The hollow spaces of the heart; rooms within buildings; worlds within worlds. Chambers are spaces of sanctuary, resonance, and containment; vessels inside vessels designed for the exchange of fluids and sounds. Across her practice, Konstantina Krikzoni constructs spatialised environments that both resemble and contain female bodies; through a visceral palette of pinks and reds, Krikzoni constructs womb-like chambers in which feminine behaviours seep and blossom without limit or restraint. Women kneel, crouch, and recline, captured in intimate moments of metamorphosis or excretion, claiming a place beyond shame and confounding viewers’ social expectations.

Krikzoni’s first solo exhibition at Newchild is intimately concerned with abjection, drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theories around the abjection of the mother. Kristeva argues that society regulates itself by destroying the mother as an object of desire by associating her with the abject, ruling that female bodily fluids, hormones, and hair must be removed, purified, or kept hidden, dealt with behind closed doors. In defiance of these taboos, Krikzoni’s paintings depict the symbolic figures of social theory, but these female archetypes emerge in ambiguous and subversive forms, challenging viewers’ expectations around women’s behaviours.

For example, in paintings such as Fantastical, Orgasmical, figures squat in a way that might suggest sexual provocation, but also suggests the poses adopted while urinating, defecating, or birthing. The works recall how mothers are bound to their children by fluids, from the blood of the afterbirth caught in a cardboard tray to the contents of nappies and the stream of breastmilk into impatient mouths.These female characters embody states of abjection, but in a way that precludes shame and reclaims the abject, thus moving beyond society’s fetishisation of female sexual organs and bodily fluids.

In this exhibition, for the first time one of Krikzoni’s abject figures emerges from the canvas into the three- dimensional space of the gallery. Crafted from the same linen the artist uses to stretch her canvases and adorned with latex and hand-sewn seashells, Cybele evokes a body that is both monstrous and beautiful, powerful and vulnerable. The sculpture takes its title from Cybele, the goddess-mother of Artemis, who is often depicted in classical Greek art as a many-breasted fertility symbol.

Here, as elsewhere in her oeuvre, Krikzoni draws on her Greek heritage and the stories of her female relatives. The musical associations of the exhibition’s title, Chamber, allude to Krikzoni’s studio practice of singing Greek folk songs while she paints, tapping into a tradition kept alive by women through tunes that resonate through the ages.This is part of her interest in exploring her identity as a woman, an artist, and a female body in the studio, considering, for example, how her monthly hormonal cycle affects how she produces work. These concerns are suggested through the depiction of artistic materials within the world of the paintings, where streams of paint squirt from tubes among the naked bodies, positing a connection between the artist’s tools and the abject excreta of the female body.

Krikzoni’s practice has its basis in drawing; her works show the centrality of lines and gestures applied to the paper or canvas with a brush in a cycle of drawing and erasure using thin layers of paint. Several of the works in the exhibition, capture atmosphere and tonality by combining a stained effect with painted lines that resemble stitching.These evocations of textiles are linked to Krikzoni’s heritage and childhood memories; like the chanting of folklore, domestic sewing is part of a wealth of traditional knowledge safeguarded by the minds and bodies of women.

 Lee Ufan, Courtesy Art Basel

Singalong

Ken Kagami, Anders Dickson, Sarah Lyn Rogers 

16.03 – 23.04.2023

Sgomento Zurigo 

Olivengasse 7 8032 Zürich

You are instructed not to ask what it
is.

You might say, “Tell me about this.”

That would be allowed.

And there are clues: what’s biggest in
the frame, how many fingers.

For some reason the sky won’t touch
the ground.

That’s fine—no need to worry over details like that.

Worry over your own self, skin and
hair, this mass that won’t conform or be obscured.

Have your edges ever felt so
distended?

In childhood you were—like any of
us—geometric, book of unlined paper, no marks.

Adults wore their experience like
scotch tape dragged across the carpet.

They picked up lint and flecks,
mysterious bumps.

Things you felt you oughtn’t be able
to see.

Experienced equated with obscene.

How a folded paper can never be
not-folded.

How the mouth’s assembly line uproots
the teeth you can’t repot.

You can’t go back, but you must go.

Some days you feel like a raw hunk of
meat, set with wire and electrified—some unseen hand pushes a button, makes you
twitch.

