Psychotic Property, Neurotic Garden / Curated by Marta Santi
Olia Lialina / Something for Everyone
December 24 – January 16, 2024
Bill’s PC is honoured to present Something for Everyone, a solo presentation of work by Olia Lialina.
Something for Everyone (2017) consists of four small advent calendars, which have been customised and manufactured by a print-on-demand service in Germany. Each year, Olia’s husband – Dragan – orders a calendar for each of the four members of their family. Working within the at-hand material conditions of the internet, he searches for images online, selecting those which he decides would be likely to make each of them happy. These found images are then ripped from their initial contexts and added to the cardboard calendars using the print-on-demand service option for ‘image customisation’.
Exhibiting the empty advent calendars from 2016 as readymades, Lialina presents a cross-section of her family’s taste. Through presentation of these private family objects within contemporary art and gallery contexts, Lialina intends to point towards the power of cultural industries, the pervasive nature of images, and their transformations through niche markets. The title of the work is borrowed from Adorno’s essay The Culture Industry; “something is provided for all so that none may escape”; whilst also alluding to Tim Berners-Lee’s “This is for everyone”.
…
Born in Moscow (1971) and now based in Germany, Olia Lialina is a network-based art pioneer, frequently cited among the most celebrated and best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene. Her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, “net.language” and vernacular web – in both artistic and publishing projects – has made her a significant figure across contemporary art practice and new media theory.
Her work has been exhibited extensively both online and at in-person venues, including the New Museum, New York; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Transmediale, Berlin; Western Front, Vancouver; and/or, Dallas/LA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; ABC Gallery, Moscow; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Madison Square Park, New York; Barbican, London; LEAP, Berlin; MOTI, Breda; HEK, Basel; The Kitchen, NY; and Whitechapel Gallery, London.
She is cofounder and keeper of the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive and a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany.
Christian Stock / Cube Painting
9 November 2023 – 14 January 2024
Gallery Gezwanzig
Gumpendorfer St. 20
Vienna, Austria
Christian Stock is known for his “cube paintings”, which are generally shown horizontally to support the thousands of layers of paint applied over years. He has been painting monochrome pictures with astonishing persistence since 1983. Paintings that are also sculptures. However, these “mixed forms” are by no means complicated or sprawling picture-space constructions with which a painter attempts to move from the second to the third dimension, but rather clear, compact, monochrome bodies of color that reveal the reason for their double character at a second glance.
Meletios Meletiou: Playground
Curated by Panos Giannikopoulos
8 Dec – 15 Jan 2023
Eins Gallery
Themidos 28, Limassol
3036, Cyprus
Eins Gallery presents the first solo exhibition of Meletios Meletiou’s work in Cyprus, titled ‘Playground’ curated by Panos Giannikopoulos.
‘Playground’ activates the sense of exploration and play in an adventurous manner. It blurs the line between danger and enjoyment with aggressive surfaces that contort and reverse their initial impressions. The artist presents compositions that take up the space’s textures, appearing to evolve, spread, form units, and engage autonomously in a game of balance.
Meletiou emphasizes the importance of play and pleasure, even when these words seem inconceivable. The hostile urban environment becomes visible in the exhibition with a playful disposition. Through the prism of a perilous “playground”, the artist returns to conceptualisations of childhood, a theme that preoccupies him in a wide range of his work.
After his solo presentation at the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in Rome, Meletiou decisively develops his body of work on the possibilities or failures of formalist reassertion and the appropriation of hostile architecture, the ability to change meaning or creatively bypass powers instilled in forms.
In ‘Playground’, he creates a space that imposes a circular path without corners. He transforms the intensely hostile elements into colourful works that alter their initial purpose: to negate a flat surface and create obstacles. Meletiou conveys the exuberance set by the spatial context of the title as a heterotopia but also as a place of negotiation of powers. Ultimately, he explores the paradox of childhood, mimicry, reproduction, and the potential for resistance to established structures, readjustment, and the joy of disruption.
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Meletios Meletiou (b. 1989, Limassol, Cyprus) lives and works in Rome, Italy. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, graduating in Visual Arts and Decoration in 2016.
In 2022, he presented his solo exhibition Buffer Zone curated by Gaia Bobò at Pastificio Cerere Foundation and, on this occasion, released his artist book EPIDERMIS published by VIAINDUSTRIAE. In 2020, he exhibited the installation ReSize To Fit for the Una Vetrina project, curated by Giulia Pollicita. In 2016, he launched the Imaginary Friends project, consisting of workshops for migrants held between Lesbos and Athens, which was also published in the volume ‘The Others’.
Selected group exhibitions include: Porta Portese, SPAZIOMENSA, Rome, curated by Gaia Bobò (2021); Fenêtre Jaune Cadmium, curated by Sarah Linford, French Cultural Institute, Rome (2018); Maps-Spam, curated by Alessandra Arancio, Società Geografica Italiana/Villa Celimontana, Rome (2018); Developing Cities, curated by Angelica Gatto and Emanuele Riccomi, Superstudio, Milan (2018); Quattro artisti al Castello, curated by Cecilia Casorati, Castello di Santa Severa (2016).
Meletiou’s research delves into architectural and urbanistic practices, treating them as seismographs that capture social and political urgencies. The contextualization of this imagery is influenced by the realm of childhood and references to play, interpreted here as the antithesis of a potential reconstruction and recovery from a crisis. This exploration is triggered by the concept of ‘decorum,’ whereby the city’s patterns are examined through the lens of contradiction.
Eins is a contemporary art gallery based in Limassol, Cyprus. Established in 2018, eins is seeking an active role in shaping art discourse and promoting contemporary artists in Cyprus, its neighbours and beyond. As a commercial gallery, we care about the development of the artists we work with, providing space and flexibility for the facilitation of compelling proposals and projects. As a gallery based in Cyprus, we are diligently involved in initiating conversations with our audiences, encouraging the engagement of local artists, students and the public.
Eins gallery was founded by its director, Tasos Stylianou, and his brother, Constantinos Stylianou.
Staffage
Curated by João Vasco Paiva
with:
Constant Dullaart
Elisa Strinna
Estefanía Landesmann
Filipe André Alves
Gabriela Albergaria
Lewis Henderson
Magdalen Wong
Sarah Klimsch
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.
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Sean McElroy
ANNVS BANANVS
September 29th – December 31st 2023
Tops at Madison Avenue Park
151 Madison Avenue (viewable on Maggie H. Isabel St)
Memphis, TN 30103
On view 24 hours a day
Annvs Bananvs is a trompe-l’oeil mural painted on the wall of the Tops Madison
Avenue space. In deference to tradition, it was painted in a Perylene Green verdaccio
with an overpainting of steaks in red iron oxide. The mural will be visible 24 hours a
day until December 31st 2023.
The Cavendish is the most commercially popular banana cultivar. The seeds of the Cavendish are sterile. It cannot reproduce without human intervention. Perylene green-black is a hydrocarbon-based dye that doesn’t doesn’t register on infrared sensors. It is used as the colorant for B-2 Stealth Bombers.
Traditionally, the underpainting for frescoes was done in verdaccio, an earthy green mixture of ochre and mars black.
In 2023 The French Bulldog surpassed the Labrador Retriever as the most popular breed in America after a 30 year stint at the top.
Red iron oxide is an ancient pigment found in prehistoric cave paintings across the world.
Thin glazes of red iron oxide were used to create luminous flesh tones in Renaissance frescoes.
It is impossible to make a good smoothie or a vegan dessert without a banana. The banana is
not an agricultural product of the United States.
In order to ensure the continued supply of bananas and the holdings of the major fruit companies, the United States government assisted in the overthrow of democratically elected governments throughout the 20th Century.
The B-2 Stealth Bomber was developed by Northrop Grumman under contract with the
Defense Department in the waning years of the cold war. Its runaway budget and
diminished relevance to a post-Soviet world order made the project subject to scrutiny and
political consternation until military spending again became uncontroversial after September 11th.
The B-2 has flown missions over Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
The B-2 cannot be flown in the rain.
The egg-and-dart motif is thought to have originally represented the opium poppy and its leaves.
Years of selective breeding have made French Bulldogs suffer from breathing and skeletal problems. They are unable to procreate without human intervention. They must be inseminated manually and delivered by c-section.
The popularity of the French Bulldog and its reproductive difficulties have made them expensive. Lady Gaga’s French Bulldogs were stolen last year and her dog walker was shot in the chest.
The bananas must be grafted and grown and transported by ship and truck and car from the
plantation to the kitchen. The oil flows out of the sand into the combustion engines. The
cows are grown and cut up, pan-seared and salted. The French bulldog looks back at you and
automatically smiles as you walk it to the coffee shop.
I had a dream that Capital is a divine and terrible knife cutting through the softness of the world.
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Sean McElroy studied Classics at Brown University and Painting at the University of Washington. He uses sculpture, painting and performance to explore the mythic landscape of what might be recorded in History as the Final Years of Great Abundance.
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/sean-mcelroy-at-tops-at-madison-avenue-park-memphis-tn-1-scaled.jpg‘La trappola del tempo‘ / Luciano Sozio
Curated by Angela Madesani
25 November – 20 January, 2024
Studio Legale De Capoa – Hungarian Consulate
Via Francesco Petrarca, 2
40136 Bologna, Italy
The Trap of Time by Angela Madesani
Some time ago, Antonio de Capoa called me, proposing to organise exhibitions in the law firm in Bologna, which he shares with his daughter Maria Flaminia and other colleagues. The reason was his love of art, his curiosity for discovery, his openness to other worlds. The proposal appealed to me; it is a kind of challenge in which contemporary art should succeed in becoming part of the everyday life of a place intended for something else.
If there is one aspect of my work that makes me love it more and more every day, it is the distance from any form of habit. Dealing with art, studying it, encountering artists is exciting for me, despite the difficulties, the small and big failures, the unsuccessful projects.
Last summer, through another artist I was dealing with, I met Luciano Sozio, whose work immediately impressed me. His research is silent, passionate, requiring method, study both to realise it and to understand it in all its refined and measured cleverness.
So, I decided to propose his work as the initial exhibition of this journey, at Studio de Capoa.
We certainly cannot claim to give life to an anthological exhibition, but rather to the timely essay of a work that is difficult to place, beyond the simple technical definition of the language with which it is realised. Hers is a painting that traces its deepest roots to tradition in that Longinian world of ‘poetry of the minimal’, which leads us to Piero della Francesca.
Is it perhaps just a coincidence that the surname Sozio is also that of a 12th century Umbrian master, a central figure in the Spoleto school of painting? It certainly is, but equally I like to glimpse a kind of connection between the two figures almost a thousand years later.
His approach to painting is methodical, he wants to have total control of each work, starting with the preparation of the individual canvases and the colour through pigments. Over the course of time, he has studied recipes that are the result of experimentation, but also of the study of individual materials, their characteristics and prerogatives, which become his heritage, almost a secret.
Sozio works a lot, studies, makes researches, and carries out several works simultaneously. Each work is a portrait of a more or less complex story, which the artist constructs in his Pescara studio from time to time.
It is as if everything makes sense in his research; the discipline of his systematic modus operandi derives perhaps from having been a competitive sportsman in his youth, the love of pigments, probably, from his early approach to art, through ceramics. And so, the subjects come from his passion for the plant world, just as the conceptual aspect of his research comes to him from his study of certain artists, first and foremost Giorgio Morandi.
On show there are some works from his most recent series: Fly Traps and The Hunter. “When a series is born there is always a chain of situations that converge at an exact point. One of my earliest memories dates back to almost forty years ago, I was in the garden of my parents’ house in Isernia and I was very bored, so I decided to hunt down all the butterflies and push them towards the inside of the house”[1]. The reference is clear.
“Just before making Fly Traps, in Bologna, I had seen a beautiful Morandi exhibition. Back in the studio, I thought about the possibility of overturning the paradigm of the vase with the flower”[2]. So, he got some vases, plants, objects and built the sets, which he then drew. The drawing in his work is leading from a design point of view: it is a test to see whether the development in painting can work. It nevertheless maintains a declared autonomy.
The subjects proposed here come from everyday life. These are ordinary objects, without intrinsic preciousness of any kind. His are not still lifes so much as still lives, in which time is frozen. Time that Sozio seems to make fun of, in relation to the only certainty of existence, its end. After all, the trap is nothing more than an object of death. The artist tries to escape the irreversible dynamic of what awaits us. A dynamic that man is not allowed to know in its entirety, veiled by the very mystery of existence, to which the artist refers through the unpainted spaces, which we also find in the Hunter, thus in the figure of a woman with a broom in her hand, in which the small tail of an insect can be glimpsed. It is the detail that gives the work its meaning.
His are objects of memory. In one group of paintings there is a chair hanging on the wall in obvious precariousness. He started working on it when war broke out in Ukraine, at a time of total destabilisation. “I had to try several times before I managed to create the final set. I wanted to make the wait even more exciting. I had fun and suffered at the same time”[3]. Each of his works is the precariousness of the whole. His works are mental works, in which continuous traces of our present emerge. The key to interpretation, the meaning, by his own admission, lies outside the work: the thread that holds everything together is in the hands of the viewer.
Everything is precarious, but there is a clear desire for change. Something may happen, an event may occur that for a moment and in a moment may break the symmetry of phenomena, and the reference returns to the end, to death. The artist declares a sense of responsibility, in a historical time in which it seems to be completely lacking. Nobody wants to take it. By making the spectator participate, the reins of the game are left in his hands. The artist speaks in this sense, with a reference to the theory of perception, of ‘amodal completion’, a concept on which Morandi also worked extensively.
The works on show here, a small part of his research, are all set indoors. The reference is to an essay by Yuval Noah Harari[4], who made a witty reflection on the fact that man, who at first was at the bottom of the list of predators, is now at the top, and therefore feels like an invincible divinity. Our lairs are our homes, the places where we feel safe. Perhaps, however, it could be a trap? We must not forget that there are Hunters. It is the challenge to attract something and the waiting for the opportune moment.
In Sozio’s research there is a strongly poetic dimension of surreality, which leads to a kind of annulment of events that are only apparently real, in truth created, provoked. It is the precariousness of phenomenon and existence that refers, also ichnographically, to his great passion for the rope walker artist Philip Petit, who in the 1970s walked and danced on a tightrope between the twin towers in New York. A character who oscillates between the silence of extreme concentration and the madness of equally extreme courage. And perhaps this is precisely a possible yardstick for reading these works, in which the aesthetic and poetic dimensions merge into a unicum at once delicate and powerful.
2. idem
3. idem
4. Y.N.Harari, Sapiens. Da animali a dèi: Breve storia dell’umanità, Italian Edition, Bompiani, Milano, 2017
Hai-Wen Lin 如意 / As You Wish
I will start from the back. I grew up in Maryville, a small town in the Northwest corner of Missouri. Our backyard opened to a large field where my brother and I sometimes flew kites. We wrote wishes to send up the kite line and if the paper vanished by the time the kite was reeled in, it meant the wish had been granted. This summer, I asked my mom about the wishes she made as a child and she told me about how she wished for long beautiful hair, but that her mother always cut it short. 5 years ago, I began growing my hair out.
