Credits: Jackie Lee, Albin Looström

 

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Echoes explores zones of transition and permeability: between inside and outside, between language and images, between visions and promises. In these transitions, memory becomes an invisible but formative medium that permeates the spaces and continually leaves new traces. The result is not only the echoing of past moments, but also the space in which the boundaries between reality and imagination become blurred. The works in this exhibition capture the subtle transformation of memories that echo within us, that shape us and slip away at the same time. They are like afterimages that manifest themselves in physical spaces as well as in our thoughts and feelings.

Rainer Spangl’s painting is based on realistic depictions but approaches abstraction through the permanent repetition of motifs with minor changes. Spangl speaks of a “sober on-off relationship to abstraction”, which is already inherent in the process of creating the works. In his works, he takes motifs from his private surroundings: Views of a face, of plants and areas of colour that evoke atmosphere or skin. The works are a painterly exploration of private interiors and exteriors as well as the pictorial medium and its limits.

Sharon Ya’ari’s photographic works often show apparently everyday scenes and landscapes. For Ya’ari, the medium of photography is in a unique way capable of mastering the complex interrelationships between imagination, historical knowledge and the socio-political present.
Almost like architectural fragments, the plants in his new series of works appear as frozen contemporary witnesses and symbols of transience and development: “I’m identifying from my childhood photos, and family photos I took: all types and varieties of vegetation that grew, changed, and have been replaced in my yard over the years. During the past year, I’ve also been photographing the yard intentionally, and maybe I have done this before, too. In recent months, I’ve been photographing the annual weeds growing in the yard. I pull them out with their roots – which forces a photography timeframe of several minutes before they wilt.” (Ya’ari)

“There is a bronze contour that was cast in sand in a liquid state. An approximation to a real scale.” (Pérez Córdova) In the Contours series, the outlines of windows, doors and passageways evoke memories of existing spaces and places and question the viewer’s location. Concepts such as absence and disappearance are just as important to Tania Pérez Córdova as materiality. Her objects remain in a state of suspension, illuminating the origins of materials such as earth, metal, marble and glass and testing their limits. She explores production processes as a new way of seeing and thinking about objects and as a narrative means of investigating time, identities and places.

Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler use drawing to articulate ideas, establish relationships between forms and content and create open spaces for thought. In some cases, this results in images that contain both figurative and abstract elements or are often reminiscent of visual notes. The artists create an intimate, almost fragile atmosphere in which the boundary between what is said and what is unsaid becomes blurred. The often sketch-like or process-like drawings themselves become a medium of thought and experimentation, constantly evolving through observation and interpretation.

In Point De Capiton (Hodja) (2016), Asier Mendizabal addresses the relationship between language, symbols and ideology and how this relationship often shifts. According to Jacques Lacan’s theory, a “point de capiton” (literally “cushion button” or “quilting point”) is a point at which language and meaning are fixed, i.e. a kind of anchorage in the otherwise floating network of signs and meanings. Mendizabal transfers this concept to a sculptural form and examines how ideological constructions can be stabilised through visual and material elements.

Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck’s series of works Sub-Entanglement Woven-Sustainable-Emigrant, 2006–2008 is a complex examination of the themes of identity, migration and the networking of global structures. The central motif of this work is the “Unidad Residencial El Paraíso”, a residential complex in Caracas, Venezuela, whose facade was designed by the Paris-based Venezuelan artist Alejandro Otero with a polychrome work. For Balteo-Yazbeck, “Woven” means the act of visually interweaving different narratives into a new composition. This principle manifests itself in the work on display through the layering of Alejandro Otero’s paper collages and the black and white photographs of the complex, taken by Paolo Gasparini, an Italian photographer who emigrated to Venezuela in the 1950s.

“In the Manifestos, Mangelos carried on a dialogic and combative relation with everything he studied, and his range of interests was great including philosophy and art, psychoanalysis, biology and physics. Humour and irony were present in the manner in which he presented his thoughts: in the shift between the pretentiousness of the message and the wit of the sentence, in the way in which he criticised authorities and combined different languages.” (Branka Stipančić)
The red lines in Manifest o mišljenju no. 1 / manifesto on thinking no. 1, c.1977–1978 seem like an attempt to capture what is thought and written – as if the artist wanted to organise language and make its limits visible.

In Lajin IV (2020), Adriana Czernin combines various ornamental structures derived from a fragment of an Islamic ornament from the 13th century. Czernin multiplies the floral elements and arabesques of the marquetry and interweaves them with the strictly geometric lattice ornament – the result is a dense, almost impenetrable and wild structure that reflects the almost opaque connections of some memories.

Werner Feiersinger’s sculptures are like signs in space. The object Untitled (2018) with its two diagonally positioned panels is covered with fabric soaked in red epoxy resin and rests on a structure of perforated metal supports. The tension between the translucent textile structure and the robust object lends the sculpture an unfinished character that breaks up the solid materiality. Despite its hardness, it almost seems to float and move freely in space. Feiersinger is concerned with fundamental questions about the relationship between object, space and viewer. “The forms come to me like memory images that are constituted over long periods of time and then manifest themselves sculpturally. At some point, these images solidify and reappear as reduced objects.” (Feiersinger)

In her work, Nilbar Güreş explores social, cultural and political structures, especially in relation to women and marginalised groups. As part of her photo series Çırçır (2010), the work The Gathering reflects a communal as well as personal experience of the artist: a group of women gathering and sharing in a place of remembrance. Güreş creates a visual composition that focuses on both intimate and collective dimensions of coming together – bodies are interwoven, gazes and gestures create a silent but expressive interaction.

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Gene’s Presents “1TB Verbatim: Los Angeles Timing 2013-2025”
Leroy’s
422 Ord Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012

www.leroys.biz
www.genesdispensary.ca

January 18th to March 15th, 2025

***

A poet walks into a bar. That’s not the start of a joke. That’s the start of this exhibition.
Well, not quite…
The start of this exhibition was back in 2013 when I moved to Los Angeles. Ian James was the first friend I made when I got here. We’re both Aries boys from neighboring Midwest states who have radical leftist politics, love bucolic landscapes and grimy towns equally, and tend to stay up way too late and fiercely debate. He immediately made me feel as though leaving New York City and driving 3,000 miles west was absolutely the right decision. And when he opened up a new gallery below the now-closed gallery metro pcs, and eventually asked me to curate a show in this new space, I was determined to try to best honor our friendship, my experiences in this gorgeous and complex city, and many of the artists who have had profound impacts on me over the past near-dozen years. It is my hope that after you make your way through the labyrinth that is known as Leroy’s, you are able to gain some insight into what matters to me and what I think matters and has mattered in Los Angeles.

Thank you, Ian. Thank you to everyone else involved with this exhibition. And thank you, Los Angeles.

-Keith J. Varadi, January 2025

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“A person or a thing that is defunct or has no chance of success.”

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Lisa Sifkovits (b. 1993 in Vienna) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. She graduated in 2024 from the class Sculpture and Space at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Sifkovits’ artistic practice explores the societal norms and rules encountered during the formative process of growing up. Her work focuses on the constraints they impose as well as the process of navigating and inscribing oneself within such structures. She adopts a childlike style, using textiles, paper constructions, and drawing as key elements in her work.

Hidden beneath delicate paper folds, precise graphite drawings, and colourful decoupage, Lisa Sifkovits’ exhibition gathers seemingly innocent symbols of power. It turns out that we, humans, have a deep affinity for such objects. We like to feel in control.

The urge to mark the passage of time, to understand, organise, and predict it, is an ancient human instinct driven by fundamental needs, crucial for survival. However, for early humans, timekeeping was not about numbers and hours, but about aligning with the natural world. The ancient Egyptians for example developed their calendar around the annual flooding of the Nile river. This natural event dictated when to plant and harvest crops. The first calendars ever used by humans were based on celestial patterns, particularly the lunar and solar cycles. Understanding the rhythm of nature was important to prehistoric and ancient people. Yet in many early societies, it was not nature but the rulers who had control over the official calendar, festivals and ceremonies. Timekeeping is, after all, a key aspect of authority.

As communities grew and advanced, organising and measuring time became essential not only for predicting natural events, but for managing the social and political functions of society, such as regulating laws, taxes, trade and civic duties. However, the calendar we use today is not only a product of the human need for organisation, control and order, but also a reflection of ego and power. Have you ever wondered why both July and August have 31 days? The Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE, established a 365-day year based on the solar cycle. To honour Caesar, the fifth month, Quintilis, was renamed July. After Caesar’s assassination, Emperor Augustus renamed the sixth month, Sextilis, to August. Wanting his month to match Caesar’s in length, Augustus added a day to August, shortening February by one day, which is why both months have 31 days. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar once again to improve its accuracy and better align Christian holidays with the seasons, creating the Gregorian calendar that most of the world uses today, while also allowing the Church to maintain its authority over timekeeping.

It’s hard to imagine our trusty daily planner, with its soft covers and charming layout, as a symbol of power. Our faithful companion that keeps us efficient, helps us think a few steps ahead and prevents chaos. In 1960, another chaos-preventer was invented: a small but magnificent tool of power for the ordinary person—the highlighter. STABILO, the company known for its iconic STABILO BOSS highlighter, released its first version in 1971—just a year after BIC introduced theirs in 1970, helping make the product widely available to the mass market.

Amanda Rach Lee, with over 2 million subscribers, is one of the most successful and well-known YouTubers in the world of daily planner and journal organisation. Her videos feature detailed, step-by-step tutorials on how to create a beautiful daily calendar that helps you track habits and plan goals in creative yet practical ways. These methods often involve using a variety of office materials and tools, such as tape, stickers, pens in different colours and, of course, highlighters. There is something deeply satisfying about dragging these oddly shaped markers across the paper. With the highlighter in our hands, we hold the reins: we decide what matters most, imposing order on the chaos and overwhelm. Highlighting is the act of drawing attention to specific information, often by marking it in some way. Like the spire at the very top of a clock tower, highlighting its verticality and authority. Another beautifully crafted symbol of power, marking the city’s control over time.

On the floor of the exhibition space, a few steps below street level, four white objects emerge from the ground. Stripped of their inaccessible verticality and placed at the lowest point of the exhibition space, the spires begin to lose their sense of sanctity and take on a softer, more approachable presence. We, the audience, become the towers in the room. There is something particularly generous in Sifkovits’s gesture of taking something as distant as the peak of a tower and recreating it in the haptic material of paper. A medium used to better understand matter, to think. Present in all of Sifkovits’ works around us, paper is an incredibly honest material. It carries the traces of every interaction, bearing the marks of time. In its fragility, it holds an authenticity that can’t be hidden, inviting us to witness the inevitable process of change. Perhaps this is why the four spires on the floor seem somehow vulnerable, evoking in our minds an image of the artist carefully studying, dissecting, and reassembling their form. Then planting them on the ground, so then, one day, they can grow roots and become towers of their own.

Monika Georgieva

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In Flor da Pele, Bruno Silva has the unusual and involuntary collaboration of Augustin Cabanès (1862-1928), a French doctor and lover of the arts who studied its relationship with medicine.

