Love’s work. The phrase is potent and immediate. It’s persistent—let it get stuck in your head like a line from a pop song. Or follow the trails of its many permutations: what kind of labor belongs to love? Or stems from it? What does it mean to equate the two? Lifted from English philosopher Gillian Rose’s chronicle of her life, published shortly before she died of cancer in 1995, Love’s Work also nods to her reflection on the revelatory power of vulnerability. The book opens with an epigraph from Orthodox monk Staretz Silouan “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not” and concludes with Rose’s emphatic declaration, “I will stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk; learning, failing, wooing, grieving, trusting, working, reposing—in this sin of language and lips.”

This exhibition brings together the work of seven artists who, in wildly varied ways, broach art as a form of love’s work. These are practices that pay attention to desire and attempt to tap into meaning on a material level. Artmaking as love’s work is implicitly experimental—expounding no thesis, feeling for the margins, moving towards the unknown. Critique emerges as an imaginative mode. And often a way of mourning. Consciousness of the conditions—embodied, institutional, sociopolitical—that inform the production and circulation of the artwork is a throughline as these artists are considerate of the stakes of participating in that ecosystem. Making art like it’s love’s work means being aware of how one takes part: tending to the boundaries between self and artwork, whether that manifests as wholehearted investment or some kind of opting out. Either way it’s about care and complicity. And carving out a space for something like hope.

– Camila McHugh

Through site-specific installations and interventions, Dora Budor positions architecture and institutions as systems with complex inner workings. She approaches these physical and bureaucratic structures as bodies that metabolize their political, cultural, and historical contexts and as beings that can be pathologized. As such, her work is often concerned with homing in on the border between interiority and exteriority and choreographing slippages and reversals of this partition: internalizing exteriors and externalizing interiors. In Love Streams (2022) sandpaper acts as a recurring background for a series of automatic frottages, made by the after-hours rubbing of escitalopram onto the floor and walls of the artist’s studio. Prescribed to treat depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, the ingestible (and thus invisible) substance is repurposed as a raw material in apparitions that lay bare connections between body, psyche, and biopolitical structures. In Pucks (bagarreurs) (2021), the disciplinary tension associated with caffeine, a stimulant central to assimilating body rhythms into labor conditions, is released into the gallery. Leftover coffee grinds collected from the cafe at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in the months prior to Continent, Budor’s exhibition there earlier this year, were molded into solid disks replicating the dimensions of a standardized hockey puck. Pucks (bagarreurs) transforms what is usually a place for contemplation of art objects into the arena of an exceptionally physical and confrontational sport. These temporary anchor points also resemble a multitude of periods or ellipses that mark a linguistic instability or a disorienting negation of space.

In sculpture, installation, drawing and text, Jesse Darling destabilizes dominant narratives propped up by the likes of ideology, religion, mythology and politics, exposing a fundamental precarity in any claim to coherence. Recent works like Corpus (Half-Staff) (2022) and Inter Alia (2022) stand as the ruined relics of crumbling empires, picking up on how the (aesthetic and symbolic) pillars of (what understands itself as) western civilization converge around ideologies of the border. Darling reflects on a society surveyed, policed, and privatized, municipalities impoverished, and systems and people on the brink of exhaustion and collapse. AA half-mast flag of rusted steel fencing and lace and Venetian blind banners erected from concrete and polystyrene posts convey the flimsiness of these controlling infrastructures with both humor and grief. Darling takes the fiddly flourishes that dress up empire building to task in faulty parodies of its theatrical artifice. In Deeds II (2022), tools of violence are adorned like distracting toys, as ribboned hammers that resemble babies’ rattles, jesters’ batons or morris dancers’ sticks speak to scripts of labor, gender, and identity. Hands are a recurrent motif in Darling’s oeuvre and here a roughly constructed arm with an open palm extends from the wall as if to alludeto the messy and unfinished labor of coalition-building and collectivity.

Ghislaine Leung’s work revolves around the contingencies of art’s context. She works with scores in a mode of production she terms “constitutional critique”—or an inquiry into “how we internalize institutions and constitute, in bodily terms, their written and legal industrial design [and] the negotiation of rights.” Bosses II (2019), a pair of readymade mugs extravagantly wrapped in heart-dotted plastic and a big red bow, is a compelling example of her expansion of the terms of critique from specificity towards contingency. First presented as an edition of twenty in Leung’s exhibition at London’s Chisenhale Gallery, the three sets of mugs exhibited here map the registers of romance and the workplace onto another, while also invoking power dynamics within relationships. Hours(2022) offers another take on tensions between life, love, and work, and marks a shift in Leung’s practice, as she turns her astute attention previously directed at institutional structures to the conditions of her own life and artistic production. An incarnation of the score, “A wall painting the size of the artist’s home studio wall divided into all the hours of the week with the portion of studio hours available to the artist marked in black,” the work imbues the Modernist grids of Blinky Palermo or Agnes Martin with the lived limitations of being an artist with a child and multiple jobs. As Leung articulates, this work manifests, “a negotiation of what it means to have dependencies and be dependent. It is a negotiation of what it means to value the labor of maintenance. It is a negotiation of what it means to hold out and resist binarized identities.”

Lydia Ourahmane interweaves personal and political histories into minimalist installations that often deploy light, sound, and talismanic objects. Her elliptical narratives consider the visceral experience of colonialism’s mechanisms of control, drawing in particular on the colonial past and illiberal present of her native Algeria. Her work gravitates towards the unassimilable, as manifested in transcendent energy or experiences of wonder. Ourahmane’s attention to the opacities and stipulations of bureaucracy often functions as the underbelly of her psychic ecosystems. The blown glass Tear Catcher, an antique artifact from ca. 400 B.C. that Ourahmane purchased on eBay, stands as a formal incarnation of the reflection on questions of loss and empathy that motivate Ourahmane’s practice. Historically used to measure the duration of grief, the implement caught tears to be buried with the body of a beloved. The object also evokes the sound of crying, nodding to Ourahmane’s broader concern with the guttural and equalizing qualities of the sonic medium.

Ima-Abasi Okon works with sculpture, sound, and video to create installations that function like linguistic and grammatical structures. Reworking and swapping arrangements of varietal objects in a sentence-like syntax, Okon attempts to imbue hand-made and mass-produced items with a spiritual charge by way of a material rearticulation. This process draws attention to how materials are embedded in and exhausted by capitalist systems, exploring how systems of taste, value, and excess are formed—and how they might be reimagined. For Aspirational-LY appraised targeted HIGHLIGHTS —The Entanglement is Quantum; Resonating Frequencies as Mahalia GETS OVER over-over! Positioning [Non-residential entry] devices – s4 epEIGHT luscious!!RECAP!!, 2016-2017/ 2019 & 2022, part of the “Mahalia Jackson” series, Okon worked over a panel of Oriented Strand Board (OSB), a cheap engineered sheet wood, in thick layers of classic oak polyurethane wood varnish, and placed it in an unconventional and decorative wooden (zebrano and purple heart) frame. Enclosed is a double passe-partout, leaving only a small area of the painted surface visible. A printed email, an invitation to enter a lottery draw for a limited edition pair of sneakers, juts out from the bottom of the frame. Just as her objects constitute only one aspect of a wider pedagogy, so too do they direct towards invisible or extra-dimensional qualities beyond their physicality. Regarding the series, Okon suggested, “Whenever Mahalia is referenced in the title, know that there’s a conjuring of hope. Go and sit with Mahalia, everything you need to know about how these works operate or attempt to [operate], is with her.”

