Ema Gaspar, ‘Please, Sleep’
Goswell Road, 22 rue de l’Échiquier, 75010 Paris, France
Exhibition 30 November 2024 – 25 January 2025
Open Thursday – Saturday 14H – 18H
“It all begins with becoming-girl. But becomings are layered, one nestled tightly into another all the way down, and to pull on a skirt is already to begin to become a flower.” [1]
Amy Ireland & Maya B Kronic, Cute Accelerationism, p.24
For her first solo exhibition in France, Ema Gaspar (b.1993 Almada, Portugal) summons a menagerie embodying sleep as a refuge, a place where intimacy and vulnerability can exist safely—momentarily—shielded from the outside world, in the absence of waking consciousness.
“In my waking life, each moment presents an opportunity for exposure, for my innermost thoughts and creations to be judged, dissected, and exploited. Here, the final moment before sleep overtakes me, I manifest that threshold, the moment I retreat inward and find solace in my interior world. Here, I scatter myself across media, each piece a fragment of my endeavour to create a sanctuary amidst confusion and trauma, a space where I can rest and reject—if only briefly—a world that constantly demands my compliance.” Gaspar, November, 2024
The works presented a Goswell Road draw on the tensile, fragile trust negotiated between the natural world and humanity. Morphemes of flora, biomes, leaves, and other natural elements cannot communicate with us traditionally; they co-exist, and become exposed and reliant on us to comprehend them. Gaspar sees this as the ultimate form of vulnerability. Her works merge natural forms with feminine, doll-like features—figures that embody a quiet strength and innocence combined with the complex vulnerability imposed upon them by patriarchy’s judgement of feminine forms—giving them agency.
In “Please, Sleep,” you are invited to enter her protected environment and contemplate the tensions of vulnerability, trust, longing, and belonging. This is a moment of respite. This is a place of coexistence and relief suspended in a bead of quiet before we drift into the safe haven of delirious, delicious sleep.
This exhibition was made possible with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation—Delegation in France, which co-financed it as part of the EXPOSITIONS GULBENKIAN (edition #5) programme to support Portuguese art in French art institutions and spaces.
All enquiries:
Bio: Ema Gaspar (b.1993) is a visual artist from Almada, Portugal, who lives and works between Tokyo (JP) and Lisbon (PT). Drawing from her lived experiences, she conjures an ‘atmosphere of memory’, beginning with a shape or object, assigning it a personality, and inventing its body.
[1] Amy Ireland & Maya B Kronic, Cute Accelerationism, published by Urbanomic, 2024, Distributed by MIT Press.
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I Desire All the Things That Will Destroy Me in the End at Quase Espaço, São Paulo
Quase Espaço is pleased to announce our upcoming group show, “I Desire All the Things That Will Destroy Me in the End,” featuring artists Brina Reis, Donatas Norušis, Gustavo Silvamaral, Romulo Barros, Natalie Braido, Samuel Alves de Jesus, Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, and Raquel Nava. The exhibition is curated by Maria Luiza Serafim and runs from December 7th to 14th.
Quase Espaço
Rua Major Sertório, 347
São Paulo, Brazil
Tue – Sat
2-7pm
Curator’s assistant: Melissa Campoi
Production: João Mazocante and Melissa Campoi
Visual identity: Arthur Menezes and Ana Gama
Dialogue: Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Desejo-todas-as-coisas-que-vao-me-destruir-no-final_27-scaled.jpgKunsthalle Bremen is pleased to announce ‘Wisrah C. V. da R. C. Celestino, Helena Uambembe, Vincent Scheers,’ a group show featuring the three winners of the ars viva 2025.
Since 1953, the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V. (Association of Arts and Culture of the German Economy at the Federation of German Industries e.V.) has awarded the ars viva Prize of Visual Arts to exceptional young artists living in Germany, whose works of art demonstrate an independent formal language and an awareness of contemporary issues.
In this period, more than 350 artists have been recognized, including Georg Baselitz, Katharina Sieverding, Albert Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel, Candida Höfer, Wolfgang Tillmans, Thomas Struth, Jochen Lempert, Jeanne Faust and Omer Fast.
The 2025 ars viva prize winners are Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino (*1989), Vincent Scheers (*1990) and Helena Uambembe (*1994). This year, the prize will be presented in an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bremen (12 October 2024 – 26 January 2025) and the Haus der Kunst in Munich (26 June – 28 September 2025).
A catalog of the exhibition in German and English will be published by Kerber Verlag. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Bremen is curated by Min-young Jeon, Maren Hüppe & Eva Fischer-Hausdorf.
ABOUT THE WINNERS
Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino was born in 1989 in Buritizeiro, Brazil, and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Through score, sculpture, text, photography, sound, and video, the artist addresses the remaining structures of the transatlantic colonial project, focusing on institutional critique, language, and objecthood. Their work has been shown in Germany and internationally, including exhibitions at Galerie Molitor (Germany), Kunsthal Nord (Denmark), Museu Nacional da República (Brazil), Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Germany), Curitiba Biennial (Brazil), and Oscar Niemeyer Museum (Brazil).
In addition to being awarded the ars viva 2025, Celestino was previously granted numerous other grants, prizes, residencies, and fellowships, amongst them the Pampulha Grant, Brazil (Belo Horizonte Municipal Foundation for Culture); Ducato Prize, Italy; Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Germany (Ministry of Science and Culture of the Lower Saxony); La Becque, Switzerland (The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia); PACT Zollverein, Germany (JUNCTIONS); British Council, UK; and Pivô, Brazil. Their 2024 exhibitions include a solo show at Kunstverein Kevin Space (Austria) and group shows at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Kunsthalle Bremen (both Germany), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), Centro Cultural do Banco do Brasil (Brazil).
Vincent Scheers (b. 1990) is a belgian artist currently living and working in Munich, Germany. After finishing his studies Printmaking (BA) and Fine Arts (MFA) at the Royal Academy of Antwerp in Belgium he graduated in the sculpture department of the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München in the class of Alexandra Bircken.
His works investigate systems of oppression and the relation between humans and nature, often utilising the embrace of temporality as a possible antidote against conservatism.
He participated in international group exhibitions and has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Jos Joos (Brussels), Forbidden City (Antwerp), Kunstverein St. Georgen (DE), Sharp Projects (Copenhagen) and Paulina Caspari (DE). In 2024, he was awarded the prestigious ars viva prize, granted annually to outstanding young artists by the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V. The prize is associated with exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bremen (DE), Haus der Kunst in Munich (DE), and an artist’s residency on Fogo Island (CA) in the following year.
Helena Uambembe was born in 1994 in Pomfret, South Africa, and now lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Her work has been shown in Africa, Switzerland, and Germany, including solo exhibitions at Jahmek Contemporary Art (Luanda, Angola), Jahmek Contemporary Art (Basel, Switzerland), The Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Arts (CIRCA, Cape Town, South Africa) and FNB Art Joburg (Johannesburg, South Africa). Furthermore, she was part of group exhibitions in Galerie im Körnerpark (Berlin, Germany), INCCA (Johannesburg, South Africa) as well as La Biennale de Lubumbashi VII: Toxicity, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Goethe-Institut South Africa (Johannesburg, South Africa).
Helena Uambembe was awarded the DAAD Visual Arts Fellowship, Berlin, Germany (2023), the Baloise Art Prize, Basel, Switzerland (2022), and the David Koloane Award, Johannesburg, South Africa (2019).
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/03-1-scaled.jpgDIVING IN THE DRY
by Vanessa Acioly
September 21 – December 13, 2024
Opening reception: September 20, 8AM – 4PM
Arquivo Público de Alagoas
Sá e Albuquerque, s/n
Maceió, Brazil
Arquivo Público de Alagoas is pleased to announce the first solo institutional exhibition of works by Brazilian artist Vanessa Acioly. The exhibition is on view from September 20 until December 13, 2024.
