Anouk De Clercq solo exhibition ‘We’ll find you when the sun goes black’ runs at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) (Vokiečių st. 2, Vilnius) until 4th May 2025. The exhibition is curated by Vsevolod Kovalevskij.

From the depths of the CAC Cinema Hall, the sounds of Anouk De Clercq’s exhibition drift through the bright corridors of the second floor of the Contemporary Art Centre, enveloping visitors in an otherworldly birdsong and inviting them to pause and embrace a world without us. One of the video works in the exhibition depict two birds in a weightless realm, their songs summoning the sun – until an eclipse reveals the stars. Birdsong reflects on beginnings and endings, offering a meditation on a world where humanity no longer exists – a postlapsarian paradise, a kind of love at last sight.

Echoes of this theme are reflected in the second video piece, We’ll find you when the sun goes black, which interprets the historical use of the ’terrella’, a small magnetised model representing the Earth. First pioneered by the scientist William Gilbert and later refined by Christian Birkeland, the terrella has been used to study natural phenomena including the aurora. The simulation of the Earth’s magnetic field and the resulting auroral displays mirror the cosmic events in the exhibition and their fleeting beauty.

The exhibition also echoes Bertolt Brecht’s poignant reflections from his Svendborg Poems, written during his exile in 1939: ‘In the dark times / Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times.’ De Clercq’s work embodies this sentiment, using art to reflect on and discover beauty in the darkness, much like Brecht reflected on expression in troubled times.

The soundtracks in both videoworks are composed by Vessel, a composer known for his innovative electronic and contemporary instrumental music. Vessel’s music sounds both ancient and unmistakably contemporary, reinforcing the works’ themes of timeless communication.

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Sleeping Muse After Several Snoozes

 

X Museum is proud to present Sleeping Muse After Several Snoozes, the largest survey exhibition to date by Romanian-born Hungarian artist Botond Keresztesi and his first institutional solo show in China. Featuring sixteen works spanning the last decade, this exhibition showcases Keresztesi’s distinct visionary aesthetic, shaped through his unique “mental-photoshop” lens. Blending art historical references with contemporary digital culture, his ever-evolving image-making practice transports viewers into a speculative future deeply rooted in reflections on the present.

 

Gallery 5: Visual Histories and Post-Human Aesthetics

 

Among the exhibition’s most emblematic works is Danse Macabre, a dystopian reimagining of Henri Matisse’s Dance and Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Originally conceived for the RGB (Roman, Gothic, Baroque) exhibition, its Teletubby-inspired red, green, and blue figures reveal an inescapable truth: the inevitability of mortality, visible through the screens embedded in their bellies.

 

One of Keresztesi’s most recent paintings, Elysium, draws from the elegant form of greyhounds and the artist’s bond with his own dog. The composition merges medieval tapestry-like aesthetics with Art Nouveau floral motifs, paying homage to Danse Macabre while evoking the sculptural beauty of marble statues.

 

The artist’s exploration of post-human aesthetics emerges in Speed of Life, which introduces the symbolic praying mantis as a recurring motif. The work envisions an ever-closer synthesis between nature, technology, and humanity, questioning whether organic life might ultimately be replaced by cyborg entities. The mantis—reminiscent of Sumerian-Aztec hybrid creatures—moves with an uncanny surrealist grace, blurring the line between the living and the artificial.

 

A pivotal piece in this gallery reflects Keresztesi’s fusion of classical objectmaking and contemporary commercial design. A first-generation PlayStation appears deified, acting as an altar for Constantin Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse. Floating clouds reference both Hieronymus Bosch’s monstrous dreamscapes and Google’s earliest AI experiments, forming a visual intertext that reinterprets the aesthetics of the post-internet era.

 

Exhibition Terrace 2: Symbols and Paradoxes

 

Stoner Elf incorporates the visual language of Apple’s early emoji sets, exploring cosmic dualities through the contrast of a full yellow moon and a dark new moon. These elements echo the balance represented in an earring piercing, with cigarette holders inserted into the lobe—an everyday act transformed into a reflection on opposition and complementarity.

 

The Solarium series is represented by When Your Winchester Flies…, which humorously portrays ancient sculptures attempting to tan under artificial light. Their pigment-less marble bodies will never change, highlighting the irreversibility of time. A hovering drone, carrying a Winchester rifle, symbolizes the paradox of knowledge transfer and cultural continuity amidst inevitable decay.

 

A second mantis-themed masterpiece, The King of Time, continues Keresztesi’s meditation on temporal cycles and transformation.

 

Exhibition Terrace 3: Cyclical Narratives and Digital Mythologies

 

In Enter the Void, a humanoid test dummy endlessly walks on a circular treadmill—a metaphor for the inescapable loop of technological and existential repetition. A similar cyclical motion appears in Smoking Break, where breath, fire, and smoke interconnect in a system echoing both Piet Mondrian’s compositions and the fluidity of Brancusi’s sculptural forms.

 

The nostalgia of 1990s rave culture emerges in Forever Young, a reinterpretation of Fantazia flyers with a metaphysical twist. Here, the planetary motifs and grid structures take on new meaning in an era of digital realities, augmented experiences, and robotic-human hybridity. The painting’s central head peels back layers of flesh, revealing an underlying mechanized structure, mirroring the era’s shifting understanding of embodiment.

 

In Tears of Joy, a knight encloses a princess within his armor, her tearful gaze peering through the helmet’s mouthpiece. The image plays with the traditional motif of a princess locked in a tower, while its background—a metro wall in Prague’s Peace Square—grounds the scene in an urban contemporary setting, layering history and modernity.

 

Gallery 6: Deities, Automobiles, and Eternal Recurrence

 

Annunciation stages an extraordinary celestial encounter between the late rapper Tupac and a praying mantis, casting them as divine figures in a cosmic tableau. A face formed from swirling clouds gazes outward, blurring distinctions between earthly and galactic realms.

 

The psychedelic, Art Nouveau-infused Lost Highway presents a vehicle that appears to stare directly at its driver. Its organic, fluid lines merge futuristic car design with timeless artistic traditions. A turquoise mineral—a symbol of wisdom—anchors the composition, reinforcing a theme of intelligence and foresight.

 

Melancholy takes a mechanized turn in Melancholy, where the traditional portrait of a dignitary with a loyal hound is subverted. Here, the cyborg dog, rather than the human, assumes central importance. Brancusi-inspired sculptures stand resilient in the post-apocalyptic setting, implying that in the wake of destruction, it is machine and material—not humanity—that endure.

 

Finally, Following the Golden Snake revisits René Magritte’s The Blank Signature, replacing the horseback rider with a surreal hybrid—a robotic horse entwined with a snake. The viewer’s perception is challenged as reality and illusion intertwine, calling into question the reliability of sight and memory. The Brancusi mask embedded within the composition alludes to art’s cyclical resurgence, while the snake—a reference to the Year of the Snake—symbolizes renewal and continuity.

 

Summary

 

With Sleeping Muse After Several Snoozes, Keresztesi crafts a dreamlike yet incisive reflection on the digital age, weaving together elements of classical art, contemporary pop culture, and speculative futurism. Through these sixteen works, he constructs a vivid universe where historical echoes, technological anxieties, and surrealist humor converge. As we navigate this exhibition, we are invited to ponder not only the future Keresztesi envisions but also the rapidly shifting realities we already inhabit.

 

Written by Péter Bencze

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The solo exhibition of Isabella Benshimol Toro, Le Fantôme de la Liberté, takes its title from Luis Buñuel’s 1974 surrealist film, which subversively deconstructs, with irony and provocation, the social and moral norms that govern society. Overlooking Kurfürstendamm, the cross-section of an apparently typical apartment—featuring a bedroom, a bathroom, a hallway, an entrance, and an office—becomes the stage for a tension between private and public spheres. The site-specific installation, composed of a selection of sculptures and photographs, incorporates fragments of everyday life. Created from architectural elements, furniture, lingerie, worn clothing, and various textiles set in epoxy resin or silicone, these pieces inhabit the space with a spectral presence. Each one seems to bear the memory, the fluids, or the forms of an absent body, revealing an implicit narrative, petrified in time. Benshimol Toro transforms Les Vitrines into a tableau of a domestic interior, where fossils or monuments of banal gestures take the form of fixed images. These unfold like a film strip that comes to life with the rhythm of passing footsteps. By intensifying the boundary between what must be shown or concealed, the exhibition is activated under the voyeuristic gaze of pedestrians, while authority and conventions, laid bare, reveal their intrinsic absurdity. The absent walls and suggested spaces create a raw transparency, where power dynamics become visible, and intimacy appears more political than ever.

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Roda Viva is an exhibition of newly commissioned works by Vanessa da Silva. 

Drawing inspiration from da Silva’s Brazilian heritage – family history, music, dance, and the legacy of Brazilian artists such as Hélio Oiticica – the work explores themes of identity, ancestry, destiny, joy and memory. 

Roda Viva, meaning ‘wheel of life’, references life in motion or the movement in life. The exhibition, which features textiles, sculptures and works on paper, is centred around the various cycles of lives, the histories carried from generation to generation, and the interconnectedness of past, present and future. 

The title also references the ‘roda de samba’ (circle of dance), where people gather together to dance, sing and play music, not only in street parties, but as a significant practice within religious ceremonies in Brazil. Such a circle, where the movement of bodies creates a vibration and rhythm, offers a powerful metaphor for collective existence and spiritual connection.

Challenging the formality of the space, colour, rhythm and movement combine to create a joyous visual and spatial experience, celebrating the expression of freedom. The sculptural forms invite reconsideration of our bodies as a permanent condition of experience. They present a site where spirit and reason intersect, exchange, decode, and fluctuate, attempting to make sense of all things worldly, and not. 

Roda Viva is curated by Kalliopi Tsipni Kolaza, Curator of Visual Arts, Mostyn. 

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Foundation Foundation, The Ampersand Foundation and the Henry Moore Foundation.

https://mostyn.org/event/vanessa-da-silva-roda-vida/

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The exhibition presents photographs of Chloe Akrithaki’s encounters with visual
artists, capturing them in their studios and other places familiar to them.

In 1992, Chloe Akrithaki photographed her father, the artist Alexis Akrithakis (1939-1994), in his studio. This was her first attempt at capturing an artist while he was creating within his studio, feeling free, forgetting the camera’s presence. However, this “defined” the manner and relationship between her and other artists she would photograph many years later in Athens.

Chloe Akrithaki’s Encounters is an ongoing project that explores the mutual relationship of trust, acceptance, and freedom between artists. Her images capture the essence of these encounters, reflecting the diversity of the artists and their works. It is a photographic rendering of sharing, the energy, and the pulse of an encounter.
The project develops like a living organism over the years, gradually taking shape through multiple visits to artists, enriched by new works, ideas, concerns, and
techniques. These encounters are, ultimately, presented through a selection of other works, her own, each as different as the artists themselves and as varied as their creations and motivations. The only constant throughout is her commitment to providing genuine and meaningful images to the viewer. Her photographs convey a sense of natural communication, connecting viewers to the artists and their creative processes. In these images, the artists compete for significance with elements and objects in their space—through a movement, an expression, or an uncontrolled play of light and shadow. Unexpected conditions and seemingly trivial details, often overlooked, contribute to shaping an atmosphere conducive to the artistic creation and the warmth of a friendly meeting…

Chloe explains, “It is a personal approach, a visit to a friend. We enjoy coffee, tea, and sometimes beer and talk about art, especially in Greece. Occasionally, I take
photographs. In some images, the studio environment and details or individual body parts stand in for the whole person. And sometimes it happens that after establishing a deep trust, the artists forget that I’m there. During these times, I can capture candid moments where they focus on their artistic creation.”

Katerina Koskina

Photographed artists:

Dimosthenis Avramidis, Yannis Adamakos, Christos Athanasiadis, Eugenia Apostolou, Christos Bouronikos, Lizzie Calligas, Capten, Dionisis Christofilogiannis,
Paolo Colombο, Martha Dimitropoulou, Antonis Donef, Maro Fasouli, Vasso Gavaisse, Dimitris Georgakopoulos, Vassilis Gerodimos, Marianna Gioka, Efi Haliori,
Athina Ioannou, Apostolos Karakatsanis, Dionisis Kavallieratos, Irini Karayannopoulou, Nikomachi Karakostanoglou, Peggy Kliafa, Katerina Katsifaraki, Michalis Katzourakis, Panagiotis Koulouras, Alexandros Laios, Vasiliki Lefkaditi, Panagiotis Lezes, Marianna Lourba, Miltos Manetas, Maro Michalakakos, Irini Miga, Kyriakos Mortarakos, Kleopatra Moursela, Eleni Mylonas, Efrosini Mytilinaiou, Nikos Papadimitriou, Nikos Papadopoulos, Ilias Papailiakis, Alexios Papazacharias, Nikos Podias, Lila Polenaki, Spiridoula Politi, Mantalina Psoma, Georgia Sagri, Nana Sachini, Kostas Sachpazis, George Stamatakis, Sofia Stevi, Chrisanthos Sotiropoulos, Tolis Tatolas, Thanasis Totsikas, Nikos Tranos, Giorgos Tserionis, Filippos Tsitsopoulos, Kostas Tsolis, Dimitris Tzammouranis, Alexandros Tzannis, Amalia Vekri, Kostis Velonis, Katerina Zacharopoulou

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Débora Delmar Trust

Débora Delmar investigates the effects of globalisation on everyday life focusing on issues of class, gender, cultural hegemony and gentrification. This is borne from the omnipresent influence of the United States in Mexico (Delmar’s place of birth), and in the wider world. Within her practice she examines the contextual value of goods, analysing their systems of production, distribution and consumption.

In her installations Delmar frequently references the sanitised aesthetic utilised in non-spaces, a neologism coined by sociologist Marc Augé to describe places such as banks, airports as well as corporate and government buildings, which are commonly under surveillance. She’s particularly interested in the psychological and behavioural influence of this kind of architecture. Physical barriers working as metaphors for political and societal restrictions have been a recurrent subject matter in recent projects. Delmar often works with appropriated images and objects, as well as with local production processes and direct architectural interventions. She frequently incorporates immaterial components within her exhibitions such as video, text, sound, scent, and situations.

Through her Stanley Picker Fellowship, Delmar explored strategies of working within systems, contracts, relationships and institutions. By incorporating the contractual structure of the Fellowship and exploring how to set up a trust in her own name, she scrutinised artistic labour as a form of currency.

As an outcome of her Fellowship, Delmar’s solo exhibition will expand on the multiple meanings of the word Trust, and build on her recent interests in how value is generated through the financial world, as well as through physical and symbolic impacts of architecture present in gentrification, consumerism and surveillance in the urban environment.

Delmar has a special interest in the relatively new phenomenon of gated communities in her home country Mexico and in the much longer history of these spaces in the UK and elsewhere. As an architectural intervention within the exhibition, she has created a large gate with the workshops at Kingston School of Art, that is based on an original side-gate at the nearby Picker House, designed in the 1960s by architect Kenneth Wood. The piece will divide the exhibition space and create a conceptual gateway connecting the gallery and Stanley Picker’s former home.

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For his first institutional solo exhibition in Belgium, Austrian artist Thomas Hitchcock delves into the intersections of Art Nouveau and Europe’s fin de siècle cultural period and contemporary technological developments: a timely response to the decadent and even apocalyptic times we are living in today, where some are experiencing a peak moment of incredible and unknown wealth and power. The title of the show, Abstract Entities, is a critical reflection on capitalism and its dehumanizing forces. For Hitchcock, abstraction is not just an aesthetic choice but a symbol of capitalist functioning, where everything becomes interchangeable and commodified. “If you look at how capitalism works, everything is reduced to an abstract entity,” Hitchcock explains. “Within this system, natural resources, workers and objects, become something to be optimized, consumed, and, at will, discarded for maximum profit.” However, Abstract Entities is not just a critique of global capitalist exploitation. The term entity also implies something elusive and ungraspable, suggesting that the exhibition aims to explore something beyond the realm of the concrete. “Abstract entities, in a spatial sense, are not completely definable. They resist full understanding.” This ambiguity lures the viewer into a space of reflection and engagement, where meanings are not fixed but unfold through experience and personal interpretation.

Whiplash Ornaments and the Aesthetic Legacies of Global Exploitation

Informed by a deep historical awareness, Hitchcock’s exhibition engages directly with the architectural vocabulary of Art Nouveau, a movement that flourished at the turn of the 20th century. The flowing, organic lines of the ornamental designs—famously employed by Victor Horta and his contemporaries—are reimagined in Hitchcock’s installation, where metal handrails extending from the walls and windows curve into the space, supporting delicate glassworks. These railings, constructed from fragments of so-called “whiplash ornaments” particularly popular in Belgian Art Nouveau evoke the lianas of the rubber plant—an important resource exploited in Congo for the global rubber trade, which was foundational to Belgium’s colonial wealth. The work makes a direct link between the aesthetic beauty of the Art Nouveau movement and the violence of colonial extraction, with specific reference to the “Style Congo”—a term used to describe the aesthetic manifestations of colonialist power through the lens of Art Nouveau. The whiplash ornamentation also conjures the image of the native whip made from hippopotamus skin, a tool of discipline and violence employed against the Congolese People under Belgian rule. This duality—between the grace of the ornamental and the cruelty of colonial violence— defines the tone of Hitchcock’s work, creating a space of tension and reflection. By foregrounding these historical undercurrents, Hitchcock positions the viewer to confront uncomfortable truths about the aesthetic legacies of global exploitation.

The Glass Works: Floating Motifs and Dreamlike Perception

Central to the exhibition are Hitchcock’s glass works—pieces that combine traditional painting techniques with modern concerns about perception, identity, and the virtual realm. Hitchcock’s approach to the glass is as much about ambiguity as it is about form. The glass pieces, with their partial opacity and abstract forms, act as metaphors for inner worlds—spaces of the mind that are often difficult to articulate, shifting, and elusive. Hitchcock’s work draws from late 19th-century psychological theories and the upcoming of psychoanalysis, and a fascination with the “inner space” that was prevalent at the time, echoing themes of dreams, the fantastique, and the virtual. The motifs painted on the glass—delicate and dreamlike—appear to hover in space, shifting as the viewer moves around them. With their elusive forms and shifting transparency, the glass works are invitations to reflect on how we navigate the digital world—how we curate our identities, furnish our “inner spaces” and how much of ourselves we decide to reveal or obscure. This connection to the virtual realm is particularly relevant in the context of today’s digital age, where technology increasingly mediates our understanding of the world. Hitchcock acknowledges the role of the internet and social media in shaping contemporary identity, while also recognizing the alienation that these platforms can engender. “We live in an attention economy,” he reflects. “Everything is designed to keep us engaged. But what happens to our sense of self in this constant flow of images and information?” Screens are also evoked in the two striking glass works presented in the side space of KIOSK. Deeply intrigued by how the material interacts with space, particularly in terms of its abstract volume, Hitchcock bridges the ancient material of mouth-blown antique glass with contemporary technologies. Yet, there remains an element of mystery surrounding both the material and the works themselves, prompting viewers to question what they are experiencing during these moments of confusion and doubt.

Now is a good time to act (Bitte nicht so rechts)

Presented above the central platform is a lamp, part of a series of metallic sculptures with torn posters inside, defined by Thomas Hitchcock as “spontaneous and direct pieces”. The metal casing that holds the poster has an industrial, serial quality, further emphasizing the tension between mass production and the unique, accidental beauty of the found material. The laser-cut perforations in the sculpture are intentionally irregular, with deliberate “errors” that disrupt the perfection of the form. The poster inside this particular lamp was found by Thomas Hitchcock in Winter 2024 in the streets of Vienna and bears the message Bitte nicht so rechts (Please, not so far to the right). The presence of the work in the exhibition speaks to the current political climate, subtly connecting the work to contemporary debates around nationalism and the rise of right-wing politics. In this piece, Hitchcock invites viewers to reflect on the interplay between everyday objects, political messaging, and the powerful role of art in making visible the urgent issues of our time.

Stage for Interventions: A Shared Dialogue

A distinctive feature of Abstract Entities is the active involvement of students from Belgian art academies, whose temporary interventions will unfold throughout the exhibition’s run. These interventions are not merely supplementary but form an integral part of the exhibition, transforming the space into a forum for collective engagement. Hitchcock, who himself graduated seven years ago, views these interventions as more than just an educational opportunity—they represent a way to break the solitude of the gallery space, opening it up for moments of dialogue, exchange, and unanticipated creativity. The central platform of the exhibition serves both as a stage for student interventions and as a space for contemplation for the visitors. By inviting students to engage with the installation, Hitchcock encourages a communal experience—a contrast to the deeply individualistic nature of the abstract entities themselves.

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Fire is never still.
It devours and purifies,
It consumes and illuminates.
An act of violence and creation, the fever of revolution and the warmth of survival.

Fire is language—a crackling whisper of destruction, a beacon calling beyond. It leaves shadows where bodies once stood, scorches history into walls, and reduces memory to smoke. No fire without fuel. No smoke without fire.

In The Notion of Expenditure, Georges Bataille writes of energy—how the sun gives it freely, while living beings burn through it at a cost. A racehorse collapses after the finish line, its final burst of speed consuming the last reserves of life. The human equivalent is burnout, a slow combustion of the body. In Thunderstorm, quatre pieds au-dessus du sol, Victor Le Guennec freezes a galloping horse mid-stride, suspended in a moment of weightlessness before gravity reclaims it. A rhythm of movement and silence, a cadence of exhaustion.

Some fires burn slow—a planet fevered, forests turning to ash, bodies worn by systems that demand more than they give. A Slow Violence by Alexandra Rose Howland reveals fire as a force stretched over time. The erosion of land and labor, the toxic inheritance of industry, the creeping damage when governments abandon those on the margins. Fire doesn’t always announce itself in flames; sometimes, it lingers in the air, water, lungs. 

But fire is also defiance. The glow of an uprising, the spark of a match struck in the dark. Exarheia Golden Shower by Kyveli Zoi is an act of remembering—a fire reigniting every December in Exarchia, fueled by anger, grief, a city selling itself piece by piece. Embers of resistance smolder beneath layers of gentrification and riot police.