Some days a piano squashes you
cartoon-flat.

You spit keys.

Cannot blow out your candles.

Some days are deep-sea dives,
gathering specimens to understand.

To understand what?

The answer.

In your mind, you build construction
sites.

You drive one of the frightening
machines.

Here, you can lift impossible weights.

Break down and discard.

Nothing too much.

Back to skin, this looped image: lip
curl of yuck, ugly sneer.

(A face for lint, loosed teeth, an
errant pube.)

Why would somebody so often hand you
this?

This wordless alphabet of disgust?

With a child’s pride, as though
passing a craft into your hands:

I made this. I made it for you.

– Sarah Lyn Rogers

carrick bell and Rocco Ruglio-Misurell: The End of Living

February 18 – March 19, 2023

Tiger Strikes Asteroid

1206 Maple Avenue, 5th floor, #523, Los Angeles CA 90015

All silence is a hidden space

If it is a great honor for an individual to have their name become part of cultural memory, then the Cloister Apartment as a piece of architecture also enjoys this distinction. Two legends exist about the building: one says it was the private residence of the owners of the British yarn manufacturer Patons & Baldwins, Ltd; the other legend claims that the American businessman Fritz and his wife lived here and hosted literary salons attended by a wide range of Chinese and international luminaries. The Chinese name 花厅 (literally the hall of flowers), on the other hand, comes from the Republican poet Shao Xunmei’s artistic rendition of the salon’s title. 

However, the legend of private residences of magnates seems to contradict the name of the apartment. Did the two groups of owners cross paths? Who lived here and when? No primary sources exist about the alleged owners of Patons & Baldwins, and Xue Liyong, a scholar specializing on the history of Shanghai, has concluded that this legend is pseudo-history. According to the tenant registration in the 1930s, seven or eight shareholders and managers of commercial companies and insurance companies lived here, the Fritzes listed among them, which shows that the site served as a high-end apartment building, not a single-family house. The first salon took place in the Cloister Apartment in 1933. Between then and 1937, when Japanese army invaded Shanghai, the salon only continued for three or four years. Little was known about its fate afterwards. Why, then, do wealthy businessmen and the cultural salon dominate the cultural memory of this building? What happened to the salon when concessions stood as the “lone islets” during Japanese occupation? What occurred to the apartment when the Vichy regime abandoned its concession in China in 1943? And during the Civil War? The only known fact is that the apartment became the Hunan Road Subdistrict Office in Xuhui District after Shanghai’s liberation.

The search in the prevailing gaps beyond the myths proves futile. The lacuna, compared to the intact condition of the building’s exterior and interior, creates a sense of absence that is difficult to describe. When the Cloister Apartment served as the subdistrict office, its exterior did not differ much from that today, with only minor functional modifications such as security bars on the windows, bulletin boards on the street, and several white plaques hanging on the front door. Alterations to the interior can only be seen from a few photos online: an addition of golden characters “Unity, Practicality, Pioneering Spirit, Progress” to the foyer, the twisted Solomonic columns painted in the same dark brown color as the floor tiles, and the unused fireplace boarded up. However, the mosaic steps leading to the second floor have been preserved. In 2018, the government initiated a restoration project of the building to bring it back to its original appearance in the 1930s, removing all traces of post-1949 modifications. In restoration practice in modern China, the guiding principle is “restoring the old as it was,” first conceptualized and exercised by Liang Sicheng. But does “the old” refer to the building at its completion, during a certain historic period, or in its current form? The preservation of history means at the same time selection and anchoring of a particular façade. Keeping a specific, unified style and narrative cuts off juxtaposition and amalgamation of different time periods and closes channels between us and a number of fragments from history. In choosing memory, one erases history.

After restoration, the apartment’s interior perfectly showcases details of Spanish architecture such as Corinthian capitals, cast iron scroll grilles, and ornamented fireplaces, but these historic architectural elements can no longer form a reliable narrative in the space. It is difficult to imagine what the subdistrict office looked like in this location, much less to recover the salon in the 1930s. Objects and furniture exist because of people and disappear with them. Architectural elements can be reproduced, but movement of people is difficult to capture and, in fact, leads to the forgetting of historical lineage. These surviving objects can only partially preserve memory, but not the essence of history. The “positive space” of the Cloister Apartment, namely the physical building, shines with unprecedented beauty bestowed by its restoration; its “negative space,” or the traces of human presence in the flow of time, disappear altogether. The blankness of memory is given a legend, one aspect is chosen from the building’s vicissitudes of fortune, and the Cloister Apartment is fixed to a time and space that never existed.