Taking Esculape chez les Artistes as his starting point, a book published by Cabanès in 1928, Bruno Silva goes beyond the obvious relationships established in this essay and expounds on the skin, not just as a casing or a thin translucent film that hides the inside and protects it from the outside, but also as a plastic support, moldable and capable of holding images. These ambivalences are, in fact, common in Bruno Silva’s practice and are often highlighted through assemblages of unusual materials and free associations, similar to the digestive process in which disparate ingredients are ingested, digested and transformed.

A multiple was released by esculápio artist editions.

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“Essentially we are each other.
I’ve given you my violence.
You are going to be prettier than me.

When will you hear my secret steps 
Along the rim of your eye?
I want us to live side by side” 
Jim Dine, Essentially We Are Each Other (1969)

             It is in the 1250 manuscript of Le Roman de La Poire, that we find the first depiction of a heart (the organ) as a symbol for one’s affection or devotion. In the letter S a man kneels, facing his lover. He extends his hand forward to offer his heart, the outline of which resembles a pine cone. Offerings are customary in tales of courtly love. Indeed, the novel takes its name from its most memorable scene: the damsel peels a pear with her teeth and offers the poet a bite –his heart, immediately taken over with love. 

I cannot tell you much about the pear, other than it derives from the rose, and is kin to the apple. You can turn an apple around and perhaps find the silhouette of a bum, or a heart. Slice the fruit in half from stem to flower and its erotic imagery is plain –it is inescapably the fruit of Venus. Same is true of the pear. Still, there is something less vulgar, less explicit about the fruit. After all, it holds no curse, no painful consequence. 

In an essay on the 13th century pear novel, scholar Véronique Guilhaume delves into the repetitive presence of offerings throughout the text, but mostly within the accompanying illuminations. First the poet offers the handkerchief, then the book itself, but when offering his heart, he does so indirectly. In his hand, the symbol. As if insisting on the sacred nature of the offering. In this exchange: a declaration of eternal fidelity and the sacrifice of a vital part of oneself – a necessary dispossession of one’s own organ, in order to receive that of the other. 

In 1969, Jim Dine produced a series of etchings, accompanying photographs by his close friend Lee Freidlander, some of which were included in their collaborative book Work from the Same House. The series, born out of their respective compulsion towards recording the mundane, became a correspondence of sorts, a testament to the intimacy of their relationship.

There is no more predictable symbol than a heart. Out of all of Dine’s work, the symbol radiates. Dine, similarly to Friedlander, is incredibly sincere. Their work is full of joy and humor, but it is never deceptive. A photograph stands out from the series: an out-shot, recently selected by Joel Coen for an exhibition, at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. In it, Dine’s frowning face leans back, behind the overexposed ghostly silhouette of Lee’s foot. As a child, I loved sitting by my mother when she watched television at night and extending my foot close to her face, waiting for her to notice it was there. One is only privy to the beautiful mundane details of another’s life, if they have offered up some of their own. 

Here, I was going to take a deep dive into 2010, the opening of Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times, a new painting show by Deborah Kass. I was going to mention the way second-wave feminism introduced this new formalism into painting of the 70s in New York, of which Kass is emblematic. And I was going to do so by also mentioning a thing or two about the New York of the early aughts –post market crash and 9-11, the deeply millennial context that these paintings were addressing while being infused with this inescapable nostalgia for the late 60s and 70s. Some kind of straw to grasp.

A little after 2010, I drove down to New Orleans, to meet and photograph an incredibly mesmerizing artist whose claim to fame was (in true millennial fashion) a Vice exposé  in which she had inserted something like two dozen tabs of acid inside of her inspiring a profound communication with extraterrestrial life.

This was when Leah still lived in NOLA, in her one bedroom. Something right out of paradise. On her coffee table there sat a book of poems from 1969 by none other than Jim Dine. I am not sure how she ended up with the book, but I have since looked and haven’t managed to find a copy that I could afford. It seems like every year I text her asking for photographs of some of the pages. Pick a poem, the most romantic you can find. 

I don’t think it is possible to be a millennial and not be riddled with nostalgia. In many ways it’s safer to look backwards. Like trying to pinpoint the moment on a timeline, where the intoxicating hope for freedom that permeated the times of Dine, Freidlander and Kass, faded out. Like trying to restage a photograph of a memory, just right, hoping it’ll bring back the moment. 

Every few days, instagram feeds me a video of Britney Spears talking to the camera: “If you’re having a real bad day” she says “Just find someone with hearts on their shoes” she runs to her assistant and points to her sneakers, laughing.  

****

JODI HEARTZ (b. 1990, Fort Ellis, Nova Scotia) uses photographic techniques to decode connections between the iconic, the personal, and whatever lies in between.

Since 2011 Heartz has built a prolific career as a fashion, design and product photographer as well as commissioned work. Her range in work domains informs her conceptual practice, as she takes inspiration from signifiers unique to mass market imagery, playfully incorporating them with references pulled from art history.  Unexpected tones in a familiar place, antagonising optimism, and unfortunate joy are current harmonies considered in her images.

Heartz completed her BFA at NSCAD-U in 2014.

FRANCES WILLIAMS  is a Painter based in Montréal. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University, with a major in Painting & Drawing. 

Frances’ work deals with the middle-space of the abstraction/figuration dichotomy. While she considers herself an abstract painter, her works often suggest letters or text, teetering on the edge of readability. Similarly, figures begin to appear but often fall short of becoming representational forms. Other times, they do become readable as figures, taking the form of ethereal girls and women. Their presence is communicated in an interrupted visual language, where the girls fall back into abstraction. Frances recently took part in a duo-exhibition with Espace Maurice at Pangée in Montréal, a solo-exhibition at an off-site venue curated by Alexa Hawksworth, and will have a solo exhibition at Franz Kaka in Toronto in 2025.

 

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BEIGE is pleased to present the group show Sequence, featuring works by Alexander Lieck, Dóra Maurer, Nick Oberthaler, Zhou Siwei, and Yui Yaegashi. Each artist explores the interplay between abstraction, color, pictorial rhythm, and conceptual approaches in their own distinctive way. The exhibition examines how painterly gestures evolve into sequential acts, revealing systemic structures within and beyond the dialogue between form, color, and concept.

 

Inspired by the 1980 film Kalah by Dóra Maurer (b. 1937, Budapest, HU) —created in collaboration with Zoltán Jeney and based on the ancient Arabic game of the same name. The work investigates the correspondence and efficiency of image and sound. As Maurer explains: “The rules of the game Kalah—played by two players with 36 stones each—serve as a ready-made system for generating the film. The filmstrip records every move of a drawn game, translating each step into 72 color forms and 72 sounds on a chromatic scale. Both elements unfold in rapid sequences in perfect synchrony.”

 

By using a predefined system to generate visual sequences, Maurer’s historical film work exemplifies a structured approach to abstraction that resonates throughout the work of a younger generation of artists presented in the exhibition.

 

Zhou Siwei (b. 1981, Chongqing, CH) explores abstraction through the lens of contemporary consumer culture. His painted objects resemble mobile phone cases produced via 3D printing and organic materials such as corn starch. These vibrant forms not only reflect the intimate, personal interface between the device and its user but also comment on the standardized nature of mobile device personalization. Rather than using mobile phones to capture or store images, Zhou Siwei transforms these empty shells—“second skins”—by applying abstract landscapes with painterly techniques.

 

While Zhou Siwei engages with mass-produced forms, Yui Yaegashi (b. 1985, Chiba, JP) distills minimalism to its purest essence. This process separates the act of painting from the anticipated aesthetic outcome. Typically using sober or neutral tones arranged in soft harmony, her work relies on the unique characteristics of each chosen brush. The predominantly linear application of paint creates abstract compositions without recognizable forms, with horizontal and vertical lines of varying sizes and widths intertwining in a predetermined order. These compositions oscillate between oily transparency and denser texture, inviting viewers to explore the subtle dynamics of form and space.

 

Nick Oberthaler (b. 1980, Bad Ischl, AU) approaches abstraction through a conceptual and process-driven lens. His small-scale abstractions began as two- or three-color paintings on standard A6 postcards in 2019—a series he dubbed ‘travelling paintings.’ Evoking the spirit of Marcel Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-valise (1935–41) and the Mail Art practices of the 1960s–1970s, his “SOS” paintings have evolved from their rigid initial concepts into more autonomous expressions. The continuous layering and reapplication of color, coupled with the dynamic creation and destruction of serial pictorial elements, challenge the formal boundaries of traditional painting within a limited spatial framework.

 

The work of Alexander Lieck (b. 1967, Berlin, DE) captivates through its deliberate use of process traces, which he composes with both authority and poetic nuance. His art invites independent observation, free from contextual constraints. As Lieck himself explains: “I don’t want to show anything with my art or prove anything. I’m not looking for the picture or the painting, but rather the imagination— overcoming the idea, overcoming oneself, working against oneself, and perhaps even repeatedly failing in the process.”

 

Through their diverse approaches, the artists in Sequence explore the dynamic visual nature of abstraction, uncovering inherent structures within the medium while engaging with conceptual and systematic processes. The exhibition presents a compelling reflection on the evolving relationship between painterly gesture, seriality, and abstraction. 

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Mute Track

SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacterial Yeast), polypropylene webbing, nylon thread, wooden growth tank on skates, 2 x 30 litre drums, 120 litre drum, Control box (Arduino & TEC Drive inverter), electric motor, rotating shaft and bearing, modified key clamp scaffold.Steel structure designed and built by Robert Mcleod Mechanism designed and built by Andrew Dixon 2025 SCOBY slowly grows in layers on top of the fermenting health beverage Kombucha, eventually becoming a fleshy, beige, wet, pungent and thick microbial mat. Bianca’s practice has focused on this material for the past nine years. She has grown it to enormous proportions and lifted or hoisted the SCOBY’s out of the growth tanks in installations with bespoke mechanisms or teams of performers. “Mute Track”’s version has grown over the last six months. It weighs 110 kilos and is shaped like a triangle, 180 cm long and 120 cm at the widest point. The SCOBY is sewn to a webbing structure which is attached to a rotating motor supported by a modified scaffolding structure.

The exhibition consists of a simple choreography. Starting from a resting position, the rotating motor gradually increases speed: the SCOBY goes from a slow circling to a faster movement that begins to stretch out its fleshy form. At 8 miles per hour, it appears to be flipping, from front to back. After stopping, the action begins again and is repeated on a loop during the exhibition.

As the exhibition progresses, the materiality of the SCOBY will change. The constant movement will bring tears and over time the SCOBY will become more dry and leather-like. There is a tension between it’s organic, fragile body and the robust metal mechanism that threatens to rip the SCOBY apart.

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General Expenses is pleased to announce Occidenterie, Marek Wolfryd’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. 

 

Next Monday, February 3 at 4pm, as part of Material Monday, Marek Wolfryd will present an installation featuring a new series of paintings, sculptures and digital media. These works, following extensive research, examine themes such as mass-produced media, consumer culture, copyright, and the mechanisms of creation and distribution in art. Work that highlights the tensions between economy and culture, providing an eloquent and challenging reading on the role of art in contemporary society.

 

The exhibition will remain open to the public until March 22, 2025.