Some fires are deliberate—ritual flames, sacred offerings, the quiet glow of a candle burning through the night. BURN: like ice, like fire, like tears by Natalia Manta, wax melts, bodies dissolve, boundaries blur. Fire transforms, softens, consumes. It is both passage and obliteration, echoing vanitas paintings where time itself is made visible in a flickering flame.

In Longevity Was Not a Priority in The Autonomous Region of Light, Irini Miga plays with fire’s reflections—coal once fueled industry, energy leaves traces in absence. Shadows on walls, afterimages in minds.

Some monuments to fire are unintentional. The walls of Hiroshima, etched with silhouettes of bodies caught in the blast. The lovers of Pompeii, preserved in ash. BRDG by Nikolas Ventourakis captures another kind of disappearance—the slow dismantling of history. In Los Angeles, a bridge is demolished, its ghost remaining in overexposed photographs, light burning into the film.

In the end, fire leaves us with remnants. Katarzyna Wojtczak’s Dirty Daddies’ Legacy is a work of purification, where soap—meant to cleanse—becomes a carrier of power, a residue of touch, an archive of excess. Purity, after all, is never neutral. To erase is to rewrite; to remove is to leave a different mark.

And yet, fire is breath. Zoi Pirini’s Breath captures this paradox—how destruction and survival intertwine. A hole in the mouth of a ceramic figure becomes the only point of release, the only way to endure. Fire takes away, but gives back. Heat reshapes, smoke signals, embers glow long after the flames die.

945°C. The temperature at which clay hardens, where transformation is set in stone. Yoshi Kametani’s work disintegrates as it comes into being—fire as process, a force that erases while it creates. Nothing lasts, all things are temporary, what remains is only ever a trace.

“They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” Donald Trump declared in 2017. But what is fire if not fury itself? The fever of history, the aftermath of empire, the ember that refuses to die.

Here, fire is held in cupped hands.
Here, fire refuses to be contained.

Panagiotis Kefalas reflects power in representation. His paintings examine how individuals are connected—or alienated—within political and social history. Figures are suspended within political gestures, visible through power—a force as invisible as it is material. His images document melancholy and isolation, revealing the subtle forms of exclusion that move through networks of spaces and screens. In this space, fire is a metaphor for the eruption of power—global leaders meet in flames of rhetoric, leaving only the shadow of destruction.

Mark Geffriaud’s two tiny plexiglass plates carry delicate, elusive light. As the light shifts, colors and fragments of hidden images are revealed, only to disappear as quickly as they come. A quiet fire, imperceptible yet ever-present. Each subtle shift in perspective becomes a revelation. A play of light—fire’s trace—but in the absence of flame.

In the end, fire is both destruction and birth. It leaves marks and memories, traces and scars. It is a force that shapes, but never settles, always burning in the distance, a reminder of what once was and what still is. A flicker in the dark, waiting to ignite once more.

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Adam Milner
Meanwhile
March 7–April 5, 2025

Meanwhile, Adam Milner’s first New York solo exhibition, explores the transformation of personal objects as they
shift from private to public space. Rooted in a practice of recontextualizing personal and found materials, Milner’s
works examine how objects hold meaning and how those meanings evolve and mutate through presentation.

The exhibition brings together several of the artist’s ongoing projects:156 red ink drawings on various food
wrappers, two large paintings embedded with intimate found materials, two pink pantsuits on vintage Rootstein
mannequins, and an assemblage of small sculptures alongside other personal items.

For Milner, the exhibition is a moment of pause, a situation where things are held still and considered complete. By
pausing the constant flux of things, Meanwhile allows viewers to absorb otherwise marginal materials, ultimately
challenging notions of intimacy, value, and perception.

***

Adam Milner (b.1988, Denver, CO) is an artist living in Brooklyn, New York. Rooted in the slow accumulation and
preservation of quotidian ephemera, Milner’s practice blurs boundaries between private and public, work and
leisure, and relishes in complications around how we identify or merge with the things we make and consume.
Milner has previously created site-specific interventions into the archives of the Warhol, the Clyfford Still Museum,
and the Greer Lankton Collection at the Mattress Factory. The artist’s work can be found in galleries, museums,
publications, public spaces, domestic settings, and online. Milner received a BFA from the University of
Colorado, an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and
Sculpture. Recently, Art21 highlighted the artist’s practice in the film Adam Milner Takes Care of the Details.

***

Exhibition Text

by Colleen Kelsey (Feb 2025)

Everything begins with an egg. And the egg is a void. I think of the Clarice Lispector short story, “The Egg and
The Chicken,” and the lucid yet madcap succession of these lines: “In the morning in the kitchen on the table I
see the egg…Immediately I perceive that one cannot be seeing an egg. Seeing an egg never remains in the
present.” Invisibility with infinite capacity.

I don’t know if Adam has thought of capacity as one of the materials in this work. The artist’s idiosyncratic
collecting, reconfiguring, and contextualizing of found objects questions how we live and engage with the items
around us. Time, order, and subject are mutable. A cigarette contains a world. I can see it lit, between lips, alone
with another in the pack, and ground under a heel, part of a narrative where the action unfolds through
immeasurable duration. Tangible fragments and accumulated detritus become physical expressions of intimacy,
perhaps even transgression.

A red rose buds and blooms; cigarettes and eggs split. The environment created by the artist is one of asides
and interludes. The power—and emotional sleight of hand—comes from the peripheral. These things exist, even
in rooms you cannot see, living on tabletops or forgotten under furniture. The studio is transient and
preconceived assumptions of display are revocable. Dust (mostly) prevents itself from settling.

There is something so alien about an egg and its ability to obscure itself, that looping and overlapping of
absence and presence. Milner plays with appearances, of being in the thing and outside of the thing. Desire is
there too, a scrim of residue asking us if we want to become whole.

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le geste du commun

Pierre Boggio, Julie Escoffier, Gisèle Gonon

 

Curation :

Émilie d’Ornano and Livia Tarsia in Curia 

 

Exhibition from

February 21^st

to April 19^th 2025

 

For their second collaboration, the art center KOMMET and the nomadic residency an· other here presents the collective exhibition le geste du commun (the common gesture) in Lyon, France. Following a joint residency between France and Germany, artists Pierre Boggio, Julie Escoffier and Gisèle Gonon unveil the results of their research conducted in Berlin and in the village of Montbrun-les-Bains in Drôme. This exhibition brings together pieces that explore the notion of community through our links with stories, territories and collective dynamics. 

 

At the crossroads of folklore, orality and collective rituals, Pierre Boggio studies visible and invisible forms of transmission. His installation summons family heritage, culinary traditions and local mythologies. He revisits legendary figures in the form of pots, representing the Tarasque, the Ondine and the Orcolat. These creatures, from popular stories, embody telluric forces, metamorphosis and myths of protection or threat, thus reactivating a collective memory.

 

At the heart of this work, a cookbook is constructed, where each element becomes the witness of a culinary heritage, nourished by the stories and experiments of those who perpetuate them. During the exhibition, visitors are invited to sip a beverage and to transmit, in writing, anecdotes associated with cooking. Through this convivial moment, his installation recalls the way in which knowledge is spread, in particular through speech, the sharing of a meal or the repetition of an ancestral gesture. In exchange, the artist gives the opportunity to compose a booklet from the recipes available. Each loose page is distinguished by the choice of its own typography and an illustration from his iconographic archives, giving the recipe a form of mystical personification. By reviving these means of transmission that are both personal and universal, Pierre Boggio questions the way in which cooking structures our social ties, forges our relationship to the territory and cultivates a common language.

 

Gisèle Gonon explores the countryside in its agricultural relationships and affective dimensions. Her work is based on common materials, rooted in an intimate narrative of rurality. 

 

For her installation at KOMMET, Gisèle Gonon draws from her personal history, evoking a peasant life and queer lives in a rural environment. Inspired by the medieval heritage of Montbrun-les-Bains, she reinterprets the traditional banner, a symbol of rallying and collective identity, to display the struggles of the LGBTQIA+ community on a tarpaulin. The latter is decorated with lavender patterns, a purple plant emblematic of both Drôme Provençale and the queer community. Gisèle Gonon integrates an anchor plate, an element used to consolidate the structure of a building, which here becomes a metaphor for resistance and the bonds of a community to be preserved. This motif continues in the finials, whose design is also inspired by the aesthetics of the Echinops ritro, a hermaphrodite flower also known as the southern globethistle that can be found around the residency. 

 

The soundtrack that accompanies this banner gives voice to those who project new narratives in the countryside, thus inscribing these testimonies in a landscape that can be perceived as inhospitable. Through this work, Gisèle Gonon affirms the possibility of a queer identity in a rural environment, opening a space where they can flourish.

 

Julie Escoffier examines the properties of materials and their ancestral symbolism. Arranged on the floor, her installation questions the action of time on matter and the way in which it is perceived, manipulated and activated. The work takes the form of a luminous hearth where artifacts made of rosin, a translucent pine resin, are connected to a sound device. Sensitive to heat, this fragile material reveals a tactile and vibratory dimension. Its forms evoke “witches’ stones”, rocks naturally perforated by water erosion, to which protective virtues are attributed. Piezoelectric sensors record the vibrations of the material in contact with visitors, generating an evolving and unpredictable sound score. The installation is thus based on interaction and activation, offering an intuitive and silent ritual. This non-verbal experience engages the body and underlines our relationship to a vulnerable world, calling for measured and delicate attention.

 

Echoing the research of British anthropologist Tim Ingold, there is an interdependence between the organism and its environment. Julie Escoffier’s work illustrates this relational vision of the world, where beings and materials are never isolated but always caught in a network of mutual influences and transformations.

 

Pierre Boggio, Julie Escoffier and Gisèle Gonon question acts that enhance our connections, prolong resistance and accompany ongoing transformations. Each of these installations invites a shared experience, where the gesture – whether culinary, symbolic or tactile – becomes a tool for reappropriation and collective resonance. In a world marked by tensions and profound changes, these artists sketch out relational micro-territories where stories are constructed through interactions. Thus, le geste du commun is not limited to a single reflection on the community: it activates its mechanisms, reaffirming the importance of the links that connect us to others, to spaces and to our environment.

 

 

Biographies

 

Pierre Boggio lives and works in Lyon.

Graduating with a DNSEP in graphic design from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and the postgraduate course Kaolin at the École Nationale Supérieur d’art in Limoges, his work has notably been exhibited at Espace Les Barreaux (Paris), at the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage in Vassivière, La Bonbonnière (Les Roches de Condrieu), at the Attrape-Couleurs (Lyon), and even in 2024 at the project space WIRWIR during his residency with an· other here (Berlin). In 2022, he co founded P.B. City, a curatorial and artistic project leading to exhibitions at the Atelier LaMezz (Pierre-Bénite) and in several spaces in Lyon such as Monopôle, La Factatory, the Réfectoire des Nonnes and the BF15.

 

Julie Escoffier lives and works in Lyon.

Graduating with a DNSEP from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Lyon in 2013, she completed her postgraduate course at the E.N.P.E.G « La Esmeralda » in Mexico. Her work has been presented in France and internationally, notably at the Festival Mouvement d’art (La Teste-de-Buche), at Kashagan (Lyon), at Untitled Art (Miami), at ALMANAQUE fotográfica (Mexico), at Efrain Lopez Gallery (Chicago) and at the Galerie Les Territoires (Montréal). In parallel, she takes part in several art residencies, including CASA WABI (Puerto Escondido, Oax.) in 2017, the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage in Vassivière (Beaumont-du-Lac) in 2021 and an·other here (Berlin) in 2024.

 

Gisèle Gonon lives and works in Berlin. 

Graduating with a DNSEP from the École Supérieure d’Art et Design in Saint-Étienne in 2005, in 2018, she joined the Goldrausch postgraduate training program in Berlin. Her work has been presented in various museums and exhibition spaces across Europe, including KINDL (Berlin), EKKM Contemporary Art Museum (Tallinn), Bundeskunsthalle (Bonn), gr_und (Berlin), Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei (Leipzig) and Week-end de l’art contemporain (Bordeaux). She participates in several artist residencies, including La Factatory (Lyon) and Tallinn Art Hall (Tallinn) in 2021 and also with an·other here (Montbrun-les-Bains) in 2024.

 

 

Captions

Pierre Boggio 

 

Tarasque, 2024

Red stoneware

19 x 23 x 17 cm

 

Ondine, 2024

White stoneware

26 x 20 x 16 cm

 

Orcolat, 2024

White stoneware

20 x 28 x 30,5 cm

 

Tridacna, 2025

White stoneware, oribe, black, brown and silver enamels, rings

39 x 32 x 15 cm

 

Recettes, 2024 – en cours

Compiling pages, risography

6 x 19 cm

 

Lune & Ouroboros, 2025

White stoneware, slip, enamel, luster

28 x 28 x 15 cm

 

Coquilles, 2025

Porcelain, enamel

12 x 12 x 6,5 cm

 

Julie Escoffier

 

8/ entières même brisées, elles sont le feu et l’eau dans la même transparence immortelle*, 2025

Rosin castings, contact microphones, sound mixer, speakers and lighting device

Varying dimensions

*The title is an extract of Pierres by Roger Caillois

This project received support from Aide individuelle à la création from the DRAC Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.

9/ Dissidences des Champs, 2025

Installation : Silver and black tarpaulin machine embroidered and sewn by hand, pink, yellow, violet and black thread

Sculptures in forged iron patinated with beeswax, made in collaboration with Lucas Poutout.

Hand-engraved steel tubes inspired by the Robert·e font by Eugénie Bidaut from the typographic creation collective Bye Bye Binary.

240 × 200 × 260 cm

 

Sound: Text in french, audio loop 06’04’’

Performers : Colette Angeli, Nico Maria Moscatelli, Gisèle Gonon. With the contribution of people from the LGBTQIA+ community who participated in the “Café-Gâteau Queer” events during the artistic residency in Drôme Provençale in the Autumn of 2024.

This text takes its roots from these collective writing and reading workshops as well as from the pinpointed view of the artist as a queer lesbian.

Sound mixing : Ὀρφεύς

 

 

Pitch

For their second collaboration, the art centre KOMMET and the nomadic residency an· other here presents the collective exhibition le geste du commun (the common gesture) in Lyon. Following a joint residency between France and Germany, artists Pierre Boggio, Julie Escoffier and Gisèle Gonon unveil the results of their research conducted in Berlin and in the village of Montbrun-les-Bains in Drôme.

Through installation, sound, ceramics and graphic design, the three artists explore acts of  social and ecological resistance, repair and reinvention. Through engaging and participatory practices, this exhibition invites us to rethink ways of building community by valuing interactions, transmissions and sensitive experiences.

 

 

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Katasterismós

g. olmo stuppia’s highly anticipated solo exhibition, Katasterismós, is now open at the 500-square-meter SPUMA Space for the Arts in Venice. Located in a late 19th-century former brewery at the heart of Giudecca Island, within the ecosystem of Fondamenta San Biagio, the site-specific project Katasterismós reaches towards the stars amidst the overwhelming light pollution of the modern era.

Co-produced by Venice Art Factory, R Platform, Orsini Collezioni, the exhibition offers a striking and immersive experience that delves into the themes of migration—of bodies, souls and icons. It embodies displacement and the quest for freedom. Running from February 21 to March 31, 2025, it merges film, large-scale textile sculpture, photography, and collaborative works in a thoughtfully curated environment that invites contemplation on both personal and collective histories.

The compelling centerpiece of the exhibition is stuppia’s film Marrying the Night Ep.V, a profound 4K production shot with a FLIR Camera and edited by Domenico Palmeri and Gerardo Brentari. The film intricately weaves together narratives surrounding migration and the search for a new world. It is presented alongside sculptures and photographs, enveloping the audience in a fluid interplay of light and shadow. These elements converge to evoke the timeless myth of migration—one that is both ancient and contemporary—offering a meditative reflection on freedom and the existential challenges faced by those in transit.

The First Room: Collaboration and Artistic Dialogue

Upon entering the first room of Katasterismós, the audience is immediately drawn into a dialogue between multiple contributing artists, whose works each offer a unique voice within the overarching themes of the exhibition. Among the featured artists are Gerardo Brentari, Diego Gelosi, Arianna Marcolin, Francesca Marconi, Cristina Nuñez, and Raqs Media Collective, all of whom bring their individual sensibilities and perspectives to the work.

Gerardo Brentari: Homage to Painting (installation, 2025). An irreverent tribute to the redemptive power of art, with a particular focus on painting, Brentari’s work is represented by a T-shirt that portrays the boxing match between Mike Tyson and Clifford Etienne, dubbed “The Black Rhino,”, which took place on February 22, 2003. In a dramatic moment, Tyson delivered a single punch that knocked Etienne out. This event marked the beginning of Etienne’s legal troubles, which eventually led to his departure from the sport in 2006 and his subsequent 105-year prison sentence. Within the confines of incarceration, however, Etienne discovered his aptitude for painting, creating an ironic and meaningful body of work inspired by the cultural traditions of Louisiana and New Orleans, his childhood home.  Making Off (video, 2025). In this video, Brentari captures the making of Marrying the Night Ep.V – Fireflies in New York using his essential handycam. The video fragments offer a glimpse into the dedication, spirit of defiance, and sharp denunciation embedded within the film, while also showcasing the powerful creative energy fostered by the collaboration between artists and the American metropolis.

Diego Gelosi: α, ιγ, λζ. 1, 13, 37 (installation, 2025). A rotating radar rod marks the passage of time through an unyielding, cyclical motion, producing a deep, percussive sound as it sweeps across a photocell. Meanwhile, in the video loop, smoke emanates from a chimney, obscuring and intermittently revealing the Madonnina of Milan in a moment of sacred clarity. During this suspended moment, both the rod’s movement and the sound cease, as though time itself pauses in reverence to the revelation. The Madonnina stands as a symbol of eternal artistic creation, transcending the transient nature of contemporary production. This reflects the builders of Milan’s Cathedral, who, knowing they would never witness the completion of their work, nevertheless contributed to a creation that transcends time.

Arianna Marcolin: Ash (installation, 2025). The writings scattered on the ground consist of ash produced by burning wood from the artist’s childhood home stove in Schio, near Vicenza. The small piles of ash are shaped into letters, which form words, ultimately creating entire sentences. In this work, Marcolin pays homage to typography, a craft passed down through generations in her family. She particularly honors her grandfather, who, when she was a child, taught her the techniques of movable type composition. The attempt—futile from the outset—to organize and control a fleeting substance like ash, translating its ephemeral form into words, transforms into a ritual of prayer. The sentences, drawn from Marcolin’s personal reflections or various authors’ writings, become magical formulas: extracts capable of offering salvation in the relentless flow of life’s questions. Once committed to memory, the phrases endure the wind’s gusts or the careless steps of an unwitting visitor.

Francesca Marconi: Cartography of the Horizon / Map the New Word. Libya-Italy, Morocco-Spain, and The Travel of Mamadou Saliou (project 2020, print 2025). This photographic triptych stems from the Cartography of the Horizon / Map the New Word workshop conducted by Marconi with a group of asylum seekers in Lombardy. Through a participatory approach, Marconi, in a manner akin to a creator, initiated the construction of a new Earth, a novel atlas that challenges conventional notions of borders and identity. This new map reshapes contemporary territories into a shared, collective landscape. The images presented are photomontages based on satellite maps sourced from Google Earth, depicting the countries the migrants crossed or aspired to reach. These maps form an unprecedented geography of desire, a trans-territorial Pangea in constant motion, prompting reflection on the arbitrary nature of national boundaries defined by prevailing political forces.

Cristina Nuñez: Heaven on Earth (project, 2025). During her time in Sicily for the Heaven on Earth project, Nuñez explored the theme of monotheistic religions in Europe. Following a photographic documentation of an Easter procession, the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet served as a powerful symbol of the supernatural—a theme central to Nuñez’s artistic journey. The celestial event, appearing before her eyes, transcended the ordinary, becoming an instrument of inner knowledge and reinforcing the spirituality the artist has long embraced. Shaped by her pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago and a transformative journey to Jerusalem, Nuñez’s art emphasizes an immanent spirituality. The comet thus becomes not just a transcendent symbol, but a guiding star on Earth, akin to the Magi’s star. This event is not one of transcendence but of the presence of the sacred within the human experience. Nuñez’s own past as a heroin addict and prostitute illuminates her mission, which is carried out in challenging environments such as prisons, psychiatric institutions, and rehabilitation centers.

Raqs Media Collective: The Course of Love (project 2019, print 2025). A real boat serves as the vessel for an ideal one: an origami boat adrift without a helmsman, at times running aground or capsizing in the canals. The real object, in this sense, embodies the concept of the object—much like the love that endures, shaped by memories transformed through nostalgic sweetness and idealized fantasy. The rudderless boat symbolizes a stream of consciousness, irrationality, and the playful contrasts of color—like a fiery sail upon the sea. The interplay of light, the geometry of the folds, and the optical properties of the materials present an image distilled to its most fundamental form.

The Sculpture-Sail: A Symbol of Migration and Freedom

One of the exhibition’s most powerful symbols is g. olmo stuppia’s sculpture-sail, a striking work crafted from traditional Italian textiles that takes center stage in the space. This piece symbolizes both the literal and metaphorical journey of migration. The sail’s movement, as it flutters in the curated lighting, captures the ephemeral nature of hope, struggle, and survival. It serves as a poignant metaphor for the journey itself—a journey marked by the constant need to adjust to ever-changing winds.

As part of a visceral and emotional act embedded in the exhibition’s broader narrative, the sculpture-sail is connected to a ritual in which Italian documents—pieces of identity, heritage, and belonging—are burned in front of the Statue of Freedom. This symbolic act, a moment of severance from the past, captures the painful yet liberating decision to forge a new identity. The ritual is a reflection on the emotional labor of migration, where one must abandon part of themselves to find freedom, and yet, in the act of burning, they also lay the groundwork for reinvention.