Diane Severin Nguyen’s photographs and videosfocus on subject matter in states of transformation, probing the division between the intimate and alienating. As she experiments with improvised assemblages of light and material in the studio, Nguyen pressures the camera to work against the impulse to identify and more towards a place of feeling. Promise to Witness (2019) and Story Control (2019) are notable works due to their site specificity, as they were made during a residency in Hong Kong amidst the 2019 protests. Conjuring the particular intensity of the light there, and employing found objects from public spaces, these images refract moments that were witnessed during a period of significant political upheaval and formation. The works embody the artist’s broader interest in how the camera facilitates our desires for individuation and identification, especially within a revolutionary context. Raindrop Bodywork (2019) is more abstract, as a dewy, green orifice crystallizes in and out of focus. Her play with contrast and contradiction extends to the works’ frames, which she burns to create an iridescent patina that looks almost wet.

I.N. Cape is an artist who paints under a pseudonym. They work serially in near-identical compositions, recently of stars, clocks and tally sticks—ancient memory aid devices used to record and document debts and other transactions. Two works from the latter two series, both Untitled (2019), are exhibited here. In obscuring their identity, I.N. Cape removes questions of authorship from painting to emphasize instead an exercise in the mediation of images. Working from screenshots and photographs of reproductions, their repeated images intervene like a stuttering pause in the act of endless scrolling.

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 Photographer : Stefania Carlotti

 

 

INVENTORY

Hanna draws up an
inventory of various exhibition devices.

 

DESIRE

She conscientiously
picked and selected the items she desires. Sometimes it is fashion, sometimes its displays.

 

NAIVITY

In
a naive and juvenile attitude she acts as if, through the act of representation,
she could possess the items she paints.

 

HANNA’S BACKGROUND

Hanna
has a background in visual merchandising, which is an activity that deals with
the visual organization of sales areas or/and cultural areas in order to
optimize the presentation of products, the well-being and satisfaction of
customers, visitors
and staff. An activity that aims at promoting
dirty so-to-say. What you see is what you get, they used
to say.

 

SHOWCASES

They are
containers in which our desires and wishes are stored. In one of the painting, the showcase has been emptied. A shift that allows the object to be freed from its usual function,
eventually gaining the prestigious status of the one of the object of desire, fetishized.

 

EMPTINESS OR BLACK FRIDAY

Empty displays, as
if they had been robbed during the last black Friday, as
if there was nothing left to sell, nothing left to exhibit; we can eventually focus
one’s attention on the exhibition’s device
itself.

 

PINK RIBBON

A kinky pink
ribbon branded by the letter H wraps the shiny/glazed cube.

 

WRAPPED PACKAGGING

The wrapped
packaging.

 

FASHION RULES

As we all know really well,
fashion is ruled by a cyclic move, a seasonal renewal. Fashion is in perpetual
motion, having to constantly reinvent and renew itself, by constantly finding
new ways of arranging shapes, colors and materials, by drawing on past fashions
to bring them up to date.

 

STARS

The famous Adidas’ jacket, international and intergenerational (let’s say:
universal) star of the streetwear is here highly displayed on a white moulding
and carefully covered by a transparent plastic sheet. A displacement that
reminds us how fashion is the best example of cultural recycling, how class
belonging is masked behind a mix and match of clothing, how the big companies
might be happy about it. How funny, the painting is title Cover
the star ?

 

 

GOOD DEAL

The good deal. It’s a good deal. A recognizable sign, as seen
as the Mickey mouse white gloved hand is articulating a thumb-up gesture as to
say « It’s a good deal », a
sign of appreciation reminding how validation or dislike are omnipresent in
everyday life.

 

THE GLOVES ARE OFF

A unique transparent hand levitating on in a 90’s grey background. The
style of an advertising for a glove-holder in plexiglass that ironically thwart
the expression « the gloves are off », meaning when people compete or
argue unscrupulously.

 

 

KEEP UP APPEARANCES

In an overall, times seem to collapse. While the injunction « keep
up appearances » evokes the merciless rhythm of consumption and its social pressure, the
patching of various eras of interiors, styles and references layered by the
very personal spectrum of the artist’s envies and desires give the feeling of
an anachronistic compilation. The feeling of time are shuffled once again by
the slow-process of painting that certainly operate as a catharsis. The artistic process being way longer than the one of the  commercial purchase provide a
kind of reverse chronology. Hanna reinvent the
idea of possession that can no longer be dealt with impersonal currencies but
need to be owned first: desiring the desire. Keep up with appearances is no
longer a threat, and the rules of the visual merchandising are no longer « what you see is what
you get ». It tells us instead that we do desire, we can then
see. 

 

                                                                                    Margaux
Dewarrat & Héloïse Chassepot

 

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 To encounter the works of Leunora Salihu
is to encounter a noticeable presence. They make themselves felt with their
human dimensions, the power of their form and materials, their balanced and
conversational relationships with and to each other in space, and the amazing
crafting techniques used to make them. These sculptural-architectural chimeras
are characterised by their “being-there and being-so”.^[1]
All these qualities are ones the artist has been working at consistently and
tenaciously for the last two decades.

        In
2021, using the title Pieces, Salihu curated a selection of her recent
sculptural works for exhibition in the well-lit pavilion of the Waldfrieden
Sculpture Park. Enigmatic arrangements, displaying the rapprochement of nature
and technology through the cooperation of their organic and putatively
functional elements. Wood and clay—which bring together the nature-technology
pairing that is so central to her art—are unsurprisingly her two most-used
working materials. Wood as an industrially processed product and clay as one of
the oldest natural working materials in the world. If one takes the titles
literally, then it would seem that these most recent works deal with energetic
phenomena such as light, sound, heat and water, which transmit themselves in
wave form and materialise in open-ended systems and sequences. In Resonanz
(2020), the sculpture stretches out horizontally in a row of ceramic shapes
resembling sideways vases, which seem to oscillate in their expansions and
contractions in between the technoid fibreboards that hold them aloft and
connect them. Elsewhere (Welle, 2020), clay forms glazed on one side in
a matte black attempt to insinuate themselves into a pre-existing rational
system. The qualities at work here can be seen in the processing and handling
of the clay. The self-confident perfection of the piece is both enlivened by
and latently suffused with the obdurate nature of clay once it has been dried
and fired, as well as by its ability to remember and reproduce “every touch”.^[2]
In Turm (2020), which from a distance resembles a powerful sound system,
the role of communicating perfection is performed by sophisticated glazing. The
rectangular tower rises up in blocky modules

and appears, at least from the sides
made from fibreboard panels, to be straightforward and functional. The two
other sides, however, are covered with rows and columns of black-green glazed
ceramic objects resembling convex suction cups, which reflect the light that
falls on them.

        These
kinds of natural phenomena inspire Leunora Salihu’s drawings as well. A medium
that, in the course of her development as an artist, first came into play for
Salihu during her studies in graphical arts at the academy in Pristina. The
academic approach was strict, and instructors were unforgiving in their
revisions, because,  after all, linework
must be exact. “It was tiring […] but it was always a wonderful feeling to have
made it through this process.”^[3]
The high degree of sensitivity and precision gained from her studies is still
very much present in her current working method, which is intensive and
characterised by its diversity of production processes. It can also be seen in
her highly personal connection to the materials she works with.

        The
artistic language of Leunora Salihu is defined by a passionate grappling with
materials, which find their way peerlessly into comprehensive new objects. The
themes that are most dear to her are bravely and self-confidently brought out
in her sculptures, even in these times of digitalisation, virtual reality and
NFTs. They illustrate burdens and burden bearing, touch on gravity and
lightness, acknowledge space and the space around space, and insist upon the
tactile and sensory qualities of material. In their suggestive visual power,
these works show themselves to be “carefully calculated flashpoints”,
unforgettable situations—experienced, observed and developed out of the
contrasts, contradictions and hazards of our modern world.^[4]
These entities by no means expunge what is known and familiar to us through the
voiced silence of their obvious abstraction. Rich in ideas, evocative, powerful
and radical, they much rather help keep the known and familiar all the more
alive.