 

Marek Wolfryd is a multidisciplinary artist that explores the intersection of artistic and economic narratives in the context of culture, history, and society. Through a wide range of media, such as process art, readymades, sculpture, installations, video, and performance, Wolfryd reviews cultural movements and their aesthetic discourses, generally delving into micro-historical phenomena surrounding these great chronicles.

Through long-term research projects, Wolfryd builds a conceptual framework that exposes the complexity of certain narratives that exist both within and outside the spheres of symbolic influence of the Western world. His works reflect and explore the means of mass production, consumer culture, copyright, authorship, and the mechanisms of art creation and distribution.

Marek Wolfryd graduated from the E.N.P.E.G. “La Esmeralda” and the 2020 generation of the ISP of SOMA. His work has been individually presented in spaces like the Museo Universitario del Chopo, General Expenses gallery, the Carrillo Gil Art Museum, Chalton Gallery (now Somers) in London, Tiro al Blanco gallery in Guadalajara and Swivel Gallery in New York. He has been part of group exhibitions in institutions such as the National Numismatic Museum, Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Alameda Art Laboratory, La Tallera, the Siqueiros Public Art Room, the Museum of the City of Querétaro, La Casa del Lago and the Museum of Arte Carrillo Gil, as well as in galleries and project spaces such as Karen Huber gallery, Salón Silicón, Salón COSA, Lodos, LLANO, Guadalajara 90210, Maleza Proyectos in Bogotá, Aoyama Meguro in Tokyo, Anonymus Gallery and Swivel Gallery in New York, John Doe Gallery and Human Resources in Los Angeles and CCA Espai in Mallorca.

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Parent Company is pleased to present Admissions, a solo exhibition of recent work by Jacob Jackmauh. Incorporating a range of references, from single-use disposable merchandise to public-facing design and architecture, Jackmauh examines the social and material symptoms of consumer-based manufacturing. His work appears in many forms, including found objects and replicated municipal fixtures. By sifting through novelty goods and seemingly prosaic materials, Jackmauh teases out latent visual patterns, embedded narratives, and implicit human aspirations.

In Admissions, the darkened exhibition space becomes a testing ground for Jackmauh’s sculptural vignettes. Including works such as a replica of an LED informational graphic found on R145 MTA trains, a discarded factory mold fragment for a giant fiberglass elephant, and an altered inflatable lawn decoration, Jackmauh presents artifacts salvaged from public life at various supply-chain stages and in shifting states of real and simulated metamorphosis.

 

Jacob Jackmauh (b. 1994 Boston, MA) lives and works in Queens, NY. His selected exhibitions include Centre d’exposition L’Imagier with Eolith, Gatineau, Canada; Bad Water, Knoxville, TN; International Objects, Brooklyn, NY; Eyes Never Sleep, New York, NY; Subtitled NYC, Brooklyn, NY; Art Lot, Brooklyn, NY; and Koganecho Area Management Center, Yokohama, Japan. Jackmauh’s work has been featured or reviewed in Believer Magazine, Burnaway, LVL3, and Artforum. He is the co-director of Art Lot in Brooklyn, NY, and received a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art, New York, NY in 2018

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Kidcore often comes alive in festive atmospheres-soft cloud pillow forts and cotton candy skies; cupcake frosting and carousel rides. Yet this symbolic ‘idealisation of innocence’ gradually fades as the structures of adult society take hold. As adults, we strive to grasp emotional connections at every festive gathering, constructing rituals unique to the repression of modernity by bridging individual experiences with collective memories, in search of spaces where emotional belonging and decentered nostalgia can manifest. Group show marks the inaugural chapter of this annual exhibition and performance program, opening on chiristmas eve and running until the Lantern festival, it reflects on the overlapping celebrations of this festive period. Featuring works by nine Sinophone artists and artist collectives, the show constructs a temporary affective community, delving into how festival rituals mediate the complex interplay intricate connections between memory, personal subjectivity, and cultural production.

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Blank Banquet is a new exhibition developed by Joel Cocks and Tarren Johnson, concerned with communication and thresholds of language.

At the heart of the exhibition is the deconstruction of Cornelia’s Room, Johnson and Cocks’ experimental operetta. The script addresses feminine desire and explores the potential of a message to gain its own force independent of the speaker or recipient.

The titular Cornelia is pursued by Ivor, who hopes they might meet on the occasion of the eclipse. Alas, his messenger, the Black Dragon, absconds with the messages, forcing Ivor to confront her directly. Framed as a Romantic Drama, it is Cornelia who constructs an independent meaning of the relationship from her own desire and emotion. Through this misdirected romance, Cornelia’s Room highlights the parallels between diplomatic and romantic correspondence.

Large-scale mosaics composed of photographs drawn from the artists’ archives reshape the gallery’s architecture and act as scenic backdrops for two durational performances.

Writer Olamiju Fajemisin’s reading of the script is played from speakers embedded within the mosaics and forms the soundtrack for the accompanying video work, Dripfeed Episode 6: Succubus. This episode continues Johnson’s and Cocks’ ongoing series that captures the boundary between creation and collapse, exploring how narratives fracture, evolve, and resist coherence. An actor’s headshot, plastered around the streets of Paris appears as a cosmic answer, amongst vignettes of pedestrians, lovers and shoppers. Edited to retain Fajemisin’s occasional line errors, Succubusrefuses to easily parse meaning, embellished with visual and linguistic obstructions.

Blank Banquet reflects on the containment and release of information, as well as the processes of alignment and separation underpinning every encounter.

*****

Tarren Johnson, an American artist and choreographer from Southern California, and Joel Cocks, an artist from Ōtautahi, have collaborated since 2016. Together, they have developed an evolving archive that includes performances in different states of completion, as well as photographs and videos from various productions and their personal lives. Johnson and Cocks recontextualise this material to create new works that explore fragmentation, cultural reproduction, and the peripheries of spectacle.

Their collective work has been presented at Systema, Marseille; Bologna.cc, Amsterdam; and Paris Internationale’s public programme; as well as Volksbühne, Berlin; HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Tanzhaus Zürich; Les Urbaines, Lausanne; Sophiensæle, Berlin; and Festspielhaus Hellerau. Tarren has performed at venues and festivals such as Festival d’Avignon; Festival d’Automne à Paris; Faurschou New York; Romaeuropa; Manifesta 11; and Art Basel. Together, they were laureates of La Becque’s 2021 program and the Cité Internationale des Arts residency in Paris in 2024. In March 2025, they will debut their play We Don’t Live Here Anymore at New Theater Hollywood in Los Angeles.

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Foreigners Are People Who Can See Spirits

In “Purity and Danger” (1966), Mary Douglas observes, “There is a comfortable assumption in the roots of our [Western] culture that foreigners know no true spiritual religion.” Her book examines how societies classify the world into binary categories of pure and impure to preserve social boundaries and, in doing so, portray the ‘other’ as both threatening and ‘extra-ordinary.’ Foreigners are often perceived as impure when they fail to conform to the internal logic of the society they are expected to integrate into.

When eight-year-old Nikita remarks, “Foreigners are people who can see spirits”—a statement that lends its title to Dejan Kaludjerović’s solo exhibition at Memphis, Linz—he captures, with striking clarity, the interconnectedness of such figures. Principles of equivalence and assimilation are defined here. His seemingly guileless observation reframes foreigners as beings with an almost otherworldly, auratic ability, at once challenging and corroborating the societal attraction and fear described by Douglas. Much like spirits, foreigners are defined by their displacement, bearing the burden of betraying their origins or no longer fully identifying with them. Nonetheless, living in a state of perpetual in-betweenness grants them a unique perspective: the ability to perceive the unseen and the unspoken.

Nikita’s statement ties directly to Kaludjerović’s long-standing project Conversations (2013–ongoing). In this body of work—which manifests as sound, performances, and sculptures—the artist employs a processual and discursive framework of interviews to engage with children from diverse socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. While the children’s responses may initially seem lighthearted, they ultimately expose unsettling undertones. Adopting the role of a listener, Kaludjerović collects concise yet incisive remarks on complex issues such as foreignness, social exclusion and inclusion, war, and more.

In this exhibition, the series ”Drawings from the Conversations“ (2016–ongoing), produced from interviews conducted in Vladikavkaz (Russia), Dnipro (Ukraine), and Tehran (Iran), transforms the first room of Memphis into a hall of mirrors. These stamp-like drawings prompt visitors to embark on a process of self-reflection. How can the ‘pure,’ uncensored imagination of a child carry ‘dangerous’ warnings, forcing us to confront uncomfortable realities such as war, trauma, and displacement? And how do the systems of values that both cause and emerge from such experiences actively inform the boundless yet fragile landscapes of their imagination?

This series of drawings builds upon a previous iteration of Conversations, originating from a 2014 project in Baku. That project incorporated a mix of three alphabets: Russian Cyrillic, Azeri (a Turkish dialect), and the Lezgi minority language of Azerbaijan. In both the earlier and current iterations, the intentionally cryptic design of the drawings reflects the artist’s view of language as often inaccessible or fragmented. By employing pastel colours and toy-like objects such as wooden letter blocks—associated with playtime and movable type printing—Kaludjerović points to the ideological matrices of families, schools, and media that imprint biases on children.

By engaging in conversations with them, he reaffirms Gilbert Simondon’s principle of individuation, which posits that the individual emerges through a dynamic process involving the material world and relational context. School children aged six to ten exist in a state of “metastability”—a condition full of potential yet not fixed into a definitive form. It is precisely this liminal state that children share with both foreigners and spirits, enabling them to articulate the unspeakable contradictions of the society they live in and to envision the unseeable in their dreams.

The fragile yet tangible presence of their voices in the drawings undergoes a shift in the immersive film Dreams Station (2024), encountered in the second gallery of Memphis. Here, the tragic reality of the aforementioned principle of assimilation comes into focus. Recorded just one month before the 2022 Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the children’s statements lose intensity in their materiality but gain profundity in substance. They resonate like whispers—ephemeral yet enduring—lingering in the enigmatic Dnipro-Lotsmanska Railway Station. This poignant setting sees the children, caught in the brutality of war, assimilated into spirits. As if witnessing an unsolicited rite of passage, their voices transform into a murmured lament that evokes a sense of injustice. The glorious future depicted by the large ceramic mosaic panel The Metallurgists, spanning an entire wall of one of the waiting rooms, clashes with the children’s articulated dreams, which seem destined never to depart from that station. The deliberate cinematic decision to reverse the footage amplifies this discord, as the fragile hopes move in a direction opposite to the retrofuturistic aspirations embodied in the mosaic.

Leaving us to wonder whether they speak from this world or another, Nikita’s and the other children’s voices echo across the exhibition space—not to haunt us, but to invite us to assume the position of foreigners. This ultimately means observing and listening to seemingly invisible and inaudible signs, and exercising the ability of premonition to take a stand in the present.

Giulia Colletti

 

Dejan Kaludjerović is a contemporary artist whose work spans painting, drawing, installation, and video. Known for exploring themes of identity, memory, consumerism, and socio-political dynamics, he often integrates childhood as a lens to address larger cultural and societal issues. His decade-long project Conversations uses interviews with children worldwide to examine universal and localized perspectives on dreams, fears, power, politics, etc.