Immersing in the Environment of Light and Darkness

Curated by Giuseppe Amedeo Arnesano, Elena Cera, and Giulia Gelmi, Katasterismós transforms the architecture of SPUMA Space into a profound artistic statement in itself. The venue becomes a dynamic setting, serving as a conduit for the emotional ebb and flow that shapes the exhibition’s narrative. The alternating play of light and darkness not only enhances the visual aspects but also emphasizes the emotional rhythms inherent to the migration story. This contrast between shadow and illumination invites visitors to reflect on the dual nature of migration: the unyielding push towards an uncertain future and the poignant pull of an elusive past.

As the exhibition embarks on its international tour, with upcoming presentations in Paris, Palermo, Milan, and New York, it offers a unique opportunity to engage with g. olmo stuppia’s deeply philosophical and visually arresting meditation on migration, freedom, and human connection. A volume titled Katasterismós. A Drift Inside “Marrying the Night” will be published by Postmedia Books in both Italian and English, further expanding the exhibition’s reach.

Through Katasterismós, stuppia not only challenges the boundaries of contemporary art but also creates a space for critical reflection on the profound emotional and political forces that shape the experience of Italian diaspora, presenting it as a metaphor for the broader experience of emigrants in the post-truth age. Emigration, in this context, functions as a political device. This exhibition not only calls for intellectual engagement but also emotional introspection, offering a hauntingly beautiful experience that resonates to the very essence of what it means to be human in an ever-changing world.

Katasterismós is open Wednesday through Sunday, from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m., or by appointment calling +39 348 704 8962;  +39 340 533 3117

 

Press Release Link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/b7xabkt07shm4g8gtbzq1/CS_Katasterism-s_ENG_31.01.docx?rlkey=u24hng4mhkkxrom07svul2dkk&st=w0gq9f4x&dl=0 

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Press Release

Bringing together new works by Maria Spivak,  Androula Kafa,  Dιmιtris Tampakis, Christos Kyriakides and Panayiotis Andreou, the exhibition comes together through a process of attunement to different modalities of sound, the group exhibition “Sonic Entanglements: Phenomenologies of Sound” curated by Evagoria Dapola, is asking the audience to trace the liminalities and sonic qualities of the works. It  is a stark reminder that listening is a full-bodied and tran/s/ensorial practice of tuning into relational signs of the contemporary sensorium, urging us to be attuned to frequences both familiar and unfamiliar, considering the ambience by tuning in to the known and unknown, recognizing familiar and infra-ordinary frequencies. A soft suggestion to privilege sound over silence, reconsidering the meanings of rhythm and vibration.   

Text – Curatorial Essay:

Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer encounters a suspended old bell: hanging midair, it seems to retain the ghostly imprint of its unique history, of an absent body, a gesture frozen in time. The rural legend claims that this bell, the central axis of Maria Spivak’s Untitled, was part of a found sculpture, transformed into utility objects like bells due to the state of life at times of critical need.  Bridging her music practice and her artistic research, the work uses commonplace devices and materials including DC motors and cable ties to create an artwork made of absences and silences, focusing on subtraction than with addition. Creating thus a ‘relational space’, her work is a trace, a relic, a remnant, which holds a memory we may not access.

This initial encounter immediately sets the unique tone for the exhibition, immersing us in the distinctive visual and sonic language of the works. In ‘Sonic Entanglements: Phenomenologies of Sound’, objects exist in a state of ambiguity and transformation. Every artwork unearths new dimensions in a perceptual space where auditory, performative and visual elements interweave and resonate, building a polyphonic sensorium.

Moving further into the space, the viewer is met with works, bridging the auditory and visual aesthetics. The body of the viewer becomes unconsciously integrated into the artwork as one is encouraged to become conscious of the soothing and a slow-burning unrest inducing presence of a sharp spear that is rotating around its own fragile ceramic axis slowly, yet treacherously, as it holds the possibility of piercing an adult’s leg or a child’s heart. The work seems to be creating into the space a linearity that feels like spinning the arrow of time, suggesting that the horizon is only interrupted by the presence of the viewer. The duality of Christos Kyriakides’ work Roughly 1°, filled with surface tension, delivers an experience of art one experiences with eyes, ears, and the whole body. This work encapsulates Kyriakides’ artistic oeuvre: he does not transform objects but relocates them, reintroducing them into new creative contexts where their meaning wavers.

The deeper we go into the exhibition space, the stronger the sense of suspension grows. Dimitris Tampakis’ FORTUNE DILEMMA, defensive pieces, are casted aluminium sculptures that seem full of energy, ready to bounce, yet they are devoid of movement, weapons stuck and stripped from their function. When the viewer steps closer to them can barely hear their sound ramifications. Aestheticized violent objects, making us admire them while thinking of absent bodies, from weapons to spectacles: interrupted forces. Their faint conceptual and sonic echo in the space, has a mysterious aura that is energetic, aggressive and exhausted.

Near them, Panayiotis Andreou’s 7m of love, challenges expectations as the vibrator motors serve as conductors of energy and subtle yet perceptible sounds and movements. As the two vibration motors seem to be dancing and fighting till death, the sounds and gestures they produce, render audible the passions and desires behind them. His work PERFORMER, the lone work in the space outside, creates a symphony and at times cacophony of sounds that reflect the friction and abrasion between objects. The materials and objects he uses for his sculptures seem to have evolved, as if they have undergone organic mutations. His selection of DC motors, wires and magnets, is both poetic and practical, introducing sound and vibratory elements that add a performative dimension to the sculptures. There’s a faint echo of science fiction and romance in his work, without aestheticization as he reveals instead of hiding the banality of things embedded in everyday life.

As the viewer arrives at the final section of the exhibition inside the space, encounters Androula Kafa’s Lull, asking for the viewer – turned listener to meditate with it.  In this new adaptation of her ongoing practice on sonic meditations with real groups of people, each speaker represents a real person as its a deconstructed choir. The 6-channel audio installation is the result of a critical and long process of togetherness improvised through recorded vocal meditations of 5 invited people, allowing the listener to engage and participate by witnessing the intimacy and vulnerability of the group. Asking for the listener to engage meaningfully through deep listening, allowing oneself a brief moment of rest, the experience of the work is both personalised and personal. Moving beyond witnessing a flow of vocal sounds, a healing practice, translating the physical into sonic textures that vibrate with both beauty and unease, the work is a gesture of care. The unique individual voices coming off of each speaker create a unique sonic atmosphere- a vocal texture filled with vulnerability as one can hear them tinted with emotion.    

 

 

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Artist note*

Each stroke signifies decisions that reply to questions. Questions concerning the medium, the limits of the medium, the limits of the self.

A painting striving to set its outlines and be-come in the context of contemporary painting. A body that does the same to be-come in the context of contemporary society.

I see painting as a process of becoming: A chaos, a nothing, is slowly getting baptized by the marks of the paint on the surface, and whilst passing through this threshold, it decides to which laws and up to what extent it will submit; And how much of it will remain. The painting surface becomes a battlefield in between chaos and order, the animal and the human, the body and the mind. A body that strives to set its outlines and become. A fighting body.

How much freedom to give to a body to express itself without letting it erase itself completely? When I paint, there’s a point in which I let my hands free – and why not to? Why not get out of the lines, break the borders? What if I mess it all up, what if I make the figures, the shapes, the forms lose everything that signifies them? What if I don’t submit to order, to the expectation of making something skillful, aesthetically appealing or technically complicated?

When I give my hands the freedom they are asking for, they destroy; Nothing; that’s what’s left. And then more nothing. To become a subject one has to submit (Butler). To question the context which defines one, is to question oneself (Kristeva).

I obey. My free hands have to occasionally stop. In front of a line, a shape, a figure. They follow. Some lines have not to be surpassed in order for the painting to exist, but how many of them to follow?

The way that I treat my surface is informing the way that I position myself in society, personally and politically. I am seeking to find a balance between order and chaos, love and anger. I fail. Again and again. Silence is louder than the loudest scream, a tutor once told me. Let it be. My body resists. My body is angry, my body wants to fight, to dance, to get pleased.

It is not about communicating a story but a state. All I aim for is a pause. A breath.

-Eleni Tomadaki 12/2024

 

Curatorial Text

A few weeks back, in a note she wrote as a response to her practice or praxes on and nearby painting, Eleni Tomadaki says that: “Each stroke signifies decisions which reply to questions. Questions concerning the medium, the limits of the medium, the limits of the self.” I read it and I remember I was left thinking: Why a stroke? Who’s historically named this often rough and abrupt and unmeasured gesture a stroke? How can a movement almost instinctive or primitive be seen or uttered as something as tender and motherly and loving?

Yet, in this new body of work bringing together a series of paintings and other works, words and sounds, Tomadaki enacts the essence of the “stroke”. There’s something in her recent patterns, once figurative, currently broken, faded or willfully fainted, sharpened and darkened and paused, that was born through and by touch.

And through this exact touch, its pains or pleasures or both, she navigates us through her questions on limit. Her touch traces the idea or the connotations of that feared and fearless line in multiple and vexed ways. Her works speaks of hesitation and chaos, they grasp the gasp, follow the chasm, intensify when shielded, show and shine when safe. The limits of her medium extend following the rhythms of her self. The bodily gesture turns into a promise, a fractured yet performative engagement with a series of subversions and other schemes seemingly contradictory.

In this new body of work presented in her solo show “Aaaaa,aa”, Tomadaki creates a world, an omniverse where she can compulsively destroy what was once delimited or bounded, only to let it grow. And within such a process, she resists time and exceeds space; she fails the image as a whole, obeys to the impositions of her ruins. She gets lost and stubbornly occupies this space in between the real and the speculative, the haptic and the dreamy.

Vernaculars and screams and whispers, urban and other landscapes, diaristic elements, spirits, animals and woods and wounds, birds and their voices in high-pitched volumes, they all co-exist in her work. Nothing’s too frivolous to be excluded, nothing’s too precious to be praised either. Relics and dirty wipes, pinks and blacks, spiderwebs or the spectrum of light, the tensions between them all, non-defined and peripheral, form what will be brought to the center of attention.

In “Aaaaa,aa” breaths are intrinsic parts of an alternative vocabulary, supporting mechanisms are vessels for resisting the body’s restraints and images escape the structure of an internal or external depiction, allowing us audiences to become with our meanings, spiralities, freedoms. And over this constantly alternating or fighting states between the tamed and the disruptive, things find another order, a limitless, unending point where the lyrical exist only through the breaks of cacophony.

-Ioanna Gerakidi

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Monique S. Desto and Klaartje van Essen share a sensitivity for the relationship between painting, sculpture, memory, and space in their extended image practices. Their works switch from two dimensions to three and back again, stretching, straining, supporting, and disintegrating.

Both artists share an interest in traces and moldings, friction and dissolution. The latex used by Desto picks up three-dimensional traces of its carrier material, but due to exposure to light brings decomposes when exhibited. Already before this process has reached final disintegration, Desto works with digital documentation or animation, which is eventually the only state in which the works will exist. Klaartje van Essen often works with wax or plaster. The material may be poured into pre-existing mold-like objects that van Essen appropriates from the streets or her studio. She utilizes fermentation to produce drawing tools, which are also handheld sculptures that wear away when used, and continuously recycles materials that have already been used by herself or by others.

In Erosion Arranged: we sink, I stretch, you flow, a practical material and aesthetic exchange develops between Monique S. Desto and Klaartje van Essen and draws them closer together, allowing the works to touch each other, refer to, and enact a multitude of relationships.

One image they conjured refers to the River Weser, which flows constantly by the GAK. Water adapts and shapes ambivalently. Another related one evokes the communicative and spatial structure of mangrove forests, which are rooted in the water and thus mediate between land and water. They are anchored and washed out at the same time; they arrange themselves in their formations, standing close together and yet giving each other space to grow. The trees negotiate proximity and distance in an unwritten contract of mutual dependency, which can also be projected onto the GAK, Bremen, and the collaboration between the artists. From here, notions of verticality and horizontality, of the relationship between landscape and movement, of gravity and time emerge, structuring the way the works of Monique S. Desto and Klaartje van Essen insert themselves between floor and ceiling, past and present, tracing the contours of the building and its environment as well as modulating their process-based inhabitation of a shared physical space between material and image.

 

Monique S. Desto (b. 1989, lives in Hamburg) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg and was awarded the Bavarian Art Promotion Prize in 2022. Desto’s works have recently been shown in solo and group exhibitions at venues such as Westwerk, Hamburg (2024); Galerie Wassermühle Trittau (2024); Kunstverein Weiden (2024); Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich (2023); Atelier- und Galeriehaus Defet, Nuremberg (2022); and Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Schwandorf (2022). Desto is a member of the artist collectives Galerie Duglas and phantom step.

Klaartje van Essen (b. 1998, lives in Amsterdam) studied at De Ateliers, Amsterdam and at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. Van Essen’s work has recently been exhibited at venues including de Omstand, Arnhem (2024); Museum Cobra, Amstelveen (2024); De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2024); Woonhuis, Amsterdam (2023); EXBOOT, Utrecht (2023); Personeelskamer, Amsterdam (2023); and EspaceAygo, Brussels (2022).

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Inoriza’s installations and performances are immersive experiences that ask us to reimagine the body not as a solitary entity but as a vessel of connectivity, fluidity, and becoming. She pushes viewers to confront the centrality of the body in understanding the self and the other, blurring the line between human and non-human, individual and collective. Through shared breaths, we discover that the boundaries of the body are constructed. The self’s edges blur into the world, reminding us that we are not alone. Inoriza’s art offers an invitation to float, not away, but together.

Exhibition text by Zeynep Kubat

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Jenine Marsh: Microcosm is an exhibition of new sculptural works by the Toronto-based artist.

In Microcosm, Jenine Marsh constructs a precarious island where history, value, and utopian longing converge. The exhibition takes its title from an 1808 artist’s manual, Microcosm, which was designed for house-bound bourgeois women to help them imagine and depict the daily lives and labor of the working class. From the protective utopia of the country estate or city mansion, these hobby artists drew and painted images of another utopia: a quasi-real world of fresh air, open spaces, and a purposeful life of work. The image has all the contradictions of imagined utopias: their impossible distance and immanent closeness; an inclusionary heaven constructed from an exclusionary hell; the illusions that drive self-delusion of separation, and vice versa. 

Marsh’s Microcosm invites viewers to navigate a world where ideals of paradise and progress fracture under the weight of history. By blending symbols of labor, currency, and utopia, the installation challenges us to consider how value is constructed and who is excluded in the pursuit of perfection. In this drifting, precarious space, Marsh suggests that even in fragmentation, there is the possibility of reimagining what we hold dear—and perhaps, of building something more collective and enduring.

Jenine Marsh (b. 1984, Calgary, Alberta, Canada) is an artist who uses sculpture and installation to explore themes of agency, mortality and value. Coins as well as other paraphernalia of exchange and contact, such as casts of hands, purses and flowers, are manipulated through serialized processes of destruction and transformation to cultivate illicit and intimate responses to the shared conditions of end-stage capitalism.

Marsh received her BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts and her MFA from the University of Guelph. Marsh’s work has been exhibited in Canadian galleries such as Cooper Cole, Franz Kaka, Nuit Blache, Toronto; Vie d’ange, Centre Clark, Joe Project, Montreal; Griffin Art Projects, and Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver. She has also exhibited in international museums and galleries including Ashley Berlin, Berlin; Prairie Gallery, Chicago; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Essex Flowers, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Gianni Manhattan, Vienna, OSL Contemporary, Oslo; Entrée Gallery, and Lulu, Mexico City. She has served as artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts, at AiR Bergen at USF Verftet, Bergen; La Datcha, Berlin; SOMA, Mexico City; Rupert, Vilnius; and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson. She also had a public site-specific installation in the 2023 Nuit Blanche (Toronto) which was curated by Kari Cwynar. Marsh lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

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The artistic practice of the duo Julia Gryboś and Barbora Zentková has been evolving within the framework of sustainability, anchoring within exploring various material dimensions, recycling, upcycling, and a return to traditional textile techniques and craftsmanship. As representatives of a younger generation of artists, they turn to traditional artisanal, originally non-artistic techniques and materials. They work with second-hand textiles, whose original function has already been fulfilled. They work with colour pigments, wide strips of gauze, and draperies with various imprints. These function as imprints of the passage of time, capturing something that once was but no longer exists. These textiles are applied directly to the gallery walls, creating a soft, site-specific wallpaper that envelops the exhibition space. The artists incorporate the architectural features of the gallery into the complexity of their installation. In their focused, concentrated work, they find protection and an escape from a world oversaturated with stimuli, speed, and efficiency. Much in their art is subtly suggested, partially revealed. The artists engage with the duality of absence and presence, and with different scales of time—for the body and for the planet. The human impact on the planet is represented by wall reliefs made of layered cotton, resembling rock sediments, soil cross-sections, or planetary strata. The theme of layering and sedimentation also recurs in their objects, which consist of rounded organic metal structures and wax. As the wax gradually hardens, it forms layers reminiscent of solidified lava, echoing the fabric layers in the wall reliefs. Observing the environments created by Julia Gryboś and Barbora Zentková, one contemplates the need for release, relaxation, cosiness, harmony, and refuge, as well as the weaving of friendships and meaningful encounters. The work is accompanied by a sound intervention by Jan Tomáš & Michal Ondrička.

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The exhibition Careful What You Wish For builds on an intricate interplay between vulnerability and identity, highlighting how fear and the fragility of human experience shape our understanding of self. By examining psychological dimensions of existence, the exhibited works invite viewers to confront unseen forces influencing perception and interaction. This exploration prompts reflection on the nature of bodily autonomy and the complexities inherent in navigating the boundaries between self and other. 

In Abysmal (2021), Johan F. Karlsson constructs a submerged tomb shielded from sunlight. The contrast between light and darkness—with black sand absorbing and sunfilm reflecting, draws viewers into a state of self-perception as they gaze into their reflections, grappling with elements that challenge existential stability. In Transition Piece (2021), the artist recreates a spatial condition where a temperature shift evokes a sense of presence. Signs indicating the recent passage of a fleeting “other” suggest a lurking danger. When the two infrared heaters are activated, they subtly generate warmth, functioning as lifelike surrogates for familiar objects, recontextualized within their original state.

In Your CEO Is Probably A Psychopath (2021), Dimitris Tampakis employs a central mechanism built around the fear of losing control over one’s body. By crafting a fictional sinister persona shaped by an elegant yet treacherous object, the artist challenges humans’ innate need to remain alert to bodily harm in their immediate environment. With its monumental size and sharp edges, the work is predicated on threats to the body—its dissolution, fragmentation, or usurpation. 

N.E.T. (2023) features a graphic image of a cannibalized ancient Greek sculpture that recalls deep-seated, instinctual fears. Tampakis emphasizes the cracks on the sculpture’s surfaces, caused by religious disputes, urging a confrontation with the historical continuum of violent tendencies. Capturing a haunting, upward gaze, D.A. (2025) evokes bodily associations, while testing the limits of scale and proximity. Meanwhile, SILPHIO (2023) teases the viewer with fleeting glimpses of their reflection through the allusive form of an aluminium dissolved mirror that transcends mere physicality.

The two artists’ shared attention to the uncontrollable and the irrational fosters a psychologically charged encounter grounded in a profound exploration of collision. This is achieved through formal or stylistic variants and affective patterns, such as utilizing minimal perceptual cues or mediating heightened immediacy. Throughout the exhibition, affect arises in the midst of in-betweenness, in the capacities to act and be acted upon. By simultaneously playing off different modes of engagement, while addressing the spectator directly, all elements merge to support a constructed narrative, inducing an air of unease and probing primal aspects of the ego.

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Ramp’s Edge is a group exhibition featuring the work of Ayanna Dozier, Won Ju Lim, Irini Miga, and Josh Rondeau. Partially nestled within a Chinese kitchen supply store, the show considers our relationships to space through a survey of paranoia and surveillance that continually asks, “do you know what to do?”

 

53 Orchard Street offers a nuanced approach to viewership within an institution. The forward facing gallery presents as a raised storefront, with floor to ceiling windows that open outwards towards the street. A step up into the space positions the viewer above the pedestrians below them. As if entering a stage, the viewer becomes the performer, as on display themselves as the work they intend to view. When the gallery is closed, the glass doors are locked and the exhibition becomes accessible only by peering in after-hours. This exhibition space shares a wall with a second, interior gallery. To access this, you must know, or be told, to enter a door to the neighboring Chinese kitchen supply store. Almost ‘speakeasy’ in its knowability, the anxiety of this structure provokes an air of suspense and relief as the viewer stumbles their way through rows of pots and pans into the gallery.

 

The architecture of the space prevents passive viewership in a way that each of the artists in Ramp’s Edge engages with. Ayanna Dozier’s film, Nightwalker, navigates the dramas of surveillance by moving between looking, being looked at, and remaining unseen. These works position the camera as witness to draw attention to how the surveillance eye overlaps with the gaze of a potential predator. 

 

Themes of privacy and paranoia continue in Won Ju Lim’s careful placement of works nestled within the confines of the gallery. Her aptly titled sculpture, Corner, is presented in its third iteration as a white model house that abuts an exposed wall of the gallery and hints at an interior space beyond the studs. Wrapped around two adjoining walls is her single-channel video projection, Endoscopy. This intrusive and claustrophobic probing examines the interactions of real and imaginary space to find the lie.

 

The use of institutional space to denote the changes that occur in and around them is achieved in Lim’s practice as well as within Irini Miga’s light-handed interventions. Her works capture the aesthetic conditions of that which often disappears in plain sight: a single fingerprint of the artists pointer finger, a refraction of a space as an accidental mark on the wall. The labor and attention required to create these easily dismissible items weighs counter to the humbleness of each work’s first impression. In reverberation of an unstable time, these micro- interventions highlight the unfixed nature of appearances to those who pay close attention.