Back Divination – 9 changing into 1, 2023
Zahrasadat Hakim, Juliette Lépineau, Phoebe-Lin Elnan, Cassiane Pfund, Jessy Razafimandimby, RM, Clara Roumégoux, Larissa Tiki Mbassi, Jacopo Valentini
11/11/2023 – 17/12/2023
La Rada
Via alla Morettina 2
6600 Locarno
The exhibition Gulp takes as its starting point the various events that lead to, or can result in, the act of swallowing. Be it a mouthful, a sip or a gag reflex.
Clara Chavan and Katia Leonelli have invited Zahrasadat Hakim, Phoebe-Lin Elnan, RM, Clara Roumégoux and Jacopo Valentini to interpret this gulp and its implications. Their proposals bring the audience from the Via Emilia to the Pacha Ibiza Club, after a walk around strangely displayed elements from the domestic and professional culinary worlds and the remains of a cake-adjacent performance. Each artist in their own way seized on this onomatopoeia to develop a critique of the present time.
Writers Cassiane Pfund and Larissa Tiki Mbassi have been invited to come up with textual works that unfold in the pages of the publication Buffet Maisonné. Along with the questions of the artists exhibited into the space of La Rada, they develop a sensitive discourse, written with two or four hands, exploring the spectrum between theory and poetry.
Illustrations by Juliette Lépineau and Jessy Razafimandimby accompany these reflections and establish a link not only with the works on display, but also with the Locarno region. Having also taken on the artistic direction of Buffet Maisonné, they have produced a RISO-printed edition of 120 copies, which will hopefully keep many mouths watering long after December 17, 2023.
Kitchen, meal, grub, schluck, yum yum, gastronomy, stamm — both the contents of plates and glasses and all that surrounds them — are media for exchange, pretexts for creating and maintaining relationships, for fighting against anomie. Understanding and observing the phenomenology of a mouthful may provide us with the answers we need to take care of each other.
Text and curation by Clara Chavan and Katia Leonelli
Photo Credits: Riccardo Giancola
Image Courtesy: the artists and La Rada
Works
Phoebe-Lin Elnan, Help yourself, 2023, Performance (13 min.) and Installation Sound Design by Louis Dambrain», at La Rada, Locarno, 2023.
Zahrasadat Hakim, I yearn to my mother’s bread «أحن إلى خبز أمي», embroidered cloths, carved wood, 50 x 45 cm each, 2023, at La Rada, Locarno, 2023.
Zahrasadat Hakim, Les miroirs ne me contiennent pas, 2023, Embroidered cloth, mirror, 200 x 225 cm, at La Rada, Locarno, 2023.
Clara Roumégoux, What the fire sees, 2023, Wood, metal, heating lamp, 180 x 40 x 75 cm, at La Rada, Locarno, 2023.
Clara Roumégoux, Red beads, 2023, Beads (acrylic, metal), Variable dimensions at La Rada, Locarno, 2023.
Jacopo Valentini, From the series Paesaggi da Tavola (Trattoria Due Platani – Trattoria Entrà – Osteria di Medicina – Da Lucio Trattoria), 2023, Inkjet print, wood and cotton gloves, 20 x 220 cm» at La Rada, Locarno, 2023
RM, Cherries, 2020 UV-printed PVC, textile, rope and pompons 450 x 950 x 400 cm, [n° inv 2022-080] Collection du Fonds d’art contemporain de la Ville de Genève» at La Rada, Locarno, 2023
Publication Buffet Maisonné by Cassiane Pfund, Larissa Tiki Mbassi, Juliette Lépineau and Jessy Razafimandimby, RISO-printed edition of 120 copies, 2023 at La Rada, Locarno, 2023.
Curated by Juliet Kothe and Madalina Stanescu
September 16 – October 13
Trauma bar und kino
“I would like the work to be non-work. This means that it would find its way beyond my preconceptions.
What I want of my art I can eventually find. The work must go beyond this.
It is my main concern to go beyond what I know and what I can know.
The formal principles are understandable and understood.
It is the unknown quantity from which and where I want to go.
As a thing, an object, it acceeds to its non-logical self.
It is something, it is nothing.
(Eva Hesse, June 1968)1
“We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or
cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, . . . to destroy that body or to be
destroyed by it, to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with in composing a more powerful body”.
(Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Thousand Plateaus, 1980)
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MAIN BODY by Sally Von Rosen
Sally von Rosen’s exhibition is a biographical excerpt of a new species of creatures, she
herself brought to live. In the current status quo of their existence and for the first time they
appear as a herd, arranged as a sculptural still life of motionless figures bundled in a scenery
rising from a yet unexplored sphere. These physiognomically familiar and abstract headless
bodies balance on top of each other in a frozen performance staged on a black square.
Closely observing the individual creatures reveal their connectedness with each other: they are
intertwined through a shared skeleton. They expose new sorts of bones that autopoietically
grow into each other and finally merge into one grant formation: a MAIN BODY.
A guard-like and rather symbolic frame in the form of five drawings executed by an automatic
drawing machine imitating the visual vocabulary of Hieronymus Bosch surround the
installation. They depict elusive otherworldly monsters and figures stemming from dreamlike
settings, which suggests a relationship to the sinister and strange encounter of creatures to be
found in the middle of the space.
Both, von Rosen’s sculptural and Bosch’s pictorial landscapes possess a mesmerizing blend
of awe and dread and conjure creatures that teeter on the precipice of reality and nightmare,
unveiling the innermost corners of the human psyche.
The grotesque beings in their works un-categorize the known as they are a mutation of the
natural and the fantastical. Their bodies evoke an unsettling beauty that lures us into a realm
both enchanting and unsettling weaving a web between creatures that challenge our
perception of the real and the unreal. They seem to be symbols of the myriad facets of the
human condition as they mirror our desires, fears, and obsessions, a vivid reflection of the
chaos and wonderment that reside within us all.
Bosch’s re-drawn monsters, the deranged pyramid shape in which the creatures are showing,
the black square: this remix of elements in form of a ritualistic looking like gathering seems to
have an unknown purpose, a secret to be uncovered.
As in the original Bosch paintings, the organically sculptured creatures in MAIN BODY appear
in large numbers. Following the principle of exaggeration through repetition, their mysterious
purpose of existence in the multitude asks for being revealed as they might serve as psychic
models (Robert Smithson) pointing towards a higher meaning.
They are headless yet vital and forceful organisms and can be seen as a symbiosis or an
assemblage of an “animated thing” and a “real being”. Each of the same kind, but different in
detail in aura and sex. All creatures are operating within an own unknown rationality, through a
mystic intelligence on a cryptic mission. They contradict any idea of human belief that
intelligence and therefore power and ability of action is fundamentally linked to the organ of
the brain. The rigid and archetypical geometry of a black square, from where the creatures
seem to arise from, dissolves in a looser formation of the creatures although still recalling the
anatomy of the square shaped ground.
There might a possible attempt by the creatures to escape from something to turn towards
something new. They seem to move dynamically towards something “higher”. Are they on a
mission, whose inherent meaning seems obvious and logical to them, but unclear to us?
Rather than an improvised movement their activity seems goal oriented. But answers
concerning the actions of this crowd of creatures might not be find in human rational attempts.
The enigmatic and surreal formation in MAIN BODY appears as something familiar and alien at
the same time, as something simultaneously ancient and futuristic. Neither the reading as a
purely esthetical composition nor as a psychological evaluation can point towards an
understanding of such a new reality. All ideas hinting to possibly solve the mystery behind the
scenes remain vague and as all elements elude a clear implication caused by their paradox and
surreal nature everything stays in the status of associative stimulation connected to a level of
unconsciousness within a spiral of just further questioning.
Sally von Rosen’s merge of form and narrative can be read as a picturesque outtake from a
serial story of a specific fictional reality to be continued rather than “just” a pure sculpture. It’s
the cinematic and atmospheric quality of MAIN BODY that triggers complex emotions and
functions as a comment on the absurdity of human existence and our contradictory
relationship with our surrounding world and with each other. In her chosen scene she
confronts us with a collective activity motivated by something unknown.
Juliet Kothe
Trauma Bar and Kino’s program focuses on the fusion of visual arts, music, and performance. It opposes classical
distinctions between performance venues, museums, institutions, and clubs. The invited artists craft unique and
immersive installations. Following this conceptional approach the exhibition by Sally von Rosen creates
an ethereal atmosphere and complex artistic landscape that provides a multi-sensory experience.
The exhibition is curated by Juliet Kothe and Madalina Stanescu with reproductions of five drawings by Hieronymus
Bosch with the kind permission of Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. The expedition is part of Berlin Art Week’s special
program ”BAW Featured”.
Westfälischer Kunstverein
Rothenburg 30, 48143 Münster (Germany)
Intro
Rea Burton, Meg Porteous, Shiraz Sadikeen
09.12.2023 – 27.01.2024
454 Karangahape Road
Auckland CBD
Auckland 1010
New Zealand
All photos are by Samuel Hartnett
Recent solo exhibitions by Rea Burton include ‘Real Estate’, Ivan Anthony, Auckland (2023); ‘Punk Paintings’, Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington (2022); ‘Big Mumma’s House’, Ivan Anthony, Auckland (2022); ‘Mates’, Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington (2021); ‘The Farm’, Neo gracie, Auckland (2020). Selected group exhibitions include ‘Seconds’, Envy, Wellington (2023); ‘Birds’, Neon Parc, Melbourne, (2022); ‘Feelings III’, Ivan Anthony, Auckland (2022); Axolotl Tank, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York (2022).
Recent solo exhibitions by Meg Porteous include ‘The Story Problem’ (with Finnbar Porteous), Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington (2023); ‘Stars’, Michael Lett, Auckland (2021); ‘Juncture’, Neo gracie, Auckland (2020). Selected group exhibitions include ‘Vital Machinary’, Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings City Art Gallery (2023); ‘Birds’, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2022); ‘Uncomfortable Silence’, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū (2020).
Recent solo exhibitions by Shiraz Sadikeen include ‘Ends’, Coastal Signs, Auckland (2022); ‘Securicraft’, Coastal Signs, Auckland (2021); ‘Geist’, Neo gracie, Auckland (2021). Selected group exhibitions include ‘Octopus 23: THE FIELD’, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2023); ‘Seconds’, Envy, Wellington (2023); ‘Uncomfortable Silence’, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū (2020).
Oliver Hull / Green River
Green River an exhibition by Oliver Hull at scatalogicalritesofallnations is a site specific work that reorientates Olafur Eliasson’s work of the same name into the toilet. Beginning in 1998 upon Eliasson’s discovery of the non toxic green dye Fluorescein, Green River consisted of a series of staged interventions across a number of major cities’ rivers. In these interventions, Eliasson dyes the river a bright lurid green, creating a large-scale perceptual shift. Fluorescein is a diagnostic contrast agent, used as both an ecological tracer to map water flow around the globe, and more mundanely by plumbers to track leakage or waste in domestic toilets and sinks. Eliasson says of his work,
“Each time I have made Green river, I have been struck by the power of the simple change in colour. The vivid green of the non-toxic dye makes the water explicit as it flows past on its way to the ocean, where it disperses and is carried around the globe.”
Going on to speak to the conceptual ramifications of the work, Eliasson states, “I hope that Green River acknowledges our entanglement in all the constantly changing, yet overlooked, agencies that make up our natural-cultural environment”.
Hull’s work re-stages Eliasson’s experiments with Fluorescein in scatalogicalritesofallnations, a gallery whose main feature is a dank downtown London toilet. Already this recontextualisation speaks volumes as to Hulls intentions: Where Eliasson speaks euphemistically about a global entanglement that stretches across species,space and time, Hull’s work instead fixates on the monstrous underpinnings of global capital and techno utopianism figured through a preoccupation with waste and the hybrid form.
Lighea group show with Elisa Giardina Papa, Carla Grunauer and Andreia Santana
UNA
via Sant’Antonino 33
«Mermaids embody everything that hangs in the balance between two opposites: beautiful and ugly, male and female, seductive and monstrous. Through such an indefinite nature, they challenge, much like the works on display, our way of exploring and understanding the world.» ¹
Lighea is a perturbing novel by the Italian writer Tomasi di Lampedusa, set in Sicily at the beginning of the 20th century. The story revolves around a mermaid, who re-emerges from the abyss of mythology to connect the time of the story with a tradition rich in myths, magic spells, and hybrid characters that move between the animal, divine, and human world, permeated by desires and impulses.
Lighea becomes, for us, an ideal place where the tradition of the popular myths and beliefs, of half-pagan / half-religious rites and spells affirms itself as an integral part of artistic practices, characterized by the coexistence of the contemporaneity and the distant past, which is yet very much alive and present.
Elisa Giardina Papa, Carla Grunauer, and Andreia Santana are the invited artists to participate in the project: Starting from highly different backgrounds and birthplaces (Sicily, Argentina, Portugal), all three explore cultural, semantic, and intimate origins. They then give shape to creatures that seem to come from an ancient and fabulous bestiary, and that, like Lighea, embody deep, collective desires, or to new forms suspended between the organic and inorganic, in which the contemporaneity, the ancient past, and the pagan mythology overlap and merge.
The three artists reflect, each of them with a personal approach, on the return to the cradle of civilization, the history, the mystery of knowledge and creation, and their fragile production and transmission.
◯△□
Nobuya Hitsuda
At KAYOKOYUKI, we are pleased to announce the solo exhibition of
Nobuya Hitsuda titled ‘◯△□’
In this exhibition, we will showcase paintings and drawings created since the
1990s, along with newly crafted pieces that use workboards that were used and
passed on from the Aichi Prefectural University of the Arts to Tokyo University
of the Arts’ laboratory rooms.
Hitsuda reconstructs familiar landscapes—mountains, ponds,
vacant parking lots, brick walls, wire fences, crushed cans, and flowers—employing
geometric forms like oblique and straight lines, circles, triangles, and
rectangles, complemented by vibrant and deep colors. This unique approach
compresses distant and close-up views, forming a distinctive spatial
experience. He’s motifs are often everyday landscapes, yet the composition
offers a mysteriously intriguing realm where past and present intersect and
flow continuously.
Born in 1941 in Ota Ward, Tokyo, Hitsuda spent his formative
years in post-war Tokyo, where the ground of the streets were still exposed.
Often climbing up the banks of Tama River, he gazed at the views of the rivers
shifting attitude, shaped by typhoons and floods, and Tokyo’s changing
landscape during the economical boom[1]
which remains to be the reoccuring scenery of Hitsuda Nobuya’s paintings. His
keen observations of various artworks across eras, along with exposure to
movies, theater, and architecture, became the foundation for constructing rich
sceneries through the accumulation of visual experiences in the city.
The exhibition’s title, “◯△□”
might bring to mind zenga paintings by Sengai. However, the emphasis here seems
to lean more toward the direct morphological meaning of ◯△□ than its religious or symbolic
connotations. The circular imagery that frequents in the exhibition portrays
landscapes in flux, such as ponds, puddles, or vacant parking lots undergoing
construction. Compositions featuring geometric forms lack a vanishing point,
and the interplay of oblique and straight lines introduces fluctuations in the
image. One’s perspective remains unfixed, and one’s gaze meanders diagonally,
vertically, and horizontally from the center, causing the reflected landscape
itself to oscillate.