He was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He gained an MA in visual arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 2004. For his achievements in visual arts, Kaludjerović was granted an honourable Austrian citizenship. In 2017 he cofounded Vienneese art and cultural organisation Verein K. Member of the advisory board of the KUNSTHALLE EXNERGASSE Vienna 2023-2026

The artist has exhibited at 1st Contemporary Biennial TEA 2024; 60th Venice Biennale, Vlatka Horvat’s project for the Croatian Pavilion; Whitechapel Gallery; Belgrade Cultural Centre; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein;  Galleria D’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo; 10th Bucharest Biennale,  Steirischer Herbst 21, Graz; Weltmuseum Wien; Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade; 6th Athens Biennale; 28th International Biennial of Graphic Art, Ljubljana; 55th October Salon Belgrade;

 

 

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Once a caterpillar has gorged itself with nutrients, it must find a suitable resting place. Clinging tightly to a branch, its skin buckles and splits like a torn seam. Its ruptured flesh hardens, forming into a protective shell. But if you were to open up a chrysalis (pupa) mid-transformation, you would not find a caterpillar or a butterfly writhing toward its next form but a soupy, amorphous substance. Before a butterfly can form, the caterpillar releases enzymes that digest its tissues, liquefying it from the inside out, expediting the cellular division necessary to create a set of wings, antennae, legs, eyes, and reproductive organs.

Charlotte vander Borght’s recent work undergoes a similarly grotesque transformation, merging the industrial and the organic. Her exhibition opens with a netted, pond-scum-colored sculpture from her ongoing series Someone, No One, Anyone started in 2019. Often inverted, mounted on walls, and nestled into architecture, works from the series seem to linger in limbo, silently awaiting metamorphosis. Initially inspired by New York subway seats, this series quickly became vehicles for abstraction, remodeling the prototype into mutable, tonal-shaped paintings. Using resin, fiberglass, urethane, and pigment, vander Borght continuously reshapes them into unrecognizable painterly variants.

Themes of manufacturing and industry, latent in the first metro seats, arrive with full force in vander Borght’s photography. Large-format, high-resolution images of industrial spaces and commercial infrastructure create the illusion of the gallery space extending outward––a vacant truck bed littered with remnants, an empty elevator where a cleaning woman pauses as if caught mid-duty. These are transient spaces built for transporting goods and individuals. Whether elevators, trucks, subways, or chrysalises, the world of Charlotte vander Borght is one of perpetual transformation.

Vertical forms like Metamorphosis (D) and Metamorphosis (G) appear both alluring and hostile. Their surfaces echo the painterly application of her previous sculpture, but their shapes are more nebulous, even anthropomorphic. In Metamorphosis (D), a slender mahogany figure hovers before a blank wall, while Metamorphosis (G) looms, foreboding like a mummy sealed in a smooth sarcophagus. Nearby, Metamorphosis (C) suggests a more deviant transformation––part silvery chrysalis, part cracked open drainpipe, seemingly abandoned mid-metamorphosis. Mounted against a massive photographic wallpaper of an enlarged apple tree, Metamorphosis (D) appears dwarfed, suspended like an ornament before the oversized fruit-bearing branches. The scene recalls a sun-faded billboard––an artificial nature looming behind a shadowy, shifting form.

Vander Borght’s latest sculptures push further into the anthropomorphic and biomorphic, reaching their most nightmarish forms yet. A monstrous purple-and-black figure, reminiscent of a corpse flower, erupts from the wall. The actual plant, known for its brief bloom and acrid stench, radiates heat—her version seems to burst through tar. Mounted at shoulder height and inverted, its central spear thrusts outward with malice. Its shiny belly appears wet as if covered by gasoline. It bulges like a snake digesting its prey.
Elsewhere, flora takes on another haunting presence. In one of the final rooms, a wall-mounted sculpture imitates a giant morning glory, its velvety petals peeling away from a deep black void. It pushes through the white plaster like a rogue mushroom, forcing itself through a crack in the sidewalk. Nearby, photo collages of the flower produce nauseating, psychedelic bouquets—dense with multicolored blossoms, singing the plant’s hallucinogenic properties.

––Lola Kramer

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Raque Ford infuses abstraction with narrative potential, producing layered works that explore how identity is crafted from the remnants of popular culture. Known for her distinctive way of working with materials, Ford troubles the line between formal registers, using reflective acrylic and transparent Mylar, welded steel chains, and laser-cut text. Her high-gloss surfaces are incised with spidery script that quotes from a range of sources: pop song lyrics, snippets of conversation, excerpts from fiction, and diaristic jottings. The exhibition Cry Baby fills the space of KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS with sculptural objects, and haunting language while collapsing the boundaries between private and collective, personal and social, opening new relational dimensions.

A new Wild Seeds publication #4, Cry Baby, collecting Ford’s poetry and writing accompanies the exhibition.

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‘The skin in itself is a poor uniform. Beautiful and porous. Prone to the cold. We wrapped an extra layer around the children, their bodies are the strongest and the easiest to wound. We gave them another layer of skin. The fur of plants. There were incantations we spoke as we worked at the loom, old phrases that seeped into the warp and settled like a whispering weft in the fabric’. – Text by Ditte Holm Bro

Using the concept of worlding as an integrated understanding of her own practice, Bülow works with sculpture and installation to explore the conceptual and material linkages of living and constructed matter.

Spanning wool, aluminium, soap, linen and bronze, the artist considers our relations to materials – as to our world – as continuously changing and endlessly becoming. With this in mind, her process explores the concept of corporeality across a wide field of inquiry, contending with the crafted body to reconsider the constructs of our habitual comprehension, and to diminish the distance between humanity and its ecological surroundings.

Organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate, human and natural simply become mutually constituting aspects of one same complex consciousness. Bülow’s work prompts ontological considerations of how we can perceive and engage with the world and with one another beyond one’s own skin, to understand the depth of our interconnectedness and the trajectory of our intertwined agencies. Through a combination of disparate, incongruous bodies, Bülow purposefully underlines the relevance of this sympoietic entanglement, revealing the unpredictable, imbalanced and immanent pathways through which the stances of our worldview can be reimagined.

Therese Bülow (b. 1996, Denmark) is a Danish artist, living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark. Bülow graduated with an MFA from Malmö Art Academy in Malmö, Sweden. Her work has been exhibited at Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art (Copenhagen, Denmark), ICA (Malmö, Sweden), Skånes Konstförening (Malmö, Sweden), Roskilde Festival (Roskilde, Denmark) and Uppsala Konstmuseum (Uppsala, Sweden) among others. Upcoming institutional shows include Rønnebæksholm (Næstved, Denmark) and Esbjerg Kunstmuseum (Esbjerg, Denmark). Bülow is currently part of the Anne Marie Carl Nielsen Programme for Art in Public Spaces (2024/2025).

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A Friend of a Friend of a Friend stands as a testament to the transformative power of embracing otherness.
Conceived as both a starting point and an internalized attitude, otherness has influenced every facet of the
exhibition—from the artists to the curator, from the spatial composition to the process of curation. This
exhibition thrives on trust, intimacy, tolerance, and a sincere curiosity for the other.
The works, emerging from this shared commitment to otherness, engage in a fluid dialogue with one
another. They overlap, merge, and cohabit, weaving a dynamic and constantly shifting narrative.
Unpredictable as always, otherness has entered the space alongside you—arm in arm.

̴ Cruz

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NEIL BICKERTON 

JOE CHEETHAM

JOSH FAUGHT  

JAME ST FINDLAY

GEORGE PLATT LYNES

KATIE SHANNON

ALESSANDRO TEOLDI

 

‘190. What’s past is past. One could leave it as it is, too.

 

191.  On the other hand, it must be admitted that there are aftereffects, impressions that linger after the external cause has been removed, or has removed itself. “If any one looks at the sun, he may retain the image in his eyes for several days,” Goethe wrote. “Boyle relates an image of ten years.” And who is to say this afterimage is not equally real? `indigo makes its stain not in the dyeing vat, but after the garment has been removed. It is the oxygen of the air that blues it.”‘

 

Nelson, Maggie. (2009) Bluets. London: Jonathan Cape. 

 

Kendall Koppe is delighted to present The sun and the sun’s reflection including works by Neil Bickerton, Joe Cheetham, Josh Faught, Jame St Findlay, George Platt Lynes, Katie Shannon and Alessandro Teoldi. In the quietness of the opening of a new year, as we start to emerge through the darkness of winter we have found ourselves reflecting on ideas of longing. From this melancholy we find ourselves longing for a different time. For unspoken understanding. For time to ponder. 

 

The urge to be in pursuit; desirous of a place – a person – a memory. Comforted by the force of our longing to either eclipse or preserve that which is longed for. 

 

A remembrance of sorts… Remembrances that are more Elysian than those same realities. And we hope that our longing- even when it must remain unrequited- brings us closer to that which we long for. 

 

Wanting is intrinsic to human nature.

We constantly find ourselves in pursuit of progress or something at the edge of our reach- our appetite for more, never sated. We are propelled onward by our desire to reach some distant and receding carrot of ‘enlightenment’ or ‘betterment’.

 

And so, with The sun and the sun’s reflection we seek a moment of stillness within this constant longing. Where we can see simultaneously the futility and the fruitfulness of this pursuit. 

That which is, and was, and will. 

To find beauty in this dichotomy of human experience and fortify ourselves for the Sisyphean task (whilst we imagine that Sisyphus was happy).

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The Title
of this show derives from my interest in food as a cultural identity marker. Potato, in Danish “kartoffel”, is immigrant slang for native Danes. Food is often the last stronghold of immigrant heritage. First, they give up traditional clothing, then their language, and finally, their food slowly changes, blending into the adopted culture over time. Now, Berliner Döner is a common sight in Copenhagen. Asger Jorn once wrote, “A painting’s favourite food is painting.” Like many of his peers, Jorn painted over flea market finds, showing that all art builds on the past, drawing on motifs, ideas, and stylistic elements from elsewhere. He wanted to shift the focus away from the individual and onto a cultural process. He often signed his modifications alongside the original author’s signature, creating a dialogue between artists across time. 

The Paintings
in this show bear my signature, but it is my assistant Nina who painted and signed them. Her eye for colour surpasses mine. Unlike Jorn’s flea market finds, these paintings were gifted to me by a friend. I asked Nina to paint over them, inspired by the original motifs, using only one or two colours while preserving the edges. The edges of a painting are where its history reads. Painters often look at paintings from the side, their cheeks almost brushing the wall. Beneath the new paint, the old motifs whisper through like a palimpsest.

The Crosses
arranged on the ground are Christmas tree stands from my collection. The collection grows every January. A cross usually hangs on a wall (like a painting), but these belong on the floor. Their subtle variations and layered meanings fascinate me. Bringing evergreen branches inside during solstice is an old pagan tradition, now repurposed by Christianity and capitalism. Like the paintings, these objects bear traces of the past while becoming something new – potato, potato. 

Magnus Frederik Clausen

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Solid Mesh explores the cold, innate qualities of everyday reality, challenging the feeling of powerlessness when facing structures and currents far beyond the scale of the individuals who encounter them. Mesh is innately solid, yet by exaggerating or dramatising its inherent qualities, a whole new world unfurls – one filled with material becomings and planetary complicities.

