three years project that deeply marked both the women’s lives.

Permanent Exile has been produced thanks to the work of Giulio Scalisi, who created all the 3D animations, Germana Frattini, who supervised the creative direction and the archive footage, the sound designer Renato Grieco, the graphic and type designer Augusto Fabio Cerqua and the color

corrector Salvo Lucchese. Supported by Goldsmiths Moving Image and In Progress Milano Film

Network.

Camilla Salvatore

Born in 1993 in Torre del Greco (NA), she graduated in 2015 in Visual Arts at NABA, and attended a MA in Artists’ Film and Moving Image at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019.

The short film Un Inferno (2016) was presented in competition at the Torino Film Festival and subsequently at the Trieste Film Festival. The film was also presented in the Premièrs Pas section of Visions du Réel, Nyon. 20 Settembre (2018) was presented in Filmmaker Festival’s Perspectives competition, where it won a special mention. Permanent Exile was developed in the Milano Film Network – MFN “In Progress” workshop, where it won first prize, and was presented in competition at Filmmaker Festival in 2020.

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Katerina Komianou

‘Heather stays at 505’

curated by Lydia Antoniou and George Bekirakis

27.05 – 30.05.21

Room 505 of

Perianth Hotel

Athens, Greece

“The atmosphere of the planet Uranus appears to be so heavy that the ferns there are creepers; the animals drag along, crushed by the weight of the gases. I want to mingle with these humiliated creatures which are always on their bellies. If metempsychosis should grant me a new dwelling place, I choose that forlorn planet, I inhabit it with the convicts of my race. Amidst hideous reptiles, I pursue an eternal, miserable death in the darkness where the leaves will be black, the waters of the marshes thick and cold. Sleep will be denied me. On the contrary, I recognize, with increasing lucidity, the unclean fraternity of the smiling alligators.”
— Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal (1949)

Taking Genet’s depiction of another planet as a departure point of where we currently stand and how we move onwards, a room at Perianth Hotel constitutes a threshold space for our research. But yet what we yearn for is not Earthly. For smaller beings within an atmosphere, weightlessness lives alongside other unattainable fantasies of the absolute. The force of reason protectively anchors itself against the dwelling – a necessary tension, nearly erotic. Nearly as erotic as the stillness of the three bodies of Eros sculptures that move and change through their entangled surroundings. Same as when the fragments leave the studio and lying on the bed, overlooking the Acropolis. Hanging and lifted, they step from sublime to sublimation. Fragmented, detached but still full – suspended they are hanging on a pleasure-terror dissolve. In this relativity of a lucid dream state we invite the guests of 505 to wander and contribute to the growth of the fragments, prior to their confinement. In our pursuit of a not necessarily human atmosphere, we invite fragments of Katerina Komianou’s work and put her practice in conversation with our research. In her ongoing project, she is experimenting with bronze and moving image as part of her practice, approaching their materiality both sculpturally and metaphorically. The isolation of small floral fragments taken from the urban environment, found in the Athenian urban fabric with historical and political meaning constitute the entities that form the conversation and through that they are reformed themselves. This procedure produces reversals, giving birth to entangled fragments . For the four day event at Room 505 of Perianth hotel, we invite visitors to dwell among selected sculptural fragments of her work within a constructed habitual environment. Lie in bed with them and stare at the Acropolis as they are slipping, mystifying and eventually fading out with new fragments materialised through the conversations and entanglements that occur in room 505.

(more…)

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Lulù Nuti / Terrain Amère

May 19 – July 3, 2021

GALERIE CHLOE SALGADO
61 rue de Saintonge
75003 Paris

After Calcare il Mondo (« moulding the world »), presented in October 2018, true “memento” of today’s world, highlighting the close and dramatic link between certain materials and the subsequent changes in the places from which they are extracted, Lulù Nuti will unveil, with Terrain Amère (« bitter land »), a new work on memory, this time through an even more personal corpus.

Terrain Amère is a sensitive exhibition conceived as a narrative lulled by intimate reminiscences, between recollection and nostalgia. Materialised by depictions of nature at times melancholic, at times hostile, these memories open the door to an exploration through wood and metal, pencils and pastels. A journey in « bitter land ».

—

Au At the beginning, the ﬁrst gesture, the inaugural gesture was to cast the Earth, like an ironic demiurge, by objectifying it and clinging to the material– plaster and concrete– to save the imprint before its disappearance. Lulù Nuti still dwelled in the “age of spheres” as described by Peter Sloterdijk, the time when one believed to be able to hold the earth in their hands, from a block. Now in the shadow of suspicion, that period seems deﬁnitively over. After exhilarating views of the cosmos, after having set sail on modern caravels, it is now a question of ﬁnding mother earth– here lies bitterness, perhaps. Some debris from these journeys both near and far lie like fragments dispersed from a persistent hope, despite everything. These pieces of globes stand as the sedimented remains of an ambition thus perpetuated out of concern for responsibility– not to throw anything away– and a desire to keep the traces of a past condemned to crumble yet persists.

Because Lulù Nuti modestly invites us to enter the bitter land of memory. The collapsing of ecosystems that haunt her through her works ﬁnd an echo in more intimate catastrophes while the window to the world changes perspective. For centuries, painters framed landscapes and geometric minds celebrated the victory of the straight line, and thus of conquering reason over Nature. Now, it is we who are kept behind bars which no longer frame the world at an attempt to order it– both by tidying it up and by giving it demands– but condemn us to a prison that we have constructed for ourselves. We stare at a limited horizon, we lament our captured future. The bars singe with their immobile leaves frozen in an eternal autumn, and pick us up with a paradoxical hospitality: you who enter, leave all hope… We dreamt of embracing the inﬁnite, to fulﬁll our dreams freely, voraciously, and here we are docking on the shores of the bitter land. Nature– which, according to the ancients, liked to hide– comes back to the forefront under other names and other forms reminding us of her ﬁerce adversity with these glittering barb wires. In our empty skies, the idea of divine punishment resonates like an old antenna in the air. The tale of a rebellious nature dominated by the modern man emerges from environmental catastrophes, beating man’s technicist pride into the ground to put him in his rightful place. Yet, he still seems too deaf to this calling. Will this barred window open to a new iron age? Lulù Nuti models immemorial materials, earth elements, and welcomes a balance. Copper, traditionally associated to Venus and the feminine, and thus fertility, aides the growth of the plants. Yet, in quantities too large, it harms their vitality. All these circuits of interdependence, when we listen to the, whisper to us to be careful with the eurhythmics of the world, so easy to throw out of harmony.