Vanessa Acioly (Maceió, 1987) lives and works in Maceió. Exploring colors, textures, and shapes in her artistic practice, the artist produces works involving embroidery, painting, and sculpture. She demonstrates her material interests through experimentation with organic inputs from mineral pigments and the earth as pictorial elements, using the straws of Ouricuri, banana, and carnauba trees as her primary support. Her creative process is based on reflecting on her experiences as a woman in the world and her relationships with other women, using the peculiarity of her culture from Northeast Brazil as a substrate. Acioly uses a polychrome of earth collected in changing immersions in repetitive and meditative gestures of ancestry in her production. Her works intrinsically carry recurring lines arranged on the eccentricity and rawness of straw and the experiences learned in the Indigenous and Quilombola communities and in the craft cooperatives that the artist frequents.
For the exhibition, Acioly continues her material, visual, and conceptual research in the field of painting using natural elements to develop an abstract study of earth colors collected and produced in an artisanal manner. “Diving in the Dry” is the embryo of the works “All the Corners of the World,” 2023, “Twisted Paths from which there is no Escape,” 2023 and “Ground, Continuous Finish Line,” 2024, in which the artist prioritizes connecting crafts and manual activities to the work of abstract painting with earth colors collected in the municipality of Maceió, as well as developing experiments with straw supports and the aesthetics of forms based on memory paint or soil paint.
For images or more information regarding the exhibition, please contact Vanessa Acioly at
@vanessaaciolyart #vanessaacioly #arquivopublicodealagoas
Photos: Felipe Brasil
VANESSA ACIOLY
Hours: Monday – Saturday, 8 AM – 4 PM
With Sentient Soil, Vera Kox invites us to question our understanding of the relationships between humans, nature and matter on the backdrop of the sweeping changes that are affecting our planet. Revolving around three major series of works, this solo exhibition immerses viewers in a part-natural, part-artificial landscape between Pleistocene and post-Anthropocene. The Luxembourgish-German artist uses the intrinsic properties of materials to create alternative scenarios in which industrial and organic elements merge and collide. Kox’s works are hybrid objects that could be described as fossils of our materialistic present. By conjoining seemingly disparate elements, they form an autonomous environment with its own logic that defies common categories and concepts. On the one hand, the artist presents fragmentary imprints of plants that are reminiscent of remains of long-lost species, thus pointing to the rampant loss of biological diversity. On the other hand, these relics combine with a ‘habitat’ of living moss, which in turn stands for the long cycles of nature that unfold independently of us humans. (Moss, which developed around 450 million years ago, is one of the first life forms to have appeared on our planet.) Kox’s video installations are the result of her research in places as diverse as the volcanic springs of Dallol in Ethiopia or the Arctic expanses of Spitsbergen, where the effects of climate change are particularly tangible. At the North Pole, for instance, average temperatures have risen by a worrying four degrees Celsius over the past 50 years, leading to extensive thawing of the permafrost soils. These geographical contrasts are also reflected in the diverse, sometimes paradoxical materialities that punctuate the exhibition, as in the works from the Viscera series, which appear to melt or drift like fragments of pack ice. The ]Instar[ series, on the other hand, with its bursting glazes, is evocativeof parched desert landscapes, such as those found at one of the lowest points on earth in Ethiopia. A central element in Kox’s work are steel girders, which embody the unstoppable progress of industrial production. At the same time, these standardised components are representative of her hometown Esch, a former steel city, which has been undergoing fundamental structural change in the wake of globalisation. In the exhibition, the angular beams enter into a dialogue with organic objects made of clay – a material commonly associated with arts and crafts and whose unfathomably long formation process contrasts with the fast-paced manufacturing methods of industry.
In Kox’s latest material associations, water, the basis of all life, plays the role of a connecting element. It is only in combination with water that clay, a solid and crumbly material when dry, becomes a flexible mass that can be shaped like skin or dough. The artist embraces these shifting properties to emphasise the transformative processes inherent in her own works, either through material deformations or references to geological processes. This play with the materiality of her objects is key to the sensual experience of the exhibition, blurring the boundaries between the natural and the artificial: hard surfaces appear soft, gooey matter has dried up, fluids have solidified.
With the title of her exhibition, Sentient Soil, the artist invites us to conceive of the Earth as a coherent, living organism capable of experiencing feelings and sensations. On the scale of the planet, a wafer-thin layer of fertile soil harbours an incredibly complex organic diversity in constant interaction. It is this layer that lies at the heart of Kox’s works, where it gives rise to diverse forms and textures. A mixture of sand, clay, silt, water and air, it has provided the breeding ground for human life for thousands of years, but agriculture, urban development and increasing waste generation are causing this substrate to disappear forever. Seen in this light, Kox’s artistic practice is akin to an archaeology of the future: bringing to light the buried remains of the consumer age, it urges us to reflect on the consequences of our actions.
The two parts of the presentation are conceptually connected by down above, a semi-circle of ceramic discs that interacts with the other works to reveal the interconnectedness and porosity of all forms of life. In a simultaneously poetic and disturbing way, the exhibition Sentient Soil shows that the planet we live on is constantly changing, but also that our actions are inextricably linked to these processes. In that respect, it is a call to radically rethink our understanding of this complex fabric.
Charles Wennig
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„For me, textiles are something that lives and breathes; I feel the ineffability of their breath or its flow, a continuous flow that is also that of society at large. It reflects the history of humanity and, at the same time, the social dimension of work.” – Marion Baruch[1]
NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein is pleased to present Widerstandsgeist, one of the first institutional solo exhibitions of the artist Marion Baruch in the Rhineland.
To mark the occasion, the Kunstverein is bringing together a large number of outstanding sculptural works from the artist’s oeuvre, all of which were created in the last decade and are distributed throughout the exhibition rooms of NAK in a site-specific installation. For example, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein is showing the large-format and room-filling Traiettorie in the lower floor, which were specially adapted by the artist for the spatial conditions. Due to her age, this most recent creative period is accompanied by physical limitations and the increasing loss of the artist’s eyesight, so that in 2012 Baruch began a series of works that use textile waste from the Italian prêt-à-porter industry as material.
Baruch reinterprets the materials that the fashion world has cast aside as unusable in a formalist sense, following her own intuitive-artistic logic and practice, thus giving them a second purpose: „When all is said and done, waste does not exist; when you see a pile of offcuts, what you are seeing is life, and life is not a waste.“[2]
The artist calls the resulting works Sculptures: „The Sculptures were born from an encounter between what I found in bags full of leftovers and my memory.”[3] Just as these works behave in space and operate with gaps as well as omissions, Baruch fills these de facto voids with memories of encounters of an artistic nature, her own work, her own biography, willingly and unwillingly enters into collaborations, thus recurring to private, social and economic relationships. The result is a complex network in which the works can unfold freely and easily.
The works are „on the very edge of existence and of that emptiness (…) – a dense emptiness, one endowed with its own meaning – (that) builds and shapes another space, one free and light,”[4] which the viewer completes with their own thoughts. Positioned in space, the sculptures thus define “a dialogue, albeit between two immaterial forces, such as space and matter.”[5] Baruch’s sculptures focus on presence and absence, a shift or even dissolution of perspective, transparency, but also on material, fabric, surface and allowing negative space. Form becomes a container, also for ideas. A genuine free space for both the artist and the visitors, like an invitation.
Marion Baruch’s sculptures „are not fixed, nor are they eternal; (…) they often acquire new vigour if a movement of the air or a ray of sunlight tickles them, thus bringing them to life.”[6] Nevertheless, Baruch specifically attributes to them a quality that characterizes all of the textile works and is virtually inherent to them, animating them. A spirit of resistance, a Widerstandsgeist. The title of the presentation chosen by the artist herself, who is always very thoughtful with language, aptly describes Baruch’s works: the material therefore outlasts its original purpose, willingly accepts changes and reinterpretations, unimpressed in itself. Existence, re-existence, resistance.