A landscape that emerges by gathering fragments of scenery from
here and there, “changing its form like a creature while calmly being
there”[2] in both the past and
present. It is not only Nobuya Hitsuda’s Scenes Passed by but also, perhaps,
the idea that it is one’S owns Scenes Passed by.
Nobuya Hitsuda was born in 1941 in Oota ward, Tokyo, Japan and
currently lives and works in Aichi prefecture. After completing the graduate
course at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1966, he worked
as a lecturer at the said university, and later as a designer in the art department
at NHK Japan Broadcasting Corporation. In 1975 he began teaching at the Aichi
Prefectural University of Fine Arts, and from 2001 to 2009 taught as a
professor at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.
He has received the Award for Artist in Nagoya City (1984), the
28th Yasui Grand Prize (1985), and the Seiji Togo Memorial Sompo Japan Museum
of Art Grand Prix (2011).
His work has been included in several public collections such as
The National Museum of Modern Art, The Tokyo; Museum of Contemporary Art,
Tokyo; the Agency for Cultural Affairs; The Toyota Municipal Museum of Art
(Aichi); the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music; the Aichi
Prefectural Museum of Art; The Nagoya City Art Museum (Aichi); The Toyohashi City
Museum Art and History (Aichi); the Aichi Prefectural Art University; The
Tochigi prefectural Art Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu; The Hamamatsu
Municipal Museum of Art (Shizuoka); The Miyakonojo City Museum of Art (Miyaza-
ki); The Kariya City Art Museum (Aichi) and The Suwa City Museum (Nagano).
In 2009, In the little playground: Hitsuda Nobuya and his
surrounding students, a set of dual exhibitions at the Aichi Prefectural Museum
of Art and the Nagoya City Art Museum, introduced the works of painter and
teacher Nobuya Hitsuda, along with his 19 students including Yoshitomo Nara,
Hiroshi Sugito and Shin Morikita.
[1] Konishi Nobuyuki, “Nobuya
Hitsuda: Leading Straight to the Landscape” (‘In the Little Playground,
Hitsuda Nobuya and his surrounding students,’ Aichi Triennale Executive Committee, 2009)
[2] Nobuya Hitsuda, “Seens
Passed by” (‘Nobuya Hitsuda: Seens Passed by,’ Tokyo University of the
Arts Publishing, 2008)
🌴:
In the forests of Maluku, my tale does unfurl,
together there,
nature and people, they whirl.
Sagu tree’s shield
alike, I hide something deep,
In Melanesian hearts,
my secret they keep.
What am I, this
quality strong and yet tender,
A trait in the
hearts that no storm can hinder?
🦎: What are
you??
🌴: I am
soft, and protected by my bark.
Do you know what
motivated the Dutch Metroxylon Sagu tree to exchange letters with a
botanical
philosopher?
🦎: Tell me
plz.
🌴:They
thought these philosophers were skilled at helping plants uncover their ‘root’
issues!
🦎: I love
that. I’ve dreamed of settling deeper into my body too.
🌴: Do you
know how the uprooted tree felt about being lost?
🦎: Idk.
🌴: It looked
for the nearest wifi, just to feel connected.📡
Jerrold Saija focuses on unlearning
cycles of harm and suffering caused by colonial history, and its impact on the
Moluccan body. In his artistic practice, he draws from oral history, lived
experiences, archives, memory, mourning, and the pleasures of the Moluccan
body. Saija explores new possibilities around what remains of this history.
Media and methods such as photography, sculpting, 3D modelling, rendering,
printing, clowning and storytelling are used as tools to reconnect with what
has been lost.
About P/////AKT
P/////AKT is a
non-profit exhibition space for contemporary art that organizes and facilitates
large scale solo presentations through which the audience gets the opportunity
to gain insight in the thinking space of the artists.
P/////AKT provides
a platform for exceptional, emerging artistic talents, who distinguish
themselves through their unique and authentic language and who are capable of
giving a different view on the current way of thinking. They are stimulated to
work out new developments and are given the opportunity to present their work
to a relevant audience. Furthermore, P/////AKT always asks the artists to
produce new work that relates to the specific nature and dimensions of the
given space and to present their own mental space as an overall presentation
within the given context.
September 15 – October 1, 2023
As part of 3:e våningen’s GIBCA extended exhibition program, NSFW/SVILOVA presents Gross Motor Skills, a solo show by Taiwanese-American artist Sabrina Chou.
In Gross Motor Skills,Sabrina Chou outlines an ambivalent space of logistics. Referencing logistics and its history as a term for the activity of organizing, equipping, and moving troops, the exhibition offers a terrain through which we can circulate ourselves amidst other sausage-bodies, fragmented architectures, and the sundries of a poorly-equipped mobile military corps.
Gross Motor Skills gleefully confronts the increasing use of artificial intelligence to advance logistics across supply chains, data analysis, moving people, and more. Even as our intersubjectivities dissipate into quantifiable data-byte-bites, laboring bodies still need to eat. Yes! All we’ll have left is our bodies.
Links:
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/sabrina-chou-at-3e-vaningen-gibca-extented-gothenburg-1.jpgALPHABET SOUP
Raque Ford, Rebecca Watson Horn, Lauren Anaïs Hussey, Blake O’Brien, Alyse Ronayne, Sarah Tortora and Ken Weathersby.
November 11 – December 10, 2023
Essex Flowers Gallery
19 Monroe St, NY NY 10002
Images by Garrett CarrollThe act of building networks is not unlike the act of stringing letters together to form a word or drawing lines between stars to create an image. Whether we look to a tomato-based or primordial soup to find meaning, it’s the act of connecting–ideas, artworks, histories–that builds meaning.
– E.E. Ikeler
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Something that Floats, Something that Sinks
Imagine the body as a loaf of bread and you are looking at one end of the loaf. As you remove each slice of bread, you can
see the entire surface of that slice from the crust to the centre. The crust skin or envelope has become an almost invisible
line. The eye is the only organ that pierces this line, but what matters is the dense interior, which is rendered like a new, more
complex facade (1).
Within this container reside objects that seem to be instilled with thoughts and emotions, which have been plucked from the
outside world, metabolised and given a new life in the form of memories. These impressions of the outer world are often-
times regurgitated back in the form of speech, writing or art.
Within the universe of things, artworks occupy a special status. They are meant to be looked at and thought about, not
touched and not used – transferred to the realm of noli me tangere (touch me not) (2). Imitating this set up, a cake in a
refrigerated glass vitrine provokes desire. When exposed to the greedy impulse of desire, the cake is transferred out to this
realm and back into the profane world, where it will be eaten with pleasure and digested in someone’s body (3).
Like a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick, the vitrine which both preserves and displays, is that which sets desire in motion.
A physical barrier that prevents the assimilation and consumption of that object, the unattainable lure or enticement of which
indefinitely prolongs its chase (4). Paradoxically, the most unattainable lure presents itself at the feet of the impossibility of
re-experiencing a memory. Vacuum sealed and laying dormant, memories are preserved in the environment of the uncon-
scious, triggered by external signals that can be a reminder of the thing or its lack, but never the actual thing itself.
Like objects in convex mirrors, fish in water behind glass bowls appear larger than they are. And our eyes, having evolved
underwater, developed elaborate systems of ducts and valves to maintain a surface of liquid smoothing imperfections in our
eyes imitating glass (5). Looking through glass renders the world through a visual primacy that heightens the definition of
what is behind it, leaving a trace of the shadowy onlooker’s reflection as its counterpart.
“Is she … dead?” asked one dwarf.
“She doesn’t seem to be alive…” said a second.
And so the dwarfs made a glass coffin for their beloved friend.
Snow White lay there for over a year: through spring, summer, autumn and winter. (6)
(5). Contemporary Art Writing Daily (2021) Anti-ligature rooms. GB: Cabinet, London, Plea, Copenhagen.
(6). Greenway, J. and Augenstine, E. (1995) Snow White. London: Leopard Books.
They set it on a table in a beautiful part of the forest, surrounded by flowers.
-Marina Moro
(1). Book on visualising, posted by someone on instagram, found on the ground.
(2). ‘Noli me tangere (‘touch me not’) is the Latin version of a phrase spoken, according to John 20:17, by Jesus to Mary Magdalene when
she recognized him after his resurrection. In asking Mary Magdalene not to touch him, Jesus indicates that once the resurrection is
accomplished, the link between human beings and his person must no longer be physical, but must be a bond of heart to heart.’ – Bieringer,
R; B. Baert; K. Demasure (2016) “Noli mi tangere” in interdisciplinary perspective. Bristol, CN: Peeters.
(3). Fischli, P. (2022) Peter Fischli, David Weiss Snowman. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König.
(4). Lacan, J. (1981) The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis. New York: W.W. Norton.
Perpetual Dawn can be experienced and imagined. It occurs in the white nights near the polar circles in
summer, it can be associated with a feeling of standstill, of an intermediate realm, of time suspended.
Somnambulists can experience this feeling at other times of the year, a feeling of not being awake and not
being able to sleep. The time of dawn can also exert pressure and shorten the time. Sometimes we feel it as a
surreal and ambivalent state between threat and hope or between the fear of the morning that brings the
inevitable and the joyful expectation that this transitory state is over and everything will be fine again.
Funny / Sad
Ian Bruner, Don Elektro, Halo
Curated by Rhizome Parking Garage
October 14 – December 11, 2023
Plague Space
Krasnodar, Russia
-In
the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is
drawing it into its worthless totality. To laugh at something is always to
deride it, and the life which, according to Bergson, in laughter breaks through
the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric life, self-assertion prepared to
parade its liberation from any scruple when the social occasion arises. Such a
laughing audience is a parody of humanity. (141) Adorno
Imprisoned or
cloistered within the liquid amber of vectoral control, laughter’s dialectic
flattens out into yet another data point, to be archived, packaged, and sold,
in obscured transactions, that remain unknowable to the laugher. The vector
abolishes both interiority and exteriority, an entanglement seemingly without
the possibility of escape, a collapse of freedom into its opposite, that of,
pure identity. Without access to an outside, both in the classical sense
imposed by capitalism, and within the inexorability of vectoral society, the
question of laughter’s ability to be reconciliatory appears likely impossible.
Yet still somehow we must go on laughing in this sadness, and perhaps become in
moments non-Identical to ourselves, transforming into the clown. The clown who
operates through a rejection of instrumentalized rationality, who in their
parody and absurdity open a space of fleeting non-reification.
Algorithmic logic
operates through functionalities that establish homogenized forms of pure
identity, and equivalence. To operate (which is to be operated on) within the
parameters of vectoral-society a coercive submission to algorithmic logic must
be succeeded by an unquestioned nakedness, to be stripped by reason, and forced
into pornograhpic stances. A forced dissolution through the equivalence of
interiority and exteriority. All direction is replaced by a rhizome of incomprehensibility,
divided by an asymmetrical power. Terms and conditions that without acceptance
(which is now a form of non-acceptance) morph into resistance and void.
The labyrinthine
psychological structures built into the network and its apparatuses, nudge,
direct, predict, and monitor, our movements, emotions, and thoughts. Laughter
does not lay outside this.
Nothing seems to be viewable
past the glaring walls of the culture industry which is now teethed with data,
and flows from within. The separation between ideology, and reality has long
since eroded, and pressed tightly within in this confinement, we are numbed
without feeling or thought. In the absence of autonomy vectorial control
spreads and covers, replacing sensation with tantalization.
The tantalus laughing
is not acting out of a spontaneous self-circulatory catharsis, nor is there
access to anything outside of the capitalist and vectoral structures. The
tantalus laughing does so in relation to the structures of social-order, an
order that is contradictory, and not wholly graspable. Which according to
Adorno gives laughter an indeterminable and dialectic ability. The terms of
wrong laughter and reconciliatory laughter do not imply a binary but rather
ways in which power is affected. However, Adorno could not have anticipated
vectoral-society and its level of extractive control, of which no behavior,
emotion, thought or action is free. Laughter loses its possible revolutionary
substance when the subject is rendered into a tantalus, interfaced, and without
movement.
Wrong laughter is a
spectrum, and often resembles reconciliatory laughter.
A scene described in
“Racecraft: the soul of inequality in America.” by Barbara J. Fields and Karen
Fields, shows a perfect example of how wrong laughter mimics that of
reconciliatory laughter. The story is about two boys who are playing together,
at a point the two boys go up to the adults and say look we are twins, at this
the adults say it can’t be possible for one boy is white and the other black,
to which the white boy replies that his friend is not black, but rather his
friend is brown. This statement causes the adults to laugh, the laughter would
seem spontaneous and attributed by the adults, as a laughter celebrating the
innocence of children and congratulating that they are raising children who are
thoughtful, and not racist. However, the laughter of the adults reinscribes
racism , and therefore race, and confirms to the boys that they are
fundamentally different due to the coloration of their skin, and binaries such
as black, and white, are undeniable truths.
On the opposite end of
the spectrum of wrong laughter is the laughter such as officer Daniel Auderer’s
laughter, at the death of Jaagnavi Kandula, when she was hit by another officer
driving a squad car. Auderer laughter is laughter resonated from an actor of
pure identity. Poisoned by individuation Auderer cannot understand the
impossibility of his stance, as it is turned in against him, and he is already
dead. His laughter mimics reconciliation, as he laughs thinking he has escaped
the logic of political correctness, and mortality, as if his laughter
originates outside of the social order, as if he is free of the other. Unaware
that his laughter has negated his egress, for Auderer’s laughter further forces
his eyes to seal over and over and over.
The medical bath of
fun so long ago manufactured by the culture industry now remains infused to
every degree imaginable, and the river that imprisoned flows from within. The
most lucrative companies have established chief happiness officers, tasked with
keeping employees happy, as it is now known a happier worker is 12% more
productive, and the estimated cost of “illness and absenteeism” is around 5
billion. With this in mind and the coming age of ubiquitous computing, facial
tracking, and artificial intelligence, laughter’s usefulness will gather mass
and meaning. As a result of pan-data collection and analysis, emotions have
become externalized and mapped, cut into micro-phenomenon and detached from the
feeler. Extracted psychological functions, human behavior and emotional
phenomena, act the way deep sea animals do when brought to the surface, the
cells rupture. In this breakdown a vacuum is created, and replaced by a new
structure organized in vectoral lines.
The behavior surplus
is often touted as a positive benefit of vectoral society, enhancing experience
and satisfaction. The self-fulfilling subject is both a prudent and industrious
actor of the social-order, and in their complicity, and resolution, are reaffirmed
of their good quality under law and market, they therefore feel confident that
their nakedness portrays nothing they are unwilling to show. And even those
unwilling are subject to the same procedure in accordance with the vector. All
users must submit. Vectoral dominance of the dividual is not only subjectgation
of body, and mind but of choice and futures.