 

Josh Rondeau’s facsimiles of painted roofs considers our relationship to the spaces we occupy and own. His piece A History of Family Labor Part III using confronting mediums to position the artist against his family’s trade in its examination of the exchange value of labor. Through trompe l’oeil mimicry, his dedication to banality borders on camp akin to cell towers dressed as trees along the side of highways.

 

In Mike Kelley’s 1985 essay, Alienation, Empathy, the Ivar, he analyzes the relationship between parties dictated by the architecture and viewing format of a strip club in Los Angeles. “The separation between audience and dancer at the ramp’s edge is the most important feature of the event. It functions in a manner quite unlike traditional theater, where the invisible ‘fourth wall’ acts as a portal into a separate reality.” The action of crossing a boundary through the arm’s extension to place a dollar bill onto the performers’ stage is likened to stepping into the gallery space at 53 Orchard St. Each of the artists featured within the exhibition engage with their audience in an attempt to betray the lie, impulse, and urge prompted by fantasy that is revealed in real time. 

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In a social context that, in some ways, recalls the Dublin portrayed by James Joyce in 1914 in Dubliners, the characters of the fifteen stories remain relevant today. Each tale presents two recurring themes: collective paralysis, driven by the politics and religion of the me, and the idea of escape, as a result of newfound awareness. In Eveline, for instance, an epiphany triggered by the sound of a street organ leads the protagonist to decide to flee Dublin and start anew in Buenos Aires. However, as she makes her decision, fear and regret hold her back in Ireland, leaving the hope of desired happiness to fade away with Frank aboard a ship bound for South America.

Friedrich Andreoni and Roberto Casti have been invited to reflect on these themes in relation to their own contexts, Berlin and Milan respectively. Comparing Joyce’s narratives to contemporary situations reveals mirrored elements: the sense of emptiness, collective paralysis, and the longing for escape. After its first presentation at the independent space KA32 in Berlin in November 2023, Fernweh finds its second act at Casa degli Artisti in Milan. Through sound installations, sculptures, and performances, the artists investigate the need to reach a place—material or immaterial—that allows an escape from the frenzy and void of urban life. This refuge may not necessarily be physical but could be a suggestion, a person, an idea, a book, or a sound that enables Stendhal’s “privileged” individual to close their eyes and be transported anywhere they desire. The title Fernweh, derived from the German fern (“far”) and weh (“pain”), conveys an untranslatable sense of emptiness from being trapped in daily life and, by extension, a “longing for a distant place,” whether real or imagined.

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COOPER COLE is pleased to present Chrysanne, a solo exhibition by Chrysanne Stathacos. This exhibition is  guest curated by Gia Liapi and marks the artists second solo exhibition with the gallery.

The following text written by Gia Liapi accompanies the exhibition:

Chrysanne Stathacos has been unsettling the linear structures of patriarchy since the moment she arrived in this world.

In her autobiographical text “Forgotten Wishes”, Chrysanne writes:

Birth.

I had been my grandfather’s forgotten wish that he loved very much. Papou had wished

for the birth of a grandson, his namesake, a new Charlie, to continue the Greek male line.

I surprised him.

Perhaps she was born in the wrong era, or perhaps she arrived right on time:

Lala, my grandmother, responded to his behavior by finding a four-leaf clover, an omen of Delphic oracle proportions;  I was a lucky girl baby, perfect, no matter what my sex.

One time while reading in Chrysanne’s guest room (in which she has graciously hosted me since my arrival in Toronto from Athens last January) I learn that her mother shared her labour ward with an artist who drew a pastel portrait of her as an infant. My gaze turns to the wall:

To this day a small pastel portrait of a tiny baby, framed in pink with a faded four-leaf clover tucked in the corner hangs in my bedroom.

I had been wondering what the picture was… when asked, Chrysanne replies:

“Sometimes you can’t escape.” 

In the many conversations I have shared with Chrysanne and her family, stories have often circled around three recurring themes: how she always knew that she would be an artist; how much of an “artist’s attitude” she had always had; and how much her family had always been staunch supporters of her path.

Chrysanne’s early life seems to have imbued its psychic resonance across her transdisciplinary practice, which integrates affect and intuition as its key methodologies. As an emigrant from the United States to Canada, but raised with the customs and traditions of her Greek heritage, and its geographically inherent roots as a cultural crossroads, Chrysanne’s experience and identity is steeped in hybrid dialogues. She is committed to epistemologies that are grounded in social practice, ritual, and spirituality, drawing from across the spectrum of Buddhism, astrology, tarot, and Greek mythology, to address some of the unattended consequences of the social injustices that her over-five-decade career traces.

Chrysanne has generously and tirelessly employed all-embracing communal practices to create social infrastructures that sustain artists and foster kinship. Relationality, empathy, and a deep devotion to female empowerment form the core of her artistic and quotidian practices. Besides her early contributions to the broader arts community as both an artist and educator in Toronto and New York City. She is a devoted Buddhist, who works to reclaim the lost traditions of Tibetan women practitioners while supporting female monastic communities in Tibet and India.

Chrysanne often tells me:

I am a collagist.

This sentiment makes me think about collage as a broader composite approach. A coming together of various divergent, or otherwise orphaned parts to form a new whole. Her collage mode of living and working speaks to an expansive and planetary way of thinking and being that makes room for the multiplicities and imperfections of the life we experience in this world.

Chrysanne comprises a constellation of gestures that reflect this approach. A place of remediation, esoteric, yet plural. It traces back ancestral narratives to open a discourse on belonging that reaches beyond individuality to shine light on our collective future. 

In this eponymous exhibition, the first solo presentation since the passing of her mother, we witness the non-chronological interplay of undisclosed works and recurring touchstones in Chrysanne’s practice. Ivy, roses, and women’s hair – all motifs loaded with mystic meaning – are paired with relics, artifacts, and garments, each a faithfully preserved personal treasure of great sentimental value. Together these sources and references weave a tight genealogy leading back to antiquity while mirroring both present and future. The pieces here contribute to the personal lineage of family archeology that has been a constant in her practice. Stories of Chrysanne’s upbringing by her immigrant grandparents, with their idealized vision of a distant homeland, are encapsulated in these works that explore a sense of corporeality and the meaning-making made possible by our intimacy with the objects and garments that surround us. 

The impression of her late mother’s nightgown on canvas – a piece that’s hung prominently in Chrysanne’s living room since its creation – is a quiet mourning gesture that reconfigures the relationship between bodily agency and the rituals and archival practices that shape memory. A box of heirloom gloves, passed down through generations, gives rise to new resonances of time and its strange mix of clarity and obscurity. These works are part of a new series that incorporates an antique tarot deck once accidentally washed in the laundry by her mother. Intimacy, recollection, and the restorative formation of a fragmentary narrative, are all powerfully at play.

Through these works and more, Chrysanne narrates her loss in order to recuperate hope. The inclusion of archival relics is more than mere nostalgia to her. In his 1988 essay on Chrysanne’s paintings, G. Roger Denson writes: 

“It is strategic that in Stathacos’ quest for meaning, rather than resorting to isolating, decontextualizing and exhibiting yet another found object—which would signify being, but not becoming or ceasing—Stathacos chose to print traces of objects left, as traces can only be left, by the objects themselves. By traces, I mean impressions left on a surface by an object after it has been inked or painted and then pressed wet against a surface with applied pressure.”

In the recent months I’ve spent living and working in her studio, I’ve often found myself wondering about both the traces and the impressions her paintings give to re-animate the objects she has recontextualized within them. The subjects she’s imprinted are neither in their initial form, nor in a new condition. They seem to contain marks of some core essence, as if the psyche (soul) of the object carries on. Her paintings are very active in their presence because they are, to use her own words, “performance paintings.” 

Performance and painting are mediums that when placed together, fray temporal barriers, generating a kind of perpetual timeless present of being. To prevent the oblivion of unsung histories and epistemes, she often integrates organic elements with spiritual, feminist, and medical properties, such as herbs traditionally used to administer abortions. Those elements are surrendered to a process of subordination, sacrificing their initial form in a quest for meaning gesturing towards healing that stretches across time. 

Chrysanne’s complex techniques and sources treat fragility in a manner that creates a new kind of soft monumentality. At the center of this exhibition we find a fluffy white flokati rug purchased by her mother in the 1960s. Dating back to ancient times, thick woolen flokati have been an important part of rural Greek tradition that continues to serve as a hallmark for communal gathering. By sharing specific cultural signifiers like this, Chrysanne works to expand our collective memory of gatherings deconstructing the notions of time and identity that are entwined within memories and artifacts. On the flokati we can watch the video work “grandfather dream” (2007), where Chrysanne’s father, Dean, plays Greek diasporic folk songs on the piano. Chrysanne combines this document with her pappou’s (grandfather’s) footage of travels to Greece in the 1950s, creating a moving portrait of her family’s immigrant trajectory while reframing the symbolic elements of a lost and longed-for homeland. These perpetual spirals of shared signification contain themes of belonging and touch on the complicated feelings of inheritance many share across diverse cultures. Her father’s music provides a soundscape for the whole exhibition, tracing tales of exodus and distance that inevitably lead to Chrysanne’s work, binding it into a one psychic space through melody. 

With many decades of artistic practice in her own committed signature behind her, Chrysanne can be considered among the pioneers of ecofeminism. For the “Petal Series” she reverses her own technique, and instead of crushing roses, prints directly on their individual plucked petals. The imagery consists mostly of women in resting poses, pulled from nineteenth century erotica. Together with the “Rose Ladies” she made in 1996, which are presented now for the first time, she knowingly employs the rose’s resonance with femininities that traces back through mythologies associated with the goddess Venus. In doing so she revives these links, critiquing how female sexuality and the autoerotic have inherently been obscured and fetishized.

In the early 1990s Chrysanne channeled her feminist frustrations and ambitions into the creation of Anne de Cybelle. Placing herself within the genealogy of women artists taking on another name and persona as an act of defiance and self-protection, as females often rendered vulnerable when using their own voices to confront injustice. In her 1997 video that followed the “Rose Petal” series, Anne de Cybelle, introduces a future world that’s radically transformed, inviting us to encounter a reality that’s flipped on its head from the world’s current state. Among the many references that reflect our present, she subversively refers to the “Rose Petals” as a futuristic technology of meditative practice. In the tradition of witchcraft and many sacred occult practices, the specific technology Chrysanne used to create this series remains a firm secret. 

In Chrysanne’s “Forgotten Wishes” text, the chapter titled “Birth” ends with: 

Papou arrived, took one glance at this lucky beautiful infant, bald

pink head, rounded cheeks, and fell madly in love. Now he was to be the only one to hold me. I had seduced my Papou by holding onto his finger and looking at him in the eyes.

Chrysanne Stathacos (b. 1951) is a multidisciplinary artist of Greek, American and Canadian origin. Her work has encompassed printmaking, textile, painting, installation and conceptual art. Stathacos is heavily involved with and influenced by feminism, Greek Mythology, eastern spirituality and Tibetan Buddhism, all of which inform her current artistic practice. She has participated in countless international exhibitions in various media, but she is most known for her unique combination of performance and installation. Stathacos’ recent solo exhibitions include Cooking with Roses, The Buffalo Institute of Art (2022), Pythia,The Breeder, Athens (2017) and Gold Rush, Cooper Cole, Toronto, (2018), and Do I Still Yearn for My Virginity?, Situations, New York (2018). Stathacos presented The Three Dakini Mirrors (of the body-speech and mind) in the 13th Gwangju Biennial Minds Rising Spirits Tuning curated by Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala (2021); she also presented Five Mirrors of the World (2019) at The Sculpture Park, Madhavendra Palace, Nahargarh Fort, Jaipur. Recent exhibitions include Every Moment Counts: AIDS and its Feelings at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Norway, curated by Ana María Bresciani and Tommaso Speretta (2022). Her Rose Mirror Mandala series was originally created to be presented to the Dalai Lama in 2006 for his visit at the University of Buffalo, and was later included by AA Bronson in many exhibitions including The Temptation of AA Bronson, Kunstinstituut Melly (Formerly known as Witte de With) for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2013). She is a founding Director of Dongyu Gatsal Ling Initiatives, a non-profit organization that works to help Tibetan Buddhist women practitioners in the Himalayas, inspired by the life work of Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo. She is represented by The Breeder, Athens. Stathacos’ works are included in public and private collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. The Chrysanne Stathacos fonds is located in the Archives and Library, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Stathacos currently lives and works between Athens, Greece and Toronto, Canada.

Gia Liapi (b. 1988) is an independent contemporary art curator and researcher. She has been involved with both public and private institutions internationally, including 2023 Eleusis, European Capital of Culture (GR), The Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver, BC (CA), DESTE Foundation (GR), and Schwarz Foundation (DE) among others. She has curated exhibitions across institutions, commercial galleries, artist-run centres, and social projects such as, the B&M Theocharakis Foundation and the Fine Arts & Music, AKSS Foundation, AMA House, Callirrhoë Athens, Greek Street Paper “shedia Home”, MISC Athens, P.E.T. Projects, and Zoumboulakis Galleries. Recent curatorial awards include Canada Council for the Arts (Explore and Create, 2023), and NEON Foundation (GR) as Emerging Curator (2020). She was a runner-up for the NEON Curatorial Award 2020 in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery in London (UK) and a Curatorial Resident of Schwarz Foundation (ASP, Samos, 2019). In 2023 she was the co-curator of the large-scale exhibition “This Current Between Us”, at the Historic Steam Electric Power Station of Greece with the support of the Greek Ministry of Culture. Between 2019 to 2023 she was the Exhibitions Director and Curator for Zoumboulakis Galleries, Contemporary (Est. 1966). She has contributed texts in catalogues and journals in Greece and abroad. She is currently a Teaching Assistant at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto, and a graduate student in Curatorial Studies, supported by a University of Toronto Fellowship, and the John and Myrna Daniels Foundation. She lives between Athens (GR), and the lands of Treaty 13 known as Toronto, ON (CA), and works internationally.

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New York, NY – Efraín López is pleased to announce No Shoulder, an exhibition of new works by New York- based artist Gabriela Salazar. The exhibition will be on view from November 8 through December 21, 2024. The artist will present a suite of ten graphite drawings alongside a sculptural work. No Shoulder will be accompanied by an exhibition text authored by curator Ana Torok. 

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Working across sculpture, installation, and drawing, Gabriela Salazar has developed a rich cross-media practice, which often addresses the tenuous balance between our natural and built environments. The daughter of Puerto Rican architects, Salazar continuously explores themes of building and rebuilding, whether in response to natural disasters or the passage of time, by isolating moments that speak ambiguously to both repair and disrepair. Her earlier work has featured receptive collaborations with nature as well as architecture. For a 2021 site-specific drawing, Holding Pattern, Walls (for Mara), produced at the Al Held Foundation, the artist rubbed powdered graphite directly onto the studio walls in a geometric composition which revealed the cracks and patches left behind by former studio residents along with the ad hoc arrangement of wood planks on its reverse. In her Leaves series (2023-ongoing), Salazar uses water-soluble paper to cast various household objects and matter–the resulting ghostly forms infused with traces of color leached from autumn leaves, kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, and other incidental media. 

In this new body of work, Salazar has produced drawings in graphite and charcoal, all of which are based on photographs she shot earlier this year. The source material, culled from the collection of images on her iPhone and sometimes paired in diptychs, expose Salazar’s careful attention to her surroundings. Across the series, an attunement to interconnectedness rhymes rows of wrapped cables with the knotty roots of trees, or the spidery cracks in a sidewalk with the network of wrinkles across a multi-generational set of hands. An image of a collapsed billboard in San Juan, for instance, is directly juxtaposed with an intimate picture of the artist’s sleeping daughter. These opposing motifs—exterior/interior, neglect/care—are harmoniously connected through formal means as the linear thrust of the scaffold crosses the sheet’s edge and merges into the young subject’s collar. While explaining her process, Salazar has described it as a conversation with the source photograph, requiring problem-solving and experimentation to arrive at each drawn reproduction. In order to recreate the wood grain of a tree stump that had been abruptly chopped down near her home, she used the technique of debossing for its concentric rings. Observed closely, the recessed marks resemble script as if embedded with an inscrutable message.

Considering the snapshot quality of her subjects, whether a road that has suddenly flooded or a sinkhole that appeared overnight, Salazar’s time-intensive and laborious process might seem counterintuitive. Recalling previous projects, which centered on a daily drawing practice, here she has invested hours of close observation and illusionistic skill in order to translate each fleeting moment into a sensitively-rendered drawing. By distilling the visual effects of overwhelming and uncontrollable forces–weather, gravity, age–into the foundational elements of line, form, and value, Salazar’s grayscale reconstructions become a way of slowing time. Taken together, through its repeated motifs of knots and fissures, the work reenacts not only interconnection, but entanglement, encouraging us to look just as intently—if not for meaning, then for a direct confrontation with the precarity of everyday experience. 

– Ana Torok

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Gabriela Salazar was born in New York City to architects from Puerto Rico. She has had solo exhibitions at NURTUREart; The Bronx River Arts Center; The Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island; Efrain Lopez Gallery, Chicago; The River Valley Arts Collective at the Al Held Foundation, New York, and with the Climate Museum, in Washington Square Park, NYC. Her work has been included in group shows at Socrates Sculpture Park, the Queens Museum, El Museo del Barrio, The Drawing Center, Candice Madey Gallery, David Nolan Gallery, Someday Gallery, Storm King Art Center, and the Whitney Museum. Salazar’s work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. Residencies include Workspace (LMCC); Yaddo, MacDowell, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Abrons Arts Center, “Open Sessions” at The Drawing Center, and the Socrates Emerging Artist Fellowship. In 2023 she was named a NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Craft/Sculpture from The New York Foundation of the Arts. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, a BA from Yale University, and lives, works, and teaches in NYC.

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About Efraín López  

Efraín López is a Puerto Rican-American art dealer and exhibition maker based in New York City. Between 2012 and 2018, López founded and directed his eponymous gallery in Chicago, where he presented an ambitious and rigorous exhibition program, often giving artists their first solo presentation in the United States. His long-standing commitment to the career development of emerging artists has led to placements in major museum collections worldwide. In June of 2023 López opened Efraín López, a contemporary art gallery in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. In September 2024, Susie Guzman joined Efraín López as partner. The program is conceptual, multidisciplinary, and globally minded, engaging both emerging and established artists.

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Lombardi—Kargl presents some notes…(barely written out), Thomas Locher’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery. Since the 1990s, the artist has been exploring themes such as law and justice. Thomas Locher’s artistic strategy is a conceptualism, whose methods of text-image-montage practices are essentially fed by deconstructive considerations and belong to an expanded understanding of institutional critique.
In his works, the artist negotiates the role that law plays in the construction of society, community, and history. In doing so, he explores the question of how the institution of law shapes its subjects and why this does not always work. In the exhibition, more recent works and one earlier work are placed in relation to each other. A frame functions as a presentation system, as a boundary marker, as an enclosure, a border.
Articles 1, 4, 6, 8, and 11 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which came into force in 1989 and to which 196 states have acceded to date, define the child as a human being – to name just one aspect. The Convention aims to protect children and safeguard their interests. Above all, its main objective is to guarantee their life (and survival), promote their development, and
prevent any discrimination. In five new works, Convention on the Rights of the Child, Locher continues his work on aspects of human rights. Using the method of commentary and specific questions (above all in a non-legal sense), the various articles are questioned as to their possible language and meaning, the content of the postulates, the effectiveness of the Convention, and its political and ethical meaning. Article 1 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child is on view at Schleifmühlgasse 5a together with an arrangement of children’s chairs, the Round Table (children’s version).
Subjektivierungen is an older work that goes back to the 1980s in terms of motifs. In these works, Thomas Locher addressed the normative nature of grammar (correct speech), but also the beauty of analytics. Grammatical rules accompany the subjects throughout their lives – they create a linguistic community (i.e. us) – and, alongside the various institutions through which the subjects pass, form a kind of continuous subordination regime.
The Indeterminate Norm and the Human Community, a new series of text-image combinations, deal with questions of law, the possibility and impossibility of community (including legal communities), and the possibility and impossibility of their representation, as well as questions of justice and violence. The visual backgrounds of the works are reproductions of images from European art history – they are secular representations of jurisdiction, juridical, truth-finding, or narratives of right and wrong political action. They show an artistic and political interest in the question of legal representability and the development and formation of law. The reproductions originate from various European cultural and historical periods, were predominantly commissioned works, and are assigned to the genre of the ‘image of justice’.  In combining the historical background and the commentaries, Thomas Locher is concerned with creating a vivid, stretched, and differential space of meaning, which is dedicated less to the expedient and more to the processual and to what has not yet been decided and is possibly undecidable.

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Eight table sculptures: the Hansaviertel in Berlin, divided into individual sculptures along subjectively drawn borders. While these mostly follow the streets and demarcations of that district on the northern edge of the Tiergarten, their unusual partitioning creates a certain disorientation. However, those familiar with the neighborhood will quickly recognize the streets cutting through the district and identify certain buildings that rise from the patinated bronze—particularly in the much better-known southern part of the railway tracks with its model settlement, created in the 1950s for the IBA 57, featuring striking buildings by well-known (and exclusively male) architects; buildings that seem to stand almost isolated in the greenery of the park. This is contrasted by the less prominent northern part, with its larger stock of old buildings and denser new developments from the 1960s.

Originally, these sculptures by Marina Pinsky were part of a broader work complex, first presented in Brussels in 2020. In that work, Pinsky explored, broadly speaking, the gaze upward into the sky, with constellations and star maps, as well as downward to the earth, dealing with aerial reconnaissance and satellite imagery. In two interconnected series, she recreated the neighborhoods where she lived—the Hansaviertel and the Koekelberg district in Brussels—based on Google Maps images. These works, emphasizing the handmade, highlight personal reappropriation, a subjective scaling down of one’s own environment from an abstract technical image. Pinsky retained the glitches and distortions of the original images, and through her decidedly subjective translation of these images, the camera’s eye also loses a bit of its presumed objectivity.