Marion Baruch (*1929 Timişoara, Romania) began her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest in 1949. Just one year later, she was given the opportunity to study at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem under Mordecai Ardon, among others; in 1954, she continued her academic training at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Baruch’s artistic practice also changed, she turned away from painting and drawing and henceforth worked mostly in the genre of sculpture, although her entire oeuvre always took unexpected turns over the decades, with a multidisciplinary orientation and interest, for example when she continued to produce art solely under the company label Name Diffusion from 1989 onwards, thereby reacting critically to the art market.
In 2022, the gallery of the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig dedicated a comprehensive solo exhibition to Baruch for the first time in the German-speaking world; the artist has previously been presented abroad, for instance at MAMCO Geneva and Kunstmuseum Luzern in 2020. Marion Baruch’s work has received a renewed, welcome recognition in recent years. Baruch lives and works in Gallarate, Italy.
Parallel to Widerstandsgeist, Kunstmuseen Krefeld are showing the retrospective exhibition Soziales Gewebe at Haus Lange with works by Marion Baruch from all decades of her career. The exhibition in Krefeld opens on October 6, 2024.
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[1] Rita Selvaggio, „Marion Baruch”, in: Flash Art 336, 2017.
[2] Emma Zanella, Allesandro Castiglioni, „Life Is Not a Waste”, in: Fanni Fetzer, Noah Stolz [Hg.], Marion Baruch. Luzern, Mailand 2020, S. 210.
[3] Noah Stolz, „Tzimtzum. Marion Baruch in conversation with Noah Stolz”, in: Illaria Bombelli, Nicola Trezzi [Hg.], Tzimtzum. Mailand 2023, S. 65.
[4] Maura Pozzati, „The other source”, in: Stampa L’Artiere [Hg.], The other source. Bologna 2024, S. 13.
[5] Maura Pozzati, „The other source”, in: Stampa L’Artiere [Hg.], The other source. Bologna 2024, S. 10.
[6] Noah Stolz, „The most beautiful is the object which does not exist”, in: Stampa L’Artiere [Hg.], The other source. Bologna 2024, S. 52.
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/01-1-scaled.jpgDIFFRACTIONS––Transforming
13 September 2024 – 5 January 2025
Opening on 12 September 2024, 6 – 9 pm
On September 12, Kunst Raum Mitte opens with the exhibition Transforming. It is part of the DIFFRACTIONS program, which uses various research processes to create new relationships between the history and building of the art space. The exhibition will be accompanied by performances and an open studio by artist Anna Zett.
With Jesse Darling, Green Papaya Art Projects (Norberto Roldan & Joaquin Roldan), Robert Lippok, Minh Duc Pham, Katrin Steiger, Pam Virada, Anna Zett (Research
Residency), exhibition display by Martha Schwindling. Curated by Natalie Keppler & Agnieszka Roguski (Artistic Directors Kunst Raum Mitte)
The program DIFFRACTIONS stages an “interference pattern” (Karen Barad) of the various layers of time and their compositions. Unlike reflection, which mirrors a specific counterpart, diffraction—the bending of waves around an obstacle—reveals the overlap of impulses. It transcends conventional linear and hierarchical orders. How is the history of a place written? And how do affects, materials and gatherings inscribe themselves into these stories?
The exhibition Transforming recontextualizes the spatial, material, and historical relationships of the place formerly known as the galerie weisser elefant. Founded in East Berlin in 1987, the municipal exhibition space was renamed Kunst Raum Mitte by the Department of Art, Culture and History in 2024 to look back on the history of the gallery with new perspectives and to link it with current debates in a pluralistic urban society. Transforming presents contemporary artistic positions and connects them with artistic and curatorial research processes, setting them in relation to one another.
The exhibition challenges the forces of commercialization and gentrification mechanisms of the present—particularly those in the Mitte district—by activating resistant and immaterial structures. It makes historical material accessible through an exhibition display developed by Martha Schwindling, including invitation cards, photos, posters, and documents. These materials reveal how the place was shaped by the move from Almstadtstraße to Auguststraße, as well as by the political regime of the GDR in the 1980s and the media and aesthetic conventions of that time. These historical and geopolitical components, in turn, create relationships with related contexts. By exploring deviant and invisible aspects, the exhibition opens up contemporary perspectives that question power structures, especially through implicit and everyday actions.
Contact: Annika Reketat
Tel. +49 30 28884455
E-Mail:
PRESS RELEASE
Inaugurated on August 17 at GDA, “How to Finish a Thesis: The Time of Color” is a solo show by Juliana dos Santos, curated by Khadyg Fares.
A month before the opening, Dos Santos occupied the GDA space for the production of the exhibition, activating her work as she progressed with the setup, which coincided with the completion of her PhD thesis.
In addition to paintings arranged throughout the space, an immersive installation was created, allowing visitors to engage with the artist’s work right at the entrance of the gallery. “[…] By enveloping us, Dos Santos manages to place us in close contact with color, with the explosion of textures, with movements that draw rhythms and gestures, with the delicacy of the violet tones of clitoria ternatea,” writes Fares in the curatorial text. “Her intention is to make us quiet so that we can, in this time of color, hear the murmurs of a deep blue.”
With research focused on the study of color and an intense engagement with Blue Clitoria, Juliana dos Santos’s work expresses itself in both theoretical and practical fields, testing the limits of linear temporality.
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TEXT
How to finish a thesis: the time of color
By Khadyg Fares, August 2024
blue as a color that marks Afro-diasporic experiences and I found myself threshing flowers to paint with blue petals, which will never be fixed in time: the Clitoria Ternátea flower, which, blown on watery paper, teaches me paths of increasingly misshapen blue shapes, difficult to name and, therefore, sometimes it is not possible to retain them in time. (Excerpt from Juliana dos Santos’ doctoral thesis)
How do you put together the criteria that “define” a color?
It can be said that since Aristotle, understanding the things of the world through ontology has become one of the main quests of Western thought. For this approach, everything could be defined by the order of being; and among all these things are colors. Blue is the color that Juliana dos Santos has dedicated herself to understanding. In this task, however, the artist has not closed herself off to the search for an exact delimitation. Dos Santos directs her apprehension and interpretation of the world towards Afro-diasporic knowledge and the valorization of encounters. It is in this sense that her paintings with the clitoria ternatea flower are created through an eye-body that is completed with the memory of the high-pitched chants in unison of the Black Men’s Rosary festivals, the flowing capes of the king and queen of the congado and the rhythmic gungas from Moçambique. It’s a blue that inherits the desire for sonority, for deeply blue music, like when we listen to Duke Ellington’s Azure.
There is a confluent way of existing that establishes a complex and open relationship. The blue of the clitoria ternatea also becomes the occupation of spaces, dances and sounds in movement, and time in its duration, which can be seen, for example, in the flower’s oxidation process. It is through these openings to the possibilities of existence that Dos Santos takes blue as an expanded concept that is established in the social, political, imagetic, textual, cinematographic and sound fields. This exhibition coincides with the completion of her PhD thesis, both dedicated to her research into painting with flowers.
The installation features large-format paintings that expand throughout the space. By involving us, Dos Santos manages to bring us body to body with the color, with the explosion of textures, with the movements that draw out rhythms and gestures, with the delicacy of the violet tones of the clitoria ternatea. Her intention is to make us quiet so that we can hear the murmurs of a deep blue in this time of color.