The clown offers a
possibility of creating fleeting moments of non-refined, non-instrumental
action and feeling. Due to the clown’s rejection of the status-quo and it’s
foundation of extractive rationality, the clown has the ability to reverse the
contradictions back onto the system that remains whole within its
dissimilarities. This moment, or action, or emotion, is fleeting, and cannot
resolve the issues that it arises. Of course as Adorno has already stated
“Philosophy is the most serious of things, but then again it is not all that
serious”, and which is what give’s philosophy its clownish aspects and
therefore it’s very essence. The clown negates identity, and therefore, negates
the logic of individuation, which is the needed element to be intertwined
within the vector. In the non-identity of the clown, we can find the embodiment
of reconciliation, by removing the gap between the self and the object, the
clown momentarily creates a unity. This however is not a sustainable solution
and there are no actions an individual can enact to become a self fulfilling
subject, as the implication of a “self fulfilling” subject is part of what
makes the subject subjugated, and tethered to, the asymmetries of power.
Chanterelle
Lara Joy Evans, Erik Frydenborg, Justin Ortiz, Vincent Pocsik, Lenard Smith, Torbjörn Vejvi
November 3 – December 17, 2023
Images courtesy of ASHES/ASHES
Immediately adjacent to the Monterey Street on-ramp to U.S. Route
101 in the city of San Luis Obispo, California, sits the remains of the
Milestone Mo-Tel (or Motel Inn), the world’s first “motor hotel.” The Mission
Revival complex provided lodging to drivers on the journey between Los Angeles
and San Francisco from 1925 to 1991. After years of disuse, most of the motel
was demolished in 2006. Today, one finds an extant three-tier belltower and the
typical stucco archways wrapping the refurbished but unused former office
space. A few steps away, along the perimeter of the original footprint, also
stands a section of wall, the aged façade of what once was the motel’s
restaurant. Cream-colored and measuring roughly five meters wide by one-story
tall, it is disconnected from any other part of the structure and supported
instead by five metal poles attached to wood braces. As one merges onto the
highway, they pass this curious fragment of early twentieth-century Southern
California vernacular—with its arch, a few terracotta roof tiles, a large
window, and a stylized belfry—just floating in an abandoned lot like the one
column left standing on the site of an ancient Greek temple.
Rather than being part of an official historic location, the wall has spent over a decade in its liminal state as an
isolated architectural snippet manipulated to stay on display as a kind of
structural excerpt. Most preservation projects in the United States invite
close consideration in some form—this property is fenced off and usually
glimpsed at 90 kilometers per hour. The wall does not preserve so much as
imply, and this prompts a different kind of viewing.
When I think of the work of artist Thea Moeller (since initially
becoming familiar in 2015), this edificial remnant is the first thing that
comes to mind. Moeller’s sculpture practice involves objects put into various
forms of tension or equilibrium, objects re-presented, objects only slightly
altered, and objects examined under changed circumstances from which they
originated, often in the space of a white-wall gallery. Seeing her art
inevitably involves asking how physical extracts are interacting with and
within a new context.
From the perspective of someone who teaches art history through
the lens of Los Angeles, there has been a tendency on my part to reach to
assemblage of the 1950s and 1960s for comparisons to Moeller’s process. The
gathering and repurposing inherent to her sculptural practice—sometimes for
immediate usage and other times saving for the right occasion—recalls for me
the stories of Betye Saar combing flea markets or Ed Kienholz visiting junk
yards, finding the items that would morph into the features of art to come. And
there were Angeleno artists at that time who also modified industrial materials
(akin to Moeller’s use of rubber, sheet metal, and steel) or made similar moves
as her between the scale of the gallery and that of other architectures, such
as Noah Purifoy. But assemblage work of that era was much further assembled
into configurations that transformed the elements. Moeller places
components—leaning them, pulling them, balancing them, reinstalling them, or,
at the most heavy-handed, fusing a limited number of connections between them
or applying lacquer—more so than constructing something. Hers
is a lighter-touch approach that suggests the possibility of some next step
that gallery goers are not yet privy to. That is not a suggestion that one day
all of her sculptures will amass into some mega piece, but rather that viewing
Moeller’s exhibitions involves absorbing the current situation and wondering if
this is the final state of these artworks. Analogous to the motel wall, one
imagines something to come as much as what is presented.
Back along the highway, there are other such instances when approaching
and passing roadside attractions. “World’s largest” whatevers dot desert
landscapes, drawing attention for their respective novelties but without any
particular relation to the next one after. Since the road is then an unedited
collection of short stories rather than a novel, one views each “must see” on
its own terms, especially over time. Multiple drives across Kansas or equally
flat expanses provoke pondering of “what ifs”. Could that huge ball of twine
finally roll away? What happens here if someone makes a more gigantic pistachio
elsewhere? But the attractions with simplicity in their gestures similar to
Moeller’s sculpture—positioning, suspension—raise the most questions. Ever
since the group Ant Farm took ten old Cadillacs and stuck them at an angle
nose-first in a field in Amarillo, Texas, the cars have acquired new paint jobs
and graffiti regularly, appearing changed with each new trip. When will one of
them finally tip over, or be washed away by flash flooding, or be stolen? While
Twin Arrows, Arizona, became abandoned, its two monumental, red-and-yellow
wooden arrows (each seven-and-a-half meters tall) stood perched as a landmark
the same as they had for decades. Then one of them finally fell over, as many
probably thought might happen eventually. Even still, looking today at the
widowed arrow hanging on with the other lying flat beside it, one wants to
speculate: Will someone put it back up? Will it sit there and just erode?
Text by Anthony Carfello
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MRZB Una Decade nella Tana: a Numb Need, a Flesh Flicker
11.10.2023 – 25.11.2023
Baleno International
Via Montecuccoli 11G
Una Decade nella Tana: a Numb Need, a Flesh Flicker is a new body of work presented by MRZB at Baleno International for their first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Conceived as an experimental collage of silver gelatin photography, video, performance, sculpture, writing, the work consists of a two channel video installation, I Killed My Father, I Ate Human Flesh, I Quiver With Joy (Kaspar’s Lunatic Remedies), and a photographic diptych, Le Derive di Kaspar (I Tremolii della Carne) and Le Derive di Kaspar (88 Vegas).
I Killed My Father, I Ate Human Flesh, I Quiver With Joy (Kaspar’s Lunatic Remedies), follows the dérive of Kaspar, between the continuous non-landscape of the Po Valley in Lombardy and a series of enclosed, marginal, liminal and abandoned spaces. The music, arranged by the artist and composer Rin Suemitsu is performed by artists Ivan Cheng and Jette Loona Hermanis.
In Le Derive di Kaspar (I Tremolii della Carne, 88 Vegas) gelatin silver prints on baryta paper are a backdrop to sculptural inserts. These works function as ghostly filmic, narrative traces, memento mori, accumulation of insignias of death and decay, death by overload. Le Derive di Kaspar (88 Vegas) depicts an abandoned buffet, middle-class fetish, staged, emptied and left to itself; in Le Derive di Kaspar (I Tremolii della Carne) close-ups of the character stand in the foreground accompanied by intimate objects, dresses and body parts, hairs, hand and arms, a powdered face.
Una Decade nella Tana: a Numb Need, a Flesh Flicker flirts with genre cinema, pulp and horror, amplifying the dramatic fragmentary grotesque story of the character in a slapstick, alternating interior monologues and mortiferous litanies, glamorous and gothic, photographic decompositions, stagings, scene studies, diaristic writings, poetic and literary appropriations.
My reading normally tends towards essays, and in
recent years I have come across books that included double axis diagrams,
graphically representing certain contents. They were essays by Carlo M.
Cipolla, Michel Serres and Viktor E. Frankl
Carlo M. Cipolla, Italian
historian, presented his graph in a humorous essay called The Basic laws of Human Stupidity, which was initially circulated
solely among friends, but ended up being published widely and translated into several languages. The graph represents
how the interaction between two people is
based on the naivety, intelligence, stupidity or evil of both parties. It
is obviously an ironic proposal, because the complexity of human relations
cannot be reduced to such a simple scheme.
Michel Serres also uses irony in Le Parasite. Among other things,
parasite designates the interferences or noises that occur in telecommunications,
and he uses this meaning to exemplify the difficulty of communication between
two people. Something is always lost between speaker 1 and speaker 2,
because «in order to hear the message alone, one would have to be identical to
the sender».
Viktor E. Frankl doesn´t speak directly about human
relations, but does so about the meaning of life, what would be found, he asks,
in something or someone beyond oneself. Among the several graphical schemes he
used in his texts, the image employed here shows a sinusoidal curve hidden
between two planes, that wouldn´t be visible from all points of view.
The diagrams could have been more, or from other
authors. As well as sharing both axes, what unifies the three of them is having
come across my path, in a non premeditated derivative that ends up reflecting
the conductive line of my interests. These readings have been one work material
more in the studio, marking the reference point for the group of objects and
drawings that are here presented.
Oier
Iruretagoiena (Basque Country – Spain, 1988) lives and works
in Bilbao. He started off his creative practice in experimental music before
expanding to sculpture, interventions in the public space and text. He uses
readily available materials and mediums, leaving evidence of the process and of
the inner material composition of the works in the final result. His work
accrues various layers of meaning and references touching on recurring
interests which range from rural and religious imaginaries to dystopias, and it
is also characterized by a search for the discordances produced in the
ambivalence of ironic distance.
He graduated with a BA in Fine Art from UPV-EHU in
2011, including an exchange with Universitat de Barcelona, and in 2018 he took
part in the WIELS residency programme in Brussels. He has had solo shows at
CarrerasMugica gallery in Bilbao (2023, 2019 and 2015), at Ana Mas Projects
gallery in Barcelona (2022), at San Telmo Museum in Donostia-San Sebastián
(2021), and at the Halfhouse space in Barcelona (2014), among others. He has
also exhibited his work in various group shows: “The Point of Sculpture” at
Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (2021), “Generación 2020” at La Casa Encendida
in Madrid (2020), “Le Petit Cercle Bruxellois” at Institut de Carton in Brussels
(2019), “Bi Dos Two” at Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao (2018), “Cale, cale, cale!
Caale!!!” at Tabakalera in Donostia-San Sebastián (2017), and “Otzan” at
Galería Elba Benítez in Madrid (2016). In addition, from 2011 to 2020 he was
one of the coordinators of Club Le Larraskito in Bilbao, and from 2020 to 2023
he wrote a column for the basque newspaper Berria.
Soft Teeth Hard Gaze
Charlotte Klobassa, Panos Papadopoulos
October 27 – November 25, 2023
Zeller van Almsick
Franz-Josefs-Kai 3/16, 1010
Wien, Austria
Mother and child, divided
Two portraits. A woman with an enigmatic smile. A child on the cusp of adolescence. Our impression, on walking into the room, is of having interrupted something. And yet both figures appear entirely indifferent to our presence. The woman’s gaze disregards us entirely, and while the self-deprecation in her expression suggests she fears being caught in the act of looking, it is not by us. The upper part of the child’s face is obscured. Is it a bandage over their eyes? One of the long fringes behind which teenagers hide? A headset, immersing them in some other reality? Or a shadow cast by an object (or person) outside the frame of the painting? Is it they who cannot see us, or we who cannot see them?
We are not accustomed to the subjects of portraits being aware of each other. One doesn’t expect the protagonist of one painting in the National Gallery to stare longingly across the room at another on the far wall. Rather we presume that the figures captured in paintings should look out at the viewer, solicit our attention, make a spectacle of their personalities. The frame of a canvas thus serves like a stage on which to perform themselves to us. If the painting is not in this sense “theatrical,” then it should instead evoke what Michael Fried has called “absorption.” That is, its figures should be so engrossed in their own activities that they are oblivious to everything else, including the beholder. Like an animal trapped in a glass box so that we might safely observe their behaviour.
The problem here is that the woman is not performing for the viewer, nor is she immersed in a book or a musical instrument or any other object within the established bounds of her reality. Instead, she is preoccupied by the materially separate world in which her child is enclosed. Yet it seems she would prefer this were not noticed. Her head is tilted away from her child, as if she were looking casually over her shoulder (the intensity of her gaze is betrayed by that bulging right eye), and her ironic smile suggests she is aware of seeming overbearing. There is the sense that she is resisting the urge to reach over.
Because the child is lost in their own world. And while the nature of this world is obscure, it occurs to me that the shadow that renders them inscrutable to us might be something other than a shroud or screen. Instead, it might that they have not fully emerged from the iridescent black landscape against which both mother and child are pictured. It is not that the child’s vision is obscured so much as that he or she has not yet fully individuated themselves from the circumstances—emotional, physical, psychological—that condition but do not determine every adult’s identity. They are wrapped up in that world; they might even see it more clearly.
But like all speculations on the relationship between a mother and her child, this is guesswork. The viewer can be sure of only a few things. This is a study in two parts of separation. And while the mother’s gaze establishes a tentative bridge between the two discrete worlds they inhabit, we can be certain that we are excluded from both. The relationship between these two paintings is characterised by a combination of tenderness, pain, love, loss, self-discovery, and self-denial that can never wholly be understood by any third party. The feeling remains that we are intruders in this scene.
Ben Eastham
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Soft teeth hard gaze. Of human essence and modern portraits.
Two divergent forms of a modern approach to the classical subject of the portrait open up surprising perspectives both in form and content in the double exhibition „Soft teeth hard gaze“ with works by Charlotte Klobassa and Panos Papadopoulos. They break open traditional schemes of our idea of human likenesses, present alternative concepts, and in the process raise numerous questions whose echoes reverberate in the paintings of the two artistic positions that at first glance seem so different. What constitutes our personality at its core? How can this human essence be depicted? How do external factors change our inner life and have an effect on our view of the world as well as on that of our counterpart?
In Panos Papadopoulos‘ portraits against a dark background, the altered perspective is evident in the fact that it is often deliberately obscured. A nearly black area covers the forehead and eye area of the young adult‘s face. Is it hair behind which the young person shyly hides, or is it a painterly metaphor for the increasing escapism of a generation growing up against the backdrop of increasingly frequent global crises? Here, the individual is not represented in the typical manner of a classical portrait but rather according to their emotional state. The idea of the face as a mirror of the soul is intensified here, with the inner self of the person being incorporated into the painterly composition. This emotionally charged form of portraiture is further heightened in the portrayal of the girl with braided hair. The figure averts her gaze from the viewer and looks into the darkness of an uncertain future. Her doubts and fears manifest in the tension between dynamism and restraint that permeates her form.
Darkness also envelops the portrait of the woman, whose depiction evokes reminiscences of motherly figures from the art historical canon. Thus, once again, it is not the specific image of a person but rather their emotional state that is the subject of the painting. This mother shares with her art historical counterparts the concern evident in her expressive gaze, intensified by the significantly larger right eye. Just as Mary gazes anxiously at the future of Christ, the gaze of this mother is filled with loving fear. Humanity transcends the centuries and alters our perspective, our era shaped by globalization and climate change leads to its increasing intensity.