Has the world stopped, or have we just learned to move along its axes?

With his Performance series, David Gruber approaches the image as a space of active engagement, aligning the paintings in visual choreographies where the depicted subject matter – the textured surfaces of microphone mesh – becomes a surprising point of symbolic contention. The microphones function both as symbolic figures and material environments. They are embedded into abstract landscapes or create their own and, as such, bridge the phantasmagorical dimensions of performance and spectacle with the intense interiority of matter itself. Performance, in this sense, is not about the familiar and resonant but of the eschewed and otherworldly – the unimagined or rarely seen.

The paintings in the show, more than endpoints of creative endeavour or aesthetic experience, present scenes or stages for an active re-negotiation of their relationship with the viewer, eventually turning the “mic” onto the audience themselves. Meanwhile, the sculptures and drawings by Brishty Alam draw on the structural features of everyday reality to deliver material forms that act ever more autonomously – instilling their effects onto a broader aesthetic regime.

Alam’s work explores the material dynamics of shapes and designs associated with scientific equipment, like chemistry flasks and reaction chambers. With her processual approach to art-making, often referencing and reusing drawings, sketches, calculations, and graphs, her work gains a modular quality that resonates with her attention to the abstract and transformative potential of parts and particles. Another white solid references the mundane reality of chemical compounds, which seems tied more to stasis or immutability than wondrous transmutation. Yet, in their structural depths, these forms nonetheless reveal strange and compelling worlds, each with its own intricate poetics and sense.

Between the two practices, change comes gradually – from within solid, at times whimsically rigid, forms. As such, however, it expresses the possibility of transformation of even the most unyielding structures and systems – whether scientific codes of knowledge production or the societal regimes and attention economies that dictate who gets to speak and when. Solid Meshaccepts the cold embrace of material reality, in which one cannot help but feel small and powerless. Yet, just as the zoomed-in, micro-perspective of the microphone mesh in the Performancepaintings or the textures and fissures within Another white soliddance dangerously on the edge of becoming their opposites, the subtle voices of material landscapes – their fields of intensity – anticipate a shift in our own embodied perspectives and, through that, an alternative vision of what’s to come.

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Our daily lives are a weave of routines and rituals—an invisible structure that holds our existence together and becomes perceptible only when disrupted. Yet, the everyday is far more than a collection of habits; it is a political, poetic, and generative space.

Building on this idea, the ordinary should not be seen as mere self-evidence but as an aesthetic and cultural resonance chamber. The objects that fill our living spaces and the gestures and patterns that structure our days are much more than functional necessities. They carry layers of meaning, deeply interwoven with social, cultural, and political structures.

Walls, door handles, scissors, or crumpled bed linens—these artifacts of our everyday existence serve as starting points for an aesthetic and discursive exploration that transcends the obvious. The works reveal the invisible dynamics that shape our relationships with objects and spaces, reinterpreting everyday items to uncover their cultural, social, or utopian dimensions.

The exhibition intentionally situates itself within a setting evocative of domestic spaces—retreats that double as projection screens for societal and political questions. Bedrooms, living rooms, and bathrooms are not simply sites of intimacy but stages where power structures and social roles are enacted and negotiated. The notion that private spaces exist untouched by societal dynamics is unequivocally challenged. In an age where online communities, social media, and messaging platforms increasingly blur the boundaries between public and private spheres, it becomes evident how deeply even our most intimate spaces are embedded in global discourses.

As the feminist slogan from the 1960s reminds us: “The personal is political.” Questions of gender roles, divisions of labor, and family structures are never isolated but always part of a broader network of cultural norms and power relations. Similarly, our private spaces are often shaped by colonial and imperial narratives—whether through the appropriation of resources, the marginalization of alternative ways of living, or the imposition of Western norms as universal standards. In the interplay of tradition and progress, past and future, utopia and dystopia, the narrative of this exhibition unfolds. These contrasts are reflected not only in the selected works but also in the dynamics that shape our everyday lives. The artists engage with these tensions, revealing the layers and complexities of even the most ordinary aspects of existence. Moving between irony and poetry, deconstruction and reflection, the works interrogate —not as a neutral backdrop but as an active space that shapes us as we shape it.

This engagement with the ordinary reveals the transformative potential of everyday life: it is not a static framework but a dynamic sphere where societal values and identities are constantly renegotiated. How often, however, do we consciously question our routines to discover new perspectives on the familiar? As Roland Barthes put it, the everyday is not self-evident—it is a constant challenge, demanding to be read and reinterpreted.

Xenia Lesniewski

 

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HAGIWARA PROJECTS is pleased to present Ryota Nojima’s solo exhibition, “Sheltie,” starting Saturday, January 11. Nojima captures everyday occurrences and sensory experiences in his daily drawings. Fragments of memories and sensations born from this process take shape and find expression in his paintings.
In his creative process, Nojima avoids setting clear goals, instead embracing a flexible and intuitive approach akin to drawing. By engaging with his own memories and emotions and interacting with the canvas, he carefully selects lines, colors, and shapes. Even the traces of erasure contribute to the unique depth and richness of his works. Imagining this process adds another layer of enjoyment to experiencing Nojima’s paintings.
Rather than being bound by the question of “what is depicted,” Nojima’s works evoke a sense of liberation, unconfined by specific themes or messages. These paintings, which leave ample room for diverse interpretations, convey a sense of openness that brings viewers a refreshing impression and a sense of expansive possibilities.

Ryota Nojima: Born in Tokyo in 1987, Ryota Nojima graduated in 2012 with a degree in oil painting from the Department of Painting at Musashino Art University. His major exhibitions include: Knuckleball, Gallery Chosun (2023, Seoul), JUNE ART FAIR (2023, Switzerland) (solo), Culture Day, Pending Paintings, HAGIWARA PROJECTS (2022, Tokyo) (solo), Paris Internationale (2022, Paris), Hyo, OGUMAG＋ (2022, Tokyo), Shared Kitchen, Fujimidai Tunnel (2021, Tokyo) (solo), ○○ life, SET Project Space Lewisham (2021, London), Invisible Strings in Spring, Devening Projects (2018, Chicago), TWS-emerging – E-kun and E-san Make Art, But It’s Not Art, TWS Shibuya (2015, Tokyo) (solo).

 

 

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In her second solo exhibition at SETAREH, Escapism – My Body Is a Bridge, Maike Illies delves deeply into the complexities of the human form and the surreal landscapes that emerge from our most profound inner states. The exhibition is a visual narrative of escapism, exploring how we seek to distance ourselves from overpowering realities. The body, in all its corporeality and vulnerability, becomes both the subject and the metaphor. “The body is a bridge,” Illies asserts, linking the inner world of dreams, feelings, and memories to the external, concrete experiences of the self. In these works, parts of the figure—eyes, hands, organs—serve as both origins and destinations for the viewer’s gaze, grounding the abstract in the tangible, and inviting reflection on the ways we inhabit and transcend our physical forms.

These paintings offer a simultaneous macro and micro view of the body, zooming in on intimate, often unseen details while also stepping back to reveal it as a vast, living landscape. The viewer is drawn into an environment that feels at once alien and familiar, where space and time are fluid and shifting. With her vibrant, almost otherworldly palette and through abstract forms and vivid colours, Illies engages with a range of intense psychological states, creating a surreal energy that contrasts with the rawness of the sentiments they convey.

A key piece in the exhibition, Eingetrichtert, encapsulates the process of becoming—of absorbing and being absorbed, of allowing external forces to influence and shape the self. The image of a funnel, or the delicate curve of a martini glass, symbolises how we are infused with expectations, opinions, and intoxicating desires. These works speak to the overwhelming nature of contemporary life and the tendency to numb oneself in the face of it all, yet they also suggest moments of cleansing and renewal, such as Kläranlage, which represents Illies’ meditation on purification and transformation. Here, a reclining figure is abstracted and transformed into a landscape, serving as both a metaphor and a literal depiction of this process. The form becomes a „cleansing plant,“ where toxins—both physical and emotional—are filtered and restored. In this internal landscape, the act of purification becomes an inherent transformation that echoes the cycles of growth and healing in nature itself. The female body becomes both the vessel for renewal and the terrain within which it takes place, offering a space where feelings can be processed and released.

Illies’ work celebrates the full spectrum of human experience—especially those aspects often dismissed or ignored. In pieces like Ausbruch, the eruption of blood-like lava becomes a powerful metaphor for the release of pent-up energy, suggesting that catharsis is not only necessary but ultimately liberating. These outbursts, intense and raw, offer a moment of freedom, signalling that what is often hidden or suppressed within must be allowed to surface in order to heal. In Feuerkorb, she opens her ribcage, revealing her inner workings—an act that exposes the deep forces at play. Rather than simply a release, this gesture also symbolises a process of drawing from these internal states, channeling them into energy that fuels personal transformation, turning vulnerability into strength. 

Finally, in Endlich, a pair of entwined hands reflects the deep human need for connection and touch, while also hinting at the vulnerability that comes with opening up to another person. The repetition of this gesture alludes to the cyclical nature of relationships: trust, affection, love, and the inevitable pain that accompanies these experiences. Illies’ work opens a space for these powerful states, embracing them in all their intensity and messiness. 

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Text by Cédric Fauq 

Defying Gravity

The first time I visited Capc in Bordeaux, where I currently work, was during the Christmas holidays in 2013. I was staying a few days with the parents of my roommate in Vincennes, Elsa. At that moment, I was just days away from starting an internship at the Centre for Art and Landscape on the Vassivière Island, assisting with dismantling an exhibition by Fernanda Gomes and installing one by Sheela Gowda (“Open Eye Policy”). A few weeks later, I would begin another internship at the galerie Crèvecœur, at 4 Rue Jouye-Rouve, which was showing, at the time, Renaud Jerez (“Adideath”). I had managed to negotiate skipping some of the bachelor degree classes to be able to work. 

During that first visit to the Capc, one of the exhibitions on display was a solo by the American artist Michael E. Smith, invited by Alexis Vaillant. It was held in the side galleries on the ground floor. By then, I was not familiar with the artist’s practice and I wouldn’t immediately register his name. But impressions of his exhibitions lingered with me—particularly that of a baby car seat suspended on the wall, refracted by a decomposed, multicolored halo of light. By the end of 2014, I would encounter his work again—this time at Crédac in Ivry, in an exhibition curated by Chris Sharp (“THE REGISTRY OF PROMISE 3 – The Promise of Moving Things”). It felt like recognizing someone’s face without being able to recall where and when we had met.

One of the works he exhibited there was installed in the art center’s entrance, on the ceiling: both the first and last piece of the show. Composed of a tangle of cables and computer connectors, its tentacle-like appearance reminded me of Marvel’s Venom. Chris Sharp wrote about Michael E. Smith’s work that it «emanates an eerie impression of the human body, something akin to possession.»

The following year, in 2015, as I moved to London and started another internship with Vincent Honoré at the David Roberts Art Foundation, several works by Michael E. Smith were included in the group exhibition “Albert the kid is ghosting.” In a space on the outskirts of the central galleries, a bicycle frame laid on the ground, at the end of which was attached a bottle of pesticide (“Spectracide: Wasp & Hornet Killer”): a prototype for an extinction machine. While Googling “Vincent Honoré Michael E. Smith,” I came across an interview Vincent had given to Trébuchet magazine in 2014. To the final question, “Who do you think is the artist to watch at the moment and why?” he answered: ” At the moment, I am particularly looking at the sculptures and videos of Michael E. Smith. They translate a sense of loss and ruin which echoes, often with humour, our current state of idealogical uncertainty.”