 

Text by Rita
E. Täuber

 

Cat.
Kunstpreis Böttcherstraße 2022, pp. 85-87

 

 

Leunora Salihu, born 1977 in Prishtina, Kosovo, from
very early on, took up a very individual track which she continues to pursue,
often combining in her sculptures different materials including ceramic, wood,
and metal. Her sculptures, along with the spatial bodies and installations,
explore the possibilities and limits of movements by using the repetition of
organic and constructive form-elements. She has established a considerable and
multi-layered vocabulary of industrial, architectural, and organic forms, which
grant her works a sense of functionality, blurring the lines between where the
sculpture ends and where the pedestal begins; between interior and exterior.

 

In 1999, she fled to Germany, moving her studies to
the Muthesius Kunsthochschule in Kiel and then further to the Art Academy in
Düsseldorf. Since then, she has received several awards and has been included
in a number of group exhibitions at institutions including The National Gallery
of Kosovo (2017), Philara Stiftung (2015), Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art
(2015), Temporary Art Centre, Eindhoven (2015), Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf
(2014/15), and Kunstraum Düsseldorf (2012). Salihu’s first noteworthy solo
exhibitions were in 2011/12 at the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg and recently at
Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden in Wuppertal (2021), Philara Stiftung (2020), and at
the K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (2017). She was also nominated for
the Prize of the Böttcherstraße in Bremen (2022). Leunora Salihu lives and works in
Düsseldorf.

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Marco Strappato – Etica, Tecnica e Pathos

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Photo courtesy Danilo Donzelli Photography. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Umberto Di Marino.

In continuing the gallery’s current research around humanity, in its ephemeral, virtual, spiritual and self- representational representations, the exhibition unfolds through a series of works, most of them unpublished and created especially for the occasion, that explore the possibilities of painting beyond conventional techniques.
Painting seen as the main form of human representation and self-representation, deconstructed in its universal self-verifying claims, personalized, subjectivized through a playful process of learning and re-learning times, emotions and techniques, becomes an intimate expression of own life.
Following the main thread of his own research, the German artist presents a cycle of works with which he explores the possibilities, rigidities and elasticities of pictorial imagery, playing with materials, beliefs and presumed universal essence.
The creative process preserves the origin of the pictorial gesture in its simplicity by assimilating it to the search for the very essence of humanity through the representation of faces and mystical-spiritual realities, carved in the sand – between reliefs and sinkings – that become counterparts of relationship.

<< In my artistic work, I focus on the essence of the human being. In 2013, I spent a few months in Giverny as part of a studio scholarship awarded by the Claude Monet Foundation. In the wonderful surroundings of Monet’s garden, I had the chance to develop my artistic work further. I was very interested in finding new ways in my painting that would allow me to work in an even more playful way. The process of learning is an essential part of my work, as learning, in a certain understanding, is for me a direct expression of life, and art in turn is nothing other than life. During my time in Giverny I worked on wooden collages. At the same time, I discovered sand as a painting medium for the first time. I had already been experimenting with painting using only pigments in the years before, but the sand now brought me an incredible number of new possibilities. Since then I have developed my own techniques, which have allowed me to explore new avenues in painting and relief art.
Relief is a immensely exciting form of artistic representation for me. It makes it possible to depict the tense relationship between different realities in which human beings experience themselves in a special way. Depending on the type of relief, it is sometimes anchored more in one world and sometimes more in another. Through the development of new techniques, it is possible for me to work with the sand in a very fluid way, unlike conventional techniques. The way I approach my work often reminds me of an archaeological process, where I try to uncover something hidden in the depths. Time plays a role in my work in various ways. Especially through my experiences in accompanying people who are close to the point of passing away and the associated experience of the transience of the body, I am confronted with the question of a perhaps supra- temporal reality within us. Working with sand, the flowing transitions between painting and relief, open up special possibilities for me to contemplate time and timelessness. One detail is the rifts that appear when I draw through the sand with my finger. The rift, or trench, on closer inspection, is an exciting detail for exploring and interpreting relationships. It is like diving into the Mariana Trench to find that it is full of life. For the first few years, I was mainly concerned with the human face. In it, I can encounter the mystery of humanity in a great condensation. For me, there is great beauty in this. The sand, with its rough texture, its cracks and trenches, contrasts with a world that with its smooth surfaces often tries to suppress the fact of transience.
A new discovery for me is abstract painting, in which I devote myself entirely to colour, sand and my relationship to it. In the end, however, the intention is to bring something alive into the world, something that uplifts the human being and possibly also has a healing effect.>>

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 ON HEARING OF AN ABSENCE 

Participating artists: Kirstine Aarkrog, Andreas Albrectsen, Anna Gonzalez Noguchi, Francesco Pacelli, Deniz Saridas, Jura Shust, Sasha Streshna, Markus von Platen

Curated by: Dinos Chatzirafailidis

November 25, 2022–January 13, 2023

Haus N Athen 

6, Kairi Street, 

Athens, Greece

                                     

The exhibition On Hearing of an Absence acts as a hinterland that proposes a distorted journey to the unknown. It aims to radiate a quality of mood within an evocative setting. This mood exceeds clear and distinct figuration and is characterised by a set of ambiguities. In this process, the emphasis falls on what the works of art irradiate, making the presence of something inexpressible that operates within the realm of the affect, and encouraging encounters that are powerful through their emotivity. 

The selected artworks do not represent a static spectacle, but one which is inscribed by some kind of affective intensity. Oscillating between real and imaginary space, some of them embrace things that no longer exist and events that leave ineffable mysteries behind. They turn the gaze of the spectator to what has hitherto been a void or an absence of some tangible reference. This type of imagery is predicated on the uncanny specter that underlies a sense of otherworldliness and calls for a de-familiarization with everyday spaces. Infused with emotion and developed beyond ordinary experience, these works represent what Gordon Burn calls the “anti-sublime”, as they can be found far away from the pleasure principle.

In this otherworldly terrain strewn with symbols and enigmatic entities, everything is concealed under a veneer of familiarity. Imbued with a sense of austerity, dereliction and bareness, the exhibited works are characterised by a dual, paradoxical aspect in that they appear to be familiar, while, at the same time, they possess an unsettling quality and so they have the power to disturb the mind of the viewer by being stretched far beyond the normal. They deny clear identification or orientation and operate as cryptic establishments, appearing to be inviting yet daunting at the same time.

Being immersed in and intermingled with such an environment, one is confronted with a sense of palpable hidden presence, an unfathomable world that is not able to be verified but can only be felt ‘in the air’. To this extent, the lines between what is present/ real and what is not become blurred. In this state of ontological inconsistency that operates beyond perceptibility, presence is being introduced in terms of absence, absence takes the form of presence and opposites are indistinct. 

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Photographer: Mareike Tocha

An astute description of reality is an important language of realism. Spending time with things serves as entry point into their thingness, as well as the whirlpool of social situations they’re drenched in. Carefully observing, pacing your gaze becomes an inevitable privilege.

René Kemp worked on a new body of works titled “Wall Pieces”, which are presented within the framework of this exhibition. The works depict fragmented elements of several wall structures. Their size is a middle format, no bigger than 80 to 60 cm and they are all painted with oil on stretched canvas. The forms appearing atop of these canvases occupy their entirety, giving the image of a cropped detail and thus alluding to missing pieces of the wall that didn’t make it to the surface. They are based on impressions of walls around the city the artist came across in his daily commute through Cologne, sometimes elsewhere, operating in a rather diaristic manner. Some are based on photographs send by friends and colleagues. In their case a deliberately trivial modus operandi comes at play, to uncover something about the not-so-trivial quality of attention, which one could argue all forms of realism are ultimately based on. The artist works through the materials and visual traditions that come with the medium of painting, and yet he is perfectly aligned with the histories of conceptualism. Building on top of a productive system of images he ventures into a careful historical reflection.