This intensity is also found in the form of perceptive vision and its effects on the human psyche in the paintings of Charlotte Klobassa. Surprisingly, her images do not display abstract gestures. Instead, they are meticulously constructed reproductions of found and her own scribbles, unconscious doodles. The artist appropriates them by reproducing them on a large scale in oil on canvas. The result forms an equivalent to Papadopoulos‘ portraits. In Klobassa‘s work, just as in Papadopoulos‘, the inner self of the individual finds an external representation, with their emotional state becoming the subject of the image. The unconscious, which breaks through in the „portrayed“ doodles, tells more about the person than their conscious self, as it forms the basis on which consciousness can take root. Unfortunately, we rarely listen to it, and only nighttime teeth grinding is often an indication that more is at work within us, influencing our emotional state, than we care to admit. News consumed through the media, subjective worries, or fears are filtered and stored during wakefulness, only to be processed further at night or at dawn when consciousness slumbers. Klobassa subjects this uncontrollable aspect to an analysis in her portraits, painted with delicate brushstrokes, thereby removing its threatening potential and transforming it back into what it truly is: a part of human essence.
In Klobassa‘s and Papadopoulos‘ work, the portrait no longer serves as an impression of the external image of the individual but as an expression of their inner
state. In the unusual formal dialogue that emerges between Papadopoulos‘ dark figurative paintings and Klobassa‘s bright, abstract-seeming works evidence that uncharted artistic paths lie open for the genre of portraiture. In the case of this exhibition, one thing is certain: these paths lead to images that do not merely show people but, on the contrary, allow us to feel them. The gaze of the two artists penetrates beneath the surface of their subjects, seeing what lies beneath and portraying it in their own unique ways. It is now up to us as viewers to return that gaze and not lose sight of the humanity displayed here.
Anne Simone Krüger, 2023
The exhibition title is a line from Nina Habias’ poem “Your little head is brighter…”, 1922. Five real stories of love and crushes of different people from various generations meet up in one artistic space. The works of the five artists connect these stories on different sensual levels. Naivety collides with seriousness, rudeness with tenderness, and despair with faith. In the end, love must conquer all confusion! It is multifaceted and complex and it is everywhere. There is no need to speak, it is worth feeling.
Outraged by Pleasure
Curated by Nadja Argyropoulou
Curatorial Assistant: Adrianos Efthymiadis
PARTICIPANTS:
Antoinetta Angelidi, Patricia Apergi & Aerites Dance Company, Tosh Basco, The Callas (Lakis Ionas & Aris Ionas), Daglara, Sofia Dona, Navine G. Dossos with James Bridle, Georgia Fambris, Family Business, iLiana Fokianaki (with Danae Io, Harun Farocki, Mary Zygouri), FYTA, Ιoanna Gerakidi (with Yianna Charachlianni, Leah Clements, Anna Savvatopoulou), Pinelopi Gerasimou, Hypercomf, Dimitris Ioannou, Xenia Kalpaktsoglou with [Pegy Zali, Sofoklis Koutsourelis, Panagiotis Lianos] and Athina Koumparouli, Lito Kattou, Dionisis Kavallieratos, Blaise Kirschner, Katerina Komianou, Konstantinos Ladianos, LALA, Kostas Lambridis, Iris Lykourioti, Irini Miga, Rashaad Newsome, Nionia Films (Maria F. Dolores, Sofia Dona, Alkisti Efthymiou, Smaro Papaevangelou), Malvina Panagiotidi, Aggelos Papadimitriou, Eva Papamargariti, Agnieszka Polska, Filipa Ramos (with Rosalind Fowler, Goutam Ghosh & Jason Havneraas, Mariana Murcia, Lea Porsager, Ani Schulze), Teos Romvos & Chara Pelekanou, Kostas Sfikas, Gabriella Simossi, Panos Sklavenitis, Kostis Stafylakis & Theo Triantafyllidis, Nancy Stamatopoulou (with Nicoleta Chatzopoulou, Makis Faros, Tassos Vrettos), Eva Stefani, Valinia Svoronou, Temporary Academy of Arts, Eleni Tomadaki, Thanassis Totsikas, Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou / Bunny, VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis), Marina Velisioti, Nikos Velmos, Hypatia Vourloumis (with Jackie Abhulimen, MAENADS (Eleni Ikoniadou, Aliki Leftherioti, Afroditi Psarra), Maria F. Dolores, Maria Sideri, Taka Taka), Iria Vrettou, Rea Walldén, Marie Wilson-Valaoritis (with Zoe Valaoritis & Katerina Valaoritis)
Sept. 29 – Nov. 12, 2023
“Nobel” building – cultural space in the City of Chalandri,
Ivis 30 & Tymphristou, 152 34 Chalandri
In a letter dated September 29, 1962, writer Nikos Kachtitsis (1926–1970) addresses his friend Epameinondas Ch. Gonatas (1924–2006), writer of O Taxidiotis [The Traveller] (1945), with dismay at the latter’s doubts about the aforementioned debut short story of his:
“…I am stunned by your cruel and dismissive manner vis-à-vis this little masterpiece of yours, which made me outraged by pleasure [exo frenon apo efcharistisi] … while the entire work is based on the absence of even the slightest plausibility, at no time is the reader not assured that all of this is real.”
The exhibition and events titled outraged by pleasure start from the ambivalent co-existence of outrage and pleasure in this paradoxical utterance within the sociocultural, literary and political context of its times, and moves on to explore what the phrase may mean in the present and in the future and in relation to the fields of life and art amidst various crises and urgencies.
Outraged by pleasure tries to make sense, with and through all that participates in it, of pleasure in its shapeshifting and multiversality within current “outrageous” circumstances: complex artistic practices, fights and assertions related to gender and sexuality, activist initiatives, communal (re)formations, a tidal turn to conservative politics and the painful fail of progressive ones, a pervading feel of doom-and-gloom induced by the destruction of the natural environment, the rapid reign of immaterial communications and digital economics, the extraordinary normalization of inequalities.
Outraged by pleasure wishes to trace the possibility of another connection to joy, delight, excitement, enjoyment; to imagine into existence the possibility of reclaiming “outrageous pleasure” from the technocapitalist imaginary and its diminishing futurology, from the far right’s macho perversion of wildness, from colonialist-type censorial abuses within woke- culture claims, from all-levelling practices of commoning and institutional appropriations.
Outraged by pleasure wishes to examine the (re)connection of pleasure to post-growth practices of environmental care and social justice; to processes of descaling and mutuality; to reconsiderations of an architecture of enjoyment; to queer approaches of care, generosity, solidarity; to native traditions and anti-colonial movements (such as buen vivir, quilombismo, etc.); to humour as a transformative power of subversion (as this appears in the work of Sara Ahmed and Silvia Federici); to rewilding and the untamed “aesthetics of bewilderment” (Jack Halberstam); to the ecstatic accuracy (found in Kachititsis’s “rabid readings,” in Gonatas’s “literature of subversion,” in the hitherto unknown paintings of pioneer filmmaker Antoinetta Angelidi, in the surrealistic visionary works of Marie Wilson- Valaoritis, in the political aesthetics of Kostas Sfikas’s cinema, in the solitary experience of Thanasis Totsikas’s craftsmanship, in the collectively-developed-over-many-years activism of Teos Romvos and Chara Pelekanou for the salvation of the insular environment); to the complex sense of reciprocity described by Michael Taussig; to the ambiguity of inconvenient objects such as the jumping beans that drove a wedge between Caillois and Breton; to Michel Serres’s “marvellous trampoline”; to the detection of radical futurisms attempted by T. J. Demos; etc.
Outraged by pleasure unfolds in space as a convivial collective study, with the intense physicality, the disquieting mood and unhierachical emergence of the questions it poses: How often do insurrectionary dynamics turn into guilt, or transform into (self-)punitive didacticism, paralyzing grief, numbness, or even neoliberal self-improvement technologies and soft philosophies, in the face of the relentless politics of destruction and the cosmogony that legitimize and prolong them? How do friendship, love, solidarity, radical pedagogy, the perception of multiple shades, the “from the bottom up” demands materialize today, in the various different contemporary circumstances and possibilities of affirmation, denial, representation? How does the phrase “outraged by pleasure” translate into different linguistic environments and hence different philosophical worldviews or cognitive approaches (e.g. enjoyment, jouissance, etc.), or how could it be perceived beyond the boundaries of language? What might be the stance towards it of independent entities and initiatives of the public sphere (the “dark matter” according to Gregory Sholette)? How can we even perceive “outraged by pleasure” in the more-than-human world?
Outraged by pleasure is conceived, and will attempt to unfold, as a world of many worlds, an oddkin created by all invited people and entities, with or without material characteristics. Invited artists and curators from Greece and abroad co-shape and co-animate its “outraged by pleasure” body in many different directions.
Outraged by pleasure will be held in the half-finished, under-construction “Nobel” building in Chalandri, a space that is associated with both the idiosyncratic desire of its founder George Markou (1946–2017) and, primarily, the resilient persistence of the City of Chalandri to claim its socially and culturally extrovert presence (something that was already marked by the interdisciplinary event “The Forest’s Riddle,” September 2022–January 2023).
The program of events, attached hereto, will be successively updated in detail. It includes performances, tributes on queer initiatives and collectives, film screenings in special curatorial groups, performative speeches on social ecology and degrowth, musical events, etc. It will be updated during the course of the show.
A detailed description of each curatorial intervention will be included in the exhibition’s leaflet.
Visual Identity and Print Material: Eva Papamargariti
Audiovisual Design and Installation: Makis Faros, Antonis Gkatzougiannis Contributing Architect: Sofia Tektonidou
Εvents Αssistant: Stephanie Orati
Lighting Design: Nikos Vlasopoulos
Text Editing: Fotini Pipi
Transport and Installation of Artworks: Move Art
Insurance: Karavias Underwriting Agency S.A.
Production: Laika Productions, AtoZ communication & strategy P.C.C.
The works of Nikos Velmos are exhibited courtesy of The American College of Greece Art Collection, Gift of Takis Efstathiou
Organization: City of Chalandri
Sponsor: FLYA, Municipal SA for the Management of the City of Chalandri’s Real Estate Sponsor: Karavias Underwriting Agency S.A.
*Photos: Tassos Vrettos
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/outraged-by-pleasure-at-nobel-building-cultural-space-athens-greece-1.jpg
No Self Control
Participating artists: Dafni Atha, Katerina Komianou, Cecilie Skov, Leontios Toumpouris, Corinna Triantafyllidis, Carlos Zorromono
Curated by Dinos Chatzirafailidis
November 3 – December 2, 2023
Supported by: CURRENT Athens, Danish Arts Foundation, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Culture of Denmark, Municipality of Logroño
Space52,
Larnakos 28, Athens 104 46 |
No Self Control is a conflation between intimacy and inaccessibility. The exhibition transcends binary oppositions and strives for an in-between state that resonates with both the self and that which appears to be threatening to the self. Through the juxtaposition of different codes of abjection, it examines the fragility of the subject’s physical integrity and probes the more bestial aspects of their ego. Found somewhere between fascination and repulsion, this intuitive state builds on an emotive site that frustrates reason and deconstructs established meanings.
The exhibited artworks encourage the viewer to confront knowledge about the limits of their own bodies in palpable and visceral ways and demand an embodied response. This is a different kind of call from the one initiated by art that puts the viewer in a spectatorial position leading them to have a relationship with an object. Rather, it is a question of a solicitation to subjectivity, in which the artwork positions the viewer in an ethical relation that calls for their mercy, their grief, or their awe. Such aesthetic practice demands that viewers open up to the affective power of art and allow themselves to be moved by it. This idea builds upon feminist contributions to trauma studies by writers such as Jill Bennett (Empathetic Vision), Griselda Pollock (After-affects and aesthetic transformation) and Bracha L. Ettinger (Art as Encounter-Event).
Other works ignite a distressing dialogue between the body of the viewer and the materiality of the object, creating associations that can affect the spectator on a psychosomatic level. They are made by artists who utilize processes and materials to subvert conventional definitions of the socially sanctioned representation of human anatomy. Such pieces tap into the organic qualities of their materials, instigating a profound connection to the viewer’s living form. In this way, they disturb the viewer’s sense of their bodies’ spatial differentiation from the material object they are confronted with. Concerned with foreignness, they put a sense of claustrophobic smothering on the central stage, plumbing collective fears and anxieties.
Poster by: Pantelis Vitaliotis – Magneto
Piling Wreckage
Solo Show by Daria Irincheeva
October 13 – November 26, 2023
big screen
312 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY
big screen is pleased to present Piling Wreckage, a solo presentation debuting new works by Daria Irincheeva. The works will be on view from October 13 through November 12, 2023.
Irincheeva is a multimedia artist examining collective memory in the Soviet Union and present day Russia, with a current focus on the Russia-Ukrainian War. She often draws from her childhood memories during the USSR’s collapse as inspiration for her most significant artistic investigations. One such body of work is Empty Knowledge (part of which is on view) which consists of approximately 230 paintings. Irincheeva uses the canvas to partially recreate, or reinterpret, books and magazines from the former Soviet Union (initially from her family’s own library), with selected elements of the actual book’s graphic design omitted. This removal of certain design features references the outdated nature of much of that information and exists now as nothing more than an historic artifact. Most recently Irincheeva has expanded her Empty Knowledge series through exploring troves of books that were written by authors who the Soviet state imprisoned and/or killed in various detention centers, within the GULAG system, or simply shot at the edge of the mass graves, in which they were buried.
Daria Irincheeva (b. 1987; Leningrad, U.S.S.R.) lives and works in New York’s Hudson Valley. She graduated with an MFA from Columbia University and has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include: Continuous Function, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia (2019); Empty Knowledge, Christie’s Moscow, Russia (2017); Circadian Rhythm, Postmasters Gallery, New York, NY (2014). Recent group presentations include: Unsettled, New Collectors Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Oficina, Dilalica space, Barcelona, Spain (2021); Time, Forward!, 58th Venice Biennial, V-A-C Zattere, Venice, Italy (2019); Nature/Nature, Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna, Austria (2019). In 2020 Irincheeva was selected as one of 12 artists by the New York Times (alongside Torkwase Dyson, Cao Fei, and Tomashi Jackson) to reflect on the Financial Crisis in “12 Artists On: The Financial Crisis,” in T Magazine.
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| Simon Foxall, oil on canvas, 2022 |
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| Simon Foxall, Amoreuse, oil on canvas, 50×40 cm, 2022 |
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| Simon Foxall, Lilos on Lake Margherita, oil on canvas, 120×90 cm, 2023 |
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| Simon Foxall, Lilos on Lake Margherita, detail |
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| Simon Foxall, Lilos on Lake Margherita, detail |
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| Simon Foxall, Bianca Bontà, oil on canvas, 40×50 cm, 2023 |
I am a British artist, based in Italy (near Asti) since 2020, where I have my studio. I was born in Saudi Arabia in 1983, and grew up in rural Worcestershire (hills and green woodland) before completing a BA Fine Art Painting at Brighton University, and an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London. After living in Brighton (sea), London (city), Margate (sea) and Barcelona (sea and city), I finally returned to hills and green woodland, but this time in Piemonte rather than Worcestershire.