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ABOUT
Juliana Dos Santos is a visual artist, a master’s graduate in art education, and a Capes scholarship PhD student in Arts at the Institute of Arts of UNESP. Her research explores the intersection of art, history, and education, focusing on the engagement of Black artists in practices of representation. She investigates the blue color of the Clitoria Ternatea flower as a sensitive experience that expands the senses. She participated in the Public Artistic Residency Program in Sertão Negro, invited by the 35th São Paulo Art Biennial, and served as a resident artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2018). Nominated for the Pipa Prize (2023/2024), she participated in the 12th Mercosur Biennial and the 3rd Frestas – Triennial of Arts at Sesc Sorocaba. She was awarded the 31st Exhibition Program of the Centro Cultural São Paulo (2021) and the Project Season at Paço das Artes (2019). Her works are part of the collections of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Museum of the Portuguese Language, and the Centro Cultural São Paulo.
Khadyg Fares is a researcher, educator, and curator focusing on anticolonial studies and image theories. She holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Art History from UNIFESP, and is also a graduate in Social Communication from Mackenzie. She has curated exhibitions such as “How to Finish a Thesis: The Time of Color” by Juliana dos Santos and “Xirê das Yabás: The Fertility of the World” at the Museum of Sexual Diversity. She has participated in projects like “Geoprópolis” and “A Barganha,” and co-organized the public program “Tramas do Comum.” Fares has been part of the Exhibitions and Programming and Museology and Collection Departments at the Museum of Sexual Diversity, as well as the Research Department at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. She was also the coordinator of the Colloquium on Cinema and Art in Latin America – COCAAL.
GDA is a group of artists organized around the production and sale of their own works. They created this platform to circulate, present, and facilitate their artworks, as well as to actively position themselves in the financial, contractual, and market decisions that shape their work. They are interested in creating a flexible and present structure that can encompass different formats, research, experimentation, and types of work. With this project, they aim to open space for research and the generation of thought, creating places for meeting and debate to explore other forms of market insertion. Currently, the acronym GDA stands for Galeria De Artistas (Gallery of Artists), but it may represent other things in the future.
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/01-view-GDA-Juliana-dos-Santos-ph-Ana-Pigosso.jpgArtist and filmmaker Gernot Wieland (b. 1968 in Horn, Austria) works primarily with film and lecture performance to investigate psychological connections between society and people. His work focuses on narration and memory. The artist entwines personal and historical narratives with scientific facts, fictional and real elements with tragicomic events, developing stories that are humorous and touching in equal measure. He constructs the stories with the help of idiosyncratic, sometimes absurd juxtapositions of images and language. Wieland uses various visual techniques, from drawing, photography, Super 8 sequences, diagrams and clay animation to potato printing and watercolor, interwoven with the use of voice-over and music on the soundtrack. The techniques appear as approachable and personal as the content. Autobiographical and fictional elements merge to create a poetic space. The personal is combined with the political and slowly develops into an analysis of social norms and repression.
In his exhibition at Künstler:innenhaus Bremen, Wieland presents a new short film in a site-specific installation. The exhibition space is constricted by a wall that, like his films, is made of unpretentious materials in a do it yourself aesthetic, creating an oppressive feeling. The wall conceals further artistic contributions by Carla Åhlander, Jeroen Jacobs, Maxwell Stephens and the poet Lisa Robertson. They are linked to the film. Holes in the wall invite you to take a glimpse of them and search for connections.
Wieland opens up a space for reflection on the connections between personality development, family influences, social restrictions and institutions. What effects do images have on our memory? What role do images play in the formation of the psyche, the social and the political?
Curated by Nadja Quante
Gernot Wieland, b. 1968 in Horn/Austria, lives and works in Berlin and Brantevik/Sweden.
Solo Exhibitions (selection): 2025 Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg, France; 2023 Argos Centre for Audiovisual Arts, Brussels, Belgium; Belmacz, London, UK; 2022 KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin; 2021 Berlinische Galerie – Museum for Modern Art, Berlin; 2020 Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland.
Group Exhibitions (selection): 2024 Museum of the Moving Image, New York; 74th Berlinale – Berlin International Film Festival, Berlin; 2023 69th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen; EMAF 36th European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück; 2018 Künstlerhaus, Bremen.
Awards (selection): 2023 Main Award of the German Competition at 69th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen; 2022 German Short Film Award in the category experimental short film up to 30 minutes; 2019 EMAF Media Art Award of the German Film Critics at EMAF – European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück.
gernotwieland.com
Carla Åhlander, b. 1966 in Lund/Sweden, is an artist. She lives and works in Lund and Berlin. carlaahlander.com
Jeroen Jacobs, b. 1968, is an artist and furniture designer. He lives and works in Berlin. jeroenjacobs.com
Lisa Robertson is a poet, essayist and translator, b. 1961 in Canada, lives and works in France.
Maxwell Stephens (b. 1966 in Montreal/Canada, is an artist. He lives and works in Bremen. studiomaxwellstephens.net
Cities as places of coexistence, as both spontaneous and staged public spaces, and as architecture made into stories and histories are the basis of Maruša Sagadin’s and Bianca Pedrina’s artistic investigations. Both artists explore the possibilities and limitations of public space, the social dimensions of architecture and urban planning, and the contradictions inherent in urban space and infrastructure. Their perception of individual buildings or parts of buildings, of striking or inconspicuous views and forms, is condensed in their work into a critique that is both humorous and subtly precise. This critique is not a mere denunciation of the existing, but a sensitive questioning of the urban everyday for its backgrounds, shadows, and deeper layers.
Bianca Pedrina demonstrates how they apply this specifically to Siegen with recent photographs of Siegen, which are presented in the public space as attractive “eye-catchers” in the form of posters. She often traces forms and ideas of architecture and their technical, functional, and aesthetic development. Rarely does she focus on prestigious buildings. When she does, it is usually on a particular detail. She focuses on seemingly insignificant traces and fragments-such as bare walls, banal joints, floor alignments, or ordinary cracks in plaster-that potentially contain the larger picture. Her motifs reveal what architecture actually tries to hide: the disillusionment with architectural art and the inevitability that emerges in troublesome details. Yet in the often overlooked, in the apparent emptiness, deep traces of human life are deposited. In the artist’s photographs, urban interventions and buildings are revealed as products of their designers, their use, and the passage of time. Pedrina’s interpretation of architectural photography aims to demystify the distorted representation of architecture that has become a selling point, and to offer an alternative reading. Bianca Pedrina was born in 1985 and studied in Bern and Frankfurt. She lives and works in Vienna and Basel.
Influenced by architectural history, Maruša Sagadin explores the social aspects underlying a building or a place. Her artistic work operates at the intersection of private and public space, fusing elements of architecture, sculpture, and painting. Through her often installative works, Sagadin addresses the contradictions inherent in secondary architectures such as stairs, curbs, building facades, dead ends, or corners in urban space. A central aspect of her work is the humorous and playful approach to these themes, which is evident in the titles of her installations, such as “Bad Mood without Kiosk and Kitchen,” “Talking with Hands and Feet,” or “Tschumni Alumni,” which emphasize a cheerful, good-humored, and ironic dimension. Her colorful, cartoon-like sculptures of wood, concrete, and cardboard resemble stage sets and invite immediate interaction. They address social and gender issues in architecture: Who builds for whom and where? And who has the opportunity to build at all? What are the rules for building, and how binding are they? These considerations lead Sagadin to consciously break norms and structures in her sculptures: Through humor and exaggerated forms such as feet, boots, and the use of color, she reveals social mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in urban space, while at the same time connecting to established codes of art interpretation. Born in Ljubljana in 1978, Maruša Sagadin studied architecture at the Technical University in Graz and performance art and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where she lives and works today.
The title “Schiefer Schiefer” refers to slate, a common material in the Siegerland region. At the same time, it plays with the tension between stability and irregularity, perfection and imperfection. The double meaning of the term refers to the artistic exploration of the possibilities and limitations of form and material, as well as the break with conventional and established interpretations of architecture. Both artists share an interest in transitions and ruptures, overlaps and intersections that often go unnoticed in built space, but which affect our usual ideas and perceptions of architecture. A series of posters placed on billboards at various locations in the Siegen-Wittgenstein district extends the exhibition into public space, becoming a constant companion in the cityscape.