Foucault wrote in „Manet and the Object of Painting“ (1971) that a wall operates like a canvas. It continues past the framed worldbuilding properties of the surface and bleeds through everything. But when walls entered paintings, they became, in Foucault’s eyes always, mere excuses for the medium to evolve and breath out. This fragmentary approach is perhaps more visible if one takes a closer look at the people in a lot of Manet’s works; in a standstill, running around, starring back at their viewers, being looked at, retreating. The Execution of Emperor Maximilian is a series of paintings by Manet, dating from 1867 to 1869 depicting a historical incident, which took place a year before in 1866: the execution by firing squad of Emperor Maximilian I of the short-lived Second Mexican Empire. Reacting to the incident Manet, who was an active supporter of the republican cause, produced three large oil paintings, a smaller oil sketch and a lithograph of the same subject. The final version was finished in 1869 but bares the date of Maximilian’s execution in 1866 alongside the artist’s signature. It is the only version of the work in this series depicting the execution scene in front of a large high wall. The wall structure stretches from one side of the canvas, all the way to the other, creating a clean horizon line and standing as a backdrop to the action.

Pacing artworks, allowing them the time to live their lives in full is the moral thing to do. If painting was able to voice opposition in a time of urgency, if is through reconditioning that she manages to escape contemporary obscurity. One of the walls of these “Wall Pieces” carries the inscription “love is colder than death”, which recalls the 1969 film with the same name, a crime love-trio drama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder about a pimp, a gangster, and a prostitute. There is an inherent irony in purposefully titling these works “Wall Pieces”, as if to render visible their status as failed communication devices or commodities, and emphasizing the alleged ultrabanality of a wall, its “worthiness” of depiction. As if they are, in the most literal sense of the word, pieces of a broken wall hanging from an unbroken one.

Text: Haris Giannouras

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Words happen like clouds

Jiajia Zhang, Marco Rigoni, and a text by Janice Lee 

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CHAMBERS

Jessica Gispert, Selma Gültoprak, Sami Schlichting, Maarten Van Roy

Curated by Alfons Knogl & Lukas Schmenger

October 21 — December 10, 2022

FLⒶT$, Brussels

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Anne-Mette Schultz / Feria

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Broken Heart Syndrome / curated by Faidra Vasileiadou

Ileana Arnaoutou, Sevastiana Konstaki,
Mariandrie, Natalia Papadopoulou, Eleanna Balesi, Elektra Stampoulou, Evi
Zampeli

26/11 – 10/12

Two Thirds Project Space, Themistokleous 42, Athens, Greece

photography by Nikos Katsaros

Broken heart syndrome is a
now-recognized cardiomyopathy that mimics a heart attack: it manifests itself
with intense chest pressure, shortness of breath and sudden weakness, symptoms
that match a heart attack. The syndrome was discovered as a separate
pathological entity in the early 1990s by Japanese doctors and became known as
“takotsubo cardiomyopathy” due to the similarity of the shape of the
affected heart to the Japanese octopus fishing tool. Usually, this condition is
triggered by intense mental stress, such as the death of a loved one, a
breakup, anger, or the feeling of betrayal.

Can our heart literally break?
Disassemble into its component parts or even more? If it falls from our hands,
will it break into thousands of pieces?

After hearing the crack, we need
to face the hovering in the void left behind by abandonment, absence and loss –
a waiting room. We can imagine this suspension as mourning itself: a half-dead
condition of being in a state of numbing and disassembly. However, mourning is
not only a wound of the soul, but also a process of healing pain that allows us
to search for the fragments of our broken heart. In that case, its cracks don’t
make us imperfect, but whole once again. After all, a broken heart proves its
existence in the first place.

The exhibition Broken Heart
Syndrome recounts the ways that a heart can shatter and fall apart, while at
the same time elucidates the processes that occur after a major crack; an
attempt to find the missing pieces. The participating artists present works
that communicate with loss, emptiness and the levitation of absence, driven by
the desire for rebirth and re-composition.

Faidra Vasileiadou

museologist / art curator

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Alexandros Laios / Flipping Coin

Curated by Christoforos  Marinos

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 “Eros the once again limb-looser whirls me sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up” 

Sappho 

FRAGILE is pleased to announce the exhibition Tyranny of Tenderness by Leda Bourgogne. For the exhibition the artist conceived an installation of site-specific, newly produced, and pre-existing works composed of objects, fabric works, and an audio piece. Although the different groups of works function independently within the presentation, the exhibition is revealed through the interconnection of each element.

The artist took inspiration for the exhibition from Eros the Bittersweet, a 1986 publication by classical philologist and poet Anne Carson. Through various “close readings” of poems by ancient Greek lyric poets, such as the works of Sappho, Carson analyzes the structure of sensual desire and longing. According to Carson, that structure is divided by a triangle consisting of the lover, the beloved, and that element that stands between the two, which can trigger the connection or disconnection of the two such as an obstacle, time, or the differences of the couple.

The number three, as a structuring component and symbol for the triangulation mentioned above, influenced some of the works in the exhibition, such as the three book columns titled Alphabetic Edge, the three large fabric works titled Butterfly Effect (2022), Cataclysm (2021), and Clavicle (2022) as well as the audio piece Edge of Desire (2022), which consists, among other things, of three poems written by the artist.

In Tyranny of Tenderness, however, eros is not only negotiated as the libidinous desire for another person; for Bourgogne, reading, writing, and engaging in artistic practice are also linked to erotic desire, as all of these activities can only be performed through the power of the imagination. Desire, as an energy that is at once beautiful and yet also causes suffering, manifests itself in various ways within the exhibition. 

The large translucent fabric wall titled Interstice (2022) stretched in the main room can be read as a symbol of an obstacle or barrier: it allows a view of the works that are behind it, but at the same time prevents one from approaching them. Code of Conduct (2022) and Triangulation (2022) each attached to one side of the fabric wall, are composed of irregularly shaped wooden panels covered with velvet, on the surfaces of which a key box, as well as three metal handles, are attached. The use of the key box is, for example, directly related to the idea of encrypted access to a person or to the creative process. However, the key box is also relevant in relation to the letterbox mounted in the entrance area, which contains the loudspeaker from which the audio piece Edge of Desire is heard. The ideas of coded messages and (love) letters are symbolized by these objects and refer to the connection Anne Carson draws between desire and language: only through the invention of writing and the possibility of sending letters could private love messages, read only by the respective receivers, be sent. The artist contrasts this originally intimate notion of language with the contemporary notion of communication, which for the most part comes to us in an anonymous and bureaucratic form. Thus, love letters are no longer found in our mailboxes, but mostly official letters from institutions, businesses and authorities, as extended communication channels of a technocratic society. Bourgogne counters this cool almost clinical appearance of language with the work Alphabetic Edge: On three aluminum bars placed between the ceiling and floor of the main room, the artist threaded various books she had recently read, which circle around the different perspectives of desire. The piercing and threading do not represent a brutal act for the artist but symbolize the process of acquiring and incorporating knowledge while reading. After the books have been read, they not only become part of the work in a metaphysical sense but are material, ready for further processing. The artist describes this cycle as a metabolism, that is, the process necessary to transform substances in the body. Even if the body appears in Alphabetic Edge in more of a metaphorical context, it appears less abstract elsewhere: Butterfly Effect (2022), Cataclysm (2021), and Clavicle (2022) are working in which Bourgogne, inspired by the human skeleton, nerves and veins, finds a formal language that appears at once anthropomorphic and emblematic. 