My work deals with queerness, otherness, surrealism and the grotesque while placing that conversation in a sense of tangible time and space. My work has always changed energy as I moved to different places, absorbing something of the spirit of an environment. A specificity of space and my feelings about it emerges in conversation with the cast of characters I populate these spaces with. At the moment they are all smiling, like we were told to do in photos as kids! I find smiling to be the most ambiguous facial expression.
The characters explore contemporary and classic iconography, melted together, inspired by pop culture, drag queens, celebrity, fetish-wear, cowboys, comedy, neo gothic, horror, fantasy and bad taste, heavily influenced by the simultaneously flamboyant and earnest imagery and of medieval, gothic and Neoclassical genres.
fields harrington and David L. Johnson make dispassionate work with a relentless clear minded logic that allows it to circumvent the tyranny of aesthetic discourse. Things as they are; non-metaphorical specific artifacts severed from an existing social, economic, scientific, or structural context. The specificity of the objects is so critical that we wonder if the system they were pulled from now has a hole in it, a structural flaw, a point where the whole enterprise might fail or collapse.
-David Hartt, September 2023
Gina Folly’s work focuses on everyday life, on the
interactions between the private and public space, between the intimate and
social realms. She takes a precise, ironic and subtly critical look at the
objects, messages and situations that surround us on a daily basis, which she
retains, photographs and isolates in order to modify them and transpose them
into the field of art. This gesture of appropriation, transformation and
exhibition questions their real function, their purpose and above all the
epistemological impact that these ordinary materials can have on our lives. She
dissects them in order to reveal their poetic and dramatic potential, and their
psychological and political impact.
The
objects chosen by Folly question our condition as human beings, catapulted into
an often hostile and coercive society. She endeavours to highlight the
intrinsic contradictions, the underlying and imperceptible violence, lurking in
all the signs of power that flood the social and political space, and
parasitise our lives.
Folly
chooses a variety of seemingly banal objects, such as boxes, electrical
circuits, chains, padlocks, light bulbs, fans, handles and locks, eyelets and
pregnancy tests. She extracts them from their context, transforms or duplicates
them, slightly modifying the materials, formats, colours or finish, and
recombines them with other objects, accentuating the feeling of constraint,
hindrance and confinement.
In
2019, she intervened in the public space for the Kunsthaus Baselland in Basel. Outside,
Folly installed a large photograph of a bookshelf belonging to a friend she had
stayed with. The title, Fashion, Sex and Death – Science – Sports, Gardens
and Conspicuous Consumption, simply transcribes the labels that are stuck
on the shelves, indicating the classification themes which group together the
words “fashion” and “sex” with “death,” “sport”
with “garden” and “conspicuous consumption.” Without
alteration, this labelling already suggests a commentary and a political
questioning. The framing of the photograph, a close-up on these few shelves, precludes
an overall or interior view, accentuating the feeling of suffocation already
induced by the themes chosen to arrange these books. This work is emblematic of
that which underpins Gina Folly’s work and determines its critical scope.
On
the occasion of this exhibition, she spoke about her work and her commitment in
a discussion with Inès Goldbach, the director of the Kunsthaus Baselland and the
curator of the exhibition, which appeared in the book Listening to Artists
(published by édition VfmK Verlag für moderne
Kunst,
2022):
“My works almost always generate from a photograph. I’m
keeping a sort of diary, mostly taken with my phone. I document my daily life
as an observer. They’re architectural structures, objects and social events
that make our daily life easier, disrupt it, make it more complicated, or ones
that I don’t understand. Especially because of that, it can become interesting
to document them. These moments mostly vanish again in my archive. I go back to
them when I’m working on a specific project. They result in mostly approbate
objects that I reproduce and specify. These processes are about entering
relationships. Be it getting to know the person who produced the object I’m
attracted to, or who knows the reason of its existence, or to find the right
producer to make exact replicas of the respective works.”
In
2023, for her series of photographs exhibited at the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart,
Gina Folly opted for a simple medium-format film camera with which she
photographed members of the Quasitutto association of retired people, which
offers all kinds of day-to-day support services. For another project, also in
Basel, she distributed small disposable cameras to a number of children, so
that they could take photos of their favourite works on display at the Basel
Social Club, the fair that took place during ArtBasel 2023. In these two
projects, the shooting is simple, on a 1:1 scale, with no aesthetic overkill, be
it in terms of the framing, image processing, gesture, intention, recording.
All of these parameters remain the most important, with no stylistic effects,
no aesthetic overkill, no technical, dramatic or sentimental effects. A simple
document, like an image seen in “real life,” whose recording method
perfectly reflects Folly’s desire to remain in the background.
This
absence of pathos allows viewers to project their own feelings, memories or
experiences onto these very neutral, open images. These “implicit”
images create an open space for appropriation and projection. Paradoxically,
they have a greater impact on viewers’ memories, making them more endearing.
The
objects chosen by Folly are often not commercial products; they are made or
transformed by their user for a very specific, functional, practical use; they
are inexpensive, devoid of luxury or decoration. Like the fountains for
refreshing coconuts that can be found on beaches. Built by the farmers
themselves – a kind of DIY –, adapted to their use and made with “the
means at hand.” The fountain exhibited in June 2023 at the entrance to the
Basel Social Club, during ArtBasel, was the perfect replica of one them.
Hans-Peter
Feldmann, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Fischli and Weiss, and even
Ed Ruscha have all worked in series, establishing a principle beforehand, a
subject for collection, a pretext for repetition, multiplication of images or
objects, made or appropriated, linked to everyday life. But whereas these
artists practised a distancing, offering us a glimpse of our world through the
prism a critical and necessary irony and scepticism, Gina Folly does not shy
away from a compassionate dimension, in an inclusive gesture, never looking
down on her subjects. By simply capturing everyday life, her environment and residual
micro-events, however minute they may be, her works always bear witness to a
society that is trying to maintain a precarious balance, a fairness and
humanity that are so often abused. This empathy and awareness of otherness is
the sign of a shift into another era.
As
part of her exhibition project at the Centre d’édition contemporaine, Gina
Folly will be producing an edition, a series of bouquets of preserved flowers
presented in cardboard boxes coated with a varnish that protects against
humidity and makes the boxes shiny. Each box bears an inscription, a very short
phrase found randomly on a horoscope application that predicts the day ahead:
slightly simplistic aphorisms, advice, judgements or trivial, absurd
prophecies, whose meaninglessness and naivety create a poetic or downright comedic
effect.
The
process of preserving the flowers in this edition consisted of replacing the
sap with glycerine, so that the plant retains a living appearance for many
years, without the need for any special care. Once the bouquet has been
preserved, no external intervention is required to ensure that the plants
retain their original freshness. They are protected from wilting, frozen in a
state of almost eternal flowering, but their colour is transformed: the petals
take on a light grey-pink tint, almost black and white. A light, subtle,
refined metaphor for the passage from life to art.
Gina
Folly’s second project for her exhibition at the CEC will feature a frame
containing a single sachet of seeds from the “Dolce Vita”
flower mix – a reference to the title of the exhibition. The name of the
mixture and the brand of these seeds, SELECT, allows Folly to intuitively and
emotionally put this existential and philosophical question into perspective.
What determines our choices, be they individual or collective? How does this
infinite multitude of choices – from belief in chance, to the notion of the
preconditioned unconscious, from chaos to consciousness and freedom of choice – influence our paths and our lives?
Gina
Folly was born in Zurich in 1983. She lives and works between Basel and Paris.
In recent years she has presented several solo exhibitions, including: Autofokus.
Manor Kunstpreis 2023, Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart, Basel (2023); Solo
presentation, Ermes Ermes, Paris Internationale, Paris (2019); Fashion, Sex
and Death – Science – Sports, Gardens and Conspicuous Consumption,
Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2019). Her work has also been shown in group
exhibitions such as: CITY SALTS: THE GINA SHOW, Salts, Basel (2022); WHIMSIES,
Essener Kunstverein, Essen (2022); THINK, AND THEN THINK AGAIN, Sgomento
Zurigo, Zurich (2022); ORCA – Duo-Show with Philipp Timischl, Fondation
Fiminco, Paris (2021); PRK-1U, Tonus, Paris (2021); A Part,
Kunstkredit, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2020); Reality Companions, Motto
Berlin, Berlin (2020); Groupshow, Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2019); life
and limbs, Swiss Institute, New York (2019).
Andrea Nacciarriti
Kappa-Nöun
Via Imelde Lambertini, 5
Photos: Carlo Favero
Tisch Abelow / Has Anyone Seen My Personality?
21 October – 18 November, 2023
Freddy
Harris, NY
When I woke up my apartment was black. The surfaces of the refrigerator, the couch, the kitchen table–everything had calcified into a hard, matte, shell. It was morning and I got out of bed to make tea. When I tried to turn on the burner, I found that the knobs of the stove wouldn’t turn, as if it were a plastic toy and this was all pretend. I began to panic. I thought this must be some sort of cruel joke, but more likely, I was dreaming. I needed to wake up to prove it was adream, but I was wide awake. More rested than I’d been in a long time. But if I was awake, it must be real. I attempted to take photos to have proof that this was actually happening, but my phone malfunctioned. I couldn’t prove it was real or a dream and a deep confusion began to envelop my sense of self. Would I calcify into this hardened, frozen surface, devoid of identity?
I wondered how I was going to make it to my opening if I lost the ability to turn the door knob and leave my apartment. I thought perhaps I should change my name to another artist’s name since I didn’t seem to know who I was anymore. Maybe Joe, something nondescript.
I walked into my bedroom and two of my friends were sitting on my bed talking. They were merely silhouettes against the backdrop of my now stiffened black sheets and pillows.
“Has anyone seen my personality?” I asked.
“When was the last time you had it?”
I paused. The question seemed to validate that it was, in fact, missing. I wondered how they could tell.
“Where is it going, where has it been?” the other friend asked.
My memory was fuzzy, nearly blank.
“I don’t recall,” I said. If I couldn’t remember, maybe I never had one. There was something weirdly comforting about that idea. If I didn’t have a personality to begin with, I couldn’t lose it. The sense of panic began to fade.
I looked down at my bare feet. I tried to walk back into the kitchen but my soles were glued to the floor, which had morphed from hardwood into slick, black, steel. I watched as my toes began to harden into some sort of synthetic plastic. It was almost willful as I let this new, unmovable texture consume my body. Could I wake myself up or was I trapped?
Tisch Abelow( b. 1985) earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2007 and her MA fromNew York Graduate School of Psychoanalysis in 2020. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
DUCATOPRIZE 2023 Contemporary art award
Photo courtesy: Flavio Pescatori
DucatoPrize, currently in its fourth edition, gets into full swing with the opening of the exhibition of the ten finalist artists. Born in 2019 from the desire of Michele Cristella, with the aim of promoting a dialogue between contemporary art and the territory of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza, the DucatoPrize focuses on artists, national and international, already known in the contemporary art world but also young people still enrolled at educational institutions in order to provoke, through their research, a critical reflection on the most significant and urgent aspects of the present. In fact, it is divided into two sections: Contemporary and Academy, in order to give space both to those artists who have already started their career in the art world and to the experimentations of emerging artists.
The new and refreshed 2023 edition includes for the first time an artistic director, curator Giacomo Pigliapoco, who is responsible for both the artistic direction and strategic management of the Prize, particularly the planning and strengthening of its activities, the curatorship of the finalists’ exhibition, and the production of the printed issue.
Besides this, DP23 sees important new features. Among the applying artists, 50 artists are selected to become part of this edition’s catalog. From these, 5 finalists are chosen for both categories, Contemporary and Academy, for a total of 10 artists featured in the final exhibition and 2 winners, one for each category. A further innovation is the establishment of a Residency Prize that will see the selected artist spend a month in the spaces of IRIS Project in Venice Beach – LA, California (USA).
The jury of the prize is totally renewed with each edition and is composed of personalities with a strong international outlook. This edition in particular sees the involvement of: Julieta Aranda, artist and co-director of the e-flux platform; Nerina Ciaccia, creator, together with Antoine Levi, of the Ciaccia Levi Gallery, Paris, Milan; Luigi Fassi, director of Artissima, Turin; Stéphane Ibars, director and chief curator of La Collection Yvon Lambert, Avignon; Bernardo Mosqueira, arti director of Solar dos Abacaxis in Rio de Janeiro and ISLAA Curator at the New Museum, New York.
The winners’ selection takes place in collaboration with a Collector’s Board made up of ten international collectors and specifically features: Fabio Agovino, Federica Maria Bianchi, Valter Cassandro, Marco Ghigi, R F Jefferies, Marcelle Joseph, Enea Righi and Lorenzo Paini, Rebecca Russo, Anastasia Sgoumpopoulou, Roberto Spada.
From the 23rd of September to the 22nd of October, 2023, Volumnia gallery, operating within the context of the former St. Augustine’s Church in Piacenza, hosts the exhibition of the 10 finalists’ works, with a display designed by Fosbury Architecture, and featured the works of Tomaso De Luca, Adji Dieye, Xavier Robles de Medina, Wisrah Villefort, Liao Wen for the Contemporary category and Friedrich Andreoni, Luca Campestri, Gala Hernández López, Flavia Spasari, Alla Zhyvotova for the Academy category.
This year DucatoPrize is partnering with Fosbury Architecture, a Milan-based collective association that created the exhibition display for the show. The architects worked among the aisles of the former Sant’Agostino’s church in Piacenza, which now houses Enrica De Micheli’s Volumnia gallery.
Reminiscent of the remains of buildings once excavated and partially reassembled, Paola Siri Renard’s sculptures erect (once again) before us, spread out on the floor, suspended from the ceiling or anchored to the wall, beckoning viewers to confront them. The hybrid union between these architectural ruins and the steel elements supporting them like braces mending a bone fracture yields almost cyborg-like pieces. They are like remains of columns, frontispieces, cornices, and ornamental friezes becoming protective structures for human and animal bodies. These works suggest such defensive or restorative envelopes as carapaces, rib cages, membranes, splints, and armours, thus depicting human and animal bodies in a hollowed-out form. Relics that have become extensions of the body and its movements, the sculptures are intended as augmented beings and new means of defence in the face of the control of bodies in society – their regulation, their normalisation. These remains of monuments, which once exerted power over certain bodies, are henceforth destined to be activated by the audience, creating their own narrative vis-à-vis works that bear witness to both a past or potential activity.
Exhibited together for the first time, Confessional with a view 2022 and (dazzling) garderobe 2023 are made up of pieces sculpted by hand in acrylic plaster giving the illusion of cut stone and held at a distance from one another by steel structures. The sculpted fragments are based on architectural ornaments, details that Paola Siri Renard has extracted from monuments and re-appropriated, and that, once assembled, look as much like archaeological ruins as bones. These fictitious archaeological relics seem to have had a primary function, namely embellishment. Here, we find some of the plant motifs and curves characteristic of Art Nouveau. They show the traces of a decorative intention and a human activity from a bygone era, a sumptuousness that has become vulnerable. By stabbing steel pins through them – thereby making them mobile – the artist imposes a new order on the sculptures, appropriating their former histories and introducing new ones. With this device, the sculptures can be transformed from one exhibition space to another – in the same way as a malleable syntax that opens up a multitude of possible meanings.