Iron age, perhaps, but also an age of undoing: the prison, beyond its gates, is transmuted into liberation for Lulù Nuti, leading to introspection. After having built reassuring structures of concepts where the artist, too, liked to hide, Lulù Nuti strips off to go to the assault of her inner self. Her concrete cubes seizing the world were already serrated with cracks,nevertheless contained, resulting from hazardous but wanted deﬂagrations. But what happens when the implosion is in itself, when the inner shaking becomes a tectonic shock? The landscapes become the receptacles of the world’s hostility and its long disdainful dangers. The mountains– here red and blue, primary like their bitter colors– are drawn by some diffused lines to deﬁne the impossible. Matter and memory join forces in the diffused charcoal dusting. The crystallize memories– the last voyage– in fragments, and the proof is that of impression and pain. The peaks neighbor the chasms like the two faces of life. Death prowls around, sketched with the ﬁngertips, without ostentation or voyeurism, because the display of grief does not make its shadow recede. The word grief seems more accurate than the overly psychoanalytical word mourning, as Barthes wrote in his Journal. In this grief, we ﬁnd the echo in the mountain that folds iron, that twists it as pain can contort the stomach. These concentric arcs recall the circles in water formed when a child throws a stone in it and thus becomes aware of itself by noticing its action on the world. The movements of the soul are externalized in this silent cry which modulates matter. In their reverberation, they seek to retain the ghosts.

Yet, Lulù Nuti resists the elegiac temptation: not the abdication within her, but the possibility of new arrangements– we can move mountains. Like the titles of these exhibitions with various meanings, these works are subject to re-composition. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed, she also seems to declare when we leaf through Autoproduction, a small publication with secret perfumes where photographs of works produced by the artist are superimposed on those of family jewels deposited in banks. We enter the bitter land of the condition of the artist, the underside of her art, but this disrobing ﬁnds an unravelling without drama: the jewels, here consigned, allow for other treasures.

The work is constantly weaving the singular and the universal, the personal and the impersonal, the past and the present, and it is in its ellipses, in its gaps that the spectators and their personal histories can slip in. What good are artists in these catastrophic times? Against the injunction to immediate resilience and false smiles, the artist gracefully invites to a sharing of the pain. Her works ricochet like challenges to despair, assuming the negative, the white, the silence, and the play of purity and lines. In her wake, one can then smell the bittersweet fragrances.

Ysé Sorel

Translation by Katia Porro

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Clare Koury / Desire of the Moth

June 1 – June 27, 2021

Disneyland Paris
1 Rossmoyne Street
Melbourne, Australia

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Alicia Adamerovich / A bat out of hell

June 3 – July 24, 2021

Sans titre (2016)
33 rue de Faubourg Saint- Martin
75010 Paris

Photography: Aurélien Mole / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Sans titre (2016)

Alicia Adamerovich

A Bat Out of Hell

Sans titre (2016) is pleased to present ‘A bat out of hell,’ Alicia Adamerovich’s first solo show at the gallery. For the artist it follows three months of residencies in Europe, first at Palazzo Monti (Brescia, Italy), then at Moly Sabata (Sablons, France), where she produced a new body of work composed of paintings, ceramics, drawings, and a new series of furniture-sculptures specially conceived for the Sans titre (2016) gallery space. The exhibition is conceived as the counterpart of a second show which will take place at Galerie Tator in Lyon from June 10th, 2021.

Inspired by the artistic trend of Biomorphism, Alicia Adamerovich’s practice studies the anthropomorphic nature of objects, sensations, and emotions, and highlights their creative potential. Her work takes form from her unconscious, from her interior thoughts and her psychic evolution. The artist divides her body of work into two distinct entities: “diurnal thoughts” and “nocturnal thoughts.” For ‘A bat out of hell’ at Sans titre (2016), the artist concentrated on the latter, that ones that appear when night falls and bats awaken. The figure of the bat – the only mammal in the world able to fly, which moves about only at night in a quick, lively, staccato manner – is omnipresent in the artist’s work. When it perceives a ray of light or when it encounters a conflict, the animal instinctively puts up its spurs to defend itself and injure the individual in front of it. In her work, Alicia Adamerovich depicts this precise moment when anguish surges in half-sleep. She develops forms both organic and animal. Some reveal a malign character; they seem to escape the frames and envelop us.

The artist’s graphite drawings and paintings represent a bridge between the real world and a fictional space. They’re intentionally produced in a portrait format, personifying the compositions. They express varied sentiments, such as fear, anguish, and perplexity. In the manner of her predecessors, like the couple Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, who painted dream landscapes and underwater scenes populated with strange biomorphic forms, Alicia Adamerovich, in her works on paper, illustrates a certain tension within a phantasmagorical architecture situated within an infinite horizon. She creates a balance of power between these hybrid organisms stacked upon each other or surging to the front of the pictorial composition. They act as a projection of the US political situation in recent months; the artist retains a bitter memory thereof.

The handmade frames are for Alicia Adamerovich a way of leaving paper behind and exceeding drawing’s limitations in dimension. They reinforce the pictorial composition of the subject and play with hierarchies by conferring upon them the status of icons.

The furniture-sculptures that the artist conceived for the exhibition space were produced from bits of recycled wood, cut, sanded and dyed by her hands. The choice to use natural wood and the importance of demonstrating an artisanal craft are at the heart of the sculptor’s engagement. She confesses to having been fascinated as a youth by a neighbour in her village in Pennsylvania who had built all the furniture in his house by hand. The artist means to propose an alternative to industrial production. The link with Art Nouveau, a movement that arose in reaction to the massive industrialization of the end of the 19th century, is evident; Alicia Adamerovich also takes up its formal codes. The rounded curves of the furniture allow her to extend the limits of the physicality of the object into the surrounding space. They seem to become animate, like chimerical figures, and are at once functional, yet paradoxically endowed with a certain fragility.

—

Alicia Adamerovich (born in 1989 in Latrobe in Pennsylvania, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a BA in design at Pennsylvania State University and studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. In 2018, Alicia Adamerovich won a scholarship from UrbanGlass (Brooklyn, NY). En 2021, the artist participated in residency programs at Palazzo Monti (Brescia, IT) and Moly Sabata (Sablons, FR), and in the coming months she will join the residency program at Del Vaz Projects in Los Angeles, CA.

Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions including ‘The Loner’s Castle’ at Projet Pangée (Montreal, ON); at Odd Ark Annex (Los Angeles, CA); ‘Vibrant Matter’ at the FISK gallery (Portland, OR). This year, she will show her work at Galerie Tator (Lyon, FR); at Palazzo Monti (Brescia, IT); at Del Vaz Projects (Los Angeles, CA); at Y2K Group (New York, NY); at Cob Gallery (London, UK). Alicia Adamerovich has participated in numerous group shows: ‘The Symbolists, The Flowers of Evil’ at Hesse Flatow (New York, NY); ‘Palazzo Monti: Transatlantico’ at Mana Contemporary (Jersey City, NJ); at the stands of Project Pangée at Art Toronto (Toronto, ON) and Material Art Fair (Mexico City, MX); ‘Tulips’ at Kapp Kapp (Philadelphia, PA); ‘A Fairly Secret Army’ at Wild Palms (Dusseldorf, DE); and ‘Serenity Later’ at Kunstraum (Brooklyn, NY).

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Ignacio García Sánchez / Un sendero entre las ruinas

27th April – 17th July 2021

Centre Civic Can Felipa

Pl. Josep Mª Huertas Clavería. Planta 2a

08005 Barcelona

The exhibition ‘Un sendero entre las ruinas’ by Ignacio García Sánchez proposes a journey through two projects: Wolves are Fiercer on the other Side and A Thousand Years of Contemporary Architecture. Both projects have a common starting point that lies in the interest in analyzing and reinterpreting symbols chosen by certain human institutions to represent themselves and legitimize their power. The concept of ruin is the common thread that problematizes the relationship of these constructions (material and ideological) with their environment and over time.

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Tim Spooner / A Wave in a Cave

curated by Séamus McCormack

June 4 – July 17, 2021

Commonage
53 Old Bethnal Green Rd
London E2 6QA

Image Credits: Installation views Commonage, Photography Reinis Lismanis.

A series of wall-based sculptures that scratch and twitch, investigate kinesics to embody a variety of sensations, revealing anthropomorphic qualities through the combination of alluring elements. In the drawings, which make use of repetition but with slight variation, figuration tussles with hybrid identities and contradictory functions, knotting the familiar with the fantastical, peculiar, humdrum and somewhat macabre. As Spooner describes: “Each new picture or object was the seed for making the next one so that the process could be self-propelling. The body of work is quite closed in on itself like a bat or echo flapping or bouncing around inside a cave”.

This exhibition follows on from an earlier digital project for Commonage We were almost in a sad film together, available to view on our website alongside an interview with the artist. Both the animation and the new works for this exhibition, all created during the period of lockdown, prompt uncanny responses, sensory awareness and make us think of anxieties caused by ostracism.

Tim Spooner’s work has been presented extensively in theatres and galleries in the UK, Europe and Asia including Battersea Arts Centre (London), b-side festival (Isle of Portland), Cambridge Junction, Mayfest (Bristol), MAC Belfast and DCA Dundee (for Hayward Touring), Barbican Art Gallery (London), Whitstable Biennale, NoD (Prague, Czechia), LASfest (Białystok, Poland), Terni Festival (Italy), TJP Strasbourg (France), Actoral Festival (Marseille, France), Internationales Figurentheater Festival (Erlangen, Germany), STUK (Leuven, Belgium), Teatro Maria Matos (Lisbon, Portugal), Culture Station Seoul (South Korea), Pesta Boneka Festival (Yogyakarta, Indonesia) and Macau Arts Festival (China). He lives and works in London.

Commonage is a space for testing new ideas that encourage commonality, experimentation and dialogue, through online projects, events and exhibitions. Exhibitions are presented in our project space gallery, which sits alongside a café, architecture design studio to create cross-pollination, collaboration and integration into this hybrid environment by facilitating conversations between individual and collective creative processes. Online projects are another way to test work through screenings, writing and other digital outputs. Commonage is programmed by Séamus McCormack and shares the site with The Common E2 and Common Ground Workshop and operates with their support.

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BONJOUR (the situation is not new)

curated by Marie Gautier.

with Jordan Derrien, Antoine Duchenet.

June 4 – June 12, 2021

W
6 Avenue Weber
93500, Pantin

In collaboration with ArtLacuna, London, UK

Photography: Aurélien Mole.

ArtLacuna (London, UK) and W (Pantin, FR) are proud to announce the opening of BONJOUR (Stockings, shoes, hairpins) and BONJOUR (The situation is not new), two exhibitions simultaneously curated by Claudia Dance-Wells, in London, and Marie Gautier, in Pantin ; presented works are from Jordan Derrien and Antoine Duchenet.

An ambiguous silhouette is composed by duplication, twinning and recurrences, during this counterpoint show called BONJOUR distributed between two cities. Although Stockings, shoes and hairpins obviously conceals and contains the pairing leitmotiv at the source of this project, The situation is not new echoes and doubles this last. It strives, so to speak, on provoking reverberation.

Jordan Derrien will be presenting a new series of canvases, amongst ready-made and paintings, surfaces and objects. He manipulates different types of wood, textures and door handles to create, as final composition, a drawer. The handle transmutes the seeming abstract painting into a piece of furniture with haptic virtues.

Antoine Duchenet will reveal recent sculptures from his Intarsia series. Structured by means of orthogonal units of representation adjusted to the different elements they contain, these squared volumes are made of chromed steel tubes and are built as stands for all kinds of arrangements. They present, align and organize, with the schematic rigor of a diagram, a selection of clearly new and very slick shapes, open to a fluid gaze. For these purely accessory objects matters mostly silhouette, profile and contours, they obey a protruding stillness.

—

Antoine Duchenet is an artist and curator based between Paris and Caen. Recent exhibitions include Overkill, Overload, Overlove with Pauline Rima at the Galeries Lafayette, Caen, Fr (2019) and a solo exhibition Tout le monde ressemble à Victor at the Artothèque, Espaces d’art contemporain de Caen (2019). He recently organised Hanging Gardens, the first solo exhibition in France of Jason Stopa, which took place at W in Pantin (2019), the group exhibition Du haut d’un arbre au milieu de la tempête at the Artothèque, Espaces d’art contemporain de Caen (2019-2020). This year, he is part of the Curators in residency programme, created by the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris.