 

Tyranny of Tenderness can thus be understood as a kind of echo chamber for the different reflections and ideas on desire, language, and art production, within which the artist uses different dramaturgical means, similar to a play on stage, to negotiate her personal interpretations of the present themes. As is so often the case, she succeeds in dissolving the boundaries between intimate and public spaces, placing female sexuality at the center and making the political dimensions visible within the sphere of the personal. 

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Oedipus In Search Of Colonus

Loukia Alavanou presents a VR360 film at the Greek Pavilion

(more…)

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Soil Thornton / Decomposition Evaluation

Curated by Nadine Droste

August 20 – October 30, 2022

Kunstverein Bielefeld

Welle 61

33602 Bielefeld, Germany

(more…)

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Nanna Abell / Psychodile

Curators:
Paola Paleari and Anne Zychalak Stolten

August 27th – September 25th, 2022

Vestjyllands Kunstpavillon, Videbæk (Denmark)

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Courtesy the artist & Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin

Foto/Photo: Roman März

Galerie Guido W. Baudach is delighted to present its fourth solo exhibition of works by Tamina Amadyar. Under the title setting the table, the Berlin-based artist is showing new paintings as well as a new sculpture.

In recent years, Tamina Amadyar has become known for her equally expressive and reduced color field paintings, which emerge from the transformation of personal experiences into abstract painting. The starting point has always been representational works on paper, in which the artist primarily processes her reality. In addition to spatial motifs, objects and people from Amadyar‘s immediate environment often appear.

The latter are now also the focus of her new paintings. Thus, in the exhibition one encounters mainly portraits, or more precisely, shoulder pieces in frontal view. The consistently large format paintings show faces belonging to members of the artist‘s family. They convey a sense of intimacy, an impression that is reinforced by the largerthan-life depiction. At the same time, these portraits are anything but naturalistic reproductions of the likenesses of her protagonists. For, analogous to her other painterly practice, Amadyar does not attempt to reproduce her motifs faithfully here either, but on the contrary endeavors to dissolve them and to work out what seems substantial to her.

Various ink and watercolors form the painting material specially selected for this series of works. They have similar properties to the glue paints of the abstract color field paintings, they are transparent and dry quickly, but they also lead a life of their own that is difficult to control, for example by involuntarily melting or flowing into each other. Subsequent corrections to the picture are more or less impossible. Amadyar therefore approaches the canvas lying on the floor with due calm. A few, quickly executed brushstrokes must suffice to create the desired image of the person portrayed. Details, such as clothing, are only hinted at. The background is always the white of the untreated cotton canvas.

Amadyar‘s painterly economy goes almost further in two canvas portraits also on display, executed in white chalk on a dark panel background. Figures and faces appear here as pure silhouettes, sometimes drawn through as if with a single stroke, sometimes blurred, repositioned and modelled into the blurred. The works appear as delicate as they are intense. The contrast with the light backgrounds of the ink and watercolor paintings creates an additional tension.

In the midst of this situation, Amadyar places a work that may surprise some in terms of its medium and at the same time builds a bridge to her hitherto predominant practice: a floor sculpture made of pieces of pigmented canvas of different sizes that are sewn together to form a kind of cover that lies on a substructure hidden underneath. The colored fabrics in different shades of red come from various color field paintings that Amadyar found unsuccessful, assorted and cut up. Circumferential seat cushions of the same material round off the peculiar-looking arrangement.

sandali, as the work is titled, is inspired by a traditional warmer of the same name from Amadyar‘s country of origin, Afghanistan, where glowing coals are piled up under a flat table covered with blankets so that the whole family during the cold season can make themselves comfortable, eat, drink and chat together.

With setting the table, Tamina Amadyar expands her previous practice. New working methods and pictorial languages are finding their way into her work, appearing alongside the familiar painterly abstractions and the figurative works on paper. At the same time, with the exhibition she creates a place where all parts of the whole, like the members of a family at a table, come together.

Tamina Amadyar (*1989 in Kabul), lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Dusseldorf Art Academy from 2008 to 2014. Since then, her work has been shown in various exhibitions at home and abroad. She is represented in numerous collections internationally. From 2018 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe. In 2021, Tamina Amadyar was awarded the ars viva prize for fine arts by the Kulturkreis der Deutschen Wirtschaft.

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Stephanie Stein | Oase

28.10. – 26.11.2022

SETAREH, Schöneberger Ufer 71, 10785 Berlin

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Matthew
Cangiano / The Problem of Inner and Outer

24
September – 6 November

Afternoon
Projects | 603 Powell St, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6B 0B9

The Problem of Inner and Outer

The problem of inner and outer is one that can be taken in many ways, yet however one takes this problem it seems to be one that is necessarily posed by life. No matter our preoccupation, spiritual or philosophical commitments, life presents itself in two apparent orders; one that varies with the individual and their action, and one that appears to go on independently of this. This double articulation of reality permeates life and all its various aspects, be it personal, social, political, philosophical or spiritual. This is true in my own life; it is a problem that stays with me, accompanying my thought and experience. I call it a problem, but not in the normal sense of the word. It is not a puzzle that contains a prefigured solution to be uncovered, but rather it can be seen as a field of potential, a question that does not contain its answer, a space in which new possibilities can emerge. In this sense,  it has been there like a friend rather than an issue; a friend that challenges me to engage with life and to partake in its creativity.

 

Art, in the broadest sense of the term, occupies a particularly interesting and privileged position in relation to this problem, for it can be seen as an attempt to open one to other worlds, to breach one’s own world, and to make true contact with an other. It has become apparent that this is what it means for me to make images. In a moment of clarity, I put it like this:

 

 

“As I continue to pursue this strange path it becomes clear that there is, for me, but one pressing question; what, if at all, of the artist’s internal state makes its way into their work? This is a question which is doomed to never find an answer, for the singularity of any affective state does not only go beyond language but is even obfuscated to the being who turns around to try and catch a glimpse of what it is they feel. It’s as if the vibrancy of these living states dissolve the second they are exposed to meta-consciousness like a roll of film in the sun. Thus it is not a question I ask to find an answer, rather it is one I ask by doing and by experiencing. I have faith that our individual boundaries are porous enough that we can reach outside of ourselves and make, even if only the slightest amount, real contact.”    

 

 

 

‘The Problem of Inner and Outer’ is a dual aspect series of 5 drawings and 5 paintings that coordinate with two distinct directions of experience; one towards the sense-perceptible and the other towards thought. Put in spatial terms; one aspect pointed outward and the other inward. What was discovered is that these directions are not so distinct and that what we expect to find in one, we find in the other.

 

The zones that emerge as a by-product of determined structures, whether they be a threshold of plants to the side of a road, the space along a water runoff that cuts through a city, or a ravine that lays in the shadows of a high-rise apartment building, have had a peculiar effect on me since I was a child. They have the capacity to grasp my immediate attention, to pervade me with their feeling, to make me unaware of anything outside of that milieu, or the distinctions within it, in short, to make me porous to an outside. This is an outside that feels truly other, something that doesn’t conform to my world, but rather dissolves it and subsumes me into it. What is found here, is what we are conditioned to attribute to subjective interiors, that is; feeling, quality and meaning. Suddenly the world is turned inside out. It is through my paintings of these zones, the plants and objects that occupy them, that I further absorb these alterities, and question if they can make themselves felt in the image.