This was followed by several “direct” encounters with the artist’s work (at KOW in Berlin, Modern Art in London, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and MoMA PS1 in New York), and a growing—though probably illusory—sense that I could decipher his language. I noticed recurring motifs, such as animals: stuffed, dried, skinned. Sometimes recognizable (a parrot, a pufferfish), other times transformed or abstract (columns of wings, furry cubes); the use of domestic furniture (sofas, chairs, tables); and manipulation of light—its removal (primarily) but also its addition (via lasers). Always present was a sense of life within the inert, and at times, a “pause” or “glitch”, a spasm.

For the 13th Baltic Triennial—on which I worked—I installed several works by Michael E. Smith at the CAC in Vilnius. The installation protocols, coupled with a FaceTime session with the artist and his assistant, helped me understand the importance he placed on balance, distance, gravity, and breathing (between the works themselves but not only). This installation experience coincided with the writing of the first text I wrote about his work—the only one to date. I then attempted to draw a parallel between the experience of flying over Detroit under snow and his exhibitions.

In recent years, several of Michael’s works have particularly struck me. One of them was a Pikachu plush toy stuck to a metal bar behind a window. A floating evicted Pokémon, left out in the street, seemingly ready to do anything to get back inside. This was at Paris Internationale in 2019, before the lockdowns. Another was two overturned kayaks that resembled, in the dim gallery of Modern Art in London, cetacean bones. I visited this exhibition with my then-boss, Sam Thorne. It was the first time I met Mike in person. As he hovered his hands over one of the two overturned kayaks, a heavy engine noise began, transforming into a high-pitched whale cry as his hand moved toward the opposite end of the vessel’s hull.

These past few days, I’ve spent several hours with Mike, often late into the night. Between conversations about the exhibition we were assembling and our lives, he shared music, images, and GIFs, as well as the name of an artist I didn’t know—Jim Drain—who now teaches his son. Memories of video games surfaced—particularly of a creature from the Mario universe called “Pokey.”  A cartoon I hadn’t known (“Beavis and Butt-Head”) made me realize we weren’t of the same generation. The presence of basketballs also reminded me that I hadn’t touched one in ages (while images of works by David Hammons and Jeff Koons jostled in my mind). One evening, he also showed me an Instagram reel that had recently struck him. It featured a monkey on a leash playing fearlessly with a threatening cobra. The video was captioned, “When You Just Don’t Care About Problems Anymore 🤣. ” The reel’s tagline read: “Unbothered.”

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This right here is not weathered by time, it’s still sleek and chromelike. It’s held many different meanings to different people. If a plasma screen shows the same image for long enough, it burn in, it stays there, a VH1 logo in the corner-mounted tv at a grill joint. Here there is no such memory, things don’t stay around or leave marks, they just pass. Discourse relies on a shared frame of reference, you’d never speak anything in full, most things are already known. Even when I string vowels to form -honestly- fully original words, people relate them to the fall of some political figure, or the scene at this and that café in some central-european metropolis. Why would I be talking about that? I want to talk from where we are here now, I’ll shape a dog’s mouth with
my thumb and pointer, illustrate new ideas with old imagery. Ownership is transferred at the point of sale, lineage is traced through narrow streets and carved in vaulted church ceilings. What we both know might come from something untrue. That is, it’s easier to remember a story if it’s funny, and the world is big and boring.

– Fritjof Krabbe Nørretranders

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A late – albeit necessary – review of Trevor Yeung’s collateral exhibition, Courtyard of Attachments, presented in the 60th Venice Biennale.

We stumbled upon Hong Kong in Venice’s courtyard in the sestiere of Castello and glimpsed, through open gates, an unusual fountain: a proto-pyramid of fish tanks, sans fish. The stacked, water-filled glass aquariums resembled a miniature, multi-tiered pastoral capitalist landscape. My interest was piqued. We popped in before visiting the Arsenal.

The fountain – Pond of Never Enough, Salty Lover (Venice) – took brackish water from the Grand Canal of Venice and filtered clean water back into the lagoon. This piece was flanked by pots of lotus plants, titled Mx. Trying-My-Best. By the chillier month of November, the plants had mostly faded, leaving only a few stray leaves as traces. Earlier in the exhibition, the lotus plants flourished in pots full of industrial waste and solar panels, exemplifying their resiliency.

Inside the gallery, we encountered Yeung’s nine remaining pieces. The most striking in both size and mood was Cave of Avoidance (Not Yours). We entered a darkened room lit by the purple glow of bubbling aquariums – again, sans fish. We stared at our reflections in the mirror-backed tanks, imagining it was we who inhabited them, as Yeung intended.

There is something familiar about the constructed heterotopic space of a pet shop or a seafood restaurant that Yeung referenced with his fish tanks – and not just for Hongkongers. The allure of colored fluorescent lights refracted in watery aquascapes is something of memories and dreams … or a scene from a Wong Kar Wai film that now resides in a cultural memory far beyond the city of Hong Kong. I wish I could say that I’ve been to Hong Kong to experience more closely what Yeung evoked, nonetheless I too feel some attachment to these aquascapes. Michel Foucault used the term heterotopia to describe spaces that are “other,” spaces that mirror and invert the world around them – sort of worlds within worlds. The garden was a prime example for Foucault: “The garden is the smallest parcel of the world, and then it is the totality of the world.” Vivariums – these little enclosed environments designed to replicate a natural habitat – would qualify.

Each aquatic installation was designed, constructed, and maintained with precision throughout the exhibition, creating a persistent feeling of control that accompanied the dreaminess. In an instant, a sort of naiveté about these spaces is revealed. How quaint it is that we humans create these idealized microcosms, mirroring nature yet wholly dependent on their caretakers. Quite a reversal in the dynamics of power.

In Courtyard of Attachments, Yeung invited us “to consider the emotional disconnect and power dynamics that characterize society today.” Admittedly, it took some time for this to click. In this world of self-contained systems, each system still relied on another, even if, at first glance, each appeared independent: the fountain, dependent on the water from the canal to function; the lagoon, on the water filtered from the fountain; the aquariums, on those who cleaned them regularly to prevent buildup. In nature, it is the opposite—as we are finding out the hard way, witnessing the increasingly extreme effects of climate change. Despite humans’ attempts to yoke nature, we are at its mercy and must play by its rules. These constructed environments devoid of fish confronted us… was it a warning? A harbinger? A call to action? Perhaps all of the above.

Yeung gently led us into the violet cave, compelling us to realize how connected we are to the world around us. Perhaps it was a subtle nudge toward embracing a more holistic, environmental perspective—one that resonates with the philosophy of deep ecology, which emphasizes the intrinsic value of all living beings and our interconnectedness with the planet.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                          Olivia Gilmore

 

Installation view of Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice Commissioned by M+, 2024 Photo: © Ela Bialkowska, OKNO studio

Installation view of Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice Commissioned by M+, 2024 Photo: © Ela Bialkowska, OKNO studio

Rolling Gold Fountain (detail), installation view of Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice, 2024 Commissioned by M+, 2024 Photo: © Ela Bialkowska, OKNO studio

Installation view of Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice Commissioned by M+, 2024 Photo: © Ela Bialkowska, OKNO studio

Installation view of Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice Commissioned by M+, 2024 Photo: © Ela Bialkowska, OKNO studio

Installation view of Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice Commissioned by M+, 2024 Photo: © Ela Bialkowska, OKNO studio

Installation view of Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice Commissioned by M+, 2024 Photo: © Ela Bialkowska, OKNO studio

 

Cave of Avoidance (Not Yours) (detail), installation view of Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice, 2024 Commissioned by M+, 2024 Photo: © Ela Bialkowska, OKNO studio

Cave of Avoidance (Not Yours) (detail), installation view of Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice, 2024 Commissioned by M+, 2024 Photo: © Ela Bialkowska, OKNO studio

 

 

 

 

 

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Espace Maurice
Friday, January 17th  – Saturday, January 25th
“Flowers waiting  Phantoms, Phantasmal surface  of earth under blue old space” 
Jeremy Richer-Légaré, Fiona Ruth, Phil Tremble
Curated by Marie Ségolène C Brault

9

Flowers waiting,
Phantoms,
Phantasmal surface
Of earth under
blue old space (1)

This time of year, I sleep an inordinate amount. This is not a unique phenomenon. Most aren’t impervious to seasons, and God knows this might last until spring. I sleep with a book entitled Torpor at the end of my bed. A Kraus’ book that is not at all  about mammalian hibernation or metabolic preservation (although perhaps metaphorically that may apply, I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet). I see the word every morning, greeting me far later than my alarm. Time contracts. Sunlight is scarce. But from my bed, night time doesn’t darken all the way. Moonlight spreads itself onto the snow – it’s just a whole lot of blue. Nothing escapes it. 

Ploughmen wait just like me. Earth’s frozen from here to the Midwest and the Prairies. All I can think about is leaving. You know the way birds conserve energy in flight? Their body temperature goes down, 12 degrees below average. All I can do is stay put. When I wake up at 3 for water, it isn’t clear what’s the phantom – how deep’s the snow. Some birds do stick around, you know. I wonder what great truth could be extracted from their song. Like Pelican’s blood, by which melody could I be revived. 

(1) Jack Kerouac, “Beginning With A Few Haikus Some of Them Addresses in The Book”, Poems All Sizes, 1992. 

***

FIONA RUTH (b.1998, Montreal, QC) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Montreal. Her paintings are meditations on lived experiences, dreams and imagined scenes. The work blurs the line between figuration and abstraction focusing on emulating tranquility and expansiveness. The back and forth of layering and paint removal results in a call and response technique that guides the work to resolution. Fiona Ruth received her BFA in Art History and Studio Arts from Concordia University (2022).

JEREMY RICHER-LÉGARÉ (b.1995) is an artist based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal, Quebec. Primarily through painting and drawing, his practice tends towards process based methods with a particular interest for temporally elusive imagery and narrative. Jeremy is currently completing his BFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University.

PHIL TREMBLE lives and works in Montréal (Tiohtià:ke). He holds a bachelor’s degree in Studio Arts from Concordia University (2020), and is currently completing a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture at the Université de Montréal. His practice, initially sculptural and installation-based, is now mainly concerned with drawing. His work has been featured in the exhibitions such as:  Art.Art (Galerie Transmission, Montréal, 2019), Un point de chute (L’Oeil de Poisson, Québec, 2021), Lysis (Espace Maurice-hors site, Montréal, 2024).