The closing event on October 20 will include a lecture by Rotterdam artist Michiel Huijben. The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine Westfale and the Stiftung Kunstfonds.
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/01.-Installationview-22Schiefe-Schiefer22-Marusa-Sagadin-Bianca-Pedrina-scaled.jpg“One thing art can do is resolve physical objects in your life. Any item with
a burdensome duty or heavy sentimentality can enter a higher realm of attention and care simply by declaring it as art, or more abstractly as finished. In this transaction the object is never again your problem. It is possible here too that actual feelings contained in the object are moved to the more benign category of symbolic feelings. We should not take this for granted as it may only be a temporary aspect of the field, and instead enjoy it while it lasts.” Bradley Kronz, 2023
“The future of an artwork is hypothetical, in that it is always unknown what will become of it but what is clear is that it will certainly, in the future, end up somewhere.”
Kristina Bengtsson, 2015
“1. THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT THE WORK
2. THE WORK MAY BE FABRICATED
3. THE WORK NEED NOT BE BUILT
EACH BEING EQUAL AND CONSISTENT WITH THE INTENT OF THE ARTIST THE DECISION AS TO CONDITION RESTS WITH THE RECEIVER UPON THE OCCASION OF RECEIVERSHIP”
Lawrence Weiner, 1968
skēnē is pleased to present a new exhibition of old artworks that emerged as a spontaneous reflection on an old exhibition of new artworks.
In 1999, Bera Nordal invited three sculptors to show at Malmö Konsthall, namely:
Kirsten Ortwed (Danish, b.1948), Barry Le Va (American, 1941–2021) and Lawrence Weiner (American, 1942–2021).
25 years later, and 55 odd years after conceptual art’s first experiments, “(…) the excitement has died down. Recollected in tranquility, conceptual art is now being woven into the seamless tapestry of ‘art history.’ This assimilation, however, is being achieved only at the cost of amnesia in respect of all that was most radical in conceptual art.” In this particular moment, skēnē is honored to re-present works by three artists who try to overcome the difficulties inherent to the making of significant works.
Kristina Bengtsson (Swedish, b.1979) studied at at Lunds University, Glasgow School of Art and the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. Working with photography, text and sculpture she explores the intersection between language, society and identity. In her practice she plays with cultural choreographies and how they are shaped and understood, with a particular interest in labour and autonomy. Recent exhibitions include ‘Searching for comfort in an uncomfortable room’ at Vermilion Sands, Copenhagen, 2023; ‘Du Jag Someone Something’ at Bladr, Copenhagen, 2022;
‘Wasted’ (with Kevin Malcolm) at Tørreloft, Copenhagen, 2021.
Bradley Kronz (American, b.1986) graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. “In his practice, framing, supporting structures, vantage points, depth and trompe-l’oeil
are combined across media. Often starting from the art or creations of others, his works (…) repeatedly solicit attention to details.” (Nicolas Brulhart, 2023) Recent exhibitions include ‘“I had all the tools even at a young age”’ at Gandt, New York, 2024; ‘Bradley Kronz’ at Gaylord Fine Arts, Los Angeles, 2024; ’Nine Types of Industrial Pollution’ at Kunsthalle Friart Friburg, 2023; ‘works’ at Mulier Mulier Gallery, Brussels, 2022.
Lawrence Weiner (American, 1942–2021) was a leading figure in the conceptual art movement of the 1960s. Weiner’s practice used language as its core material. Questioning the fundamentals of sculpture and artmaking itself, he shifted away from object-centric work with his 1968 precept. Significant solo exhibitions include The Jewish Museum, New York (2020–2021); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2013); Tate Modern, London (2012, 2006); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007–2008); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2007) among many others.
When I was about ten years old, I visited a friend’s house, a two-story villa on a sloping hill. The living room had floor to ceiling glass panes. The transparent layer framed a scene of nature, trees, clouds, and rolling hills and fields where a farmer had just turned the soil. By the windows was a telescope, pointed out over this setting. I was wearing socks, standing on a carpet that was covering a floor, with a basement beneath it, more floorboards below, some insulation in between, and a concrete foundation underneath it.
The explanatory gap in neuroscience shows that the subjective experience does not match the neural circuitry of the brain, and thus a large explanatory gap remains between the ways in which information is received and coded in the brain and our perception of a stable world. Panpsychism, as the view that consciousness is everywhere, has significant theoretical implications with respect to the mind–body problem, as well as the question of the intrinsic nature of the physical world. One of its potential practical or ethical implications is whether, if it is true, it follows that ‘we are all one’, in a sense that implies that egoism (understood as bias towards what we normally, but falsely, take to constitute the self or ego) is not only immoral but also fundamentally irrational or imprudent (1). It should be noted that panpsychism doesn’t entail that every conceivable entity possesses mind. For example, valid panpsychist theories may exclude composite or collective entities, such as piles of sand, or tables and chairs. They may exclude physical ultimates such as atoms, or they may include only physical ultimates. They may include matter but exclude various forms of energy. They may exclude conceptual or logical entities, such as numbers (2).
Quantitative facts, and a few notes (I know now that these are not answers, just further confusions, argh). The universe is 13.8 billion years old, the contents of the universe include 4.4 percent atoms, 22.4 percent of an unknown type of dark matter, and 73.2 percent of an undisclosed dark energy. The stars are 10 billion years old, the Sun is 5 billion years old, it takes 1.3 million Earths to fill the volume of the Sun, Earth’s molten core is 4.5 billion years old, the first oceans are 3.8 billion years old. The Bible says that Earth is 6000 years old, Genesis 1 King James V.1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the Earth was without form, void and darkness was upon its face. An incandescent light bulb converts about 90 percent of the electricity it consumes into heat and 10 percent into light, newer LED bulbs function the opposite way, with a 10/90 percent ratio, speed of light is 300.000 km per second, Earth’s distance from the Sun 150 million km, year 0, year 2000, we, us now, got to experience a millennium on that time line, some people say its year 8526, or 7. Information like thoughts and emotions are processed at a speed of up to 120 m per second, which travel through electrical signals along the axons of neurons, average weight of a human brain 1305 g, atoms in the human brain 1026, atoms in the universe 1078 x 1082, average weight of a human 65 kg, weight of all humans on earth 521.500.000.000 kg, La Jolla Complex life expectancy 16-17 years, number of stars in the universe is around 200 billion trillion, a 500 g corn flakes box has about 5000 corn flakes, the weight of a cornflake can unfortunately vary due to differences in size, making it difficult to assign a consistent weight to each one (stress), 1 table spoon sugar has 60000 grains of sugar, a single grain of sugar is a cube app. 0.25 mm per side, with a volume of 1.6 x 10-11 cubic meters, the average weight of a grain of sugar is 0.2 mg, number of grains of sugar on Earth is unknown (stress), the paradox of God is that God cannot create so many cornflakes with sugar that God couldn’t eat them all (stress). A body requires an average of 1250 grams of food and 3.2 liters of liquid daily. Other needs are prioritized next, recreation and entertainment following later.
To a body of infinite size, there can be ascribed neither center nor boundary (3). The figure is androgynous, without sex or beyond it (4). The energy body, the being, has no name, country, or planet. A floating tank in an ashram is shaped like a pyramid, it’s large, and precisely aligned with Earth’s cardinal points. It stands at an awkward diagonal across the room because the building, constructed earlier by others, was built according to more pragmatic lines on the plot of land. Not an efficient use of space, but dedicated, or just convinced, of something. Sometimes, when being in the pyramid and a yogi comes to end the meditation, they open the door on the side, and I find myself looking straight up at them, realizing only then that I’ve been spinning around in the tank, unaware of how many times I’ve turned around my axis. I heard the same in the villa, somebody on TV said something about this as well.