However, this narrative—this supposedly objective discourse of ideas, concepts, and processes that allows the experience of art to be elevated from personal observation to a general discourse—takes a backseat in the case of the exhibition at GROTTO, a space located in the middle of the Hansaviertel. Detached from its Koekelberg counterpart and now situated within what it represents, the place itself takes center stage. The result is the observation of an observation, an echo chamber, self-reflection. The associated reading: recognition and comparison … isn’t that … do you see here … do you recognize there … yes, exactly. Here we are, today.

In the Hansaviertel—here, not entirely correct, referring the Interbau ensemble—live Marina, Leonie (who runs GROTTO), and I. It’s a neighborhood shaped by absences, by what once stood here but is no longer, by what lies beyond its borders and indirectly shapes its form. Topographically: the less prominent northern part of the district, usually overlooked. Politically: its counterpart in former East Berlin, the old Stalinallee with its opulent “workers’ palaces,” to which the modernist, clear, and rather modest apartments of the Hansaviertel were created as a counterpart during the Cold War. And historically: the past from which this district, this “city of tomorrow” (as a related building exhibition called it), tried to escape toward the future. “Tomorrow Never Comes,” Marina’s exhibition title for 2024, echoes that programmatic title from 1957 like a distant reverberation. The place may be the same, but the times have changed. Tomorrow has long since turned into yesterday.

I don’t know how others who live here feel, but the longer I stay, the more that absent past becomes apparent, pushing through the bright elegance of the almost uninterrupted mid-century modernism. The further back in time that abstract “tomorrow” from back then sinks, the more clearly it reveals itself as a defense against an even older, but all the more concrete, yesterday. Numerous memorial plaques and “Stolpersteine” (stumbling stones) remind us of those who once lived here—long dead, often deported and murdered. Giant trees trace avenues into the greenery where none remain. The rubble of the old buildings, almost all destroyed in several nights of bombing in November 1943, lies just beneath the undulating ground modulations of the flowing landscape architecture or is embedded as aggregate in the concrete. The large windows of the new buildings that rose from the craters, meanwhile, promise an openness that seems to hide nothing. And on their brightly tiled facades, everything can be washed away, even guilt. As I walk through the neighborhood, the large spaces between the buildings appear as gaps and voids. The Interbau ensemble: a paradoxical knot of time that cannot be untangled, a complex place with stuck layers; a monument that clearly demonstrates that in post-war Germany, before remembering and commemorating, forgetting and repressing were practiced. A memorial—indirectly, in part unintentionally, and perhaps all the more striking because of that.

Today, the neighborhood, which is comprehensively protected as a historical monument, struggles with its own musealization. Musealization—something fundamentally different from living memory—is a double-edged sword. The necessary impulse to preserve too quickly locks into concrete stagnation. The result of blocked future horizons is a lack of the present. This, it seems to me, is what the deliberately conventional form language of Marina’s sculptures, reminiscent of the 1950s, points to: a revenant of the neighborhood’s table model, with which the design was visualized in the so-called Berlin Pavilion back then, now suspended in time as an eternal bronze.

There is also a second element in the exhibition, a mural on the back wall of the room that—in an almost dialectical manner, as abstract-geometric as the sculptures are concrete—sets things in motion again. A new plan? Perhaps a design, tipped from horizontal to vertical. Maybe a seating module, a place where people can come together. The three shapes on top are from Marcel Duchamp’s ‘3 Stoppages étalon’ (1913/14). For that work, Duchamp let a one-meter-long string fall onto a canvas and cut out the resulting shapes: new units for a different measurement, emphasizing deviation, randomness, and individuality but based on the standardized, fixed, and shared.

If this picture could now be tipped from the wall back into the space, so that, without covering it, it would end as another layer over the bronze version of the neighborhood? Wouldn’t that be a beautiful image for a lived and active community, representing a density that the neighborhood lacks, not on a historical level, but on a tangible urban planning one? A density that is the opposite of an abstract generality, meaning complexity and concrete, tangible proximity, as only a jointly animated place can offer—one that constantly renews its history and its becoming through ongoing interaction. Because even museums are, in the end, just the people who work in them, who care for their artifacts and continually bring them back to life. And neighborhoods, accordingly, are made up of the people who live in them, who come together for a certain time, acting together in this present, not another one—landing here by chance, like strings on a canvas. No, on this canvas.

Text by Dominikus Müller

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PRESS RELEASE

 

Vertigo

Exhibition by Natalia Manta and Dimitris Tampakis

Curated by Faidra Vasileiadou

 

The exhibition titled, Vertigo, presents works by Natalia Manta and Dimitris Tampakis and is curated by Faidra Vasileiadou. Vertigo is presented as part of Raw, the contemporary art series at the B&M Theocharakis Foundation.

 

What would archaeologists from the future discover if they were to explore the artistic scenery of Athens nowadays? How would they study the experience reflected in artistic practice and echoing contemporary concerns? In what ways does contemporary art seek to understand the values, ideologies and beliefs that prevail in our culture today? The B&M Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Music is approached as an incubator of culture, in the depths of which the future emerges and hatches. The exhibition titled “Vertigo” is part of the Raw contemporary art exhibition program and depicts the intense volatility of our time, while at the same time discovers ways of balancing the vertiginous pace of evolution of today.

 

The participating artists, Natalia Manta and Dimitris Tampakis, converse gesturally in the Foundation’s in-between spaces and infiltrate the cultural genetic material of the future, as they mirror the obstacles of reality through their artistic vocabulary. The resulting artistic dialogue offers a metaphorical approach, where the artists create artworks that do not remain restricted to specific forms or spaces, but diffuse and interact with the surrounding space, emphasizing points of transition, transformation and change. This artistic collaboration, although based on material contrasts, manages to create a coherent narrative that explores the inner processes of the soul and delves into the concept of liberation from the traumas and existential dead ends of modern life.

 

Prints on aluminum surfaces, which freeze in time, imitating a primordial wound back to ground zero. Ceramic vessels in the soil, which narrate archaic rituals, metallic sculptural elements placed with acrophobic tendencies and cyanotypes as an x-ray of existence itself. These are some examples of the works that add an internal and inward dimension to this exhibition, while at the same time allowing the participating artists to expand the boundaries of their artistic expression and explore new ways of interacting with the public.

 

The general feeling of lack of balance and instability is encapsulated by the title of the exhibition, “Vertigo”, inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s most influential masterpiece (1958), a cinematic essay on human suffering and catharsis. The comparison of the Hitchcockian gaze with Dante’s descent to Hell or the myth of Orpheus entering Hades to save Eurydice, highlights the need for liberation from the shackles of personal “vertigo”. Like Dante and Orpheus, Hitchcock’s hero, Scotty, dives into a

 

dark and dangerous world, both literally and figuratively, to find or save something he has lost. This journey is a deep psychological exploration of the human condition, obsession and psychological meltdown, with the director describing a man’s inner struggle with his fears and trauma in order to redeem himself.

 

This is exactly where the significance of the exhibition lies: in the introspection of the inner psyche of the individual that leads to catharsis – a process of discovery and self-understanding, which becomes especially important in times of instability and uncertainty and may be the only way of recovery in a toxic culture. From sculptures that flirt with the existential void of intergenerational trauma to ceramic forms from which flowers bloom in homage to the subtle art of saying goodbye, the exhibition “Vertigo” brings together two artists who do not just create static sculptural works, but rather stories that evolve in time, thus inviting the viewer to a deep introspection. Collectively, their dynamic and multidimensional work synthesizes a profound contemplation of the present moment and a prediction for the future, through artistic and existential exploration that attempts to create a living archive of the cultural and social challenges we face today.

 

Artists: Natalia Manta and Dimitris Tampakis

Curator: Faidra Vasileiadou

Artistic Director: Marina Miliou Theocharakis

Exhibition Production Assistant: Nefeli Siafaka

Communication: Marina Kampouroglou, Eva Karagiannaki

 

Duration: September 26–December 13, 2024

Opening hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 10:00 – 17:00

   Thursday: 17:00 – 21:00

 

PARALLEL EVENTS PROGRAM:

 

Guided tour of the exhibition Vertigo from the curator Faidra Vasileiadou

November 7 2024

Thursday, 18.30 – 19.30

 

CVs

 Natalia Manta, is an artist based in Athens, that holds a BFA and an MFA from the Athens School of Fine Arts. Central to her artistic quest is the exploration of the mythological element as a revelation of an inner memory that springs to life in the present, entwining with both local and global histories. While clay serves as her primary medium, she also adeptly navigates metal, wax, glass, and light-sensitive chemicals. Collaborating across various artistic disciplines, including visual, music, theatre, and performance arts, has been an integral part of her practice. Noteworthy

 

collaborators include director Thodoris Ambazis, choreographer Androniki Marathaki, and musicians Jannis Anastasakis, Hayden Chisholm, Sébastien Gramss, Michalis Siganidis, Savina Yannatou, and Evi Filippou. From 2017 to 2020, she taught as an assistant professor in the sculpture department at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Her work has been part of numerous solo and group exhibitions globally, making appearances at prestigious institutions such as the Korean International Ceramic Biennale, Eleusis European Capital of Culture, EMST, Onassis Culture, and Stavros Niarchos Foundation. She was honored with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS in 2022. Her creations find homes in private collections, embodying a fusion of material mastery and narrative resonance.

 

Dimitris Tabakis is an artist and designer. He holds a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts (2019-2021) and a degree in Product and Systems Design Engineering from the University of the Aegean (2009-2015). Since 2018, he has been a co-founder of the art group un.processed.realities, active in art and design in Athens and Tinos. In 2020, he collaborated with Philip Raskovich on the FUGA project at the ETOPIA Center for Art and Technology in Zaragoza, Spain, and in 2022, he participated in the Bajaramovic Unlimited hosting program in Athens. Tabakis’s work has been featured in group exhibitions in various institutions and independent spaces in Greece and abroad, including MOMus in Thessaloniki (2018), UCL London (2019), MIET, Athens (2019), Keiv Gallery, Athens (2021), Centrum Gallery, Berlin (2021), Galerie Basia Embiricos, Paris (2022& 2024), One Minute Space, Athens (2023 & 2024), Kyan, Athens (2023), National Archaeological Museum, Athens (2023), Foundation of Tinian Culture Tinos (2023), HAUNT Berlin (2023), Xeno, Sigri (2023), and POLE-SUD, Strasbourg (2024).

 

Faidra Vasileiadou is a museologist and art curator, based in Athens. Since 2015, she has collaborated with cultural organizations and institutions such as MOMus, NEON and Schwarz Foundation, as an art mediator and museum educator in contemporary art exhibitions. Meanwhile, she participated as a guest curator in residencies and independent art publications, whilst in 2016 she was a fellow at the Curatorial Fellowship of Schwarz Foundation at Art Space Pythagorion in Samos, curated by Katerina Gregos. She has coordinated exhibitions curated by Kostis Velonis in Athens and Vienna, as well as part of the audiovisual archive of Katerina Zacharopoulou in ASFA Library. Finally, since 2018 she has been curating exhibitions and cultural events in Athens as an independent curator, most recently the exhibition “Contemporary Womanhood: Present Femininities 1.0” at MOMus Alex Mylona Museum.

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Xirómero/Dryland, which is representing Greece at the 60^th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, is an interdisciplinary collective work conceived by Thanasis Deligiannis and Yannis Michalopoulos, and created along with the artists Elia Kalogianni, Yorgos Kyvernitis, Kostas Chaikalis and Fotis Sagonas. The participation of Greek artists was curated by Panos Giannikopoulos. The work consists of a piece of agricultural irrigation equipment that synchronizes the installation’s sound, video and lighting in real time. The artists investigate the experience of a village festival by following its course from the village square all the way to the outskirts and surrounding land. More specifically, they draw their inspiration from the experience of the panigyria -local festivals- of mainland Greece, Thessaly and the area of Xirómero, in Western Greece, which lends the work its title.

The artists behind the work refer to water as a prism —a way of seeing and thinking—focusing on its scarcity or abundance, on how it is needed or wasted, as well as on its social connotations. The exhaustion of resources is linked here to physical and financial exhaustion. The work navigates the political potential of sound and music, and the impact of technology on rural landscapes and cultural diversity.

The panigyri conveys information and meaning through ritual and entertainment. It is connected to agricultural work; it is born from – but also begets – the community’s internal time cycle, which tracks the pace of irrigation and other agricultural tasks and helps each community form an image of itself. But at the same time, it allows contradictory notions to coalesce: viewers become participants, on-stage becomes off-stage, and the performative gives way to the everyday.

This incessant interaction between ‘representation’ and reality is reproduced within the work itself. Xirómero/Dryland also uses the particular architectural features of the Pavilion of Greece to associatively evoke images of agricultural warehouses and religious architecture that is so often the panigyri’s backdrop. The watering equipment at the centre of the Pavilion defines a circular perimeter that is the actual space of the installation. The work serves to bring the outdoor space – where the community comes together, the village square, a place of public assembly – indoors. As the watering system comes on, it initiates a specific rhythmical pattern, measuring time like a clock or a cassette tape playing, suggesting specific routes for the viewers to follow and encouraging viewpoint shifts along the way. Xirómero/Dryland steers clear of an aesthetic approach, emphasizing instead the emotional immediacy of the encounter with objects, sounds and images. 

By observing gender relations in the context of the panigyri, we can examine the various possibilities of presenting the self, the different versions of femininity and the manner in which the female body is either revealed or concealed, but also the ambivalent gesture by the subject that chooses to withdraw, opting for absence and exclusion from the festivities.
Xirómero/Dryland attempts to create associations between a geographically contextualized experience and the global condition; to facilitate shifts of perspective between dominant and marginalized cultural subjects as a means of opening up a liminal space for the emergence of new meanings.

*Xirómero [ksirˈomero], a historic area of Aetolia-Acarnania, is known for its festivals. Today, it is one of the municipalities in the regional unit of Western Greece.

Research for the purposes of the installation Xirómero/Dryland that will be representing Greece at the 60^th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation and conducted in the context of the Margaroni Residency by Onassis AiR Fellows interdisciplinary artist and composer Thanasis Deligiannis, and dramaturge and philologist Yannis Michalopoulos. Both brought together a team that includes visual artist and filmmaker Elia Kalogianni, photographer and documentary filmmaker Yorgos Kyvernitis, sound engineer and designer Kostas Chaikalis, and visual artist and architect Fotis Sagonas.

The project and its presentation in Venice have been funded by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. EMΣT / National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens is the commissioner of Greece’s national participation and in charge of planning, production and promotion. Panos Giannikopoulos is the curator of the Pavilion of Greece.

Greece’s participation in the 60th International Art Exhibition ‐ La Biennale di Venezia is powered by Onassis Culture. The project is also supported by the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, the Athens-Epidaurus Festival and the Greek National Tourism Organization. Support from ARTWORKS was provided through a founding grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF). Additional support was made possible by NEON Culture and Development Organization, by Outset and the Qualco Foundation. AEGEAN is the official air carrier sponsor and the project has been placed under the auspices of the Municipality of Xirómero.

ABOUT

Artists:
Xirómero/Dryland is an interdisciplinary collective work conceived by Thanasis Deligiannis and Yannis Michalopoulos, and created along with the artists Elia Kalogianni, Yorgos Kyvernitis, Kostas Chaikalis and Fotis Sagonas.

Artistic Collaborators:
Fotini Papachristopoulou, Vassiliki-Maria Plavou, Marios Stamatis

Curated by: Panos Giannikopoulos

https://pavilionofgreece2024.emst.gr

Commissioner | Organization :

EMΣT | National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens
Head of Production, Pavilion of Greece, EMΣT | National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens: Yannis Arvanitis
Head of Communication & Press, Pavilion of Greece, EMΣT | National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens: Maria Tsolaki,
Exhibition Production: Giorgos Efstathoulidis – Constructivist Exhibitions, Antonia Chantzi

EMΣT | National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens
Artistic Director: Katerina Gregos
Administrative & Financial Director: Athina Ioannou

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A
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THESE OO’S

THE   (     )’S

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BBBB ITES OF OOTS can be read as a visual, sculptural and performative search for an absurd in-between space between that which is flat, empty or full. In BBBB ITES OF OOTS a black rubber boot discovers, produces and questions its own grammar. It (RRRR)prints, (RRRR)peats, (RRRR)hearses, (RRRR)moves and (RRRR)boots. While faltering, stuttering and repeating, the BBBB or BOOT or OOT searches its way between letters, sounds, words and verbs for its own shape or body. By constantly repeating its own shape, an absurd feedback loop of sounds, movements and meanings is created. Between these BBBB ITES OF OOTS two parentheses (    ) move. (    ) zooms in and out and twists and turns. As a scenographic co-performer, (    ) animates both space, our looking and thinking.

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The following conversation between artist Anna Berenice Garner and writer and philosopher Jimena Cervantes covers thematic overlaps within their practices and research, including: ocularcentrism, material relations, and the layered meanings of the body within the work of art. This dialogue started shortly after Jimena facilitated a two-month seminar on speculative materialism and Anna mounted a solo exhibition with Lateral in México City. Using these two events as starting points, the interview delves into Anna’s larger practice in photography, sculpture, and performance as well as Jimena’s research into poetic materiality and contemporary art. 

 

JC: Anna, since the day that I visited you in your studio I have been thinking about many things we discussed about vision, the body, and fiction; I would like to start our conversation here. In your work there is a search for something in the image that is not visible at first sight, a search for the elements that construct or underlie the image; a series of frameworks in the sense of “agreements”. Each agreement is the result of a negotiation within the terms and confines of the image, and each agreement is neither neutral nor arbitrary but imbued with the consequences of this relation. I feel that your work can be thought of through the idea of operative images, in which there doesn’t exist what is customarily expected, but which reveals the mechanisms that make up an image itself. To begin with something that could be problematic and complex, I would like to know what you think about the idea of the “not visible”

 

 

ABG: There is always something visible in a work of art, but on the other hand the shadow of this, the not visible, is similarly always present. Where the problematic in this enters is through the historicization of art that has normalized precedents for what is visually permitted in a work of art, what types of spaces and/or subjects. I see photography as an apt tool to talk about relations between what is visible and not visible because of its position as a technology of vision and the notion that it honestly replicates reality. My images start with real references such as mountains, monoliths, geometric forms, and my own body, but I depart from this in search of simplifications and abstractions of these referents. I intentionally eliminate details, hide parts of the image within the shadow and only show fragments of my body; I feel that when an image doesn’t permit a full view or vista then more possibilities arise from what is not visible, it creates a nascent and emergent space. 

 

This question reminds me of when we met during a philosophy course you taught about speculative materialism, where we discussed the volition and autonomy of material and how to relate to objects outside of established norms. I notice in your research a curiosity for the senses that are considered periphery in art: smell, touch and sound. Can you expand on how this interest connects with ideas about what is visible or not visible in art and say more about your investigations around ocularcentrism?

 

 

JC: I am interested in approaching material in ways that examine the relationships that objects and bodies generate in their interaction with others and with their surroundings. I believe an epistemological worldview dominated by vision brings with it many problems, and that this primarily has to do with how the visible upholds the fantasy of individuality; subjects are the priority while the objects who are perceived exist in the margin. The relations that these traverse and cause are not at first glance evident except within spatial positions and relationships, wherein space itself appears as something previously existing, or a priori; this appears to me as one of the main problems with ocularcentrism. Exploring the epistemological possibilities of other senses can permit the imagining of distinct relationships with things and objects and acknowledge that nothing exists at the margin of its interactions; for example sound is a vibrating material that unfolds in space through physical mechanisms, it resonates and is made perceivable by the bodies that encounter it in their daily lives. I like to think that fiction has an important role to play within these types of philosophical explorations.

 

This seems to me something that we have talked about before and I have the intuition that your work functions in a space between representation and the apparatuses that produce it. Your photography is not only at the service of technique, but works with artifice, in particular through artificial light. What I mean by that is that you work with methodologies that dismantle the physical supports of an image to reveal the thin line between reality and fiction. Your practice allows me to think about the space of these investigations and their implications. Do you think the mechanisms you make visible in your works seek to reveal something?

 

 

ABG: It is really compelling what you say about the connection between vision and individuality, and it makes me think about how the two are both products and catalyzers of modernity. Within ocularcentrism and the belief that vision is the most faithful sense there is much that is lost or left at the peripheries. In my practice I investigate these margins through the mechanisms and tools of photography (the medium/technology that represents the climax of vision’s epistemological dominance); for me these are the studio space, the materials represented within or used to construct an image, and lighting techniques. The association between photography and reality imbues the photographic with an interesting ability to both question and reconstruct the same reality it is supposed to objectively convey. And even though fiction is important in my work, I also want my images to have the charge of the real because I believe that through this I can create fictitious spaces that are believable. Playing with the fiction of the image my goal is to put the image itself in doubt and through that to examine the margins of vision, and I think this is what I hope to make visible in my work, the failures of vision and that maybe these failures and the forgotten margins can be productive sites of thought, creation, and reinvention. 

 

When we talked in my studio you stated “materiality is not reality, but a relation of affects that create perceptions”. This idea can be applied to photography and how reality within photography is not fixed, but is a perception or rather a network of perceptions undergirded by social agreements. Can you talk more about the relationship between reality, perception, and materiality and how these enter into your research?

 

 

JC: One of the reasons that I have had an interest in materiality is that it is a dimension that makes evident the relationships that exist between or are produced by all objects. Materials have a history, they are not neutral. This has to do no only with the fact that matter itself can change and generate forms outside of human interaction, but also that humans have produced value systems based on these forms. The perception and production of images is deeply implicated in this. 

 

It is interesting to approach objects from both their material and emotional history, which is simultaneously a history of commerce and economic and symbolic exchanges. For this reason objects are complicated by their relationship to colonialism and power that sustain processes of extraction, theft and distribution that exist within all systems of capital and exchange. This interests me because tracing the lines of these histories can help to comprehend the complexities of agreements and meanings generated by and through objects, how they are valued and why they are desired. 

 

What do you think about this?