Claudia Dance-Wells is, amongst other things, an Artist, Curator, Writer, Production Designer and Prop Mod-eller based between London and Paris. She has taken part in artist residencies such as at Organhaus Gallery, Chongqing, China and at Glyndebourne Opera House, East Sussex, UK. A recent example of her writing is ”Nature is Healing, Racism is the Real Virus, Street Art is Returning” – published by Screenshot Magazine, 2020. Selected exhibitions include: “A Bigger Splash”, Galerie PCP, Paris, France, 2019 ; “Let Them Eat Fake”, Bad Art, London, 2017 ; “No Werk”, Trocadero Art Space, Melbourne, Australia, 2017 ; “Company”, Summerhall, Edinburgh, 2016 ; “CLAM JAM”, The Royal Standard, Liverpool, UK, 2015. She is currently a Prop Modeller at Warner Brothers Studios for Aquaman 2.

Marie Gautier is an exhibition curator, former student of the Ecole du Louvre, she has taken part in the pro-duction of many exhibition projects in France and abroad, among which “Le Salon de Montrouge” (2016-2020), “Roleplaying– Rewriting Mythologies”, Daegu Photo Biennale, Corée du Sud (2018), “What does the image stand for? De quoi l’image est-elle le nom ?”, Momenta Biennale of contemporary image Montréal (2017), “Juli.o Sar-mento, The Real thing”, Fondation Gulbenkian Paris (2016), “Taryn Simon, Rearviews, star forming nebula and foreign propaganda bureau”, Jeu de Paume, Paris (2015), “Stuttering – Melik Ohanian”, Crac, Sète (2014), “Off to a flying start”, Nuit Blanche, Toronto (2013), “I am also… Douglas Gordon”, Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2013). She coordinates art projects, and works on and organizes the production of various programmes with collectors and artists throughout the world.

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Hanna & Björn / Borta

29 May – 6 June 2021

Crum heaven

Högbergsgatan 38-40

118 26 Stockholm

Link to participating artist:

Björn Engberg

Hanna Andersson

Gallery:

Crumheaven

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BONJOUR (stockings, shoes, hairpins)

curated by Claudia Dance-Wells.

with Jordan Derrien, Antoine Duchenet

June 4 – June 20, 2021

ArtLacuna
48 Falcon Rd
London, SW11 2LR

In collaboration with W, Pantin, France

Photography: Theo Christelis.

—

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Yusuke Muroi

Kodomo-Otona Clinic

curated by mumei

May 8 – June 5, 2021

2x2x2 by i am labor

3-9-6 Higashiueno

Taitō City, Tokyo, Japan

All images courtesy and copyright of the artist and the space.

im labor is pleased to announce Yusuke Muroi’s solo exhibition, “Kodomo-Otona Clinic,” curated by mumei, Open on May 8, 2021.

About the Artist__

Yusuke Muroi (B.1990) is a Japanese artist who was born in Gunma, Japan.

He completed his MA from Tokyo University of the Arts.

In 2009, Muroi started to make work on the street, inspired by the graffiti culture. Along with graffiti, Muroi has always been interested in art brut and outsider art, and he began to collect things that seemingly exist between the inside and outside of art.

Also, Muroi is part of artist collectives “Issyuumawattetsurai,” which intends to turn unnecessary objects into artwork, and “Tofutokani Club,” which aims to produce one work a day.

His recent exhibitions include: “THEヨエロ寸-尋-,” VOU, (2021, Kyoto), “KEN & Peace” HIGURE 17-15cas（2019, Tokyo）, “Hamster-Powered Night Light” mumei （2019, Tokyo）, “Gunma Biennale for Young Artists” The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma (2017, Gunma), etc.

Interview with: Yusuke Muroi

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Anezka Grodzińska / Headquarters

curated by Jagna Domzalska

14th May – 4th June 2021

Skala Gallery

Šwięty Marcin, 49a, 61-804 Poznan, Poland

The headquarter carries a head within. It stands on it or rises touching the ceiling with it. It duplicates itself, forms groups and splits into delaminated layers. Inside the task allocation unit, its working strings and arrays construct their own architecture of feedback. The placement of the desks, their size and illumination determine hierarchical dependency.

In the article entitled The Line (dated May 1921) the artist writes: “The human is bored, considers work a dreary, tedious and futile spending of time, while their life—with minor exceptions—appears monotonous and void, for they fail to recognize in themselves an entity capable of constructing, building, and destroying.” Today, the building and the destroying have been taken over by corpostructures. Alone, there is little one can build or demolish. Only construction is left to the individual, most often available with “de-“ as a prefix, and no return options. Thus, we construct the shared space, the dependencies within its bounds above all. This is the sole thing we have access to as the material of resistance against that monotony of work.

Over the hundred years, various Offices for Brand Strategy and Sector Promotion have learned how to tighten the tolerances in the cogwheels of wringing the employee dry. The upper floors demand more, adding cubic or square metres in return. The promotion provided for in the structure invariably requires the material to be stretched yet again and further sections of time to be perforated. Here, the consciousness is moulded by the expanding space. This is the SelfDesk vs Helpdesk round being played.

The repression of vague forebodings we may have with regard to being penned in groups in the organized shared space exacerbates the tension and situational discomfort. Admiration and desires are awoken and aroused in the groups, only to die and expire because of them. We persist in the established pattern of behaviours, but grasp at every opportunity of release. We desire others, peeping at them through the apertures of the furniture and desks, simultaneously dreading the gaze of another resting on ourselves. The bonding connection is as forcible and impossible as it is yearned for and imagined.

Each and every office is a headquarter. The fact that the gallery is located in its immediate vicinity and the symbiotism of both spaces are not without significance. The installation Headquarters constructs itself by virtue of the material whose inherent properties dovetail with the analyzed issue. Built around a metaphor and reversed perspective, it compels one to look through to the other side. The successive openings and shapes create the interlacing weft of particular patterns. The dimensions are flattened in this world to maximize the communication and unequivocality of the guidelines. The target shape is discarded, leaving the blanking die in the inversion of what has been cut out. The hole offers a glimpse of the consecutive layers and couplings which strive to sustain the vicarious structure more or less intact.