–
(1) Hedda Hassel Mørch, Non-physicalist Theories of Consciousness, Cambridge University Press, 2023
(2) David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West, revised edition, The MIT Press, 2017
(3) Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds (1584), Scott Gosnell, Createspace, 2014
(4) Alina Szapocznikow, Sculpture Undone 1955-1972, Elena Filipovic, Joanna Mytkowska, MOMA New York, 2012
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/1-min-1-scaled.jpgWeatherproof is pleased to present it was revealed to me on my walk, a solo show from Cj Shaw.
They meet at a bar on western because that’s where one should always go, in the sense that it fits.
I don’t really know how I landed this job in the first place. I’m working with people who are double my age but they are just like me. It’s like that scene in the Basquiat movie where Willem Dafoe is an electrician that the gallery hired but he’s all like “you know I make sculptures?”
You can look at it like that’s the death you’ll be given, eternally waiting, or where it’s actually quite positive.
The group of friends is two men who have known each other for a while, at least 7 years if they didn’t grow up together, and another visiting from some other place that the others would love to immediately leave, or talk eternally in, where his familiarity of them might pay dividends if they could suspend their gut. There was no smell that I could discern, but they looked like they smelled like dust, a new musk, a penny, a sheen.
My dad always told me to have a fallback plan, said one of the friends, you know, like a trade or something, a way to put food on the table if painting doesn’t work.
A glass hits the table, like a decision.
That used to be something I derided, but now it seems cool to be an art handler, for example. They’re all hot. You can have the cool trade and not ‘compromise’ your persona.
Maybe that means I can finally be old.
You’re 24.
EC: For some people the physical proximity of others is unbearable, as if there were only one type of closeness, namely that which leads to engulfment. Megalomania and paranoia probably are closely related: one wants to become immense, to increase in size, to entrance others, as if there were no better way to snatch them up than to be taller than them. The tallest, whose head rises above all others, would then be the least endangered. The hunted saves himself amid vastness by running, in the heights by climbing higher, in the depths by hiding. The heaven that you enter after your death is the place where nothing bothers you anymore. Nothing tries to snatch you, there nobody is snatched any longer. In such empowerment there is also always mercy, for you live on, you have indeed been chewed to bits. To drink is so much less culpable than chewing something to bits, for the teeth do nothing and there is nothing to chew.
I was sitting at an adjacent table, eavesdropping and looking at my phone. I caught a few names and ended up trying to find all of them online. The one in the button down was wearing a hat that G’s ex had, I think, Boot Boyz. A smear of esotericism with good graphic design, you didn’t have to explain it because its unidentifiability played the part of the contents. I fail, leave quickly, and avoid a near-clotheslining by a man in Dahmer glasses on my way out.
Cj had been telling me about ‘adult things’. He has just moved into a new apartment. It’s a very nice apartment, and his commute is short.
When I look at Cj’s paintings, I see everything that I wanted and was warned of out of adulthood as a kid. Tattoos, sex, fighting, gambling, the numerical markers that confirmed that I was considered mature. I get the feeling of being in an elementary school playground, watching a stranger pass by. They wouldn’t even look my way, but I would telepathically connect with their status and they knew I saw them with respect, they must have. I would think them so lucky because they are an adult and can leave and spend their time doing whatever they please. I would chew on my shirt, my pencil. This telepathy contains a threat, shares a candid moment, like a greeting card would:
HELLO MY LOVE I MEAN MY RIVAL
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/IMG_3101-scaled.jpgResurrecting only the skin, without the body that covers and belongs to it. Cristina Spinelli (Madrid, 1993) brings back to life the trimming of the drawing she made two years ago, with fire, on plasterboard walls, later repainted. The flourish burned into the wall was buried under the plastic paint; and now, the surfaces have been polished, the membranes have been torn from the plasterboard body and under the title of folus (aura) appear again like burnt clothes spread out on the floor. Like niches, like archaeological research plots. Archeology as scar. Spinelli does not give up thinking about her artistic practice in terms of language. Plasterboard is important because it is a conjugation of different materials -paper, plaster, aluminum, fiberglass-. Intervening it, disintegrating it and recovering a language that had been hidden within means undoing a palimpsest and revealing a text that develops in an elliptical, umbelliferous way. These skins stretched on the floor interpellate, morphologically, the layers of rice paper of umbela [umbel], the exhibition’s homonymous work that grows like a flower on the wall of the showroom joining fragments of clothing patterns. Again, a surface that emphasizes the absence of the body it clothes. We find it also in and , the ceramic works made from the mold of the artist’s legs. In some we find wax that is sheltered in its concave part; in others, what is sheltered in the concavity are some wildflowers that Spinelli raided and preserved inside a book. Because hiding and burying are forms of protection. A protection without guarantees. Like the nervous and erratic language that has freed itself from the compact homogeneity of plasterboard, Umbel·la [Umbel] as an exhibition shows us a nature that can no longer show itself or act as a block, with a certain consistency. It is in this sense that, sin título [untitled], it is shown to us spineless and worn out, and the binding that characterizes this object takes on a new grammar, emerging from the pages that hide it -like the flowers now in the ceramic pieces- to take on visibility. A final characteristic of Umbel·la is viscerality, a certain melodramatic sense. Going all in, with everything, brutally. They are proposals made point-blank. Collapsing to rise again, like tus geranios con nosotras [your geraniums with us], a 2021 sculpture that now opens to show its insides. But the most ethereal works also show a certain fatigue or an emotional impact about to explode, like encender un fuego [light a fire], the sound work that fills the room with the sound of castanets; or last, the projection that is there and is not there, waiting for someone to give it support to manifest itself. And also Daniel, the spoon suspended in the air. One last umbel, umbrella, about to fall. About to lose. In Umbel·la nothing ends in a painful result, but it does end at the limit of outburst.
– Jordi Vernis
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/02_Cristina_Spinelli_Umbela_©Goro_Studio-1-scaled.jpgDavide Hjort Di Fabio
Vivavoce
Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Copenhagen
August 15 – September 16 2024
From autumn 1943 to spring 1944 violent battles were fought in central Italy between the
Nazis, who had occupied the northern part of the country, and the Allies, who were
advancing from the south. A little north of the Nazi defense lines is the small mountain town
of Popoli. The town was hit by sixteen air raids by the Allies between 24 October 1943 and
23 May 1944.
During the period of bombardments, many of Popoli’s inhabitants used caves in the
mountains around the town as refuge, among others Paola Di Giandomenico, Di Fabio’s
grandmother. She was three years old when the first air raid hit. In the video Occhi socchiusi
(squinting eyes) she shows Di Fabio to the cave she took refuge in with her family. They had
arranged the cave as a home with a dining table, chairs, kitchen drawers and mattresses.
It is Di Giandomenico’s oral recounts that form the starting point of the exhibition and in the
works Di Fabio has preserved the volatility that characterizes the spoken word. The
grandmother’s own photographs of her brother on a bicycle, her dog Lampo and her house
have been scanned and printed on the back of photo paper so that the toner and motifs
become blurred, and in 9:15 pm we see only shadows of objects.
In modern Italian, vivavoce refers to the speaker function on phones, but in the exhibition it is
especially the etymological meaning “from mouth to mouth”; which is highlighted. And just
like the title of the exhibition Vivavoce invites both a direct and an indirect interpretation, the
works offer a situated, material experience at the same time as they open up an imaginary
space related to the experience. The relief Muro (wall), for example, is a ceramic cast of Di
Fabio’s torso, which brings to mind a rock wall and thus turns the body into a memory
archive.
The shadow cabinet gives a feeling of looking into a home through the windows, perhaps on
a winter evening, but also a feeling of being distanced from the objects because it is difficult
for the eyes to focus on the shadows and because we can hardly see what all shadows are
shadows of. The indistinct and hazy shadows are like memories that are never quite as clear
and distinct as the experiences themselves, changing over time and taking other forms in
our consciousness. In the same way that meanings of words change. With Vivavoce,
memory becomes both a bodily and a social matter. Memories are retold and anchored
materially, and material sediments give rise to commemoration.