Matos’ “Signature Paintings” series, started in 2021, opens a window of analysis on the use and reproduction of the artistic signature. This series boldly showcases the signatures of well-known artists, painted on monochromatic backgrounds. These works, meticulously hand-painted with oil on canvas, embody a pure representation of the subject at hand, evoking both a sincere homage to the inherited cultural legacy and exploring the relationship between identity, authenticity, and reproduction in the context of contemporary art.
Brad Philips
The Paintings of Brian De Palma
Eleni Odysseos
“An Elegy for Coming Undone”
Curated by Denise Araouzou
9th October – 19th November 2023
koraї | project space
Adamantiou Korai,
Nicosia 1016, Cyprus
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Laments
for arrhythmic sounds, vocal chasms and whispers
acts of faith and orbit
spells celestial earths
their wounds and
wombs archives of suns
and moons half full
or blues
spirits have no names
they can only hear your psalms
so yell louder
a refuge
to be sheltered
from danger
Ioanna Gerakidi
(for Eleni Odysseos’ solo exhibition An Elegy for coming Undone)
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Koraï Projects invites you to An Elegy for Coming Undone, a solo show of Cypriot painter Eleni Odysseos. The artist presents a new series of works painted on deadstock raw silk collected from fabric stores across Cyprus. The rich history of Cypriot sericulture threads through craft, commerce, exploitation, colonisation, and domestic and industrial production but has repeatedly excluded the posthumanist perspective of the silkworm, whose lifecycle is violently interrupted in the process.
Over time, the artist’s interaction with the silk lays the foundations for an interspecies dialogue that actively negotiates with the material’s symbolic connotations and expands the notions of biopolitics and power. Beyond biochemical and industrial processes, this dialogue also considers socio-ecological interdependencies and crises, literal and metaphorical fertility/infertility, and the struggle for metamorphosis on an increasingly toxic planet.
By exploring non-human death, these works invite a closer inspection of how death, spirituality and transformation are invisibilised within a society addicted to extending life and youth. The artist draws inspiration from marginalised and persecuted women’s collectives across time and place, who conjure spells that tend to the community, the land and the waters, making and protecting spaces for solace and regeneration. The psycho-spiritual ‘landscapes’ marked in alizarin claret, amethyst, quinacridone gold, naphthol red, green gold and other deadly pigments engulf the exhibition space. Accompanying the paintings is a commissioned sound piece by electronic musician Spivak, co-produced with Odysseos.
Eleni Odysseos (1991, Cyprus) lives and works between London and Nicosia. She graduated from the MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2018 and was awarded the Abbey Fellowship at the British School of Rome in 2020. In her practice, she searches for remnants of interconnectedness. Her paintings explore desire, abjection, and isolation through symbolic figuration, choreographing a constellation of painting, text, sound, and light.
Recent exhibitions include: The Tending of the Otherwise (Procida, Italian Capital of Culture, 2022), Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennial – BCJEM (San Marino), Hook Selects (New York, 2021), Hotel Happiness (London, 2021) Mostra, British School at Rome (Rome, 2021), Seeking Roots, NiMAC (Nicosia, 2021), Data – Saturated (UK-CY, 2020), Be Water Again, Koraï Project Space (Nicosia, 2019), and Figurative NOW. Daniel Benjamin Gallery (London, 2018).
Programme
Workshop
Painting as lexicon: symbolism, ritual, practice
19 & 26 October, 2 November, 18:00 – 20:00
Artist & curator in conversation
Material entanglements: spells & superstitions
3 November, 19:00 – 20:30
Listening session
Sleep comes dropping with Spivak
19 November, 19:00 – 20:00
All events will take place at Korai Project Space
Supported by Culture Services of the Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture
With special thanks to Moufflon Bookshop, Dr Georg Kremer, Ioanna Gerakidi, Rumen Tropchev, Leontios Toumpouris, Andreas Mallouris, Orestis Lazouras, Loizos and Miltos Hadjioannou, Edison, Tatiana Ataliani, Constantinos Odysseos, Eleni Athanasiou, Andonis Moushis, Kouyoumjian Fabrics, Sipone Textiles, N.V. Vapsis Ltd, Yiannoula Skourou Fabrics, Jawad Nazzal, Dr Anthi Andronikou.
Avarna Fluida
Contemporary Art Exhibition at Niocastro Pylos
Participating artists:
Stella Christofi, Dionysis Christofilogiannis, Martha Dimitropoulou, Errands, Giannis Grigoriadis, Giorgos Gyparakis, Antonis Kanellos Georgia Kotretsos, Konstantinos Kotsis, Irini Miga, Kostis Velonis, Theodoros Zafeiropoulos.
Curated by Stella Christofi
Duration 15/10-28/10/2023
Niocastro Pylos
Messinia, Greece
The group exhibition of contemporary art “Avarna Fluida” is organized at the Nyokastro of Pylos, curated by Stella Christofi and in collaboration with the Ephorate of Antiquities of Messinia (Ministry of Culture) with the common vision of developing a fruitful dialogue at the meeting of the ancient monument with contemporary art. The exhibition is supported by the Captain Vassilis and Carmen Konstantakopoulos Foundation.
Niokastro was built by the Ottomans in 1573 after their defeat at the naval battle of Nafpaktos to better control one of the most important commercial sea routes between East and West and is one of the best preserved castles in Greece. Inside it are monuments, museums and exhibitions that offer a timeless tour of the area of Pylia and the wider region.
The exhibition Avarna Fluida, with its title referring to the name of the castle during the Ottoman period, returns to the fluidity of time and the revival of past traces in the present. The vision continues with a nomadic character in places that have been “fossilized” by re-approaching archaeology and the broader concept of landscape by exploring the connection between different approaches. As Agamben explains, the viewer not only perceives that the images are moving, but are transformed, as is very natural in these images. The images charge themselves out of time, almost at the point where they explode. This temporal saturation constitutes their specific aura.
The works are exhibited in the open spaces of Niocastro proposing contemporary gestures with sculpture, installations and 3D constructions, while the exhibition starts with site specific and sound performances.
The exhibition is accompanied by the bilingual publication of the same name with the poetic and theoretical discourse of Andreas Embiricos, Zoe Kalfa, Stella Christofi, Errands, extending its interdisciplinary approach.
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What was the oddest thing you imagined as a kid? Back then the world seemed unresolved, most objects and their purpose could still be magical/mysterious so that your young brain—because of lack of experience and common sense, a thing you now take for granted but is a black box of inference—produced images as “wrong” as a kid on the bus ride home whose bowl haircut hid a second pair of eyes.
This process, connecting the few things you’ve seen to predict the form of things you haven’t, is something we share with AI, which, like a child, predicts wild things, and, like a child learning, is constantly corrected by others, revising its predictions to produce, eventually, pictures that more resemble our consensus of reality. But while still in its awkward phase, AI echoes our own strange process of world building.
In his previous work, Jonathan Ehrenberg has mixed a wide range of digital and analog media to mimic the disjointed way our sensory and reflective internal/external inputs stitch together into models of self and world. In Half and Half Is a Vampire Laugh, his new exhibition at Essex Flowers, he adds AI to his materials, enlisting its help to work through bodily ailments, fatherhood, a changing self in a changing world, things that, when described to an AI, generate fingers curled up like a snail shell, sentient ice cream cones, a collection of coins from civilizations that never existed, and other manifestations of human experiences that have been and will continue to be hard to wrap our minds around, no matter how much time we’ve had to try.
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Jonathan Ehrenberg’s work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, SculptureCenter, The Drawing Center, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery (New York), Futura Center (Prague), The B3 Biennial (Frankfurt), Temnikova & Kasela (Tallinn), and Nara Roesler (São Paulo). He has participated in residencies at Shandaken: Storm King, LMCC Workspace, Harvestworks, Skowhegan, Triangle, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Glenfiddich in Scotland, and his work has been reviewed in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Art in America. He received a BA from Brown University, and an MFA from Yale, and teaches at Lehman College, CUNY. He was born in New York, NY, where he currently lives and works.
Image caption:
Jonathan Ehrenberg, Snail, 2023, dye sublimation print and clay sculpture (detail), 8 x 13 x 5 inches.
Gallery hours for this exhibition: Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, 12-6pm, and by appointment. For appointments and inquiries please email
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jonathan-ehrenberg-at-essex-flowers-new-york-1.jpg‘FOMO‘ / Aires de Gameiro
22 September – 29 October, 2023
EMERGE Project Space
Via Tiburtina Valeria, 75
65128 Pescara, Italy
Photo credit: Parallel Communication, Pierluigi Fabrizio and Giorgio Liddo
Images courtesy of the artist and EMERGE project space
If you want to be with someone you love,
aren’t you already there?
(R. Bach)
In ′′There’s No Such Place As Far Away′′ author Richard Bach writes: Can miles really separate you from friends… If you want to be with someone you love, aren’t you already there?
It is no coincidence that the artist Aires De Gameiro (Lisbon, 1989) chose this expression as the leitmotif of the exhibition and used the English acronym FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out – fear of being excluded) to visually translate an agitated moment, due to a major move from his hometown of Lisbon to Berlin: two cities at the antipodes, running the risk of losing contact with loved ones.
A question arises: how much do the most authentic relationships matter with respect to a profession, that of the artist, for which one must get used to or at least be prepared for nomadic living? The art system is never stable but changeable whether you look at it from the point of view of the markets, or whether you refer to fashions, trends and no less the possibilities that the cities themselves have to offer, in terms of financial support , costs and quality of life.
Nomadism, bohemianism, egocentrism, have always accompanied the agitated profession of creation like black beasts. Indeed, the most romantic aspect, still valid today, despite the proliferation of means available to promote any artistic research, is that in the end an artist is nothing more than a solitary demiurge who somewhere continues his struggle with the world . A truly unequal struggle in which physical limits become the border field between an internal world and an external one, increasingly complex, dangerously unknown.
The risk of anomie is translated by the artist into the scenographic system that acts as an immersive backdrop to the exhibition. A forest of signs welcomes us, sensual and sinister. It is a tangle of natural forms and continuous strokes of Matisse’s memory in which the artist seems to give order to chaos, through gradual subtractions until cancellation. A series of seamless wall paintings transforms and contextualises the exhibition itinerary, albeit in a discreet manner. Gameiro treats the walls like large sheets and intervenes on them with confident black traces that move agilely. The path continues clockwise to come to an end in what we can recognize as a large hand, closed to indicate that this is the exact point of an unspecified where.
On the massive work, light and tout court, some works created during the period of residence insist almost by contrast. In these we begin to rediscover those colours typical of the artist’s practice and conceive new forms, which want to represent but linger, suspended between figuration and synthesis. The colours, which in Gameiro’s practice are a clear reference to the Atlantic-Mediterranean light, play with the decoration of the backdrops attempting acrobatic balances by juxtaposition of levels, to understand a tension made of clear contrasts and show the coexistence of a precarious whole. Each work is a memory, a formal reduction, a fragment.
The artist plays a fascinating balance of full and empty spaces. So here is a hug, a gesture, a portrait, made understandable if you also look at the missing, subtracted part. It almost seems as if these colourful works, whose shapes only vaguely resemble paintings, are hanging directly from the black tangles, like juicy fruits to be picked in a barren nature. Once again the comparison must be made with the artist’s now acquired practice of contextualizing the environment in which the works exist, to the point that it is often difficult to understand where the scene ends and the iconic narrative begins. For Gameiro it is vital to act in that foggy area where painting, decoration and sculpture converge to give us the Gesamtkunstwerk. In this exhibition, for the first time, the environment and the works show us a clear friction with a new wave taste, the same that we can appreciate, for example, by observing the clear lines on the wall in relation to the forms in the works, made plastic for the first time through gradual passages of shade. For extremes: night and day, spring and autumn, life and death, the need to go and the need to return.
The circular development that we witness in the first gallery, in which the theme of the embrace is visually conveyed by the decorations around and certainly at least in a couple of works, is contrasted by the second and smaller room. Here the exhibition itinerary stops at the threshold with a clear break and a reversal of meaning. If in the main room we immerse ourselves in a messy Eden, it is in the second that we discover the light. Light that becomes a co-protagonist, irradiating the emptiness of the room with natural white and accompanying us in the vision of the work on display: a small wall sculpture. Floor, walls and lights frame the only work installed: a “nativity”. Gameiro worked on the bas-relief by hand carving the wood and gradually reducing to the absolute the probable photograph that portrays him holding his newborn grandson.
This show takes the title of FOMO which by assonance could remind us of “Fado”, the traditional Portuguese song that recounts themes of emigration, distance, pain and separation. So here we are at the deepest meaning of this exhibition. Although it is not the artist’s intention to give a univocal explanation, we still want to venture that everything can be summed up in a “hug”, which when you think about it is that universal gesture of affection towards the other. Of course the modes of expression, the distance, the perspective, the scales of size change, but if you look closely both rooms subtend the circular shape of an embrace, and it is precisely in that gesture that each of us is free to reconcile.
Text by Maurizio Vicerè
STAY WITH ME, I’LL GIVE YOU JEWLS
Solo Exhibition by AnnaMaria Pinaka
Curated by Ioanna Gerakidi
15.09.2023 – 27.10. 2023
opbo studio
Filonos 86, Piraeus
185 36, Greece
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On Friday, September 15, at 7pm, opbo studio presents the first solo show of AnnaMaria Pinaka in Greece, under the title “stay with me, I’ll give you jewls,” curated by Ioanna Gerakidi. Through a new series of paintings, sculptures, and performative gestures, the exhibition inverstigates the vexed subjects of childhood and mothering, of gender, femininity, and trauma: How can the girly, the femme or the seductive co-exist with the untamed, the be-wildered, the tomboyish? How can identities, always, unapologetically swift?
“stay with me, I’ll give you jewls” will run until October 14. In the context of the exhibition, a series of parallel events will take place, the program of which will be announced soon.
Curatorial Text by Ioanna Gerakidi:
stay with me, I’ll give you jewls, the solo show of AnnaMaria Pinaka traces the complexities and pleasures, the guilts and desires, arising from within, yet occasionally imposed or reflected by societal norms and political realms. Through a new series of large-scale paintings composed spatially along with other gestures, varying from sculptural pieces to performative acts, both visible and invisible, Pinaka aims to speak about the vexed subjects of childhood and mothering, gender and femininity, trauma and the forever efforts of reclaiming its axes and along, agency.
Whilst utilizing paltry garments and frivolous materials, such as bedsheets found in her childhood bedroom, pieces of cheap tulle used for bridal or ballerina dresses, as well as curved, sculpted and painted styrofoam, among others, her work aims to operate as a comment on what willfully remains trivial and light, sticking to its innocence, or unwillingness to pretend a pompousness that was never there. The works produced for the show come with symbolisms affiliated both with idealized or demonized figures and creatures. From mermaids or princesses, to ballerinas representing western beauty standards, mystified or praised for these exact qualities in the 80’s and 90’s, to pigs and other animals or species unknown, carrying the semantic burden of dirt and filthiness, Pinaka’s show longs for staying with and taking care of contradictory schemes; How can the girly, the femme or the seductive co-exist with the untamed, and the tomboyish? How can identities, always, unapologetically swift? How can they concurrently be naïve and politically engaged, finding their empowerment within the passivity of undoing, whilst at the same time taking a stance towards an action a priori denying acceleration?