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A series of paintings shows simple views of walls seen up close, repeated scenes of the painter’s observation of the flattenings of natural light on different surfaces: bricks, stones, or slate sets. Fixated on a single motif and diffused through repetition, they seem to display cornered paintings, firstly because they literally show angles, but also because of a specific positionality in which we imagine the painter to be in, in front of the humbling poverty of the elected subject. The chosen portions of the walls show most often the garnished architectural ornaments at their base, the ones that confront any passerby in daily wanderings. Sometimes rounded, they can look like plump bas-reliefs, sitting down the building on the street with refinement. The brushed light gives them a delicacy, and the sensuality of their shape, together with the candor of the subject, provides the feeling of a faux decor for a theatrical set design. This mise-en-scène makes them almost tasteful, almost as if those stratifications were the ones of a pastry, as in those “Cake or Fake?” videos, where all sorts of perceived objects open up as layer cakes. René Kemp’s textured visibility gives flesh to a modest ordinary, painted images that are comforting yet strangely unsettling.
The paintings are done quickly, without aftereffects, maybe since their earnestness lies precisely in their beginnings, and anything added on top would be insincere. Similar to the potent feeling of vanity procured by a successful still life painting, the realism of Tip Jar Mud Flap heightens up the senses of what lies already there, reaching disturbance of the tricking real from the start.

Alongside the wall pieces, the other series that compose the exhibition appear with a stronger sense of composure: bare canvases, unprepared and unpainted, void but for a sewn-in pocket. Contra the impressionistic tones of the wall pieces, those paintings-as-objects prefer to hang in their exteriority. In this reading, their dryness is expressionism, an inversion in line with their presentation as paintings, just as if they got turned inside out to meet the real world. Rigidified, more austere and formalist, the paintings seem at first glance to treat repression inside a determined history of the medium, maybe to leave a humorous back door open: their tailor-made “pocket” give the paintings the look of well-ironed shirts, formal attire for a good day at the office.

While both series assert their position differently, they join in treating the act of revelation as a presence to oneself: in both, we arrived even before starting the journey. Opening up in their muted feelings, the apparent simplicity of the paintings stages all kinds of deceptive games based on a reality that never seems so fake than when it is presented in the stability akin of a digital rendering. Tip Jar Mud Flap betrays a sense of evident presence to heighten a taste and consistency, producing discrete epiphanies, imitated second takes to make them look like first ones.

Text by Paolo Baggi

 

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“I am for the art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper,” Claes Oldenburg wrote in his statement I AM FOR in 1961. Licking and peeling, this was a particular brand of realism that he and his fellow Pop-travelers were interested in. It was grounded in the common experience rather than a viewing of the few, seeking to create an art as “heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.” In keeping with his promise, he opened The Store a few months later, sculpting and selling objects typical of a New York deli just a few blocks away in the East Village.

This mimesis of the art of commerce has its own much longer history, dating back at least to the proto-Pop art of early 17th-century still lifes mastered by Dutch and Flemish artists like Clara Peeters. As artists were experiencing their own proletarianization for the first time in art history, they ventured into new markets and pioneered art as middle-class consumption (albeit at much lower wages than before). To attract merchants who were not trained in classical humanism but in the complexities of rapidly expanding global trade, references to ancient storytelling were dropped in favor of a subject their new patrons understood intimately: the art of arranging products. With resemblance taking precedence over narration, these merchant-patrons could thus view a painting and experience the infinite pleasures of their own expertise, indulging in the intricacies of identifying goods from a world that had suddenly become so much bigger than it had ever been.

So small objects come to stand in for a big world indeed, the right scale providing a measure of reality. What we still cannot seem to agree on is whether these arrangements are creating grand windows onto the world or miniature mirrors of it. Are we looking in or out, North or South, up or down? As the frame usurps its content, as resemblance gives way to reflection, we might lose our orientation only to remember that all we have to do is squint.

Text by Pujan Karambeigi

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Press Release by Sophia Nava:

 

Bianca Barandun (*1984) is the prize-winner of the Bündner Kunstverein Art Prize 2024. She grew up in Rodels and today commutes between Essen and Graubünden. In the space filling installation “Ghost Note” in the Labor of the Art Museum Graubünden Barandun is concerned with memory and language.

While she used the memories of others as source material in her work “Silos” in the Annual Exhibition 2023, the artist now drew on her own resources for “Ghost Note”: Her observations of the birds in the garden of her parents’ house in Rodels. This resulted in a collection of different materials, with which Barandun created a new series of sculptures made of wood.

In music theory a “Ghost Note” is a muted note used as an upbeat for the following one, and as such is decisive for the dynamics of the entire piece. It is a build-up, is at once there and also not there. Bianca Barandun is interested in the oscillation between presence and absence. That is what her interest in memories is all about. Just as in a piece of music, narratives are shaped by concentrations and accelerations – depending on how fresh the memory still is.

Barandun transfers this concept into the exhibition space in a poetic way. When one moves around between the wooden sculptures, one senses a rhythm: In varying intervals elongated wooden frames are placed alongside each other on the floor. It is these intervals that determine the rhythm of the space. Again and again empty spaces appear in the installation as protagonists: as an interval between the objects, as a negative space within the frames, as a hollow space, as a circle on the surface of the wall. They are a space-creating element between remembering and forgetting, between presence and absence.

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Debt
Text by Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas

Repaying is a duty, but lending is an option?

         A man may surely claim his dues:
         But, when there’s money to be lent,
         A man must be allowed to choose
         Such times as are convenient![1] 

Such is a passage from Lewis Carroll’s poem, ‘Peter and Paul’—a lengthy, rhymed narrative about two characters who are bound together through debt. This loaded term and broad concept can be examined from various perspectives, including its emotional, social, historical, and economic dimensions.

What is debt, in its most elementary sense?
A promise of repayment. The concepts of promise and value are at the heart of the creditor-debtor relationship. Friedrich Nietzsche describes it as ‘the oldest and most personal relationship there is’—a relationship in which ‘person met person for the first time, and measured himself person against person’.[2] According to him, the vital task of a community or society has been to produce individuals capable of making promises—those who can stand as guarantors for themselves within the creditor-debtor dynamic, capable of honouring their debts. This entails constructing a memory for the individual, one that secures the ability to keep promises. Such a memory involves the production of a conscience. It is, therefore, within the realm of debt obligations, Nietzsche argues, that subjectivity begins to take shape.

Debt is closely linked to temporality: one who keeps a promise assumes the role of being answerable for their future—a future that is always unpredictable, no matter how near or distant. If debt points to the absent (the what is not), it simultaneously holds potentiality (the what could be): the insufficiency inherent in the lack carries within it an active potential, unfolding through both possibilities and impossibilities. It was exactly such potentialities that interested me when selecting the artists and their works for the exhibition.

What is debt?
A ‘perversion of a promise’, according to David Graeber.[3] Contemporary society is shaped by promises—of security, community, and care—and it is often governed by economic contracts, historical injustices, and societal expectations. The economic aspect of debt—financial debt—is an inescapable, daily reality for many working under the precarious conditions of the art world: those living from one honorarium and commission to the next, barely staying above zero. Who, then, is privileged enough to be able to operate as part of a system that is so classist?

With declining wages and pensions largely deferred until later in life, access to credit and personal investment portfolios have been proposed as a tool, a form of investment in the self, which can compensate for changing social and economic conditions. The right to (higher) education, housing, forms of social protection, and social services has been redefined as a privilege that is conditional on the acceptance of credit and private insurance. Debt, therefore, operates as a mechanism intrinsically linked to control and discipline—it organizes social life and intensifies mechanisms of exploitation and domination between the owners (of capital) and the non-owners (of capital). Additionally, deficit spending forms the foundation of all modern nation states.[4]

Debt is such a charged word, since it is situated in the field of morality, between one’s responsibilities, obligations, and feelings of guilt. Both obligation and guilt, as ‘the common condition of those who feel they are in debt’, can, according to Nietzsche, be traced back to the very materialistic idea of debt itself.[5] It is the German word Schuld that captures this duality, encompassing both meanings: the moral concept of Schuld (guilt) originates from the tangible notion of Schulden (debts).

As the curator of the members’ exhibition, I encountered a clear asymmetry between myself and the nearly three hundred artists who applied to the open call.[6]
Symbolically, debt represents any form of imbalance.
To what extent, then, can it be argued that the concept of debt is the essence of it all?

Ontological debt entails a fundamental indebtedness inherent in the very nature of human existence (we owe and are owed simultaneously); it is incurred by the very act of being born into the world. Here, our existence is not self-sufficient but shaped and sustained by various—familial, social, cultural, and ecological—reciprocal relationships. Debt is, therefore, also about recognizing the contributions of past generations and the interdependencies with those yet to come.
Between the fragility and persistence of the (power) structures that bind us together, the exhibition responds to the topic of debt in its material—largely sculptural, using a variety of materials and approaches—written and spoken forms. Performative readings, as part of the opening event and on another evening over the course of the exhibition, are an integral part of the show’s narrative.

Artists: Gleb Amankulov, Benjamin Hirte, David L. Johnson, Tammy Langhinrichs, Artur Schernthaner-Lourdesamy, Miriam Stoney, Magdalena Stückler, Frank Wasser

Curator: Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas

With the generous support of Tectus Risk Management, Thaddaeus Ropac Galllery Salzburg and the Slovenian Cultural Information Centre Vienna.

Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas (she/her, b. Slovenia) is an art historian, independent curator and writer. From 2019 to 2023, she was director of the ULAY Foundation, where she was responsible for various (curatorial) projects related to issues of the artist’s legacy. A selection of her recent curatorial projects includes exhibitions at SOPHIE TAPPEINER (Vienna, 2024), Gregor Podnar (Vienna, 2024), Schauraum MuseumsQuartier Wien (Vienna, 2023/2024), Sector Gallery 1 (Bucharest, 2023), Eva Kahan Foundation (Vienna, 2023), HOW Art Museum (Shanghai, 2022/2023), Georg Kargl Fine Arts as part of the Curated by Festival (Vienna, 2022) and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 2020/2021). Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas is a contributor to Artforum and her writing has been published in Frieze and ArtReview. She recently held a visiting professorship at die Angewandte, University of Applied Arts Vienna. She lives and works in Vienna.

Footnotes:
[1] The poem, ‘Peter and Paul,’ in chapter 11of Lewis Carroll’s novel Sylvie and Bruno (1889), contrasts a whimsical fairy tale with serious social commentary. Characters engage in discussions about religion, philosophy, and morality within the context of Victorian Britain. The book can be accessed via Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/620/pg620-images.html
[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 45.
[3] David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), 391.
[4] Through public debt—the amount of money governments owe to external (foreign governments or international financial institutions) or domestic creditors—entire societies become indebted. In Austria, the discussion about managing public debt and financial instability is a major topic of concern. In October 2024, the newspaper Der Standard reported, under the title ‘Excessive Debt: How Will Europe Punish Us if We Flout the Rules?’, about the fact that ‘Austria’s incoming government will have to consolidate between two and three billion euros a year in order to meet the requirements of the EU debt pact. Those who break the rules must pay the penalty. But there are also loopholes.‘ András Szigetvari, ‘Zu hohe Schulden: Wie straft uns Europa, wenn wir auf die Regeln pfeifen?’, Der Standard, October 17, 2024. Translation by author.
[5] Elettra Stimilli, The Debt of the Living: Ascesis and Capitalism (New York: State University of New York Press, 2017), 138; see also Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 161.
[6] Although I had been part of juries before, I had never been the sole person involved in the selection process for an open call with so many applicants. A significant number of artists responded to my open call textual prompt, in which I invited a brief response (maximum 150 words, in English or German) to the following question: “How does the meaning of debt—on a personal or societal level—relate to your work?” The artists provided meaningful, intimate reflections that gave me much to contemplate and that also somehow framed the show. My lengthy selection process was a privileged experience, albeit it one accompanied by feelings of responsibility and guilt—knowing I could have curated thirty very different exhibitions in response to the topic. I hope—and, to an extent, feel obliged—that future collaborations will emerge from this experience, especially with the artists I was unable to work with on this occasion. The artists who applied invested their time and resources into their applications, yet were not selected, leaving them in a state of both debt and being owed. To what extent do I owe them?