Exploring the absence in the historical narratives of the Cloister Apartment is the exhibition’s departure point. In her work “Archival Memory Room” (2008), the German artist Dorothea Reese-Heim cuts out people’s contours in photographs, perhaps conveying that forgetting and remembering are always relative and that they are interdependent as positive and negative shapes, thus revealing the absence of memory. The Chinese artist Xu Zhe’s work “.wav” (2023) collects the sounds in the apartment, which are transformed and re-released into the space to converge with on-site sounds to form a new soundscape, a metaphor for dislocation in the return of memory.

The Cloister Apartment became a museum that developed from the old French Concession to the present, and it is by itself a museum exhibit. However, has it also become what Adorno calls a “museal” in German, merely “museum like,” without any personal connections? In preserving architectural and material heritage, how much of human activity can we retain from time? The Japanese artist Hikaru Fujii’s practice focuses on the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear accident, questioning whether we still have the capacity to record and recreate history. Is the museum’s reinterpretation of history also a threat to history? Can these constructed meanings and orders really help us see the reality of time and space in the past? The Georgian artist Vajiko Chachkhiani explores the connection between the individual and collective memory in “Winter Which Was Not There” (2017), implying an attitude of release from metanarrative. Xu Zhe’s new work “Into the Slit” (2023) starts from an individual’s life experience and finally returns to the care between individuals. Individual person is the most difficult to capture in history, but ultimately composes the core of history.

The exhibition title is inspired by “Vertical Poetry” by the Argentinean poet Roberto Juarroz.

april april

by appointment:

https://aprilapril.gallery

Current Exhibition: 

A Place for Everything

Bronson Smillie

12 FEBRUARY – 26 MARCH, 2023 

About: 

april april is a contemporary art gallery and poetry program currently operating out of an apartment in Brooklyn, NY. To schedule an appointment and retrieve the gallery’s address please email:

Founded by Patrick Bova & Lucas Regazzi

Ashlin Ballif: 

Are the artists you work with generally based in New York?

april april:

Over the 10 exhibitions we’ve done, most of the artists actually don’t live in New York, which hasn’t been entirely intentional. Once we noticed that, it felt good to latch onto and to give space to artists mostly working in second cities. Definitely excited to provide a kind of nest for people that don’t get this experience so readily. 

It feels as though the affinities are drawn toward things that we’re not seeing all the time in New York. And so for us, that’s meant working with artists who are based in the US that live in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, or Los Angeles. We do want to focus on international artists and try to kind of keep a pulse on things that aren’t so centered in North America. For example, we’re doing a fair in a couple of months with a Singaporean artist. We’re just starting to work with him. 

AB: When I visited the space, it felt like a nest, as you said. How did april april come about? What made you think to incorporate the element of poetry alongside exhibitions? 

aa: Lucas and I met back in 2018, through an Ekphrastic poetry publication that he and his friend Elora Crawford were starting that I submitted to. So there’s a root interest in writing around art, it’s always been present. We thought it was a ripe opportunity to integrate that on the level of exhibition making…It came from this fundamental idea about the writing that gathers around art. The way that it attributes meaning to the work is nefarious, so poetry felt like an answer as a form to that problem. In that, it is trying to speak in a language similar to art. Not to speak at it, or for it, but rather with it or around it. Trying to think about objects and art as a kind of container for language, that can be mined from or felt around. Of course, this happens through individual channels as poets have different styles and their own writing, but still, there’s a kind of fundamental belief that there are words in the work that are dormant. 