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Valentin Guillon / LET! Remise en jeu

March 20 – July 24, 2021

Florence Loewy
9/11 rue de Thorigny
75003 Paris

Throughout his youth, Valentin Guillon was always on the move: spinning in circles in roller skating rinks, in gymnastics, and also in spirit. Today in his artistic practice, he seeks to rediscover such hypnotic perceptual experiences in which a state of great physical concentration leads to meditative spaces. In his studio, he draws circles, geometric forms, builds models of tracks, in a serial and surely obsessive manner. He follows a quest in which the position of the viewer is central as the works are addressed to their ambulatory gaze. The format of the canvas is intrinsic to a stage like protocol that puts the body, its possible trajectories, and the way it is included and excluded into play. Valentin Guillon’s work follows the same vein as that of El Lissitzky’s, who in 1927 proposed to manipulate sliding panels to vary the viewing points of artworks in his installation Cabinet des abstraits; or more recently Xavier Veilhan whose projects play with exhibition design by dynamically connecting the plinths, displays, exhibition labels, lighting, bodies and artworks, bringing invention to the exhibition space. Valentin Guillon also creates viewing devices, perceptive environments, and obstacles exploring different ways of leading the viewer to penetrate the spatial dimension of the artwork.

The painting is in situ: it designates the space and brings itself to the scale of the spaces it inhabits. The projects are formed through preliminary drawings and models which are used as steps to test, analyse and vary the proposals before entering the real space. Yet, at times the attention paid to the model portrays a sculptural or even pictorial dimension that stimulates the exhibition. Framed, hung, posed on a plinth, the model questions the necessity of the realisation by containing in itself an ensemble of possibilities open for the viewer to imagine.

Valentin Guillon has realised his second exhibition at the Galerie Florence Loewy as a reduced model of an exhibition that will take place in September 2021 at Wonder, a collective studio space in Clichy where he works. In it, we discover a fresco, a ring, tracks, and a net that crosses the room¬– a structure simultaneously connecting and separating the space. The forms that he manipulates evoke not only sport equipment and architecture inscribed in our collective memory, but also the history of geometric abstraction with the pleasure of misappropriation, play, and manipulation. By realising both projects at the same time, Valentin Guillon has created a tension. As in a tennis match, the gaze moves back and forth, from the model to the in situ work, skimming the net stretched between the two, never ceasing to put the work into play. The viewer finds themself stuck in a coming and going between two possible steps, experiencing the impossibility of deciding which one is complete. Valentin Guillon makes us live the rules that are at play on the field, as with his previous exhibition in the gallery where we literally stepped onto a roller skating rink. Here, we follow him in the time of preparation, the warm up, exploring his capacity to produce an aesthetic experience. In the narrow space of the gallery, Valentin Guillon multiples perspectives, optical movements, staging the path through a dense and stratified installation that warms the spirit and blurs the reference points between what makes an artwork and what makes an experience, an invitation to multiply the possible paths.

Mathilde Roman

Mathilde Roman is an art critic and she published «Habiter l’exposition. L’artiste et la scénographie» at Manuella editions.

Translated from the French by Katia Porro

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Hugo Servanin / REGIME SELECTING DEVICES (ENVIRONNEMENT FOULE #6)

May 8 – June 6, 2021

NICOLETTI

12 A Vyner Street,

London, E2 9DG

photography: Theo Christelis.

In ‘Culture and Technics’, the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon challenges the assumption that technics – the general domain of technologies, techniques, methods, arts and practices – are only invented to respond to the utilitarian needs of a given culture. Instead of a means to an end, technics would be an act: the expression of a desire and the manifestation of an uncalculated vital impulse that has the potential to modify not only the life of the people who invented it, but the entire environment, to which culture then adapts. ‘Generally speaking,’ Simondon writes, ‘a situation involves two kinds of relations, particularly when it concerns an interaction between several human groups in their concrete habitat and the exploitation of their environment. Humans, to better pose such problems, must be able to conduct themselves like a regime selecting device, which analyses data according to the mode best suited to the information received. One could say that culture and technicity are two modes of analysis, and that humans must learn to treat problems according to each of these processes, extreme modes that allow them to grasp the limits of complex domains of reality.’

The relationship between culture and technics can be seen as the focal point of Hugo Servanin’s artistic practice. In Regime Selecting Devices (Environnement Foule #6), his first solo exhibition at NıCOLETTı, Servanin presents a new series of sculptures, robots, computers and artificial intelligence, through which the artist reflects upon the mimetic relationship between organic bodies, analogue machines and digital technologies. Conceived as an ecosystem in which a network of pipes, rods and mechanical systems connects all the works to one another, the exhibition navigates an idiosyncratic territory at the confluence of medicine, mythology and pornography.

These ideas are explored through the staging of situations enacted by sculptural bodies that Servanin calls Géants [Giants] – a nod to Greek mythology, in which the Gigantes were endowed with supernatural powers. Referencing the aesthetics of classical sculpture – busts or naked bodies made of clay or porcelain – Servanin’s Géants are composite beings that are firstly molded on human bodies before being combined with an array of synthetic materials and prosthetic technologies.

Here, Servanin coupled his sculptures to IV stands on which he affixed computers designed to monitor a mechanical system distributing water in and out of the Géants. These computers are also sending ultrasounds that transform water into a fog floating within the bodies. Another sculpture, made of clay and displayed on a bed, is connected to a system distributing water on its surface, which will slowly melt throughout the exhibition. With these works, Servanin implements a process of exchange between bodies, machines and computer engineering – a posthuman ballet evoking both the medical assistance of living beings and the artificial recreation of organic life by technological devices.

Although initiated before the beginning of the global pandemic, Servanin’s Géants inevitably denotes a musing on our technological dependency to maintain and extend life. His reflection, however, extends beyond the specificities of this context. Indeed, Servanin’s work rather contemplates the ways in which machines always already expand beyond their function to become a type of device mimicking the organic condition of bodies – a process that Simondon would call the ‘individuation’ of the technical object, whose ultimate inclination is to become a ‘technical individual’ that is no longer subordinated to human needs.