 

The drawings in ‘The Problem of Inner and Outer’ tend toward those worlds we do not experience with our senses. Each drawing starts with a simple scaffolding of ruled lines or shapes on which the drawings begin to develop their own desire and logic. My role is like that of a gardener; tending to the conditions of the drawing and allowing it to grow. In this process ideas spontaneously emerge that exceed my own understanding, revealing later their foreign logic of symbols, ratio and space. By going ‘inwards’ toward thought, I am confronted with a world beyond myself. Again we arrive at an inversion of our associated expectations.

 

In the case of the sense-oriented paintings it is as if an inside was reached by going out, and in the thought-oriented drawings an outside by going in. This inversion has given a new sense to the problem of inner and outer. A sense that sees one in the other. A glimpse of light seeping through the cavernous walls of individual experience. An invitation to the possibility of unmoderated contact with an other, with the world in itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Matthew Cangiano is a Toronto-based artist whose interest lies in the idea of images. He sees art as a way to experience, explore, and discover their unique capacities. ‘The Problem of Inner and Outer’ is his first solo exhibition in Vancouver.  

 

 

  

 

 

 

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Seeds, Voids, and Tailored Cloth

Daniel Graham Loxton, Jens Fröberg and Matthew Peers 

27 Oct to 10 Dec 2022 

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Michaela
Zimmer – ON GOING

In the UK
and the US, full-body suits are back in fashion: cosy and colourful as pyjamas
or house suit. Featuring rounded ears or a stubby tail, the onesie then looks
like a domesticated form of Heracles’ coat of the Nemean lion, which made its
wearer almost invulnerable. Slipping into someone else’s skin has always proved
advantageous to humans, be it from cows or crocodiles. Conversely, few
Christian depictions of saints are as gruesome as that of Bartholomew, whose
martyrdom consisted of being flayed. In murals and sculptures, he wears his
skin over his arm like a limp, empty onesie.

Empty overalls
also lie on the floor in Michaela Zimmer’s exhibition ON GOING, some hanging on
welding rods as if waiting for their next assignment. How that might look like
is shown in a sequence of images that runs in a loop on a screen: three figures
dressed in Zimmer’s full-body suits roam the eerily beautiful industrial
dystopia of Middlesbrough and its surroundings. Their faces averted or obscured
by hair, they appear isolated and stern. Their suits become an incorporate
uniform.

These
onesies are not made of colourful plush: assembled pieces of shiny black cloth,
as if covered with oil, grey painted canvas and white disposable protective
suits made of polypropylene seem to shield their wearers from an inhospitable
outside world in which the human body needs more than the strength of a lion—rather the constitution of soldiers: Each of her suits is still based on
the cutting pattern of a British Army boilersuit, that Michaela Zimmer took
apart some twenty years ago.

From the
beginning up until now, the overalls are closely connected to the movement of
the human body — a theme that has long pervaded Michaela Zimmer’s art. The
works 220605 and 220604 shown in the exhibition seek to make
something as ubiquitous as the movements of our bodies perceptible. Michaela
Zimmer approaches this phenomenon with the help of an annotation system inspired
by choreographic notations recording the reverberation following movement
repetition during her daily run. From the resulting archive of a movement vocabulary,
she has transferred the memorised curves, lines, and dots larger than life onto
Lacktex Oil Cloth using acrylic spray. Michaela Zimmer abstracts the physical
intuition of movement into a filigree visual immediacy that connects with the beholders’
through their mirrored black image.

With these
works, Michaela Zimmer’s own powerful jogging movements become a stimulus for
the boilersuit-wearing performers. If you look closely, her movements are to be
found everywhere in the exhibition: they are present in the material of the
disposable coveralls worn and spray-painted in previous performances, as much
as in the grey or gesturally blue painted canvases, now enclosing other people’s
arms and necks as parts of the coveralls. Zimmer’s own energy finds a transfer
in this: the impasto layers of paint and the synthetic textiles promise
protection and strength, but they also trail behind the wearers in a train of
stretcher bars partly covered with canvas. To set this material from her past
in motion too Michaela Zimmer equips it with heavy duty caster wheels. But
movement proves difficult for the canvas frame: the asphalt of the industrial landscape
is not its natural habitat.

Stretcher
frames and wheels, movement and liminality, dance, and boilersuits: in ON
GOING, materials and techniques from Michaela Zimmer’s long artistic career in
Great Britain and Berlin come together. Like a remix, the works inscribe
themselves into each other, develop each other further and open up trains of
thought: how does movement coming from within us influence the full-body suit made
out of skin, fabric, space and environment that surrounds us every day?

Anika
Reineke, Nov 2022

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Strukturversagen / Paul Kolling

September 20 — November 5, 2022

14a
Poolstrasse 34
20355 Hamburg

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Magnus Gitt-Henderson / CRISISCORE VOLUME 1

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The Lathe of Heaven 

with:

Andreas Angelidakis, Claudio Coltorti, Chioma Ebinama, Panayiotis Loukas, Olga Migliaressi-Phoca, Angelo Plessas, Mathilde Rosier, Amalia Vekri

Curated by Amalia Vekri

29 September – 5 November, 2022

Haus N Athen

Kairi 6

Athens, Greece

‘Cold, cold. Hard. Bright. Too bright. Sunrise in the window through shift and flicker of trees. Over the bed. The floor trembled. The hills muttered and dreamed of falling in the sea, and over the hills, faint and horrible, the sirens of distant towns howled, howled, howled.

She sat up. The wolves howled for the world’s end. 

Sunrise poured in through the single window, hiding all that lay under its dazzling slant. She felt through excess of light and found the dreamer sprawled on his face, still sleeping. “George! Wake up! Oh, George, please wake up! Something is wrong!”

He woke. He smiled at her, waking.

“Something is wrong – the sirens – what is it?”

Still almost in his dream, he said without emotion, “They’ve landed.”

For he had done just what she told him to do.  She had told him to dream that the Aliens were no longer on the Moon.’

The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971

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Kelly Tissot / Spurious Crops

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Olga Balema | Geta Brătescu at Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

September 11 – November 5, 2022

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Zheng Wei / Zombie or God

Curated by Feng Xi

September 23 – November 10, 2022

WishinART 

B1 Block C, Jing Yuan, Ying Ke Center,

Beijing, China

In dealing with the normalized epidemic prevention, the individual will is dissembled and reassembled into new collectivism, leading to the intangible and giant capsule. Combining wood carving and painting has been one of the methods used by the artist. This In dealing with the normalized epidemic prevention, the individual will is dissembled and reassembled into new collectivism, leading to the intangible and giant capsule. exhibition will present his woodcut paintings spanning 16 years as a point of departure to study his creative methodology. Given the homogenized artistic trends, these woodcut paintings reveal his stubborn and stereotypical pursuit, like his sincere and honest personality, and distinguish them from other artworks.

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Claude Eigan &
Jake Kent / CJ’s Place

17.09.22 to 15.10.22

gr_und

Seestrasse
49, 13347 Berlin

 

As squatters we would take over a
house that had been empty a year or many. We’d break the door open and a gust
of dust would wheeze out along with the dead dream of somebody’s investment,
motes and figures accumulating in the unmade silence while the speculators
waited for the market to crash or to cash in their flats. But nothing is worth
a shit if all it’s worth is money, and the empty houses all knew it too, sad
city drool in the rainpipes and the door maws scowling shut.

When we took over the house we would pull all our chairs in there. Maybe a
mattress or a horseshoe for luck, some flowers someone found outside a
restaurant. You and me drinking our beers in there and looking out the windows
on to the new street. Everyone living on stale loaves and chickpeas until one
day someone cooks up a pot of stew and after that we take it in turns. The old
dust gets bright and wet with the smell of cooking and people start bringing
their lovers back and we’re calling it home. And slowly, the house stops its
long sulk and we all start to go about living/ there.