     Installation View

AB: In the press release for your current exhibition, A Place for Everything, you write, “Cassette tapes and letter presses are but media’s memory. Within these containers, as well as on found industrial ledger papers, Bronson Smillie charts color and form as topographical arrangements. Notation becomes a song.” ‘Notation becomes a song’ feels as if it expresses what is at the core of april april, much like Smillie’s work: the asterisks become the full body or central experience. Oftentimes, these are the elements that are overlooked. What challenges have arisen as you’ve been trying to highlight the poetic aspects of language?

aa: I think that’s a really beautiful way to render the projects that we’re gravitating towards: work that is paying attention to what could be overlooked in an everyday experience. Along with the idea of trying to access the feeling of the work through different poets as channels. The challenge is that it becomes quite abstract or conceptual at a certain point. As such, a bit intimidating in the end, maybe. It’s important to us but we also have been recognizing that it’s a really particular exercise, to engage with this idea about art and poetry as a way of meeting the meaning that exists in the work. Because poetry is so vast, people have an incredible amount of ideas about the form and what it does. So I think we’re meeting our own idea about poetry in this particular context in, you know, in contest with other people’s ideas about it as well. So it’s not always a surefire thing that people are as excited about the practice as we are. 

What feels important about it is in making the exhibition more polyphonic, decentered from our singular voice. It is a very particular ask of people, and our selection of poets for shows isn’t always straightforward. It’s just based on a feeling or a sense of affinity. And often, the artists and poets don’t even live in New York so the way that they’re able to experience the exhibition and work is mainly through documentation…Which is a very specific way to perceive the space because our understanding of it (as it’s in our apartment) is from, you know, seven in the morning to midnight. We experience being with the art, as we’re moving about our day. 

  

    Luz Carabaño. llamas, 2022. Oil on linen on shaped panel. 10 x 9 inches.

I remember Rachel Oyster Kim, who wrote for our Poem Objects (2022) show, came in and sat down for 30 minutes and the poem was done. An example of a less ready-made experience is from poet CAConrad, they were very busy teaching during the course of our exhibition Unfoldings, but really responded to Luz Carabaño’s work. So they rifled through their archives and chose two poems they felt were akin to the work. So it’s not always “new” language.

Ideally, it is a commission of new writing. However, we’re also coming up against the haste of the exhibition cycle in relation to the length of time it takes to process and produce a poem the poet is satisfied with. It’s a challenging task, and one that we acknowledge is challenging. Therefore, in the previous example with CAConrad, we tried to have more of a curatorial request for the poet to dive into their archive. Which is still a meaningful engagement with the show, providing a counter pose or a resonant node. 

AB: What are your thoughts on (Soma)tic poetry? I know CAConrad specializes in that form. The gallery, as previously described as a nest, lends itself to warmth and a comfortable space to hear oneself or feel more centered while working. 

aa: I actually attended a Zoom workshop around (Soma)tic poetry that CAConrad was hosting during the height of the pandemic. They walked through their process of creating recipe stations, which was really fascinating and beautiful. It’s interesting how this format, in a way, parallels an exhibition or the way that we’re asking people to approach it. Beyond the fact that it’s situated in this very particular environment, an exhibition is a type of recipe station. 

AB: Like poetry, art as a medium is an essence of feeling and also holds the inaccessibility we mentioned earlier–particularly in the sense of abstraction, among other ways. It’s not always like this, in fact often the opposite, but language can be the only thing that people hold on to that makes sense of what they’re seeing. It goes back and forth in that way. How do you curate the poems as part of the exhibition so that it’s available for people to read?

aa: It’s only online at the moment. Usually, the poems in relation to a show get released towards its end or at its very end. So there hasn’t been an explicit experience of someone who has come for a visit having read the poem in relation to the show beforehand. So the poems act as and prompt a returning-to.

Again, because the project is so new, we’re still negotiating this method. It was important to have the show’s run be the duration (in an ideal world) that the poet would come to visit the show, have an experience of it, and then could take that with them to create a poem. But there are ways to better highlight and centralize the poetry program rather than have it seem more like a footnote. We’re still workshopping it. And the intention has always been to take the accumulation of works and publish them as a book. Initially, we were thinking we should include documentation from the show in relation to the poems. We’ve since decided that it will just be the poems in the book as a way to highlight their singularity.

AB: Yes, that difficulty in balance is something I’ve been thinking about since I visited the gallery. On the one hand, as you just described, you want to figure out what work you’re highlighting and who gets the public, visual experience. There’s also a desire I felt to view their combination as an experience: poems alongside the work. I think a publication would be special in that sense. What is the curation process like for you? Is it intuitive on your part or is the artist more involved?