 

 

ABG: Just like objects, images are also not neutral, their meaning is informed by historical precedents and social agreements. I understand that an image does not show reality but a fiction constructed, again like what you say about objects, by human paradigms. Recognizing this and exploring it in my work permits the possibility to question these exact relationships that in complicated ways intertwine image with ideology. In the history of photography there are many examples of the use of the medium to promote and defend political objectives and colonial programs, in particular within the landscape genre. Working with photography, I think about the problematic relation of image and truth and how to reorient it to consider the complex agreements between the physical world (objects, space, material) and the ideological, political or epistemological meanings that are associated with its photographic representation

 

JC: I would like to talk about the body and the role of performance in your practice. The movement of the body within a performative art practice activates a series of particular political implications. What types of understandings do you think underpin the relation of the body in space, and why are they relevant? Do you think the gesture or the body in movement reveals a particular pact between body and space. Do you see these ideas resonating in your performative explorations?

 

ABG: My investigations of the body and space have to do with how a space can support or not support a body, thinking about spaces that are both private and public, and both in nature and constructed. Many movements are unconscious, the body responds to its surroundings without thinking, but meanwhile taking into account the particular guidelines or customs of a space; I feel that sometimes a gesture does not necessarily reveal something personal of the body, but is more of a communal expression about inhabiting and moving through the world. In my work I attempt to form spaces where my body can exist in a manner distinct to what I find in everyday environments or where the space is made considering my specific needs and the particular size and shape of my body. I think a lot about the queer body and how many spatial organizations are not congruent for the queer body, which causes the need to construct new space and to embody a sense of metamorphosis. I want to express the plasticity of the queer body and of the spaces it can exist in, thinking about what can be born out of this. 

 

I would like to touch on minimalism as a final theme; an interest that we both have in common. Could you talk about how minimalism connects to your investigations about materiality and relationships of objects?

 

 

JC: The first thing that interested me about minimalism or a minimalist aesthetic in art has to do with how I saw forms playing with the tension between the material and immaterial, action over the material and yet the materiality transcending the action. I am interested in the effects of the absence of the metaphorical and the function of the literalness of minimal forms, perhaps through elemental forms and codes there is a possibility to make evident information inherently contained in the material or object itself. What do you think of this? How would you explain your interest in minimalism and how does it relate to your own formal and artistic language? 

 

ABG: I feel that working with minimalist or abstract forms helps me to focus on the mechanisms inherent to photography, to widen and open the reading of my images, and to problematize the reality of the photograph through editing out information and specific details. The evolution of this in my practice came about through my interests in making the materials I use for my constructions legible in my images. It naturally made sense to simplify my forms so that the materiality could be present and readable. From there I began to investigate, historically and theoretically, reasons for utilizing these methods; I connected a lot with the concrete and neoconcrete movements, in particular their examinations of the limitations of rationality and logic and how abstraction permits existences outside of problematic orders of modernity.

 

I feel there is a lot more we could discuss about both of our research and practices, but for now I’ll just say thank you for taking the time to talk with me and to elaborate on these ideas. 

 

 

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Bios 

Jimena Cervantes is a philosopher, writer and researcher with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). She is currently studying with an academic excellence scholarship at Universidad Iberoamericana (2023-2025) in a master’s degree in studio art. Jimena’s recent investigations delve into poetic materials, speculative ecology, and contemporary art. She has collaborated on numerous curatorial texts and her writing has been published in Onda MX and Artischock. In 2023 Jimena published a book of poems, El nómada del borde, in collaboration with PotentA Editores in which she explores the emotional and political powers of amorphic spaces and the body’s physical limits.

 

Anna Berenice Garner is an artist working in performance, sculpture, photography, and video and is based México City. One person exhibitions of her work have been presented at Lateral, México City, México (2024); Lighthouse Works, Fisher’s Island, NY (2022); and ltd los angeles, Los Angeles, CA (2019). Anna’s work has been included in thematic exhibitions Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY (2021), Museum aan de Stroom, Antwerp, Belgium (2019); The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2019); and Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ (2016). She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2016), and Art OMI (2019). Her work is held in the collections of The San Diego Museum of Art (San Diego, CA), The Federal Reserve Board (Washington DC), The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Houston, TX), and The National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington DC).

 www.annaberenicegarner.com

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IN SPANISH:

La siguiente conversación entre la artista Anna Berenice Garner y la filósofa y escritora Jimena Cervantes aborda temas que ambas tienen en común dentro de sus prácticas e investigaciones, incluyendo: el ocularcentrismo, las relaciones entre materiales y objetos y el cuerpo como significante complejo en la obra de arte. Este diálogo empezó poco tiempo después de un laboratorio de investigación dirigido por Jimena sobre materialismos especulativos y una exposición individual de Anna en la galería Lateral en Ciudad de México. Partiendo de estos eventos, la entrevista profundiza en la práctica de Anna que se enfoca en la fotografía, escultura y performance, así como en las investigaciones de Jimena en torno a las poéticas de la materialidad y el arte contemporáneo. 

 

JC: Anna, desde el día en que te visité en tu estudio he pensado mucho en algunas cosas que platicamos sobre la visión, el cuerpo y la ficción; desde allí quisiera comenzar a conversar. En tu obra hay una búsqueda por algo que no es visible a primera vista en la imagen, sino más bien, por lo que permite sostenerla y hacerla posible. Una serie de frameworks en el sentido de “acuerdos”. Todo acuerdo es el resultado de una negociación entre términos y ningún acuerdo es nunca neutral o arbitrario. Siempre carga consigo con las consecuencias de lo pactado. Por otra parte me interesa mucho el carácter minimal de tu obra, el lenguaje formal con el que trabajas te permite hablar de muchas cosas sin detenerte en las determinaciones del contenido, sino preguntarte por sus mediciones. Pienso que tu trabajo podría pensarse a partir de la idea de las imágenes operativas, en ellas no hay suficiente de lo que, por costumbre, se espera poder mirar y eso permite revelar los mecanismos que las atraviesan. Para retomar algo que puede sonar problemático, me gustaría saber qué piensas tú sobre la idea de lo no visible

 

ABG: Siempre habrá algo visible en una obra de arte, pero por otra parte siempre está presente la sombra de eso que es lo no visible. Donde entra lo problemático de esto es dentro de la historia de arte que ha normalizado las reglas sobre lo que está permitido visibilizar o no, qué tipos de espacios y/o sujetos. Veo que la fotografía es una herramienta muy apropiada para hablar de las relaciones entre lo visible y lo no visible por su papel en el desarrollo de tecnologías de la visión y también por la carga de objetividad para replicar la realidad. Mis imágenes empiezan con referencias reales como montañas, monolitos, geometrías y mi propio cuerpo, pero parto de allí para buscar simplificaciones y abstracciones de esas referencias. Intento deliberadamente eliminar detalles, esconder partes de la imagen dentro de la sombra y solo mostrar mi cuerpo fragmentado; siento que cuando una imagen no permite ver una vista completa existen más posibilidades y que en lo no visible todo es potencial y emergente. 

 

Esa pregunta me hace recordar que nos conocimos cuando impartiste un laboratorio sobre materia y sensibilidad, donde platicamos sobre la voluntad de la materia misma y la posibilidad de entender un objeto fuera de los paradigmas establecidos. Veo en tus investigaciones una curiosidad por los sentidos considerados como menores en el arte: el olfato, el tacto y el sonido. ¿Puedes expandir cómo ese interés conecta con ideas sobre lo visible o no visible en el arte y decir más sobres tus cuestiones en torno al ocularcentrismo?

 

JC: Me interesa mucho explorar un acercamiento material que permita seguir las relaciones que un objeto o un cuerpo genera en su curso en función de otros. Pienso que dentro de los muchos problemas que ha traído consigo el predominio de la visión como soporte epistemológico, es que permite sostener la fantasía de individualidad. Los objetos parecen estar puestos al frente y el sujeto que los percibe puede quedarse al margen. Las relaciones que los atraviesan no son a primera vista evidentes más que en relación a su posición en el espacio, y el espacio aparece como algo previamente existente también. Ese es a mi parecer uno de los  problemas con el ocultocentrismo. Creo que apostar por explorar las posibilidades epistemológicas de otros sentidos nos puede permitir imaginar relaciones distintas con las cosas y no obviar que nada existe al margen de sus interacciones. Por ejemplo, el sonido es el resultado de vibraciones materiales que se despliegan en el espacio a través de un medio, resuenan y se hacen percibibles a partir de los cuerpos que se encuentran en el camino.

 

Me gusta pensar que la ficción tiene un camino importante para explorar a través de este tipo de aproximaciones. 

 

Esto me parece que lo hemos platicado antes, y tengo la intuición de que tu trabajo se encuentra en un lugar medial entre la representación y el aparato que la produce. Tú fotografía no está al servicio de la técnica, sino que trabajas con una técnica a la luz del artificio. Se trata de una serie de ejercicios que a través del desmontaje de sus soportes, muestran la delgada línea que sostiene a la imagen entre la ficción y lo real. Tu obra me permite justamente pensar el espacio de esas negociaciones y sus implicaciones. ¿Piensas que los mecanismos que haces visibles en tus piezas buscan revelar algo? 

 

ABG: Es importante lo que dices sobre la relación de la visión con la individualidad, y como los dos son a la vez productos y catalizadores de la modernidad. Dentro del ocularcentrismo y la idea de que la visión es el sentido más infalible hay mucho de lo que se encuentra en el margen que está perdido. En mi práctica investigo esta margen a través de los mecanismos de la fotografía (el medio y técnico que representa la cima el predominio epistemológico de la visión); para mí estos mecanismos son el espacio del estudio, los materiales que son representados por una imagen o que construyen una imagen y/o las trucas de luz. La relación de la fotografía con la realidad da un poder interesante para luego cuestionar y reconstruir cómo definir esa misma realidad. Aunque la ficción es importante, también quiero que mis imágenes tengan la carga de lo real, porque dentro de esto puedo crear espacios y/o mundos ficticios pero creíbles. Jugando con la ficción de la imagen mi meta es poner en duda las imágenes mismas y a través de esto examinar los márgenes de la visión, y creo que esto es lo quiero hacer visible en mi práctica, los fracasos de la visión y que tal vez los márgenes olvidados pueden ser sitios constructivos para pensar, crear y reinventar.

 

Cuando hablamos en mi estudio dijiste “la materialidad no es una realidad sino una relación de efectos que crean percepciones.”  Esa idea se puede relacionar con la fotografía y como la realidad dentro de ella no es fija sino, una percepción o una red de percepciones reforzadas por acuerdos sociales. Puedes hablar más sobre la relación entre realidad y percepción y materialidad y cómo entra en tus investigaciones? 

 

JC: Una de las razones que me ha llevado a interesarme por la materialidad es que es una dimensión que hace evidentes las relaciones que atraviesan y producen a todo objeto. Los materiales tienen una historia, no son neutrales. No solo se trata de que la materia permita por sí misma generar formas más allá de las decisiones humanas, sino que como humanos hemos producido sistemas de valor en función de esas formas. La percepción y la producción de imágenes no están al margen de esto. 

 

Resulta interesante aproximarse a las cosas desde su historia material y sensible, la cual es a la vez  una historia de mercancías, e intercambios económicos y simbólicos. Por lo mismo, están atravesadas por relaciones de colonialidad y poder que sostienen los procesos de extracción, saqueo y distribución en todo intercambio. Esto me interesa porque trazar las líneas de estas historias puede ayudarnos a comprender la complejidad de los acuerdos que generamos con las cosas, cómo las valoramos y por qué las deseamos. 

 

¿Tu qué piensas de esto?

 

ABG: Como la materia, las imágenes tampoco son neutrales sino que están cargadas de acuerdos sociales e históricos. Entender que una imagen no muestra la realidad del mundo sino una ficción construida, es parecido a lo que dices de la materia, por decisiones y paradigmas humanos. Esto permite la posibilidad de cuestionar estas mismas relaciones entre imagen e ideología. En la historia de la fotografía hay muchos ejemplos del uso del medio para sostener objetivos políticos y/o avanzar programas de colonialidad, sobre todo dentro del género del paisaje. Trabajando con la fotografía, pienso en lo problemático de la relación entre imagen y verdad y como reorientarse para pensar en los acuerdos entre el mundo físico y sus representaciones fotográficas.  

 

A partir de esto que comentas, me gustaría hablar sobre los  gestos y el rol de la performance en tu práctica. Todo movimiento del cuerpo activa una serie de implicaciones políticas en cada práctica corporal. ¿Qué acuerdos crees que está sosteniendo la relación entre el cuerpo y el espacio, y por qué te parecen relevantes?¿Crees que el gesto es un movimiento que revela algún tipo de pacto entre el cuerpo y el espacio? ¿Crees que esto tiene resonancias con tu exploración sobre la performance?

 

ABG: Mis investigaciones del cuerpo y el espacio tienen que ver con como un espacio acomoda o no acomoda un cuerpo, pensado tanto en espacios privados como públicos, en la naturaleza y la arquitectura construida. Muchos movimientos son inconscientes, el cuerpo responde a su alrededor sin pensar, pero tomando en cuenta reglas y/o costumbres de un espacio. Tal vez un gesto no revela algo personal del cuerpo sino una expresión comunitaria de cómo habitar o atravesar el mundo. En mis obras intento formar espacios en donde mi cuerpo pueda existir de manera distinta de lo que encuentro en el mundo externo o donde el espacio está hecho pensando en las necesidades o el tamaño específico de mi cuerpo. Pienso mucho en el cuerpo queer y como muchas organizaciones en el espacio no son congruentes para este tipo de cuerpos; eso genera la necesidad de construir nuevos espacios y de transformarlos. Quiero expresar la plasticidad del cuerpo queer y los espacios en que existe, pensando en que puede nacer de esto.

 

Me gustaría tocar como último tema el minimalismo; un interés que tenemos en común. Podrías hablar sobre cómo el minimalismo conecta con tus investigaciones en torno a la materialidad y relaciones de objetos? 

 

JC: La primera razón por la que me interesó el minimalismo tenía que ver con cómo las cosas se jugaban en la tensión entre lo material y lo inmaterial de las obras. El lugar de la acción sobre el material y la materialidad desbordando la acción. Los efectos de la ausencia de lo metafórico en función de lo literal de las formas mínimas y las formas y en la posibilidad de hacer evidente la información contenida en la materialidad a través de códigos y formas elementales. ¿Tu qué piensas de esto? ¿Cómo podrías explicar tu interés en el minimalismo y cómo se relaciona tu propio lenguaje formal y artístico? 

 

Siento que trabajar con formas minimalistas me ayuda a enfocarme en los mecanismos de la foto, en ampliar y abrir las lecturas de mis imágenes y en problematizar la realidad de la foto al quitar información y características específicas. La evolución de este estilo en mi práctica surgió por mis intereses en mostrar y enfocar en los materiales que he usado para construir mis imágenes. Naturalmente tenía sentido simplificar mis formas para que la materialidad estuviera más presente y legible. De allí empecé a investigar, histórica y teóricamente, razones para utilizar estos métodos; conecto mucho con las propuestas artísticas en torno al concretismo y el neoconcretismo en sus cuestionamientos sobre la exacerbación del racionalismo y la literalidad, además de  como la abstracción permite formas  fuera de los  órdenes problemáticos de la modernidad.

 

Siento que hay mucho más de lo que podemos hablar en torno a  nuestras investigaciones y prácticas, pero por ahora te agradezco mucho por tu tiempo para conversar y profundizar en estos temas.  

 

Bios

 

Jimena Cervantes es una filósofa, escritora e investigadora. Licenciada en filosofí­a por la UNAM. Actualmente es becaria de Excelencia Académica por la Universidad Iberoamericana (2023-2025) en el Programa de Maestrí­a en Estudios de Arte. Su reciente investigación atraviesa los cruces de las poéticas materiales, la ecología especulativa y el arte contemporáneo. Ha colaborado con espacios de exhibición en la escritura de textos curatoriales y publicado para medios como Onda Mx y Artishock. En 2023 publicó el poemario El nómada del borde en colaboración con PotentA Editores en donde explora las potencias sensibles y políticas de los límites y los espacios amorfos. 

 

Anna Berenice Garner es una artista que trabaja con performance, escultura, fotografía, y video; Anna actualmente vive en la Ciudad de México. Se han presentado exposiciones individuales de Anna en Lateral, México City, México (2024); Lighthouse Works, Fisher’s Island, NY (2022); y ltd los angeles, Los Angeles, CA (2019). Sus piezas se han incluido en exposiciones temáticas en Simone Subal Gallery, Nueva York, NY (2021), Museum aan de Stroom, Amberes, Bélgica (2019); Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2019); y Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ (2016). El trabajo de Anna ha sido apoyado a través de residencias en Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2016) y Art OMI (2019). Sus obras forman parte de las colecciones de San Diego Museum of Art (San Diego, CA), Federal Reserve Board (Washington DC), The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Houston, TX) y National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington DC). 

 www.annaberenicegarner.com

 

 

* 1st Featured image credits: Jimena Cervantes, Collective note taking exercise utilized to create discussion groups based on themes within speculative materialism, part of Laboratorio de materialismos especulativos, 2023

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The exhibition focuses on the architectural structure, function and strategic location of the fort. It combines issues of power, enforcement, rebellion and hope to create a hybrid dialogue around contemporary socio-political remnants in states of anxiety, turmoil and a tendency towards change and social progress. The surprise of the rebellion is transferred to the voices of the visual works that come to coexist and establish themselves renewing their place of reception resurrecting it in a new field of renegotiation of history, cultural heritage and values ​​of collective identity and consciousness. The nomadic character of the uprisings, the naval battles is translated in the context of the nomadic project through visual visual signs as an act of resistance that expresses a state of rebellion to activate the emerging postmodern humanism.

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10N Gallery – Menorca
Weird Double
17.07 > 24.08.24
Panos Profitis, Anna Ruth & Luca Vanello

Exploration of dualities
Text written by Jérôme Nicod

The concept of the “double” is prevalent across all cultures and mythologies, symbolizing dualism, inner conflict, and
interconnectedness. In mythology, twins, often signify two halves of a whole, embodying contrasting qualities like male/female,
good/evil, or sun/moon. Featuring the visionary works of Anna Ruth, Luca Vanello, Panos Profitis, this exhibition explores the
concept of the “double”, it delves into the intersections of nature, mythology, and technology, offering a multi-faceted lens throughwhich we can contemplate the complexities of human existence.

Anna Ruth’s work is atmospheric and imbedded in romantic medieval references, parts of character’s head or eyes are often
depicted crying or in action of intense lamentation creating a psychological tension and linking us to our own introspection. Setting here a particular focus on the relationship dynamics between characters in her scenes and their mirrored reflections in water, those Narcis figures prompt viewers to ponder the complexities inherent of the psychological construction of the self. Quoting the dual ambiguity of our personalities those character seemed frozen action of self-meditation. Navigating further the intricate web of interpersonal relationships depicted, the presence of a mythical characters like Harpies in Ruth’s body of work adds depth to the theme of duality.

Using architectural elements to structure the composition, Ruth’s blurs further the limit of her the paintings and our physical space, often reproducing those elements in the space and some artefacts. Here the heterotopy is emphasized by some mirrored doubles placed in specific corners of the gallery space to further enhances the uncanniness resulting from the duplication of subject inside the painting’s field.

Luca Vanello’s sculptures and installations envisions a symbiosis between organic elements and synthetic materials revealing theimpressive beauty of vegetal structures but also critically showing the danger and limits of a possible dystopian future. As the
boundaries between ecosystems and organisms are now being challenged more than ever, his innovative sculptural pieces crafted from salvaged branches and leaves of plants offer a unique possible future state where this limit would have been exceeded. What if the intersection of nature and technology could create a different kind of life?

Through a meticulous process Vanello’s is able to extract and replace the plant’s fluids with resins, this process results into the
extraction of chlorophyll and to create a preserved faded artefact, almost mummified residue of the vegetal body resembling bird
feathers of an alien biosphere. The display and hanging of these skeletons in space emphasizes the transformative process resulting in a peculiar duality that blurs the lines between the natural and the artificial. His sculptures invite the viewer to reconsider the boundaries of the uncanny double that has been created and could now potentially create new forms of harmony and coexistence between the organic world and the man-made environment. In doing so, they provoke conversations about the evolving relationship between the ecological spheres of the Anthropocene.

Panos Profitis, a Greek artist, brings a historical and mythological dimension to the concept of duality. Drawing inspiration from
both Hellenistic Greece and the rationalist period of the late 1920s, his cast aluminum sculptures inhabit a potential fictional
theatrical stage created for the viewer. Profitis infuses his works with architectural precision and geometric forms activating the
space as a scenography or a field of a potential scenery. By combining these versatile materials with manufactured modern
artefacts and structures such as ladders or prefabricated pipes or found objects he fuses the timeless historical references, satirical faces, tongues eyes and bodies. Ultimately, he creates a dialogue between past and present, tradition and innovation.
Through this fusion of styles and narratives, Profitis encourages viewers to reflect on the enduring influence of the past on
nowadays socio-political struggles and propaganda. Profitis’s art stands as a testament to the enduring power of mythic narratives and socio-political lineage while heralding a new chapter in the exploration of form, symbolism, and cultural heritage in the realm of contemporary sculpture.

It is in this collision of diverse perspectives and creative voices that the true essence of the exhibition emerges, inviting viewers to engage in a dialogue that transcends individual works and converges into a shared experience of the broad artistic expression of duality that ultimately aims to transcend individual narratives.