In Regime Selecting Devices, these interrogations are amplified by the presence of a series of artificial intelligence programmed to download the 100,000 most popular pornographic images on the internet. Dissimulated in glass tanks filled with boiling water, these AIs engage in a process of Deep Learning whereby they decompose the downloaded images into individual pixels, which they then redistribute within a continuous flow of merging bodies projected on a screen. Through these technically complex artworks, which evoke the Géants’ sexual phantasms, Servanin repositions desire and sexuality at the centre of a reflection on our relationship with technology. In this context, the infinite proliferation of pornographic images appears as the stigma of a disincarnated human sexuality, an increasing distance between humans and their bodies that Servanin presents within a reversal between means and ends – here, it is the technology that conditions the culture at the origin of its creation.

Whether reflecting upon our relationship with science, our faith in medicine, or our addiction to pornography, Servanin’s exhibition invites us to rethink our condition as humans, that is, as regime selecting devices that don’t always select the best-suited regime, nor the right devices.

Hugo Servanin (b. 1994, France) lives and works in Paris, France. Selected solo exhibitions include Magasins Généraux, Pantin, FR (Forthcoming, 2022); Regime Selecting Devices (Environnement Foule #6), NıCOLETTı, London, UK (2021); Cacotopia, Annka Kultys Gallery, London, UK (2018). Selected group exhibitions: Deus Ex Machina, Musée de Soissons, FR (Forthcoming, 2021); Spaced In Lost, Paris, FR (2020); Form and Volume, curated by Jens Hoffmann, Cristina Guerra Gallery, Lisbon, PT (2019); Futures of Love, Magasins Généraux, Pantin, FR (2019); Notte Bianca, Villa Médicis, Rome, IT (2019); Maison d’histoire(s)-(non) naturelle(s), NıCOLETTı, Paris, FR (2019); Artagon Live, Citée internationale des arts, Paris, FR (2019); Point Contemporain, Villa Belleville, Paris, FR (2019); Le Hurlement du papillon, Double Séjour, Paris, FR (2018); Dictionary of Rhymes, MI Galerie Paris, FR (2018).

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Andrew Freire / ex-tradition acts, 01-02

May 22 – May 23, 2021

Riviera Parking
Santa Barbara, CA 93103

the paintings, ex-tradition acts, 01-02 assemble comments from memoirs, news and social media platforms about a relative’s recent relief from US penitentiary facilities. These comments arise during the relative’s return to a country they had not resided in for twenty-seven years.

In the early months of the pandemic, I reflected on my relative’s and others’ continual experience with the prison industrial complex, as permeated through legal regimes. Some extradition treaties, for example, state that so long as the underlying conduct is criminal in both contracting states, it is irrelevant where the criminal acts were committed (art. 2, 3(b)). Even though extradition is not immune to the impact of the human rights branch of the law, I question whether human rights doctrines are sufficient; could these protections actually enable individuals and local communities from reconnecting and repairing harms on their own terms? To start my inquiry , I assembled a dialogue in the paintings as an attempt to place disparate voices in proximity to one another, since they are not able to share a space together.

The following text is a provision within an amended extradition treaty, that grants states judicial assistance in criminal matters on the basis of bilateral or multilateral treaties, or on an ad hoc basis. This would be the procedure my relative followed:

Article XV–Transit

Paragraph 1 gives each Party the power to authorize transit

through its territory of persons being surrendered to the other

Party by a third state.35 Requests for transit under this

article are to be transmitted through the diplomatic channel

and must contain a description of the person being transported

and a brief statement of the facts of the case upon which the

surrender is based.

—————————————————————-

35 A similar provision is present in all recent United States

extradition treaties.

—————————————————————-

Paragraph 2 requires that a Party shall respond promptly to

transit requests, but allows a Party to refuse permission for

transit if such transit would compromise its essential

interests.

Paragraph 3 states that no authorization is needed when air

transportation is being used and no landing is scheduled in the

territory of the other Part. If an unscheduled landing occurs

in the territory of a Party, that Party may require a request

as provided for in paragraph 1. In such a case, the person in

transit shall be kept in custody for up to 96 hours until a

request for transit and thereafter until transit is effected.

Bio

Andrew Freire is an artist working in installation, sound, and painting. His work participates within documentary practices, archive platforms and legal discourse. Research within these disciplines and subsequent artwork, allows him to reconsider the impacts of legal regimes, its generational transmission and mythologies. His current projects are exploring dynamics between resource extraction and memory. Freire earned a BA at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is a JD candidate at USC Gould School of Law.

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Christophe de Rohan Chabot

ARNAULT MARK RIHANNA

April 14 – June 16, 2021

Établissement d’en face

Rue Ravenstein 32

Brussels, Belgium

All images courtesy and copyright of the artist and space.

What pleasure? The title of the exhibition indicates the identities and enables the association: Bernard Arnault, president of the LVMH group, Mark Zuckerberg, president of Facebook and Rihanna, pop singer and businesswoman, president of the Fenty brand. Formally, the display insists on the notion of sequence: that of structures, portraits and the black-red-blue color code. The reframings indicate the artist’s engagement with these images, mummified and sublimated icons, presented in icy placidity. Plasticized and chromatically coupled, the sequentiality acts out the rhythm of the dynamics of pleasure: it fixes the perception, directs the movements, provokes the desires.

How to get pleasure? In the epistemic model of the network, we cannot make clear distinctions between the types of agency of the works of art, the artists and the spectators. The only function of these actors is to perform the network, and their identity is thus given by their behavior. The backlighting of these images is maintained, refusing a compensatory effect of the exit of the digital. These images are avatars, and the users become by-products of their activity.

In Établissement d’en face, the repetition of structures, a hybrid mime of fair booths and tombs, forces the bodies to an inter-passivity that responds to the inter-mediality of the images. These entities do not possess their own reflection or rather, their reflection is diluted in the color code associated with them. Christophe de Rohan Chabot displaces the language strategies of these networks through a form of funeral rite.

Paolo Baggi

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FERAL SIGNALS
Eliška Konečná, Stanislava Kovalčíková, Lotte Maiwald

27/04/2021 – 05/06/2021

eastcontemporary
via Giuseppe Pecchio 3
20131 Milan, Italy

We are pleased to announce our group exhibition Feral Signals featuring a series of paintings and textile-based works by Eliška Konená (Czech Republic, b. 1992), Stanislava Kovalíková (Slovakia, b. 1988) and Lotte Maiwald (Germany, b. 1988). The ‘three sisters’, as we got used to call them adopting the title of the play by Anton Chekhov, each different, but all united by their interest in the exploration of the invisible and the subconscious.