    Installation View

aa: It is intuitive in nature, to the extent that it’s a sensibility around the room, and in relation to the work. In this particular instance, the latest exhibition with Bronson Smillie’s works in A Place for Everything was more of an iterative, collaborative process where we were sitting with the work and trying to understand which needed breath. In regard to the asterisks in particular, in the bay window near the floor, it was sort of thinking through the multivalence of the work being that it’s a symbol or icon that usually sits in the top corner of a word or some markup language. On the first wall of the show, in the top left corner, there is a work whose placement evokes that. 

At times it can feel like a really difficult space because of its size. It varies though; an artist who came to see the show today said the gallery has the perfect proportions for an exhibition and that it’s an ideal space to work in, which was generous to hear. It was a curious task when we did our first big group show back in September, Poem Objects. We were working with seven artists to negotiate everything in the show. But I still feel like we haven’t tapped the full potential of what can be in the space.

     Bronson Smillie. Felt Drawing #10, 2023. Found paper, polycrayon, pencil crayon, cork pad,        felt pad, stickers, framed. 14.25 x 11.25 inches.

AB: Also, as a side note, in Smillie’s Felt Drawing #10, the composition reminds me of sheet music. Does their work have any relation to music? Was this a theme that was intentional? 

aa: It was moreso in his last exhibition at a space called Maurice in Montréal. The exhibition is called tempo 85 (2022) and has some works that are interpreted as a deconstruction of a piano. Bronson has worked in the past on piano scrolls and within existing grids of these notational pages. In A Place for Everything, the notational becomes a thematic in the work, not necessarily as it relates to music, but as it relates to composition on a line or grid. So either music, math, or cartography. 

AB: Do you find that you use the little nooks and crannies of the space? Is it easier to experiment with in that way? 

aa: I think the first artist that allowed us to see the space in a more expansive way was  Mo Costello, who was in our second show along with Nabil Azab, Juliette, and they, over the course of like, two days, barricaded themself in the room. Did a lot of ritual performances, with objects and tools they brought from Georgia. We heard a lot of banging and clanging from down the hall haha. Mo was engaging with every sort of scene in the room. To this day, there’s still sugar left over on some of the windows—residual Berry Bronco Sauce from Arby’s and peanut butter. 

We also invited Chris Andrews, a friend from Montréal, to curate a group show in the space over winter of 2021-22. That was really illuminating as well. Beyond each individual artist’s gestures and placement of works, Bea Fremderman made a site-specific work that was a curtain transformed at its tail into a dress shirt. There were also these two chairs adorned in gowns by HULFE. The show helped to highlight the different ways that artists could respond to the room, and what kind of objects suit the area or could be accommodated by the space. The curation is always collaborative with the artist. I think good curatorial work consists of and is conceived of as collaboration or co-conspiration.

         Top: Installation View of exhibition Rattling the Dags, December – February 2022

AB: Are there often site-specific or commissioned works? 

aa: Not as common, however, Laura McCoy made some work when she was here. It’s definitely a goal for shows to come. I think it’s also a matter of not having worked with as many artists that identify as installation artists. It’s a question that we were working through, even in this current show. It felt like what we were coming up against often was giving the impression of site-specificity in relation to the work when it didn’t exist. So in some instances, we needed to acknowledge that the work can’t perform that way sometimes or shouldn’t. A balance of pulling back, reading the work, and listening to the work. Always.

AB: Are you looking for the gallery to be a collaborative or public space in terms of programming? 

aa: Yes! We hosted our first public reading back in August at Anna Sergeeva’s dear friend books. We’re hoping to do a new iteration of that this spring when it gets warmer. Our most recent one, La Cité des arts, another guest-curated event, was very heavily programmed with guest screenings. Mona Varichon invited other artists to show alongside them, including filmmaker Marie Losier. At the beginning of her screening, she addressed the audience in the format of a talk. She was explaining and contextualizing the work. We deeply want to have more dialogue and reason to incorporate people and their ideas and their work in relation to the space in programs–In the form of talks, readings, and events more broadly. We hosted a reading group as well, a couple of weeks back. A series organized by Darling Green Studio. We had pre-selected a series of texts that the curator offered up and they came by to discuss the screening in relation to the reading.

ArtNoble gallery