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In their duo exhibition Am Ryck (engl. At the Ryck) in Greifswald’s botanical garden, the artists Juliane Tübke and Alison Darby explore the history and future of the drained peatland landscapes around the Ryck meadows and the Steinbecker Vorstadt polder in Greifswald. The exhibition focuses on the development of the Ryck meadows as captured in the drawing Am Ryck in Greifswald mit Blick auf die Mühlen vor der Steinbecker Schanze (1801) (engl. At the Ryck in Greifswald with a view of the mills in front of the Steinbecker Schanze) by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich. In 1801, he drew the Ryck meadows in washed ink from the banks of the Ryck. The drawing was created when the area was first used as pastureland: At that time, the process of peatland drainage – which would continue for centuries – had already been started with the help of windmills and small ditches. In the context of their exhibition, the artists examine how the complex history of the drainage of the Ryck meadows has since then affected the peatland ecosystem up to the present day. (Text: Ulrike Gerhardt)

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The exhibition “Ultramareal” is an expansion of the intertidal zone, that strip of land between high and low tide where complex networks of ecological relationships proliferate along the coast of the central littoral. This space brings together various involved elements that articulate a rich ecosystem, such as the wave crashing against the rock that fosters the growth of “cochayuyo” seaweed. “Ultramareal” represents an accelerated intertidal zone expanded into a speculative and symbiotic future at Galería Gabriela Mistral until August 16th.

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Through four rooms of the MAC, we accompany an imagined crustacean in its material drift. At Concha en ácido, we become participants in the story of dissolution. In a dialogue with the architecture (both material and symbolic) of the museum, this exhibition presents a fable about the dissolution organic materialities in the ocean, as well as certain symbolic structures of culture. Through a series of works, including sculptures, installations and spatial interventions, our scale or self-perception is distorted around more-than-human bodies, creatures and phenomena.

Polluting gases that accumulate rapidly since the industrialisation of human life are eventually deposited in the ocean. A series of chemical processes cause the waters to increase in temperature, and consequently in acidity. One of the consequences of this acidification is the dissolution of calcium carbonate structures. This mineral is found in small creatures such as crabs, molluscs and planktonic communities. These creatures are currently suffering from the dissolution of their shells.

We decided to travel to Tongoy and isolate ourselves as a residence to think about our exhibition. In this way, the beach, as an ambivalent territory —a fantasy that borders on culture and nature— was our refuge and our point of view. It was during this retrear that we visualised the multiple destinies of dissolution. Legs, pieces, claws and skins of crabs, as well as shells scattered on the sand told us their life history as well as their decline. In general we could understand that these ruined materialities, once autonomous creatures, had been part of a delicate ecosystem: food for birds, food for humans, merchandise or even organic waste deposited by the tides. Sometimes rubbish, sometimes treasure, as Elizabeth mentions. Progressively, each time we returned to the beach we became part of the dissolution of these creatures, understanding that there was no distance between their fate and our daily lives. That we were not passive beings, and never had been. 

As indicated in the name of the exhibition, we borrow ideas from the essay Your Shell on Acid by Stacy Alaimo. This text seeks to decentralise our thinking in order to consider other (non-human) forms of existence with which we could establish alliances and imagine forms of existence beyond anthropocentrism.

Alaimo invites us to include, within our reflections on the crises of the present, small creatures that are currently experiencing the catastrophic dissolution of their own bodies in the ocean. This exhibition adds to this search for and encounter with biological and material processes that are more-than-human. Both the essay and this exhibition take the acidification of the seas and its consequences as their point of departure. We decided to imagine materially our transcorporality in the drift of these ignored stories and thus approach a multitude of creatures that suffer other kinds of catastrophes; extinctions and/or irreversible dissolutions that at first glance do not seem to affect us. 

With the intention of exceeding a passive contemplation of these scenes of extinction, Elizabeth Burmann’s “Concha en ácido” materially constructs a narrative to self-perceive ourselves as bodies exposed to the dissolution of our own shells. First from the material imagination, as the mineral that is most present in our bodies is calcium carbonate (in bones, nails and teeth). But also to dilute a series of symbolic shells that determine us as individual subjects, alienated and sometimes lacking in empathy; absolutely immersed in harmful ideologies (very human) such as neoliberal capitalism.

Sergio Soto Maulén

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Press Release: Press-release-–-Cecile-Lempert-An-evening-far-–-Super-Super-Markt.pdf

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It starts here, and yet, it never begins in this place. We were sitting there and were talking about this one occasion. Starting to pick something, you know: chatter, noise around you, movements between the tables, the smell of the U-Bahn running nearby, textures of the city, tastes of an atmosphere. It’s not like you could pin down what this is all about. But you get something: the sound of this voice, the way things are put, the pauses in between, the loose ends that might lead somewhere. What is handed to you are daily matters, as they pass you, as you pass them. Each specific, each like a shred of a story, even if it doesn’t appear like that: somehow incomplete then, open-ended, layer upon layer, thread upon thread. Things that might make you stay a bit more. That make you adjust, slowing you down in relation to them, as you try to get as close as possible. Somehow, you get weaved into this scene, so that it could no longer be said that you would be on top of this situation. If these are chunks of time, they also tell something about yourself. About the way you have moved upon now, the traces and references that precede you and that you have followed. The space here and now is not simply boundless, it is so in all its dispersed details. It’s not about one single line. What was happening? is a question that loses its significance, as this scene got the hold of us, as we got tangled into it.

– c.s

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Alkinois is pleased to present «FITZCARRALDO,» the new solo installation by Greek artist Theo Michael, with the support of NEON. Inspired by Werner Herzog’s cinematic masterpiece, this in situ intervention challenges traditional art hierarchies and presentation methods within a dedicated exhibition space. Over the past weeks, since his return to Greece, Theo Michael has meticulously explored the quarries around Mount Pentelis, the historic origin of the Parthenon’s marble, to source massive rocks for this installation. By reflecting on the ancient techniques of extracting and transp orting marble, Michael performs an act where not only the stones themselves become the primary artwork, abut also the process of their extraction and transportation, relegating the accompanying sculptures to a secondary role. This performative gesture disrupts conventional art display, inviting viewers to rethink the relationship between art and space.

The installation, which occupies a significant portion of the exhibition area, comprises large marble rocks arranged to create a sculptural volume that balances meticulous assembly with the aesthetics of ruin. This work blurs the lines between historical and ahistorical, indoor land art, and the reflection on ancient skills and lost technologies.

«FITZCARRALDO» extends beyond mere sculpture to engage with architecture, social interaction, and meditation. The stones form a space within a space, evoking archaeological sites and fostering a unique landscape for social interaction throughout the exhibition. These boulders serve as metaphorical and practical anchors, prompting viewers to reimagine norms and traditional concepts of living spaces.

On the surrounding walls and spread around on the floor, Michael presents sculptures that explore archetypal forms with ancient Greek references and futuristic aspects. These pieces, depicting animals, undefined creatures and abstract stelae, reinforce the timeless nature of the installation’s themes.

«FITZCARRALDO» is curated by Alix Janta-Polczynski in collaboration with Romain Bitton. The show will be on display at Alkinois Space all throughout the summer, inviting visitors to engage with this unique blend of archaeology and science fiction, histo ry and modernity, and to experience a redefined approach to art and social space approach to art and social space.

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Tina Kohlmann’s installation offers visitors a transformative experience. Entitled “Go make thyself like a nymph o’ th’ sea,” a quote from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the exhibition challenges one to morph into an aquatic entity while evoking the transformative power of art, like in the play. In this new installation, the public is greeted by amorphous creatures oscillating between monstrous and enchanting beauty. These mesmerizing beings move gracefully on an almost dissolving surface, blurring the boundary between interior and exterior realms.

Reflecting the audience and surrounding architecture during the day, constantly morphing with the interplay of light reflections in the changing sunlight, the installation takes on another form in the dark. Like two guards guarding a portal to another world, it lures the passers-by to reflect on the fluidity and malleability of identity and space. 

Kohlmann’s work frequently engages with mythical figures, drawing on various cultural narratives. Her latest installation delves into the myths and legends of the Danube, one of Europe’s longest and most culturally significant rivers. Flowing through ten countries, the Danube is not just a vital waterway but a symbol of connection and division across cultures and histories. Kohlmann’s work reflects this duality, inviting viewers on a journey. Utilizing organic and inorganic materials, Kohlmann crafts objects that merge elements like the colorful play of church windows and the reflections of flowing water into figures teeming with movement and stories.

Aligned with the Art Lab on the Move philosophy, this work encourages contemplation of the visible and invisible worlds within a city. What stories lie hidden behind the facades? Who is seen, and who remains invisible? Visitors become part of the installation themselves. Every step and every movement is absorbed and reflected by the surface, creating a continuous dialogue between the artwork, the city, and the audience. As a space within the public realm, the exhibition will be visible to all visitors and particularly to the neighborhood residents both day and night. Every Saturday, donumenta e.V. will host gatherings for communal exchange.

About the Artist:
Tina Kohlmann studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach, earning a diploma in Visual Communication. She also studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main under Michael Krebber. Since 2016, Kohlmann has been part of the Frankfurt-based artists’ collective HazMatLab. She has received numerous grants and residencies, including a travel grant from the Hessische Kulturstiftung (Arctic Circle) and a six-month New York grant from Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, as well as a year-long grant from Künstlerhilfe Frankfurt. She participated in the Arctic Circle Expeditionary Residency on a sailing boat in Svalbard and has been an artist in residence in Fljotstunga (Iceland), Shimla (India), Budapest Galeria (Budapest), Sandnes (Norway), LES Artists Alliance Inc. (New York), Copperleg Artist Residency (Estonia), The Wassaic Project (USA), and The Future (Minneapolis). Her work has been exhibited in numerous national and international solo exhibitions, including at Philipp Pflug Contemporary (Frankfurt), Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Art Cologne, Cuchifritos Gallery and Project Space (New York), Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Mousonturm (Frankfurt), AiR Antwerpen, Regina Rex (New York), Kunstverein Letschebach (Karlsruhe), and Field Projects (New York). Between her travels, Kohlmann lives and works in Frankfurt.

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L’Effet de serre (« The Greenhouse Effect »)
(The Deluge)

There was no way things could get messed up. A harmonious order, centred on cultivated Man, a rational being who guaranteed that the universe would run like clockwork. A soul brought to perfection by education, contemplation and action ruled over the flesh, keeping it from slumping into its animal nature. Religion promised beatitude to those who led a just life.
But cracks had been splitting open for a long time. There were attempts to put the pieces back together after each bloody convulsion, but technological “progress” continued to rend the protective fabric. Then protests from the outside began to be heard. Why can’t we women, too, warm ourselves in your greenhouse of sovereignty, gentlemen? Why are we colonised people not entitled to your dignity?
Recriminations broke out all around. Likewise, advocates for the animals, plants, forests, rivers and oceans, all mistreated by human exceptionalism, demanded an end to domination. Inside the tattered greenhouse, some could not accept the decentring and accusations. Instead of stitching it up once again, they decided that the greenhouse had become a hindrance and had to be burned down. They began building high walls to re-establish borders and constructing spaceships to escape.

***

The Bellelay abbey church was desacralized in 1797 and remains so today. It has been looted, its steeples razed. But even in its diminished and degraded state, the building retains its imposing monumentality and people still sometimes come to kneel and pray. As an historic monument, the abbey church is testament to the civilising role of religion, which seeks to uplift the souls of the faithful through the verticality of its architecture and educate them through the fear of Evil and the pursuit of Good.
The church’s undeniable immersive power provides the setting for an exploration of the ways in which human beings are constructed and raised up at a time when humanist culture is collapsing. What new ideal can we project and aspire to? What scenarios – desirable, utopian or more disturbing – could enable us to rethink ourselves and become part of a community of living beings open to all variations and forms of exuberance, caretakers of all species, even our artificial alter egos?
This exhibition in the spiritual colonnades of the church offers the possibility of a whole new function for the site, a mission that is necessarily materialist and utilitarian, embodied in a three-part greenhouse crossing the nave and extending to the choir. Simultaneously an artwork and a theatre, conceived by the artist Jan van Oordt, the tunnel-like shape of this composite greenhouse matches the church’s vaulted ceiling. It seems to refute the church with its earthly, biological and carnal counter-presence and the ceaseless churning of its renewal and transformation. Yet it allows itself to be enveloped – and contaminated – by the building’s diaphanous light. This spectral, limbo-like atmosphere strips the greenhouse of its status as a disciplinary apparatus designed to increase productivity. On the contrary, it offers a vision of an environment where, amidst the corrosion, life could extravagantly reassert its rights.
Under, against and around the greenhouse, in the meadow at the entrance to the site and in the crypt, works by twelve other guest artists put the body and its changingness at the centre of their approach. Visitors are accompanied by a multidiffusion sound piece, Le paradis n’est que l’horizon de la traversée by Émilie Ding and Alizée Lenox. Made up of layers of frequencies, this piece’s throbbing baseline comes from a geofon1 ecording in the church basement. The composers used this instrument as a geo-psychological stethoscope to auscultate the church’s depths and access its visceral subconscious. Superimposed on these telluric sounds are the more ghostly noises of flapping wings and fragments of conversations. At the topmost of these ascending frequencies are the voices of a queer, trans and non-binary choir from Berlin, singing emancipatory lyrics by the lesbian feminist author Monique Wittig.
In the main span of the greenhouse a series of hybrid devices awaits visitors, ready to spring to life. They explore the concept of robotics as a means to blur the boundary between machines and people. Itself (2024), by the Zurich artists Thomas Julier and Max Kriegleder, presents a massive office filing machine from the 1980s, a mechanical precursor to the digital folders omnipresent in today’s computers. The mechanism driving this ridiculously massive automaton was altered by an algorithm that makes it operate at random. This obsolete technology seems to have acquired a life of its own, that expresses itself through a metallic rattle.
Like primitive cyborgs, Benedikt Bock’s assemblages of strips of wood, cardboard boxes, plaster bells and Roomba robot vacuum cleaners are dressed up with accessories that make them look buffoonish. But these stiff, primitive figures are also a source of embarrassment because their status as commodities and disposable packaging reminds us of how we have become reconciled to our own objectification, commodification and automation.
The daily drudgery of woman’s work is the throughline in the videos of the German artist Margaret Raspé, who died last November at the age of ninety. Finding herself the sole caregiver for her three children after a divorce in the 1970s, Raspé dealt with the fact that housework left her no time for making art by attaching a Super-8 camera to a construction hardhat so that she could film her daily hustle and bustle. Augmented by this prosthetic device, she won her emancipation as an artist and a woman, able to expose and transcend her condition as a “Frautomat” (automated housewife), a term she coined to describe a lifetime circumscribed by the mechanical and repetitive daily tasks necessary for human sustenance, such as, for example, whipping cream, doing the dishes or slitting a chicken’s throat and cooking it. Although she never explicitly associated herself with the women’s movement, her artistic practice during this period can be read in light of the critical thinking of materialist feminism, with its denunciation of the double exploitation of women, in the workplace and through their unpaid domestic labour.
The pastoral mission of education and moral guidance, which the Church has long assumed, and more broadly the question of the relationship between the individual and the group, are at the heart of Virginie Sistek’s concerns. The artist examines the (apparently purely historical) problem that arose when the sixteenth-century composer Manfred Barbarini Lupus tried in vain to teach polyphony to Saint Gall Abbey monks accustomed to singing in unison. Sistek transcribed a short extract from a score by Lupus onto a long strip of knitted fabric. Repeated many times, this short musical phrase becomes a territorial ritornello expressing a desire to appropriate a space by encoding access to it and determining the right path. In the science fiction video Pâtis Tidiness, the figure of an orchestra conductor trying to get a choir to sing in harmony gives way to that of a shepherd faced with a rebellion by their non-binary flock.
Beneath the fresco in the church’s choir, Thomas Julier placed multiple green fragments resembling the remains of an archaeological dig. The perfect finish of each piece, the absence of any visible clues as to their composition and origin, and their arrangement in what was once the most sacred part of the building, all suggest a mystical interpretation, a reference to an extra-terrestrial afterlife. In reality, they are the remains of a broken round bird feeder. This object has been a recurring mo1
An instrument made to capture noises produced deep underground, the geofon is a kind of omnidirectional geophone suitable for field recordings
tif in Julier’s work for several years now, and he has modelled its fall and remnants. Using 3D printing, he recreates the real aftermath of an event that only ever existed virtually, and thus contrasts auto-genesis with the god-driven Biblical version.
The sheer physicality of the body is foregrounded in Léa Katharina Meier’s brightly coloured carnivalesque drawings and the metal and resin sculptures of Jean-Charles de Quillacq. The way the latter’s subjects seem to offer up their bodies in this churchly context may also suggest acts of penitence. A powerful fetishism emanates from their nether regions – which is all we see of them – through the insistence on certain body parts moulded in fine detail. Quillacq’s video Fmaily Work Travail Fmailial is an exercise in the film genre of an artist’s studio documentary. Shown on two screens back-to-back, there’s no place to hide and viewers become voyeurs whether they like it or not. A sequence of self-satisfying actions confounds work and procrastination. In an impossible sublimation, the creative act is dissolved into an external economy that makes bluntly visible our manipulation by incessant appeals to our impulses and desires. The artwork becomes a receptacle for, and a recycling of, the material production of the body yielding to the market’s drives. In Léa Katharina Meier’s work, manifestations of female desire pour all over everything. Her characters drip bodily fluids that fertilize the city, the earth and the libraries, to liberate women, educated to be modest and servile. Old books, with their sexist stories, are rewritten for this great regenerative and emancipatory festival.
The same exuberance inhabits the assemblages of Claire van Lubeek, with their climbing plants made up of brooms, feather dusters, brushes and sponges. Referring as much to the universe of domestic toil as to that of witches, her works embody what the hierarchies of both the church and art try to erase: the knowledge and actions of all those whose work contributes to making life possible rather than just making unique art.
Two keys to understanding this exhibition are provided by the photos of Richard Frater from his series Invitation Dilemma, and the video Soulnessless (2012) by Terre Thaemlitz – the latter on view in the crypt. Frater, an artist passionate about birdwatching, is haunted by the common phenomenon of birds fatally smashing into the glass facades of modernist buildings. Not simply forensic documentation nor entirely an elegy, he shoots the point of impact where we can make out clues to the tragedy that has occurred. While having or lacking a soul has long been considered the essential distinction between humans and animals, that assumption can be radically contested. In Soulnessless, Thaemlitz’s semi-autobiographical work comprising several chapters devoted to religion and superstition, this U.S. musician and artist who self-defines as a “cultural producer” takes issue with the injunction to authenticity so common in the music world, often said to pertain to what’s known as “soul music” or expressed in lyrics that assert «not everyone understands house music, it’s a spiritual thing.»
In this video the deeply materialist Thaemlitz proclaims «the absolute non-existence of the soul». This exhibition takes that position as its starting point in seeking to rebuild something, perhaps not free of clumsiness, handling errors and climatic misfortune, but with the certainty that life is to be cultivated in compost.

Sylvain Menétrey

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Throw of the dice – down a slippery slope

A standard game of dice is not a game of chance. At stake is probability, the odds of throwing this or that number, easily calculable. This is why we often lose, as the fable famously forewarns.[1] The young man inherits an estate and quickly gambles it away. In one sweep an entire forest is laid low. Is bad luck to blame? No, replies Fortune to an angry Pan. Just the foolishness of man.

A game of chance takes place on a far more slippery slope, like the round of croquet played in Alice in Wonderland, a game of cards of sorts.[2] Flamingos are mallets and a hedgehog is a ball. Whenever Alice wants to hit the hedgehog with the flamingo’s head, the bird turns floppy and spins round to look at her so comically that she laughs. And when she finally gets the flamingo’s head down, the hedgehog crawls away.  In this game, cards move away from us and the players play all at once, quarrelling and fighting while the queen screams, “Off with their heads! Off with their heads!” For in a real game of chance, anything can happen. This would be the challenge: throwing the dice without knowing the rules of the game. To continue throwing the dice while accepting that each time the rules of the game change. 

This is Nietzsche’s divine game, played across two tables, the earth and the sky.[3] Each time the dice is thrown the earth trembles, because the dice returns to us as divine. At that moment when the dice hover briefly in the air, they belong to the gods and all is possible. Our task is to affirm the entirety of possibility, any fate the gods prepared for us, cooking all of chance in one pot.[4] In this forest, we must wander bewildered and wild.[5]

In the exhibition, Sophia Mainka shows a series of wall mounted works made from silicone paste. Heavy and solid, yet curiously slippery, they are based on a Tarot deck of cards. It is peculiarly appropriate that the largest is the wheel of fortune, usually interpreted as standing for change or becoming. Fortune can be good or bad depending on the game, the question asked of the cards, open to interpretation.  In Tarot, one card can mean many things and then change meaning at different times. In contrast, destiny is the thread woven through the image and cut by the three mythological sisters.  The turn of the card is always fateful. Whatever the outcome of the roll of dice, this outcome is necessarily so: sky back to earth, slide and snip.

Perhaps then, we wander not quite so bewildered in this forest, as we necessarily follow our fate. But we wander on a surface without ground or depth, because free of cause. Everything in Mainka’s work takes place on the surface, like the hybrid creature scuttering around the ornate interiors of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in her video. It imitates not animals, but depictions of them. The two talking dogs are not half-human but half-sculpture, their head and paws the same silicone as Mainka’s wall pieces. In Nazim Bakour’s music score, they do not bark, but whoop with the sound of the cuica drum.

Lukas Hoffmann too stages a fictional world that has something of Lewis Carroll’s unsettling absurdity about it. There is a wooden castle with ears, eyes, a wide-open mouth and a nose, and it is both too big and too small. Drink me, eat this, nibble both sides of the mushroom circle. As Alice grows bigger, her initial self also becomes smaller, pulled in both directions at once. With components jutting out and sliding in, the body both outside and inside, the castle too grows small as it becomes big. “Becoming without measure, a veritable becoming-mad.”[6] Observing this madness is the upside-down head of Pan, the mischievous god of the wild. A mascaron fallen from its pediment. Run away in panic, it urges us – run away in chaos, it smiles.

Magdalena Wisniowska

[1] John Gay, Pan and Fortune, Fable XII, “Yo a young Heir” see https://kalliope.org/en/text/gay2005052971

[2] Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, for a replica of the original first edition see https://www.adobe.com/be_en/active-use/pdf/Alice_in_Wonderland.pdf

[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Book III, “Before Sunrise”, trans. Kaufmann, p.166cd and “The Seven Seals” 3, p. 258. See also Deleuze’s reading in Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, (London and New York: Continuum, 2002) p. 25-7.