The exhibition Feral Signals conveys the sensation of the somnambule oscillation between dream and reality, exploring in particular a category of ‘place’ in its archetypal and symbolic dimension. Where do we go when we fall asleep? A question we could pose, while immerging ourselves in the depths of the dreamlike, yet unsettling works by these three female artists. When we dream our mind becomes fluid allowing connections to form between sometimes remote concepts – the eponymous ‘feral signals’ – which we might not notice in the structure of waking thought. The works of Konená, Kovalíková and Maiwald seem to be as intimate and untamed as a night’s sleep during which their subconscious finds the protagonists of their future pictorial and textile compositions. All of them create a narrative context of a mysterious fairy tale that could be a mere whisper before falling asleep. Following the random juxtapositions typical for dreams, the artists create magical and enigmatic works, which disturb and fascinate us all at once, and while suggesting rather than defining the content, they encourage the viewer to open up to its inner self and personal associations.

Tender sensuality in Eliska Konená’s modulation of shades and bas-reliefs evokes such game of associations and gives rise to a series of non-defined images. A series of textile-based works evoke ‘a sense of pleasure that derives from the visible dominance of curvy round shapes based on the gentle relationship between convexities and concavities.’1 Balancing on the fleeting border of wakefulness and sleep, tactile and immaterial, the soft forms underline the transgression of the body and its visual narratives related to the corporeality perceived through the prism of desires and drives. The notion visible particularly in the work ‘It could be us’, which depicts intertwined bodies suspended in an abstract dimension. It seems to be a more subtle and fairytale like version of the soft sculptures by Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, which at the end of 1970s produced a series of textile works evoking fragile and soft bodily forms. Konená uses found fabrics and stretches them against the edges of the frame, creating a bas-relief. The result does not come from the process of the shallow carving associated with the 15th-century sculptors but from fine and floaty work with textiles. The artist’s artifacts recall the internal experience of the human incursion to the metaphysical levels of physicality. Here, the body is not the opposite of the soul, but a place where what we traditionally call the ‘spiritual’ happens. Graduated in painting but driven by the desire of discovery of new means and mediums, Konená embraces the crafts and develops her interest not only in embroidery and textile, but in wood carving too. The plasticity of this material is explored in the work ‘It should be us’, in which swirling arms and fingers, a recurring theme in the artist’s oeuvre, suggest the ‘free play’ of hands or the ‘free play’ of the imagination just like in the Les main libres2 by an American avant-garde artist Man Ray and a French poet Paul Éluard.

Yet, the dreamscape may be sometimes the opposite of such fluid and pleasant environments; it is also a place of unforeseen meetings with strangers, bizarre juxtapositions and malevolent desires. Stanislava Kovalíková’s paintings depict figures, in a dense manner of old masters’ technique, which gaze intensely at the viewer with a kind of all-knowing menacing innocence. Just look at the protagonist of ‘Wannabe’ with her bewitching gaze and long sun-kissed hair burning like flames of fire. A surreal imagery sending us back to the paintings of Dorothea Tanning or a photograph Woman with Long Hair (1929) by Man Ray. But what is this portrait? ‘Is it a mystery and revelation, conscious and unconscious, poetry and madness?’3 Is she asking for silence, attention or is her suggestive gesture just another seduction technique? Is she an angel or a demon? ‘[…] all of these things and many more’4- Kovalíková would rather agree with Tanning’s answer. The enigmatic paintings of Koval íková are complex visual narratives appropriating the darker side of the fairy tale genre. They often refer to abuse, harassment and desire-driven narratives. In the ‘Horny Apocalypse’ a graceful woman wickedly smiles to the viewer, while the exploding volcanoes mark an apocalyptic landscape behind her back. Depicted on a gold leaf background like the icons and protagonists of the medieval panel paintings, this female figure is definitely not a saint. The painting is distinguished by an ambivalent and rather dark atmosphere, which is reminiscent of Leonor Fini’s surrealist paintings. ‘Wannabe’ and ‘Horny Apocalypse’ could also remind us the characters of the Marquis de Sade’s novels: the virtuous, but constantly meeting abuse Justine and amoral Juliette eagerly exploiting her sexuality. Koval

íková seems to suggest a submission to the logic of dream mirage. As she suggests: ‘Real paintings exist in the consciousness of the viewer.’1 Indeed, in the extraordinary world of dream illusions, the narrator identifies him/herself with the protagonist. Just as uncanny as when we find something in common with the hidden personal narratives in the artist’s portraits. The dark psychological, emotional, social, and political realms are intertwined in Kovalíková’s works, which are provocative and playful at the same time. The images released from the depths of the artist’s imagination are introduced through uncanny stylistic interventions and complex layering treatments of canvas’ surface, which include gold leaf dustings, sanding, palette knife smudges or the work with ink and latex. The distinctive textures of her paintings often melt away physical features of her ambiguous characters, while making her works looking like if they have been eroded by time too.

The protagonists of Lotte Maiwald’s colorful unstretched canvas are mostly tiny human figures, placed in isolated and empty landscapes. The ‘feral signals’, both realistic and abstract, flawlessly merge within Maiwald’s visionary worlds just like in the painting ‘Süß rund hell’ reminding a cartoon story under construction or ‘Mitten zwischen Fischen’, in which real, but mysterious elements merge with abstract background. A free play with the color is fundamental to Maiwald’s artistic research recalling the vision of Hans Hofmann: ‘Color stimulates certain moods in us. It awakens joy or fear in accordance with its configuration. In fact, the whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.’2 However, Maiwald highlights that the pleasing colors of her works might not necessarily remind of bright dream visions, but rather clownish nightmares. These imaginary landscapes often defined by alienation and solitude are almost reminiscent of ‘long – take’ shots, a cinematographic technique that paralyzes and reduces the camera’s work to an activity of pure registration and passing from a ‘subjective’ to an ‘objective’ vision, with a very slow tracking shot just like in many of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films. All that captures the complexity of the situation represented as a whole, where only apparently nothing seems to be happening. The story is rendered in an unclear way and the distance makes the viewer to imagine what transpires on the canvas. Indeed, Maiwald’s paintings encourage the viewer to imagine the rest of the story. In addition, the choice of the artist to not stretch the canvas allows her to use a very fluid paint superimposed by many layers, and to control the direction of flow of the paint by moving or creasing the canvas. The paintings with irregular shapes and atypical dimensions furtherly imply the sensation of imagination’s freedom, boundlessness and unlimited subject matter.

eastcontemporary

Agnieszka Faferek and Julia Korzycka

1 Eliška Konená in conversation with Piotr Sikora, commissioned by eastcontemporary, April 2021.

2 Éluard, Paul; Ray, Man. Les Mains Libres (Free Hands). Paris: Jeanne Bucher, 1937.