Popoli is full of traces that evokes the shared memories of the inhabitants. Many houses are
still roofless or uninhabitable due to the risk of collapse after the bombings during the war
and an earthquake in 2009. The Pescara River rumbles through an empty brick-walled
building where they used to wash clothes. In one of the town squares, there is a bust of the
doctor who sent Di Giandomenico to a sanatorium with tuberculosis when she was fourteen.
He did not think she would survive, but she recovered, and when she returned from the
sanatorium, she got a camera as a gift and used it to take the photos that Di Fabio has
reworked for the exhibition.
–Mads Nielsen
Davide Hjort Di Fabio, born 1990 in Popoli, Abruzzo, Italy, lives and works in Copenhagen,
Denmark. He received an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2024.
Recent exhibitions include Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2024), Vejen Kunstmuseum (2023), Outpost (2022), Kunsthal Rønnebæksholm (2021),
Galleri Bo Bjerggaard (2021), Den Frie Udstillingsbygning (2020).
https://www.davidehjort.com/
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/1_vivavoce-scaled.jpgCastiglioni is pleased to present Beam Me Up, the first solo exhibition by artist Bianca Millan with the gallery. The title, inspired by one of the most famous phrases from sci-fi pop culture, serves as a pretext to explore the artist’s focus on movement, drifts, displacements, and traces. These elements are collected, analyzed, and reworked through a reappropriation that often modifies the reality from which they originate, engaging in a game of restoration, reinterpretation, and falsification.
The title is a clear reference to the famous phrase “Beam Me Up, Scotty!” used in Star Trek whenever the plot required teleportation. This solution originally served as a device for scene transitions that would otherwise have required more costly aesthetic and stylistic choices. In this case, there is no Scotty, or anyone to teleport (perhaps), but the gallery is transformed into an immersive environment, a space of anticipation for a hypothetical and metaphorical ‘teleportation’. However, it is not so much matter in its classical sense that is transported, but rather information, sound, collaborations, interactions, and their evolutions that, from passage to passage, transport to transport, become the central point of the exhibition and the artist’s work.
The first piece of information from which this chain of events originates is the audio track and the large white and blue installation/seating that greets the viewer upon entering. The audio track is the zero point of the Blue Traces project: an archive of the artist’s personal movements and displacements, which Bianca collects through GPS tracking. Since 2019, these lines of individual movement, in collaboration with musician Giovanni Di Giandomenico, have been encoded into musical compositions and audio tracks that over time have layered, continually giving new forms to the BT project. This is a work of personal and collective listening where the stratification of the listener’s experiences meets the artist’s biography.
The exhibition presents for the first time in Milan an audio track of 7 hours and 33 minutes that collects the artist’s movements from 2018 to 2019. Visitors are invited to listen while seated or lying on the installation at the center of the room: a device for waiting and contemplating the environment, where sensory planes begin to rarefy, and from which one can continue to follow the movement initiated by the sound. These lines ‘teleported’ into the environment create other versions of themselves—not the same object repeated or displaced in space, but a new and further version of themselves, maintaining all the initial information, reassembled differently, probably randomly, but definitively meaningfully.
The viewer can then begin to notice the objects on the walls, the sculptures surrounding this waiting room and completing it. These objects suggest ideas of navigation, measurement, or use in case of emergency. All elements inherent in travel. There are hourglasses, lanterns, cushions or life vests, wind socks or, more likely, memories of these. Their craftsmanship flirts with the sophistication typical of a sci-fi TV show; a taste that forces contemporaneity to serve a familiar and recognizable aesthetic with a ‘futuristic’ scent.
One can feel attracted by this familiarity and be led to make it one’s own, in an exchange of input and output with the information the artist presents to us. They are on one hand catalysts of experiences and on the other mechanisms of transmission. Just as in Blue Traces, the form changes state to transmit the information; in the same way, it changes the experience of those who encounter it, altering its form to preserve the message it carries.
During the exhibition, various moments of activation and stratification of the project will be presented. These different performances will take place inside and outside the gallery space. In collaboration with Sara Castiglioni, who curated the development of this musical and performative program, these events will be announced in the weeks following the opening and will involve the participation and collaboration of Elena Rivoltini and Nicola Ratti.
Bianca Millan, (1992, Milan)
Lives and works in Paris.
2022 Fine Arts, Gerrit Rietveld, Amsterdam
2018 LungA Art School, Iceland
2014 BA Politics and International Relationships, Università Cattolica, Milan
2013 Journalism and New Media UMASS International Program ISCTE, Lisbon
Solo:
2023 POUSH, Blue Traces Playlist From Paris to Paris, performance with Hector Cavallaro, Paris
2021 MINIERA, Blue Traces x Rome, Studio 33, live performance and presentation, Rome
DELAY #2, Spazio Mensa, Rome
Group:
2024 Areoporto, curated by Castiglioni e Thomaz Rosa, 2024, Sao Paulo, Brazil
2023 Ambientalism Without Politics is Gardening, curated by Erica Petrillo, ADI Design Museum, Milan
2021 La linea retta non appartiene a Dio, Contemporary Cluster, Rome
Portal 1l2021 U1 #01 – #05, curated by OMUAMUA Legacy, Milan
2020 DarkHawaii, curated by Omuamua Legacy, 2020, Milan
2019 5th Internet Pavilion, 57th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Miltos Manetas, Venice
Blue Traces for Miltos Manetas ‘Towards a Computational Existence’, MAXXI Museo, Rome
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Beam_me_up_Millan_Castiglioni-1-scaled.jpgIn Stefano De Paolis’s drawings, a delicate and pale light defines subtly suggested yet highly precise spaces. His practice mainly revolves around drawing, through which he brings to life on paper imagery connected to his personal experiences. Stefano’s work is nourished by what he reads, watches, and listens to; the sci-fi culture and the aesthetic of 80s robot anime, where spaceships embark on intergalactic journeys, piloted by sleek commanders in aerodynamic suits.
In his latest series, exhibited at Spazio MenoUno in Treviglio, he continues to explore the idea of the Saturnian artist. He revisits Thonet, the pilot, a subject he has previously explored, now represented on a larger scale and engaged in a different activity. This time, Thonet is at rest, captured in a moment of intimacy. The iconic chair serves as his broad seat, allowing him to adopt an elegant posture. He resembles a rock star gazing into the camera with conflicted and subtly melancholic eyes, suspended in the aftermath of a phone call that has just ended or perhaps never happened.
“5 o’clock” is the piece that, like the title track of an album, gives the exhibition its name. Through a simulation of reflections, the pendulum clock becomes a representational device that projects an imaginary space—the hypothetical room where the pilot is experiencing the phone call moment. The addition of a cherry wood frame acts as a less neutral element compared to paper and aluminum, grounding the work in a more tangible reality.
“Dorothy” presents an outward vision. It depicts a motion outward where the light, originating from a circular form, gradually fades into total darkness. The small-format print, positioned at the end of the exhibition path, reveals the exterior of a house for the first time, offering a complete view. “Dorothy” is an evocative space of tranquility that concludes the narrative.
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/DePaolis_FiveOClock_IV1-copia-scaled.jpg
These features are the effects of extensive experimentation with materials and processes. Drawing, collage, painting, photography, and sculpture are all in negotiation. Despite their specificities, they produce a strange visuality that threatens the limits between subject and object, animate and inanimate, interested in declassifying forms, confusing us, cheating categorizations.