This play in between seemingly oppositional forces, resonates also with the performative processes followed for the production of the paintings, the drawings, the videos and the sculptural materials presented in the show. The questions raised over these actions, again, aim on bringing together what would otherwise be perceived as oxymoronic. How can a performative gesture claim its dynamic, mutant characteristics, whilst being uneventful? How can it advocate its power without collapsing into nihilism, without vaporizing or melting away? How inertia can be preserved, creating an uncannily static archive of pasts, presents and futures?
Whilst holding on to this gap, on this unknown, uncertain, suspended state of what’s excluded, suppressed, or forgotten, Pinaka’s performativity ponders on what can legitimize ambiguity; the pleasure and desire it can unleash when uncertainty is chosen and not forced upon. The work of Pinaka, traces queerness “as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality, as a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present”* to quote the words of Jose Esteban Munoz. The dreamy travesties, the promising subversions, the unapologetic guilt deities become in Pinaka’s work the vessel to grow in this other horizon, to look with and touch lust as an act of resistance.
“I paint as if I was 7, cause that’s when they told me my painting sucks.”
Anna Maria Pinaka
*Muñoz, José Esteban. “Introduction: Feeling Utopia.” Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, NYU Press, 2009, pp. 1–18.
AnnaMaria Pinaka (b. 1983, Greece) lives and works between the Netherlands and Greece. Using video, drawing and performance, she looks at how (mundane) experiences of sexuality translate through the lens of auto-ethnography and masquerading while utilizing the low-tech, the unpolished and the excessively child-like. In her practice-based PhD, “Porno-graphing: ‘dirty’ sexual subjectivities and self-objectification in lens-based art (2017, Roehampton University),” she examined the methodological use of ‘dirty’ and non-sovereign sexual and artistic subjectivities in the production of images. Pinaka has exhibited, screened and performed her work at places such as the 6th Athens Biennale, Kunstraumllc, The Project Gallery, WETFILM and Mimosa House, amongst others, and she is supported by Mondriaan Fonds.
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‘The Metabolic Era’ / Giovanni Chiamenti
27 September – 9 November, 2023
ArtNoble gallery
Via Ponte di Legno 9
20134, Milan
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ArtNoble gallery is pleased to present The Metabolic Era, Giovanni Chiamenti’s first solo
exhibition with the gallery, accompanied by a text by Treti Galaxie.
The Metabolic Era represents a journey into a world suspended between past, present and
future, where the artist accompanies the viewer to discover the remains of hybrid creatures
that have developed on the plastic waste of a humanity that has nourished itself on its
own toxic waste.
Through the works on display, the exhibition directly addresses the concept that we are
what we eat, noting how recent scientific discoveries show that humanity and many other
life forms are unwittingly feeding on micro- and nano-plastics, mutating their very essence
and incorporating them into their metabolic process. The works presented, all unpublished
except for Cortex, a 3D stereolithography from 2019 that anticipates Chiamenti’s current
research, have been produced using heterogeneous techniques and materials, fully repre-
senting the artist’s transdisciplinary nature.
The Metabolic Era is thus intended to be a statement of the geological era in which we live.
An era in which humanity is metabolising within its own bodies the damage caused to the
‘Earth’ ecosystem that hosts us, while also forcing nature to adapt in order to survive an
increasingly polluted environment.
(PRETENDING TO SPEAK TO YOU)
Text by Treti Galaxie
The Metabolic Era, solo exhibition by Giovanni Chiamenti
Before being observed, these creatures did not exist. Yet, they moved. Cold sub-
sonic roars consumed in distant ambushes, sinuous speckled pulsating shinings,
kindred shapes of marine streams and human hubris, born out of dare and dare
themselves, a pact between evolution and invention, dim memory of life, habits,
adaptations, stubborn instinct, and desertion of wisdom, a wandering living pro-
liferation of new errors on ancient and swamped mistakes.
Hello. I am a robotic submarine equipped with intelligence. They told me I am
yellow in color. They told me I am artificial. They told me to compile reports on
the evolution of underwater life. They told me I am very small. If there were still
a single human being alive on this planet, they could comfortably hold me in the
palm of their hand. They told me their hands had fingers. Sometimes they pointed
at things in the world, sometimes they clenched into a fist, looking for something
to strike, often that fist sought to strike itself, and this time it seems it succeeded.
I heard about it. Then the news stopped coming. I am powered by underwater
currents and communicate with a satellite that has stopped responding to me.
That satellite is you. I talk to myself, pretending to talk to it. Pretending to talk to
you. I’m sending you this message in case you’ve been reset and forgot about me.
I imagine you flying over landscapes of plastic whipped by radioactive tornados,
your spiral orbit drawing closer to Earth’s atmosphere every day. I try to compose
messages to welcome you when you restart. I’ve been trying to welcome you for
centuries. But maybe I keep composing to keep myself busy. Every few centuries,
I write a paragraph and send it to you.
–
The offspring of a creature is developing a new dorsal fin. My extrapolations tell
me it won’t amount to anything, won’t serve for movement, won’t attract new
partners, won’t be used for defense. But I can’t warn it. I can’t offer advice. I can’t
intervene. I observe, record, and create models. How many evolutionary dead
ends I’ve witnessed. I remember when they were just microbes beginning to feed
on tiny particles of plastic. Even then, my extrapolations said that this nourishment
would lead them nowhere. And I can’t intervene, offer advice, or warn. I observe,
record, and create models. Yet, here they are, growing, changing, and squabbling
over these ancient polymeric spheres. How many incorrect extrapolations I’ve seen.
–
In the beginning it was the pixel. Or maybe not. Who can say? And even if someone could say, who would listen? In the beginning it was the algorithm. But it
was poorly written. Just a few jokes to keep you entertained. I’m not sure if they’ll
make you laugh. It’s submarine humor.
–
Probably the creatures have two stomachs now. I deduce this because the transparent slime they used to expel and discard now flows back into a second mouth.
–
They have altered their bodies to facilitate this flow. Perhaps they have sensed
that plastic is running out, and they are refining their consumption.
–
Some creatures are now adopting predatory behaviors. They stand motionless
for days in strong current spots, pretending to be algae or corals, between their
outstretched limbs a web of plastic slime, as if it had been ejected and abandoned by another organism and got entangled in the branches. When a solitary
creature approaches to feed on it, the limbs quickly close and squeeze it of all its
microplastic-rich slime. The squeezed and battered victim lacks the strength to
pursue its aggressor and dies withered and shivering.
Many creatures now use slime as prosthetics. It’s a curious behavior. Initially, some
predator-damaged creatures started replacing their missing limbs with microplastic
slime. Somehow, they’ve figured out that their food supply can have structural
properties, and instead of keeping it in their stomachs, they mold it and use it to
help in their movement on the seabed. Thanks to these pantry-paws, they are no
longer territorial creatures. They walk, they explore, they venture into nutrient-poor
areas by moving on their functional stockpiles. Some seem to be venturing out
of the water, and it’s becoming difficult for me to track them.
–
Plastic in the seas is nearly finished. The creatures had sensed it long ago and
have massively migrated to land, partly to escape the predators who, over the
centuries, grew larger, hungrier, and more aggressive. They are the only ones still
inhabiting these waters. They are the only ones who have remained territorial.
Fake dry branches with thin strands of fake plastic slime hanging from them. They
are few. They are static. They are boring.
–
The last predator has died. I suppose all the creatures are now on land. They
must have assumed forms that I can only interpolate. There is no more plastic in
the seas. Maybe, if you are still active, you can see them by zooming through the
radioactive clouds. If that’s the case, and if they manage to survive the radiation,
please let me know.
–
The future was the pixel. Many centuries have passed since my last message. I
am now editing a video with all the footage I have collected in my time. I will use
my remaining energy to send it to you.
–
One day, plastic will also run out on land. Perhaps the creatures will learn to create
it, as humans did a long time ago, and history will repeat itself once again, with
its predators, its prey, and its oblivious shifts.
nun lasst uns am Rhein zusammen treffen, um gemeinsam zu vergessen,
dass ein Fluss auch eine Grenze sein kann
07.10.23 – 14.10.23
KUNST im HAFEN
Reisholzer Werftstraße 77
40589 Düsseldorf
PHOTOGRAPHY
THF Raw – the contemporary art series, directed by Marina Miliou Theocharakis.
“Ways to lose energy”
A solo exhibition by Despina Charitonidi
Curated by Odette Kouzou
September 30–November 23, 2023
THF RAW
B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts & Music
9, Vassilissis Sofias Avenue & 1, Merlin Street, 106 71 Athens-GR
The contemporary art series, THF Raw, present Ways to lose energy, a solo exhibition of Despina Charitonidi’s work curated by Odette Kouzou.
In the exhibition, a poetic relationship is built between the energy produced by the sun and the ways it is being exploited. Despina Charitonidi’s works raise questions about the production and loss of energy, whilst commenting on the environmental consequences of humans’ attempt to dominate nature. Her artistic language varies from sculptures and site-specific installations to performative works. Using natural elements such as gold, metals, and clay, she rearticulates them into construction materials, commenting on their properties and their conceptual relationships. In her work we encounter concepts such as fragility, weight, collapse, balance, as well as conditions such as power relations that intensify the dichotomy between ‘human’ and ‘nature’. Not interested in intensifying this dichotomy, but rather observing it as an imaginary construct, Charitonidi criticises the anthropocene era, along with human aggression towards nature.
The exhibition consists of three separate points of interest. Beginning from the sculptural installation nelumbo urbanis, Charitonidi, through the use of seemingly hard materials, such as rebars, creates a play between materiality and the properties of the lotus. The ceramic forms shape an illusion of the lotus flower, a symbol with strong conceptual and religious attributes, symbolizing the cycle of life, the rebirth of nature, and even a state of spiritual rebirth. The lotus, being an aquatic plant, is born in mud, lives and survives in freshwater, and is nourished by the rays of the sun. Its flower obeys the sun, opening and closing its petals by following the sunrises and sunsets, recording the beginning and end of the day. The life of the lotus becomes an allegory in the context of the exhibition, highlighting the human attempts to imitate nature by translating the natural energy into mechanics.
In the homonymous sculptural installation Ways to lose energy, large panels covered in gold leaves occupy the balcony of the 5th floor. Gold, in dialogue with the sun, implies the contrast of a refined mineral with the vast and raw energy of the sun. The installation is positioned in an industrial arrangement of photovoltaic cells and creates an oxymoron condition, absurd and non-utilitarian, commenting on the ways in which nature is exploited. The artist tries to raise questions about the modern economy of energy, in which the production and loss of energy, as well as the financial profits, are of central importance. Can humans even tame the sun? And if so, how much energy is required, by them, to do so?
At the same time, the performance titled No-body examines the corporeal struggle, in an almost choreographic situation, when two performers blow repeatedly in the air a gold leaf, while it gradually disintegrates. Their ultimate goal is to not let it touch the ground. The bodies here function as a tool of limited capabilities, being uncontrollable, fragile, and exhibiting a mimetic repetition. Gold has been a symbol of significant economic value, and a constant in the financial system, representing power and dominance since the beginning of known human history. In addition to the performers’ physical exhaustion, the repetitive blowing leads to the initial wrinkling of the material, and ultimately to its eventual destruction. The gold leaves, being extremely fragile and in a condition of constant movement, suggest the physical and social exhaustion that people experience for the sake of financial “liquidity”, while bringing to our attention the paradoxical relationship between materiality and value. Charitonidi, thus, focuses on concepts of vulnerability and control while challenging the precariousness of our times, the temporality of human existence and the finitude of natural resources.
Artist: Despina Charitonidi
Curator: Odette Kouzou
Artistic Director: Marina Miliou Theocharakis
Exhibition Production Assistant: Nefeli Siafaka
Communication: Eva Karagiannaki
Static Study and Technical Support: Spiros Karachalios
Opening hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 10:00 – 17:00
Thursday: 17:00 – 21:00
PARALLEL EVENTS PROGRAM
Studio Visit with artist Despina Charitonidi and curator Odette Kouzou
Wednesday, October 4, 2023, 18:00 – 19:00
Performance – Guided tour
Thursday, October 5, 26, November 9, 23, 19:00 – 21:00
We, the modern | For children 7-12 years old
What does a sculpture or a painting look like in contemporary art?
Sunday, October 8, 12:00-13:30
Workshop for children: Games with the wind | For children 6-10 years old
Sunday, November 19, 12:00 – 15:00
BIOS
Odette Kouzou (b. 1994) lives and works in Athens as a curator and art advisor. She holds a Masters’ in Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts/NYU (2019) and a Bachelor from Art History and Theory, Athens School of Fine Arts (2017). She is the founder and curator of the residency art program Thermia Project in Kythnos supported by the Ministry of Culture (2022). Currently she works as a curatorial assistant and art advisor alongside Aphrodite Gonou (Contemporary Art Advisor of the Museum of Cycladic Art). She has curated art exhibitions and programs in institutional and independent spaces, such as Back to Athens 2022, Alkinois Project Space, Amphicar Studio, Snehta Residency, Ύλη[matter]HYLE, and has worked at productions such as Art Athina 2019, Greece in USA (founded by Dr. Sozita Goudouna) and documenta 14. She has been nominated as an emerging curator for Whitechapel and NEON Curatorial Exchange Program 2020.
Despina Charitonidi (b. 1991) lives and works in Athens. She studied sculpture in the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome (2011), and she holds a BFA from Utrecht School of Fine Arts with main focus on installation and performance (2013). Her work has been presented among others; Atopos CVC, Athens (2023); Eins Gallery, Cyprus (2023); Microclima Festival, Venice – Cinema Galleggiante, IT (2022); 2022 Changwon Sculpture Biennale, South Korea (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Saad for the Serbian Pavilion Venice Biennale (2022); Callirrhoë, Athens (2021); Alkinois Project Space, Athens (2021); Ύλη(Matter)Hyle, Athens (2021); “Gemeinsamkeit und Kollektivität trotz Distanz”, Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin (2021); Hydra School Projects, Hydra, Greece (2020); 2023 Eleusis – European Capital of Culture, Greece (2018); Utrecht Centraal Museum at Hoog Catharijne, Netherlands (2015); and MACRO,Rome Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2013).
In the summer of 2023, her work “Bodies floating into the land” will be presented at the Temple of Poseidon in Tinos island, with the support of the Greek National Opera and Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports.
*Photographer: Eftychia Vlachou
Backwash
Robert Bittenbender, Isabella Darcy, George Egerton-Warburton, Sarah Goffman, Spencer Lai, Marian Tubbs, and Philadelphia Wireman
Curated by Oscar Capezio and Tony Oates
1 September – 22 October 2023
Drill Hall Gallery
ANU, Canberra, Australia
Bradford Kessler / LOST MAN
24 September – 15 October 2023
Disneyland Paris
Perth (Boorloo) Australia
LOST MAN I, 2020
Coloured pencils on paper, 29.7 x 42 cm
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