3 Gottlieb, Adolph; Sidney, Janis. Abstract and Surrealist Art in America. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944, p. 107

4 Idem.

5 Stanislava Kovalíková in conversation witk Anke Kempkes, 2021.

6 Hofmann, Hans. Search For the Real. 1967, p. 42.

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Gay Love in Pictures

Kostis Fokas, Konstantinos Ladianos, Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis (VASKOS),

Angelos Papadimitriou, Ilias Papailiakis, Dimitris Papaioannou

curated by Kostas Tzimoulis & Vassilis Noulas

EIGHT

Politechniou 8, Athens

The exhibition explores homoerotic sensitivity as it is reflected in the present time, through the work of six artists living and working in Athens .Through the use of traditional techniques and mediums of representation (painting, photography, sculpture) but also hybrid or conceptual practices, an “other” subject matter is approached, a powerful eroticism that claims visibility but also its “normalization”, its representations.

The reception of a work of art in the context of homosexual desire poses a twofold challenge: moving away from the abstraction for the sake of a “statement” (representational or conceptual) of desire and, at the same time, moving away from the “death of the author” theories for the sake of a biographical “statement”. We are dealing here with a return to the specific, to the historically and biographically determined. The simple – often
judged obsolete – questions about a work of art “What does it depict?” “Whom does it depict?” “Who created it?” “What was their intention?” acquire a key character here and charge the projects automatically and naturally with a claiming power.

The joyful and profane painting of Konstantinos Ladianos, the double self-referential portraits of VASKOS (Noulas-Tzimoulis), the intertextual and playful works of Angelos Papadimitriou, the dark oil paintings and the drawings of Ilias Papailiakis, the familiar recordings of the personal time of Dimitris Papaioannou, and the naked intertwined bodies of Kostis Fokas compose a representative sample of modern iconography of gay love.

The exhibition “Gay Love in Pictures” is like saying: Things are simple, things are right in front of our eyes and they are beautiful! Look at them!

* VASKOS is an artistic duo by Vassilis Noulas and Kostas Tzimoulis, started in Athens in 2014. It deals with hybridity exploring playfully

the notion of artistic, sexual and national identity. The exhibition “Gay Love in Pictures” is an extension of VASKOS’ search in the field of

the Athenian visual queer scene.

* The poster of the exhibition is inspired by the work of Faith Ringgold.

With the support of NEON Organization for Culture and Development

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“Al limite del Visibile” / Francesco De Prezzo

6 May – 6 June, 2021

LOOM Gallery
Via Lazzaretto, 15
20124 Milan

At the Limits of Visibility are Francesco De Prezzo’s painted canvases, painted with care and then either
obliterated or covered with nearly transparent veils. Some of his subjects are entirely abstract, because
the final layer of paint is dense and opaque. Others are fully spelled out in their details, having escaped
the final brushstroke. In both cases, De Prezzo (Lecce, 1994) has studied the subjects with an eagle eye,
spending countless hours portraying the objects that surround him in his studio.

Fabrics, tripods, panels, containers, tiles, hangers and other objects that are used to cover, support,
contain or divide and that cast off their simplicity to enter a new dimension and acquire a new aura. What
we find in these works is an idea of synthesis and transformation away from figurative painting through
a process of layering and covering at the limit of the monochrome, questioning the possibility of fixed
visual perception and challenging the role of the image as language.

In Rosalind Krauss’s The Optical Unconscious – a rereading of modernism in which the critic questions
some of the idealist dogmas of traditional art history – one of the main themes is that of figure/ground
in relation to issues that fuel debate on the concept of “representation”. In De Prezzo’s work, figure
and ground switch places, the one going past the other: the image is supplanted and positions itself on
a different level. It is the same for his installations, where multiple subject/objects physically enter a
shadowy zone, modifying their utilitarian identity to become something else.

No figure, then, either; but a limit case of self-imbrication. The perceptual terms are rejected thus, and marked by this re–jection as not-figure and not-ground. But in being canceled they are also preserved. And the logic of that preservation is
made transparent by the graph. The graph’s circumference holds all its terms in mutual opposition: figure versus ground;
ground versus not-ground; not-ground versus not-figure; not-figure versus figure. Its diagonal axes yield, however, to mirror
relations, or rather to mirror restatements (the structuralists’ inverse-of-the-opposite, their double negatives), with figure
in this case being the “same” as not-ground.

Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 1993

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Liu Fujie/ Three Exit Strategies

May 8 – June 6, 2021

Sense Space

No. 309, Ceramics 1st Street, 798 Art District

Beijing, China

*photo credits:

Images courtesy of the artist and Sense Space

In the exhibition ” Three Exit Strategies “, artist Liu Fujie imagines the “expression” of the internal structure hidden in the construction according to the geographical environment and the specific context of the space where Sense Space is located. If one takes a structure out of construction, what kind of dialogue will it have with the whole space through three ways: 1. Vent/ 2. Objects, Plaza / 3: Between Imagination and The View.

1. Vent The function of the pipeline is conveying and connecting different locations including the interior and exterior spaces of the construction. It helps a modern building to better hide and deal with activity, fluidity, and substances that wear out the surface of the building.

2. Objects, Plaza Most of the artificial spatial relationships around us (including artifacts, architecture, urban planning, etc.) use our bodies as the primary reference. Leveraged handrails and fences, climbs and slides in amusement parks or squares, are the passageways between high and low points with the body as a reference. But when the body exits these devices, the functional passageway becomes still life for the building or the square. The spatial relationship derived from the body reference is similar to the distance between high and low in a group of still life.

3. Between Imagination and The View Maybe we don’t need changes in physical space to exit a place because we already have many pictures in mind both still and moving. The large window facing the entrance inside Sense Space proportionally creates an L-shaped passage between the space and the corridor. The window is both the exit and the picture at the endpoint. The borrowing scenery at the window allows people to move without physical changes. The recorded image of another time and space is juxtaposed with the image in each present moment on either side of Sense Space.

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