Julia Gallo’s works are like dense, nebulous shadows, with a graphic appeal that comes not only from the charcoal that scratches the surface but also from the scissors that cut the paper. Bathed in coffee, they gain a sense of unity that blurs the outlines, making the different parts of the composition indistinguishable, muddling our perception. An attentive eye, however, is capable of identifying anthropomorphic and zoomorphic fragments that are never complete, like mirages stored in amorphous smoke, secret images in mutation. Its surface pulses very little, but rather invites us inside, introspective. They keep with them an enigmatic or mythological dimension, difficult to locate historically and geographically.
Although her bodily expressiveness converses with classic anatomical studies and observational drawings, her relationship with tradition seeks to awaken what lies dormant beneath the precision of drawing. If Western art history recognizes in the line “the basic structure of the idea,” here, projective reasoning gives way to phantasmagoria, to the psychic fantasy of visions. Gallo’s graphic gesture does not seek to organize the world but to densify shadows, those negative forms that, unlike reflections (where the double is mimetic convergence), are indicators of a mysterious otherness. With a certain pictorial flirtation, the drawings strive not for the sharpness of the line but for a haze or stain, shapeless enough for us to project our own desires onto them. She scrutinizes the uncanny.
Marina Woisky, meanwhile, acts as a taxidermist, giving flesh and skeleton to the skin of the images. Her references come from the kitsch universe of antique shops and private collections of exotic items from many origins, capable of converting brutal beasts into docile ornaments. While the decorative impulse tends to domesticate what it touches, the artist works to pry these forms away from their secondary condition, altering their scale, intervening in their compositions, printing them in fabric, sewing them, and, finally, filling them with cement (which, to the eye, looks more like soft flesh). Lions, elk, sheep, horses, bears, dogs, once bound to be hunting trophies, taxidermy molds, and other decorative objects, acquire a new grotesque appearance, as though they have recovered some animality. The images are given new life; the beasts awaken, even at the heart of the simulacrum. Ironically, they recover some hint of the natural world, for which our linguistic codes are always failing.
Yet, there is no moralizing in these successive processes of the image. By reconciling ornament and figuration (the apparent Roman contradiction of those who decorated walls with monstrous forms, as Vitrúvio described), the grottesche created methods of existing between classical beauty standards, metamorphosis, delirium, and extravagance. Woiksy’s sculptural facsimiles are creatures not satisfied with simply being themselves, they perform themselves as hybrids, simulating other identities. We are dealing with the world of appearances, but not to condemn them. From the original animal to the ornament, from the ornament to the photograph, from the photograph to the fabric, from the fabric to the sculpture, a chain of visual traces that accumulate anachronistic and heterogenic times is structured, still capable of touching the present through means of mutation.
It is also striking that there are constant situations of hunting and predation in both productions, expressed through agonized mouths, twisted and sinuous volute-bodies, allergic to any linearity. Like beating wings captured in amber, they condense traces of movements that seem only temporarily frozen, they are the captured moment that immediately precedes or succeeds the gesture, as though they keep with them a certain disruptive potential, on the verge of a new awakening. Together, we remember that each form holds a species of life and that the images, far from passive, are always at the edge of convulsion.
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In her 1978 essay Grids, the art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss explores, in a structuralist sense, the grid as an emblem of modern art and outlines its mythic power, its ability to express and incorporate both material reality and the spiritual: “The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).”[1] As David Joselit notes, the contradiction that Krauss recognizes in the grid has before been described by Michel Foucault as a central condition of modernity, and closely mirrors his broader description of modern thought as that which engages–attempts to resolve–the split between the empirical and the transcendental.[2] Tracing the evolution of the grid from Mondrian to Warhol in the 1960s, the author notices a shift in this contradiction for contemporary art.[3] Instead of emptying the grid of all but its purities or spiritualized essence, what Krauss calls the “concrete aspect” (rather than the “abstract”) of the grid takes precedence and serves to organize material drawn from the world.
fragile images as windows onto psychological realms. The artist has chosen to either maintain or interrupt the strict geometry of traditional grid compositions thereby bringing continuity and collision into play. As a result, his works produce associations with an insight or an outlook onto “something”, using the body like a sculptural bust to elicit the eros and psyche of his personas. Krauss connects the emergence of the grid with the use of the window in 19th century symbolist art, and describes the window as a “transparent vehicle that lets light–or spirit–into the darkness of the room. But if glass transmits, it also re ects. And so the window is experienced by the symbolist as a mirror as well–something that freezes and locks the self into the space of its own reduplicated being.”4 The artist ascribes in his works a dualism as laid out by Krauss by deconstructing and reconfiguring notions of inside and outside, front and back. In these replicated and fragmentary self-portraits Kaufmann draws analogies to ideas of psychoanalysis and subjectively alludes to the concept of conscious and subconscious.
Similarly, Lukas Kaufmann charges the rationality of the grid not with references to the transcendental, but with fragments of the everyday. In a series of varnished photographs on folded yellowish paper (all Untitled, 2024), sensitive imagery such as the exposed body or face of the artist are depicted in hues of brown sepia. Interweaving a range of production techniques, the artist generally questions the relationship between image carrier and image surface, while synergistically merging spatial and psychological dimensions. With utmost delicacy, Kaufmann continuously suggests ideas of structure and vagueness, distance and intimacy. By folding the paper, he underscores a spatiality in his works, becoming three-dimensional through the subsequent application of water and varnish, until the material outside the tectonic structure of the grid softens, curls. While the grids serve as the image carrier and focus the viewer’s gaze, the image surface seems to convey emotion, as the material takes on a sculptural life of its own. A simultaneous game of concealing and revealing of content or leitmotifs is a recurring approach in Kaufmann’s artistic practice and is continued in the exhibition.
As exhausted structures of modernism, the grids in Kaufmann’s work are by no means utilized as formal constructs, but are rather support systems that locate and fix the fragile images as windows onto psychological realms. The artist has chosen to either maintain or interrupt the strict geometry of traditional grid compositions thereby bringing continuity and collision into play. As a result, his works produce associations with an insight or an outlook onto “something”, using the body like a sculptural bust to elicit the eros and psyche of his personas. Krauss connects the emergence of the grid with the use of the window in 19th century symbolist art, and describes the window as a “transparent vehicle that lets light–or spirit–into the darkness of the room. But if glass transmits, it also re ects. And so the window is experienced by the symbolist as a mirror as well–something that freezes and locks the self into the space of its own reduplicated being.”[4] The artist ascribes in his works a dualism as laid out by Krauss by deconstructing and reconfiguring notions of inside and outside, front and back. In these replicated and fragmentary self-portraits Kaufmann draws analogies to ideas of psychoanalysis and subjectively alludes to the concept of conscious and subconscious.
eveling the playing field, the artist implements seemingly antagonistic forces as he exploits the counterpart to abstraction, namely ornamentation and craftsmanship craftsmanship, moreover, that is traditionally associated with women: graphic and textile design. rawing on the silhouettes of chocolate boxes from the traditional Viennese artisan Altmann & Kühne (known for Wiener Werkstätte designs by Kató Lukáts), his wall-mounted sculptures (Chest and Alex, both 2024) imitate chests of drawers and engage with the whimsical phenomenon of the treasure box as a repository for childhood memories or everyday commodities. Close-ups of long hair on an uncovered chest, oral fabric patterns (the tendril as inspired by the craft of block printing and reinterpreted by the Viennese architect and modernist Josef Frank) or collaged gift ribbons subsume the austere structure of the grid as the artist engages with sexual ambiguity.
In a subtle game of introversion and extroversion, Kaufmann brings to his imagery the notion of desire as his depicted characters turn inwards or outwards and the grid takes surprising sculptural turns.
Cara Lerchl
1 Krauss, Rosalind, “Grids”, in: October, Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), The MIT Press: Massachusetts, p. 54
2 Joselit, David, “Mary Heilmann: Embodied Grids”, Flash Art, Vol. 27, No. 178, 1994, p. 70.
3 Ibid.
4 Krauss 1979, p. 58-59