 

It always felt fucked up when we had
to go. As a matter of principle we resisted the charge, mainly because it
didn’t feel true; what is a rightful tenant after all but someone who does the
daily work of living somewhere? But every time we’d lose or nearly. All those
chairs out on the street looking like what happens when you don’t do what
you’re told, and the property cops strong-arming their way through the spaces
we called bedrooms and tearing out the furnish like it’s personal.

 

And then we’d move along, and we’d
start again. They always get the house but we have, we have, we have our

 

*

I didn’t know another way to do it.
Didn’t know which cupboard I should use or if I’d fit inside it otherwise. So I
made a new thing from an old thing and it changes all the time but it always
goes a little bit like this:

 

We move into an empty house. This
time we pay the money and we sign down and gather. Buy-to-lets are like
neglected animals, silent & skittish: you walk around the cold open rooms
made up all nice but you know it’s still just a sell until you find a chair out
on the street and pull it inside. People bring their lovers home and start
cooking dinner there. You and me drinking our beers in there and we’re cooking
dinner for lovers and friends and the guests from elsewhere or just for one
another and inevitably it starts that we go/ about/ living/

 

until the market crash means cash
for flats, and all our chairs sitting out on the street. But the lovers and
friends and the guests from elsewhere/ are what we have left /inn/it because

 

They always get the house. But we
have, we have, we have our –

 

 

Text by Jesse Darling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Romain Bobichon 

soleil.je

Cur. Liza Maignan

10.09.2022 – 19.11.2022

Galerie Florence Loewy

9-11 rue de Thorigny

75003

 soleil.je (pronounced “soleil point je”).[1]

The title of this first solo exhibition by the artist Romain Bobichon at the Galerie Florence Loewy came from a typing error by the artist’s mother, writing too fast on her computer’s keyboard.

It evokes both one of the most powerful stars in the universe and a referential value, closest to our inner self: the personal pronoun of our individuality faced with the world. Two value nodes poles apart from each other, linked or separated by a period that does not end anything, much to the contrary.

 

Before falling asleep, I sometimes play with nuanced forms of gray that emerge in the dark infinite landscape of my closed eyelids. When I was a child, I thought I was a master of these liquid abstractions, these sometimes granular, sometimes smooth materials. Working hard to attenuate the rough forms to create a silky material like oil, before being able to fall asleep in this monochrome whose color (#16161D) has a name: eigengrau, “intrinsic gray” in German). This color is that of an impossible black. It manifests itself in a non-vision context, through the appearance of photons that are luminous in the dark. This color is the memory of a mental gray, a light in the retina.

In Romain Bobichon’s paintings, the grays are colored in dark, almost muddy nuances. This sometimes uncontrolled phenomenon in painting comes from aggregates of the material, meetings between colors. Colors that are nonetheless chosen, as much as the chosen stretcher formats, the work timeframes, which are partially chosen. Whereas the measurements of one’s body, one’s hands, one’s torso are not chosen. The gestures are subject to the intuition of this body, these hands. Working conditions are variable: an unstable economy with changing natural light. The mind is nourished by collective stories in the daytime and solitary readings at night.

 

It is summer and the canvases are drying in the studio. I could describe to you in this text what I saw there: the formats, the colors, the materials, the forms. But a textual description of these paintings would not in any way show an exact representation of what you are seeing today as you read these words. In the same way that you and I do not have an identical visual spectrum, and that our eyes do not read the same nuances that are played out in transparency, the language that I will have used to partially describe these paintings will probably have been disturbed by my subjectivity and my personal emotions. On the other hand, the pictorial phenomenon is played out in each of the paintings and is being produced even as I write these lines: layer after layer, covering one painting after another, would not make it possible to create a static image of them. Whatever the case, it is obvious that if I could write Romain Bobichon’s paintings, they would not warrant being hung in front of you. However, silence is not called for and these words more clearly come from a relationship, experienced contextually with the works and thoughts shared with Romain than a vain search for a semiotic utopia (search for signs, to read them and say them aloud). This text is therefore to be apprehended like a commentary on a relationship superimposing (once again a story of layers) two presences: that of color and that of language.

 

If Romain Bobichon does not take anything from elements of the real, he pays particular attention to his thoughts for the others (artists) whom he summons like passing friends, more than chronological reference points in art history. He summons them to stroll with them in the history of forms and colors. At the end of the day, he leaves them without any regrets and returns to the solitude of his studio. In Romain Bobichon’s sedimentary paintings, there are layers of stories hidden in them, as there are in himself. They reveal his subjectivity as a whole and their relationships, which are woven in this space-time that is dedicated to them, as unique variants of themselves. All these layers of relationships, conditions, uncontrolled impulses spring up like “a surprise that (tells him) something (that he didn’t know) already.”[2] The colors talk to each other, “block each other, contradict each other; they live and die according to movements of destruction and perpetual reconstruction.”[3] They are relational, they circulate between themselves, between you and me. Covering one painting after another creates this very canvas, creates a vibration, a visual noise that is perceptible according to the attention paid to these surfaces that retain the memory of those that preceded them, like sisters of another generation or past experiences that withstand time.

 

Have you already tried to specifically identify each instrument in an orchestra, each row that emits and composes a symphony? It is not really this identification that counts, but the very result of listening to it, and here, of seeing it. In the same way that heteroclite objects, which nourish the collecting of hoarders (people who keep everything or never throw anything out), do not have links to each other apart from their relationship to the body and their accumulator who lives in the last empty spaces of his invaded environment. Could abstraction be a form of pictorial Diogenes syndrome? Cannibalizing the memories of forms and colors, assembled and mixed in the painting’s transparency. The accumulation of each form, each color, each musical tonality creates the sound coherence and visual perception of a homogenous and harmonious or dissonant ensemble depending on the intention of the writing, calling out to each other in the interstices of silences, of each of them.

 

Certain people fill the void with speech, in order to create a constant link with the other, as though silence altered the link between bodies and minds. Others appreciate the void between them. They hear each other in a shared sound void that slows down the discussion. This silence creates a link in the reception of information drawn from the discussion that preceded it. The empty space is one of the conditions of the relationship that Romain Bobichon creates with his paintings. It becomes a threshold between him and them, between them and us. He is both the conductor of his pictorial thoughts and the friend who creates an intimate link between each of his paintings, respectively being born in the context of his studios: located today in Saint-Beauzile, yesterday in Carquefou, and tomorrow?

 

Romain Bobichon evoked in our discussions the artist, theoretician and activist Tetsuo Kogawa, who gave an account of his experience in the Japanese free radio movement of the early 1980s. Kogawa reinvented the relationship of transmission and reception of radio waves: from broadcasting (massive diffusion) to the idea of narrow-casting (limited diffusion) involving a more intimate relationship with the receivers located in the intimate perimeters of the city, addressing a group of situated and involved people. We can thus situate the origin and the address of speech. Romain Bobichon also attempts to understand and apprehend these transmissions and receptions (massive/limited) relationships of the pictorial gesture: From where and for whom do I speak? From where and for whom do I paint?

Like signs of invisible punctuation, which dictate the rhythm of our enunciation (we do not see them, but they speak to us), abstraction, if it does not harbor signs, is not however mute. Then like the mouth, which permits us to share thoughts, the hand could transmit a pictorial thought, beyond writing. If the hand liberates speech, does the painting whispers thoughts on the fingertip to my eyes?

 

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[1] “Sun.I” in English

[2]  Sillman Amy, Faux Pas. Écrits et Dessins, translated and edited by Charlotte Houette, François Lancien-Guilberteau and Benjamin Thorel, After8Books, Paris, 2022 p. 76

[3] Ibid.