[4] Zarathustra, Book III, “The Bedwarfing Virtue“3, p. 189.

[5] See blog by Corry Shores, https://piratesandrevolutionaries.blogspot.com/2009/05/dicethrow-11-in-deleuze-nietzsche.html.

[6] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 3.

***

The works by Lukas Hoffmann (b. 1990, Aalen) are developed using a comprehensive approach that includes intuition, impressions from daily activities such as shopping, a rich visual memory, and the memory of muscles and tendons. This involves calculations, knowledge of masses and forces, familiarity with art discourses, and awareness of material costs. The aim is to create space for self-dynamic development that produces a convincing result. The production process is not characterized by intense spontaneity but by careful and attentive inquiry into the emerging work. Each step in the process sets conditions for subsequent decisions. Through their interplay, shape, and positioning in space, the works acquire a narrative character, often appearing like a snapshot from a scenario.

Sophia Mainka (b. 1990, Munich) works with various media such as drawing, sculpture, and video, which she usually combines in expansive installations. Her work engages with philosophical discourses and current social trends, as well as artistic research and production in an analysis of a middle-class aesthetic. Doing so, the artist raises questions that the structure and reality of life in a supposedly posthuman age inevitably raise. Relationships between human beings and objects are called into play, as is the movement of the body. She abstracts, enlarges, reduces, manipulates everyday objects, playing with interpretations and reinterpretations. (Maurin Dietrich)

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The catalogue of the 1984 overview exhibition, Alltag und Epoche (Everyday Life and Epoch), which featured fine arts from the first 35 years of the GDR (German Democratic Republic), states that “fine arts and everyday life are two sides of the same thing, two sides in the life of a social human being which cannot be separated.” As a result of “class struggles and social changes,” the socialist era of SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland) rule was inextricably linked to the bureaucratic management of the most mundane aspects of people’s lives in the GDR. What remains relevant today was even more true back then and with an enforced existential pressure: the personal is political.

That this exhibition, bearing the same name and held 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, brings together works from various generations of artists who either lived in the GDR or deal with its legacy—in this case, the dichotomy of the private and the state in their artistic practice—is therefore not surprising, providing an artistic overview of an equal time frame.

The term Anti-Politik (Anti-politics) was first used in the 1970s by Hungarian writer György Konrád to characterise a retreat into the private sphere as a means of escaping the overtly standardised public space of ideological conformity under socialism. That one was apolitical did not follow from this. In order to avoid the all-pervasive state as much as possible and to fulfil their desire for self-determination within a limited personal framework—which then becomes politically charged—people instead withdrew into private spheres of life.

Although at the time retreating into the private sphere was seen to be an escape from overbearing political control and standardisation, we now live in an almost obsessively politicised age. Today, it is difficult to view withdrawing into one’s private life as an escape from politics in a society where politics permeates every aspect of existence; Specifically in the Eastern states of the former GDR, individuals seem to have moved from anti-politics to hyper-politics.

Making the most ideologically charged links between life in the GDR back then and life in the Federal Republic today, however, goes straight to the trench warfare of the East-West conflicts. Since the early years of reunification, the obsession with GDR art and daily life has been equally delegitimized, ignored, and has festered beneath the surface of popular consciousness. These linkages are highlighted in the exhibition Alltag und Epoche which also exposes the audience to creative interpretations of life in the GDR.

Three jugs, a water glass, and a set of pliers are shown in Doris Ziegler’s (*1949 in Weimar) 1975 painting Stillleben mit Zange. These objects are on one hand mundane and commonplace everyday objects, yet some of them, the jug on the left and the set of pliers are clearly distinct products of the Volkseigene Betrieb (VEB) Schmalkalden. The paintings of Oskar Schmidt (*1977 in Erlabrunn) are stylistically directly related to Ziegler. About forty years later, the two exhibited still-life paintings use  the same specific painting technique for which Doris Ziegler as a member of the the Leipzig School of became known for. Using layers of egg tempera and oil glazes on a hardwood panel, Schmidt constructed a complex design that reflected ORWO black and white films, which were standard goods in the GDR. Although Otto Dix had been painting in this style since the 1920s, other Leipzig School painters, such as Doris Ziegler, took up the technique and further developed it during the 1970s. Petra Flemming (1944-1988) was another member of the Leipzig school. In one of the exhibited works Schmidt directly references Flemming’s 1975 painting Weiße Gefäße. Two partially open containers are positioned next to a cactus, forming another iconographic connection also to Ziegler’s motif. While Doris Ziegler’s work has lately earned recognition after 30 years of marginalisation in the new FDR (Federal Republic of Germany), Flemming and many other artists from the former GDR remain widely under-appreciated – a negative long-term impact of the (East) German – (West) German pictorial debate.

Josephine Reisch (*1987 in Berlin) painted on GDR damask fabric the faded word “Exquisit” – the name of the most expensive GDR clothing shops. Two different variants of a ship are seen below. In 1985, the cruise ship MS Astor was sold from West to East Germany and renamed to MS Arkona with the aim to serve as an exclusive holiday escape for exceptionally politically dependable comrades. Instead of everyday goods, Reisch collects symbols for the most exclusive leisure activities available under socialism.

If personal is political, then political is personal. Even the most mundane private affairs were never genuinely private in the GDR, especially in an artistic context, and one could never be certain that even the most private moments would remain so. The relationship between private and public, between inner withdrawal and exterior expression, were also “two sides of the same thing” and influenced the artistic perspectives in this exhibition. The exhibition’s chosen artists and works engage in a relationship with one another that crosses generations and, if you will, epochs.

Sung Tieu’s (*1987 in Hai Duong) artistic work focuses on the intersection between personal life experiences and state authority. Tieu, daughter of a Vietnamese contract worker who travelled to the GDR to work in a VEB steelworks in Freital, arrived in Germany with her mother in 1992 and was subjected to the state immigration machine’s excessive bureaucracy. The works and ready-mades presented here, like Schmidt’s paintings, have socio-political connotations of their own: car polish from VEB Hydrierwerk Zeitz is presented alongside a three-page work contract for Vietnamese workers. In her artistic practice, Tieu connects the personal history of her family, which is shaped by post-socialist transformation and reunification, with the structural aspects of a state in which issues such as bureaucracy, isolation, racism and surveillance were by no means resolved even after 1990.

Tina Bara’s (*1962 in Kleinmachnow) 1986 photograph from the series Lange Weile looks down onto the artist’s East Berlin kitchen table. On a floral tablecloth, a Mitropa cup with black coffee and an ashtray stand next to a black and white photograph taken by the artist Martin Claus, in which Bara herself can be seen with her eyes closed. Coffee, cigarettes, floral tablecloth, close your eyes, boredom. In a 2002 interview, curator Christoph Tannert compared his experiences as a young man in the GDR with his current situation in the reunified Federal Republic. In the GDR there was a “different time pulse, a different sense of time, a different rhythm of life”. Before 1990 he always found time to read entire art catalogs, whereas today the catalogs pile up unread on his desk. “We had a lot more time.”

Leisure time, everyday life, closing your eyes. Through the artistic processing in the exhibition, the objects of everyday life in the GDR become signifiers for this complicated world of life. 34 years later, at a time when it is still controversial to simply talk about everyday life in the GDR, everyday objects simultaneously become symbols of a renewed political charge. This unites the positions of Schmidt, Tieu, Ziegler and Bara – across generations and beyond the temporal boundaries of the GDR.

In the work Berliner Zwischenlösung by Wilhelm Klotzek (*1980 in Berlin) the different generations merge. He arranges the photographs of his father, the artist Peter Woelck (1948-2010), on fake blue leather. Commissioned works and everyday street scenes and objects – official and unofficial – are mixed and presented unlabeld. Similar to Tina Bara, Woelck documented his social environment in the alternative Prenzlauer Berg during the GDR era, embodiing Anti-Politik: by withdrawing from public life and establishing alternative, decidedly non-political spheres – a kind of “second culture” existed in which people could exercise passive resistance through their private way of life.

Jasmin Werner (*1987 in Troisdorf) negotiates the afterlife of the architectural symbol of the “first,” official GDR culture in her work. During the dismantling of the Palast der Republik, large quantities of construction material were removed for reprocessing, with some of the steel being later reused to build the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. In Werner’s sculptural wall objects, the curved aluminum parts represent the cross section of the Burj Khalifa, while building protection nets are printed with the floor plan of the Palast der Republik. The historical and ideological significance of both buildings converges exclusively in their materiality.

The GDR saw itself at the beginning of the socialist era, after which the communist era would have commenced, bringing the the chronology of epochs to its final, desired state. In Erik Niedling’s (*1973 in Erfurt) work “Folded flag (GDR)”, the GDR flag, which was once omnipresent in the standardized public space, is neatly folded with its socialist symbols of hammer and sickle no longer visible. However, the exhibition Alltag und Epoche demonstrates that the debate of topics related to the political notion of the private life in the GDR is far from complete, and that it cannot be simply discarded in the linen closet like a no longer needed flag. After 30 years of marginalisation, the process of reconciling with everyday life and art in the GDR is only at its beginning.

Marlene Militz

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In the tightly-woven fabric of the universe, all forms of life interact with each other in a cosmic dance of mutual interdependence. Yet mankind has often forgotten this fundamental principle, focusing its energies instead on egoism and domination for personal gain, in the form of speculation and profit, rather than on principles associated with caring and sharing. But what would happen if we reversed this mentality? What if we performed a specific action that would lead to the refounding of a new world, consisting in a different approach to life? Indeed, what would happen if we planted a new seed, the seed of care, and nurtured it with love and devotion?

Sowing the seed of care is more than just a metaphor. It is an invitation to immerse ourselves in radical coexistence, and in the creation of networks of care, and in using our imagination in ways connected to the environment.

Disseminating awareness and a sense of responsibility, and propagating a concern for nature, for others, and for ourselves, means introducing an outlook that seeks to regenerate rather than use up and deplete, supporting a future in which compassion and mutual attention are the roots of a thriving, balanced society. Sowing the seed of care is an invitation to cultivate significant changes, to embrace a holistic approach, and to help to create a more harmonious world. The show sets out to challenge the traditional vision of man as the supreme dominator of nature, suggesting that the greatness of humankind lies in our ability to repair, preserve and cultivate a symbiotic relationship with the other species around us. Populated by fruits and vegetables, animals, sounds, and anthropomorphic figures, Sowing the seed of care is staged at three different sites across the city, and is designed to be seen as a meeting-space between universes of the senses. Galleria Fuoricampo will show the works of Bora Baboci, Adam Bilardi, Enej Gala, Cecilia Granara, Julien Monnerie, Jessy Razafimandimby, and Ambra Viviani, and in addition there are also two installations, one by Baboci in the spaces of the Orto Botanico dell’Universita di Siena (Botanical Garden) and one by Viviani at the Museo di Storia Naturale dell’Accademia dei Fisiocritici.

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It is 90 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock – in the past years, filled with dramatic social, political and environmental changes, everyone’s attention was directed to the well-known indicator of humanity’s vulnerability to catastrophe. Founded by Albert Einstein in 1945, the Doomsday Clock inevitably moves its hands closer to midnight every year.

It is a potent metaphor, but of course the actual state of the planet cannot be measured by one linear time. As revolutionary XX-century historian Fernand Braudel noticed, the idea of unified time is a social construct, and the world is a complex set of structures evolving at various speeds. Each system, structure, social group, human or non-human entity has its own time and pace, entangled into a one world of different time-scales.

The Braudel’s Clocks is a body of work that consists of a series of digital prints, set into a movement resembling that of the hands of a common clock. The objects consist of round layers of Chromalux brushed metal prints on aluminum and semi-transparent UV-prints on acrylic glass, joined together by a clock mechanism. Each layer moves at a different speed – measuring seconds, minutes or hours, sometimes counterclockwise. The layers depict motifs related to technological phenomena, human and non-human imageries, micro- and macro- universes.

 

Agnieszka Polska

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Derosia is pleased to present Naked Name, a group exhibition including works by Ben R. Clement, Magalie Comeau, E’wao Kagoshima, Leah Ke Yi Zheng, Beaux Mendes, Elizabeth Orr, Richard Rezac, Kern Samuel, Emma Rose Schwartz, and Yui Yaegashi. The work in this exhibition explores the material poetry of objects through their entanglement with and resistance to language.

 

The title of the exhibition derives from a Kagoshima work depicting a figure obscured through layers of purple-gray haze and elements of collage. Kagoshima’s name floats across the figure’s thigh, as if performing the role of signature or clothing, yet somewhat lacking in either respect. The simultaneity of “both” and “neither” often occurs in Kagoshima’s work, as here it alerts us to the physical characteristics of the collage as object as well as the relationship between author and subject. The name Kagoshima is both “of” the image and “apart from” it.

 

A preoccupation with the duality of painting as image and object also appears in the work of Beaux Mendes. Often influenced by direct observation, Mendes treats painting as a transitory medium, as much committed to the description of an image as to its undoing. The smoky expanse of charcoal interferes with the columnar structure in Mendes’ untitled work, rendering its subject with as much clarity as obfuscation. This ethereal quality appears in Magalie Comeau’s large oil painting as well. The airy but earthy diamond is quietly divided into a corner of compression in its lower central point—fragments of landscape contrast with the emptiness around it. 

 

A strong flatness contrasts with Comeau’s spatial projections in Kern Samuel’s Two Circles. The three steel panels comprising the work bear the traces of mark making as two faint circles are perfectly bounded by the two by four foot rectangle. The steel here is both a barrier and a passageway, its subtle reflections recalling that of a window or mirror. A reference to the iconic Rembrandt self portrait with two circles, Samuel’s work is a portrait of sorts, yet in this work the self does not appear in an explicit rendering, but in the liminal space between viewer and artwork. It is a portrait in a state of flux only fully activated by the act of viewing. The tension between self and double appears again in the two works by Emma Rose Schwartz, which depict figures tightly bound by their surroundings and framing. Slowly built up with layers of oil, pastel and paper on canvas, the highly tactile surfaces draw tension with the energetic and mannered forms. 

 

Composed of mineral pigments and ox bone glue on silk over a mahogany stretcher, Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s painting draws a unique attention to its construction. The slightly askew rectangle ripples beneath the fragmentary marks on its surface. A painting that recalls a monochrome but denies a simple reading in almost every way imaginable, Leah’s work is not logical, it plays with and subverts our expectations. This phenomenological experience of looking occurs again in Elizabeth Orr’s works. The freestanding sculptures are rulers that have been molded into perfect circles, bound into an ongoing measurement of its surrounding space, no longer the exacting tools of their initial invention. Orr’s wall-bound work presents us with three sheets of aluminum resting between two vertical supports. The surface of the work is covered in a thin sheet of industrial cork, suggesting that its verso is a measuring device of the same ilk as the sculptures.

 

The process of concept formation is a continual motif throughout this exhibition, as in the work of Ben R. Clement, whose Vault #1 is composed of two spheres resting in the inner cavity of a cast iron skull cap. The cranial vault, the negative space between the eye and the brain, is the space where perception and self are formed, and in Clement’s sculpture this space is revisited, undone and reconstructed. 

 

Yui Yaegashi’s intimate abstraction describes three repeating rectangular shapes. The subtle chromatic variation between blues creates an optical contrast, highlighting the edges and boundaries of the surface. This tension between boundaries can similarly be found in Richard Rezac’s work Zeno—a rectangular, wall-mounted object made from a waxed pine panel and three slabs of cast bronze. Zeno’s philosophical paradoxes challenging intuitive notions of plurality are invoked in this work. What may seem to be many can also be seen as one. Art can be given life by our desire to describe it, but this language is often inadequate, creating false distinctions where none exist.

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ELKE DENDA 

Schleifen 

Jun 6 – Jul 13, 2024 

Elke Denda’s exhibition Schleifen at EXILE, Vienna provides a continuation of the artist’s exhibition Projection at Josey, Norwich in May 2023. The works displayed span a time period of almost thirty years ranging from 1986–2024. Installed across EXILE’s two gallery floors, the exhibition comprises panel paintings, reliefs, floor sculpture and reverse glass paintings; Denda’s video work ZIB (2008) is available to view on EXILE TV. The exhibition includes two new reverse glass paintings titled Schwarzwaldbild (Black Forest Painting) (2023) and Punktebild 3D (Dots Picture 3D) (2024) – the artist’s first new works after a 15- year hiatus. Denda’s oeuvre offers a unique stance on a recent history of abstract painting and challenges attitudes towards decoration, ornamentation and display through schematic geometry, animal iconography and motifs often borrowed from her childhood. 

Denda’s reverse glass paintings are inspired by a folk technique made popular in the nineteenth century to paint devotional imagery. Motifs applied on the reverse of the glass in acrylic paint appear bold and vivid viewed through the frontal glass surface. Beginning in 1986, Denda produced these glass paintings continuously for nearly two decades. Two works from this period 10 Rote Sonnen (10 Red Suns) (1989) and Zigarrenbanderolenbild (Cigar Bands Picture) (1989) are included in the exhibition. 

Installed on the lower floor, Schwalbenbild (Swallow Picture) (1986) extends the planar pictorial surface into three dimensions: an array of simple cast swallows perch on diamond ledges extruded from a commedia dell’arte harlequin pattern ground. Installed in the upper gallery, the panel painting Punktebild (Dots Picture) (1986) creates an immersive space of encounter. These works of individual panels might, it seems, be added to or subtracted from. Thinly painted on light cotton fabric, Punktebild, borrows its tessellated abstracted motif from a toadstool (Fliegenpilz).

 

EXILE presents for the first time both of Denda’s Noppenwürfel (Dimple Cube) (1987) floor sculptures. The sculptures – one a maquette of the other – provide an insight into the artist’s ongoing fascination with repetition and remaking. Freed and transformed from the systems present in the two-dimensional relief works such as Schwalbenbild, they are a three-dimensional exploration of Denda’s unique abstract language. These searing volumetric objects combine a language and form developed between these works in an intensely productive period of painterly inquiry for Denda.

 

Presented online and accessible via the website, Denda’s 2008 film ZIB is a 52 seconds ‘supercut’ that fixatedly tracks spherical forms as they appear in disparate appropriated clips from television and cinema. The spheres as focus for, and symbol of, a restless gaze disrupts intended pictorial hierarchies of subject and object, foreground and background. Everything that is not the sphere becomes a background to be montaged into a world of endless audio-visual-spatial boundaries, limited, nonetheless, by the frame. Emblematic of the exhibition’s title Schleifen ZIB is a metaphorical loop in meaning, time and thinking.

 

Viewed as reproductions, squinting, or at a distance, Denda’s works appear to share a hard, inhuman manufactured edge, produced in collaboration with machines. Looking more closely, however, slickness breaks into a wholly more bodily facture: in the paintings uneven blooms of colour are subtended by loose underdrawings coming out at the sides – ‘subtle eccentricities’, as one commentator put it. The lines of the reverse glass paintings bubble and fizz; their painted wooden surrounds are not frames but part of the pictorial composition. Painterly application oscillates between manufacture and 

facture – between machine and human hand – the personal and impersonal – the physical and the embodied – in a way that is deeply affecting. Denda has an extraordinary ability to conjure a certain irreducibly human emotionality in a commodity language of graphic reproduction.

Abstract elements in Denda’s pictures are typically anchored in actuality. Familiar images, selected for their personal resonance, become symbols that constitute, as she puts it, ‘an alphabet of the important elements of life’. Stripping back is, for Denda, a device to work towards abstraction rather than being abstraction itself. In the reverse glass paintings the imagery might be excerpted and transformed from some thing in the world, for example a particluar cherry tree in the two versions of Noppenwürfel on display across the galleries. The only new work made after her hiatus, exhibited here, Schwarzwaldbild (Black Forest Painting), provides a useful counterpart to the earlier version. For Denda, the works must function as pictures on their own terms while simultaneously suggesting the possibility of endlessness, as if the motifs presented are just excerpts held by the frame that reach far beyond.

A viewer with an interpretive frame informed by modern abstract art will not be equipped for the register that Denda’s works demand. Stripped back and simplified, the non- specificity of the images teases at recognition that never quite arrives at its referent. Looking at the work on display at EXILE and previously at Josey their literalism is striking: a series of disarming disclosures. Everything that is the matter is present. The work at times feels hyper-prescriptive, as if answering more questions than they ask and in a way that is often contrary to contemporary painting, giving the viewer an abundance of their internal workings and the parts necessary for understanding: they reveal everything. The amplification of stylisation and rigid formality has the effect of hardening the work into ornamentation, seemingly deflecting any further interpretation. Yet, paradoxically, it’s actually at this apex where they become imbued with the thing they seem to be conscious of deflecting.

 

Writing about Denda’s work in 1988, the art historian Julian Heynen noted the ‘oscillation of decorative form and symbol’ which, he goes on, is ‘nowhere ironic or polemic against itself’. Heynen finds it necessary to defend Denda’s work against charges of irony, naivety and the ‘problem’ of decoration. In the meantime, forty years later, it is no longer necessary to defend against such things. Characterised by a refreshing total absence of irony, Denda’s technically uncomplicated take on abstraction is staggering in its simplicity and complexity.

 

Text by Josey

Born 1956 in Oberhausen, Germany, Elke Denda studied at the Kunstakademie with Fritz Schwegler and currently lives in Düsseldorf. Selected solo and group exhibitions include Projections, Josey, Norwich (2023), We are stardust, we are golden, Galerie Johnen + Schöttle, Cologne (2008); Galerie Lindig in Paludetto, Nuremberg (2002); Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (1997); Humpty-Dumpty’s Kaleidoskop: A New Generation of German Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (1992); Anni Novanta, Galleria Comunale di Arte Moderna, Bologna (1991); Galerie de Lege Ruimte, Brugge (1990); Museum Schloß Hardenberg, Velbert (1988); Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld (1988); Galerie Johnen & Schöttle, Cologne (1985); Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich (1984). Denda has last exhibited in Vienna in 1989 as part of the group exhibition Melencolia at Galerie Grita Insam. 

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