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Butterfly March

Gabriel Mills

19 Oct – 19 Nov 2022

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 Maude Léonard-Contant at Kunsthaus Baselland

Digs

9 September 2022 – 13 November 2022

curated by Ines Goldbach

St. Jakobs-Strasse 170, 4132 Muttenz, Switzerland

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Athanasios
Argianas / An Ear of Arms
(around you)

 

 28.09 – 16.11.2022

RENATA FABBRI arte contemporanea

Via A. Stoppani 15/c, 20129 Milano

Renata Fabbri is pleased to
announce An Ear of Arms (around you), the gallery’s first solo
exhibition by the Athens and London based artist and composer Athanasios
Argianas. On the occasion, Argianas is presenting a body of new sculptural works conceived specifically for
this project and collectively resonating in the exhibition spaces.

Athanasios Argianas’s
interdisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, painting, text, performance
and music. It is concerned with the physicality of sculpture versus the
immateriality of performed lyrics, or language, making immaterial objects from
material means and vice versa, and is often informed by his background, and
parallel practice, in musical composition.

An Ear Of Arms (around you) hints at an ear that listens in empathy, rather
than sound, composed of arms—a hugging gesture, transforming to a communal ear.
The exhibition takes shape in various new formats of works: from a tasseled
outline of a wild Cichorium weed, cut in steel, to a 3d scan of a Pinna
Nobilis—a creature currently facing extinction—and an architectural weave of a
scanned Turtle shell, to text etched works that play with the limits of
sculpture through layers of representation and reference. A solid brass ribbon
is bent to pretend it is supple, soft, etched with text that again opens up
another layer of space, that of spoken language, a virtual immaterial
objecthood.

 

Athanasios Argianas (b. 1976,
Athens) lives and works between Athens and London.

Hollowed Water, his first major solo show in a public institution in
the UK, was on view at Camden Arts Centre, London, in 2020, and toured to ARCH,
Athens in 2021. Has held solo concerts exhibitions at: Max Wigram (London); The
Breeder (Athens); Arcade (with Len Lye; London), On Stellar Rays (New York);
Aanant & Zoo (Berlin).

Selected group shows include:
Grimm (Amsterdam); Mor Charpentier (Paris); Madragoa (Lisbon); Lisson Gallery
(London); RODEO (Istanbul) amongst others. His work was presented at the 30th São Paulo Biennial; documenta 14,
Fridericianum (Kassel); Kunsthalle Wien (Wien); Lisson Gallery (London);
Fondazione Prada, Ca Corner (Venice); Performa 13 (New York); Tate Britain,
(London); The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (London); amongst others.

Species Counterpoint, a monograph on his work was co-published in 2021 by
Lenz, Milan, with Camden Arts Centre, London, and ARCH, Athens with essays by
Dan Fox, Quinn Latimer, Jen Kabat and an interview with the artist and Martin
Herbert. He records with the Lo Recordings label in London and runs Daedalus
Street with Rowena Hughes, a project facilitating the development of new
artworks by invited artists in their studio in Athens.

Critical essay by Giovanna Manzotti

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‘Work’ / Magnus Frederik Clausen

September 8 – October 22, 2022 

Claas Reiss
96 Robert Street
London NW1 3QP

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Images courtesy the artists and Callirrhöe

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My Street, and the Films I Dream Of

Menelaos Karamaghiolis, Katerina Komianou 

Curated by Panos Fourtoulakis & Titus Nouwens

7 July – 29 September

Haus N Athen off-site

Vatsaxi 6, 104 38, Athens

For our first exhibition at Vatsaxi 6, an off-site space by Haus N, we are honoured to present new work by Menelaos Karamaghiolis and Katerina Komianou.

Fokionos Negri street and Exarcheia square, two sites of cultural and political significance in the centre of Athens, are the contexts of the presented works. The artists explore notions of time, perception, memory and their intimate relationship to these public spaces through observing, documenting and archiving that which often goes unnoticed.

A spontaneous moment of four boys swimming in a street fountain at night forms the subject of Karamaghiolis’ ‘City Divers’ (2022). The fountain is on Fokionos Negri street, where a stream runs underground. Originally shot with the artist’s mobile phone camera, the video is cut up into stills and projected in digital and analogue formats in varying rhythms and scales across the interior and exterior spaces of the exhibition. Moving bodies turn solid. Time is slowed down, and elements that are invisible in real-time reveal themselves. An everyday scene at the doorstep of the artist’s home turns mystical, exemplifying his ability to document that which is extraordinary out of ordinary encounters. Karamaghiolis documents reality in ambivalent ways, inviting viewers to insert their own meanings for what they witness. “Reality is stranger than fiction” he writes.

Alongside ‘City Divers’ (2022), we present ‘Unseen I’ (2019), where the camera follows a stray dog running across a protest. The two works continue the series the artist has been developing over the past ten years, where he documents life in the city as experienced by those who tend to remain invisible.

Katerina Komianou’s ‘For Now and Forever’ (2018-ongoing) comprises more than 500 photographs of the sculpture of three young Eros standing next to one another for over a century. Close-ups of the eros’ body parts intertwine with long-distance photographs of the square — posters, stickers, paint, anarchist placards, toys, and police shields appear. Through this daily documentation over the past four years, the artist captures the traces of temporary interventions that the sculpture endures, sometimes even for a few minutes, before they disappear and get replaced by others. Komianou’s documentation allows us to understand the power of the symbol; a public sculpture used as a blank canvas by everyone to express how they feel about the city. By looking at the photographs, it is almost impossible to identify when they were shot, as the artist uses films from different decades, confusing our understanding of linear time. The artist explores this further through the installation, where she arranges photographs of different periods into a single body. The changes in the sculpture reflect the changes happening in Exarcheia, intertwining with those occurring in the artist’s life at the time of documentation.

In this joint presentation, the two artists come into an intergenerational dialogue, where one captures the same subject in different moments in time, while the other examines a singular moment through various forms and perspectives. Urban myths intertwine with personal histories; in two works that are as much about what they depict as those who created them.

Bios

Menelaos Karamaghiolis is a filmmaker who works in Athens producing feature films, documentaries, video art, radiomovies and video installations starring real-life neglected heroes. His work transcends frontiers and stereotypes and serves as an essential tool for dialogue and social change. His films have received international acclaim; ROM (1989) has been considered “a turning point for Greek documentary films” and “a masterpiece that must become a classic of the history of cinema”, BLACK OUT (p.s. RED OUT) (1998) was considered as “the first post-modern Greek film” and J.A.C.E. – Just Another Confused Elephant (2011) participated in 48 international festivals, including TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, winning 11 awards. His interactive documentary series, MEETING WITH REMARKABLE PEOPLE, includes 12 feature films, 180 short films. His video installations have been shown at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, the Venice Biennale, Rodeo and Geneva Contemporary Art Center. He is currently working on video installations and live events of the ongoing collective community projects ‘’the AfroGreeks’’ and the “Greekies”

Born in Piraeus, Katerina Komianou is an artist based in Athens, working with sculpture and photography. She studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, in the workshops of Giorgos Lappas and Nikos Navridis (2013-2018). Komianou participated in Performative Transcending Somatic Dinner, curated by Lydia Antoniou and Giorgos Bekirakis (2021); Unhappy Monuments, curated by Christoforos Marinos, ARTWORKS in collaboration with OPANDA (2020); The Same River Twice: contemporary art in Athens, curated by Margot Norton and Natalie Bell, DESTE Foundation, Athens and New Museum, New York, in collaboration with the Benaki Museum (2019); ASKT Graduate Thesis Exhibition (2018).

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 Nacy Lupo and Monique Mouton, Destiny Cornucopia

22/9/2022 – 12/11/2022

Spazio Veda

Manifattura Tabbachi, B6, Via della Cascine 35, Florence, Italy

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Six Decades of Women Artists with:

 

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