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O O is a combination of letters, two marks drawn on paper that stare at the viewer like bewildered cartoon eyes. They repeat the shape of a hat placed on the gallery floor and the yellow centre of a daisy. They form an exclamatory or sighing sound, and a circle – a symbol of enlightenment. O is an open mouth. O is a hieroglyph referring to the eye, symbolising sight. The gaze of an idiot sees what is, without preconceptions, purely in wonder. It has the patience to stop and look again.

While preparing works for Photographic Gallery Hippolyte, Mikko Kuorinki photographed daisies, melted beeswax, collected round objects, and bowed thin wood into circles. He studied the history of Shaker furniture, listened to artist lectures, watched YouTube tutorials, and waxed pink awnings. He traced the relationships between shapes and materials by touching and watching, observing and moulding. Folding tables have been arranged into islands and clusters. Complex collections of objects accumulate atop them, only to be dismantled and cleared away without a trace. Some areas of shadow have been illuminated, while others remain dim.

The collection of works in the gallery combines processed and unprocessed objects and photographs. Materials meet, overlap, blend, and shape one another. The photograph transforms into an object among objects. Straw hats are filled with beeswax, and the spheres are the size of an eyeball or a pupil. The space is a central partner to the works, with the final form of the exhibition defined in relation to it. While the combination of materials may appear random, it has undergone a complex dialogue with other materials and the artist’s wondering gaze. The almost performative choreography that preceded the exhibition remains hidden from the viewer. Instead, visitors encounter the presence of the objects in all their complexity.

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The exhibition Aurora Vessels explores a deeply empathic, communal feeling, one that anticipates the emergence of queer ecologies and shared narratives throughout current times. This evolution weaves together into a communal myth – an ever-evolving foundation that grounds the identities and collective imagination of queer entities.
Myth, by its very nature, is paradoxical: it is both a foundational tale and a falsehood. Myths are stories outside empirical truth that nevertheless offer frameworks for understanding profound, often inexplicable phenomena, frequently invoking the supernatural. Through this lens, myths ground the formation of selves and communities by providing symbolic structures that transcend empirical truths, yet capture essential, shared realities.

Devdutt Pattanaik argues that myths “capture the collective unconsciousness of a people”*; they reflect deep-rooted beliefs about variant sexualities that may be at odds with repressive social mores.

Myths are making politically queer claims on behalf of nature and time.
The fluid potentials of mythology destabilize hegemonic frameworks.

The gallery is divided into two “time capsules,” each embodying an interconnected approach to queer manifestations. The first time capsule draws on ancient myths, reinterpreting mythic tales as open dialogues that speak to the fluidities of our own time. By reclaiming and queering these mythologies, the artists explore the timelessness of queer experiences – highlighting how echoes of these ancient stories remain potent guides for contemporary understandings of self and other.

In contrast, the second time capsule foregrounds the struggles and systemic oppressions that have shaped queer existence in our contemporary world. Through nuanced reflections on social marginalization, censorship, and identity politics, these works probe the forces that continue to constrain queer lives. Yet even here, myths become beacons of defiance and resilience. In this context, they emerge not only as a form of cultural heritage but as tools of survival, inviting us to reimagine worlds where queer people exist beyond persecution and erasure.

In “Aurora Vessels,” queer mythology emerges as both a historical and revolutionary tool, disrupting entrenched binaries of fact and fiction, nature and culture, past and present. By drawing on decentralized narratives of socially repressed queerness, this exhibition seeks to amplify voices and stories that have been silenced, finding new vessels for their re-emergence. In this context, mythology is not simply a repository of ancient lore but a dynamic medium through which queer identity continues to evolve and be reimagined.

*Devdutt Pattanaik: The man who was a woman and other queer tales of Hindu lore, 2002.

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b/w
Emma Hummerhielm Carlén & Jochen Lempert
Curated by Christine Dahlerup for Salon 75
15.12.2024 – 01.02.2025

Housed in a storefront, the architecture of Salon 75 carries traces of its former life as a shop. It is easy to imagine how merchandise was once displayed in the bay window, catching the attention of passersby. Inside, the room is framed by peculiar wall molding with recessed, tilt spotlights that may have been used to direct the gaze onto different objects. In the duo exhibition b/w, the delicate placement of Emma Carlén’s sculptural works and Jochen Lempert’s photographs alternately foreground or divert the circumstances of the space.

Carlén’s sculptural installations turn the logic of display inside out. Upon arrival, one encounters the back of Tilted slabs (2024), a large frame that leans against the window, supported by four cast miniature stools. The slab partly obstructs the view of what is inside the exhibition space. From the outside, passersby can only glimpse how the image surface – a paper sheet – neatly folds upon itself, becoming its own frame. Once inside, the front reveals itself as a blank image plane akin to a projection surface wherein the gaze can wander, and afterimages can appear. Elsewhere, on a table, Spots (2024) float in space like a dozen eyes removed from their sockets, glancing back at the ceiling. Above the bay window, another blank image plane, Untitled (2024), draws attention to a cavity in the room that might have passed unnoticed.

Where the installation of Carlén’s sculptures frames the space, Lempert’s distinctively frameless, black-and-white silver prints are mounted directly onto the wall. Yet their framelessness seems to emphasize that a photograph is already, in itself, an act of framing. It cuts and crops in the field of perception. As the walls of the exhibition space become a temporary frame for the photographs and photograms, formal aspects of the motives begin to converse with the texture of the hosting walls and pick up formal qualities of the space. Miniscule mussels captured on the light-sensitive sheet in Shells (photogram) (2024) evoke the feel of the carpet – or the other way around. A dove, Martha (2005), seems to mediate between the exhibition space and her chosen habitat in the city street. In another frame, a snail thrones on a packet of cigarettes. The white whorl shines in the darker landscape, adding yet another spotlight to the room.

If Lempert, a biologist by training, typically directs his lens at flora and fauna, the exhibition b/w foregrounds other aspects of his oeuvre through photographs that engage with a more abstract and sculptural syntax. The critic laughs (2024) – a mini print that invites a closer, more intimate view – makes familiar parts of the human body appear as four serial sculptures, not unlike Carlén’s cast sculptures of mini stools. The dialogue between the two artists’ practices is not only one of different modes of framing. It is also a conversation between casting and photography as distinct ways of capturing fleeting moments and the shape and textures of things in the world.

– Johanna Thorell

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The first floor of Hunsand Space (Beijing) will host Jin Ya’nan’s solo exhibition, Touch, Cut, Construct, opening on December 21, 2024. Featuring over a dozen of the artist’s sculptures, this exhibition serves as a concise overview of his creative practice spanning several years.

Jin Ya’nan received extensive formal training in sculptural modeling at the Sculpture Department of the China Academy of Art. For him, sculpture is a material form that mediates between history and reality, acting as a portrait of societal systems. In his work, sculpture functions as a method of creation, a means of occupation, and a device for dialogue.

In this exhibition, Jin Ya’nan condenses his creative process into three actions: Touch, Cut, Construct. “Touching is prolonged and gentle, evoking a sublime transformation of images. Cutting is a brief act of violence, creating a distortion of the everyday. Constructing becomes the staging of a temporary performance, turning a space into a frenzied altar: southern fruits, northern air, crises on all sides, severed limbs, and the body of a guitar.”

Like a long-lasting movement, Jin Ya’nan uses these three actions to respond to the enduring art of sculpture: gazing, clashing, rebuilding. The act of smoothing seems reductive but simultaneously layers traces. It appears gentle, yet it erases the solid; it seems like a tribute, but it devours its subject. As the image recedes, the vitality of the object comes to the fore. Everyday objects, through a shift in conceptual perspective, are severed from their inherent functions (“objecthood”) and transformed into subjects of observation. What is cut is not just the object itself, but also the mechanisms by which the world operates. The old order dissolves; fragmented pieces regenerate independently. Performances, revelries, ascents, or descents emerge, guided by a tenuous belief.

Touch, Cut, Construct also serves as an inquiry into the process of sculpture itself. The shaping of form, the intensification of material textures, and the tactile control over surfaces—these objective considerations of the artwork’s essence imbue Jin Ya’nan’s creations with a quiet yet enduring tension.

 

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Grunts Rare Books is pleased to announce our second gallery exhibition, NARC. 

NARC is a two person exhibition of new works by Chicago-based artists Justin Beachler and Sam Dybeck considering trust, wellness, media literacy, sensationalism, and the pseudo-intellectual.

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The narc-etype is appealing—an attitude of relating to the world through a prism of rarefied insight: a truthteller. To narc is a basic human instinct; survival before indifference depends on the narc’s ability to collect information and manipulate it into understanding.

Without certainty in a grand narrative, the counterculture of the American 60s and 70s sought transcendence in alternative systems. The hippie dream caught on, and the sheer quantity of new spiritualities—infused with Eastern philosophy, mysticism, and personal enlightenment—created a vacuum for intellectual authority. For a generation bereft of coherent leadership, a figure of pseudo-spiritual enlightenment who
offered the illusion of insight and direction became increasingly necessary.

Gurus of the time—Timothy Leary and Charles Manson among them—offered visions affirming the immediate need for cultural transformation, each achieved through varying degrees of mystical discipline and psychedelic mediation. Paranoia, always an undercurrent, emerged as the dominant principle, fed by insights into the mind-control experiments federal intelligence agencies performed on civilians seeking free love and psychedelics. These revelations, alongside murmurs of COINTELPRO infiltrations into radical movements, exposed counterculture’s defenselessness to manipulation even as it protested it.

The desire to simulate escape from the mundane and tragic decade, by imagining oneself at the center of a different grand and hidden truth—proved timeless, as seductive then as it is now. Paranoia delivered today’s Great Dissociation, and among so many facts to choose, the narc, a figure who stands apart from the masses—insulated by their proprietary interest in information—has never been more prominent.

Today, the narc is an anonymous figure with any number of followers operating in gaps of collective uncertainty. By signaling to depth without requiring it, the work of a contemporary narc acknowledges distance and conspiracy to no resolution, engaging at face with the contradictions of the moment and moving forward with them. The narc waves a flag. In doing so, the narc is a flexible observer and active participant in the construction of meaning, a filter through which chaos can be read clearly.

Far from a solipsistic pursuit, the narc’s engagement with truth stresses the constructedness of knowledge by suggesting a different narc could have built it otherwise. The narc’s popularity is in their brazen ability to snitch. Meaning here is a manipulable and participatory structure, and the narc makes islands with it.

Justin Beachler (b. 1981, Springfield, MO) is an artist currently living and working in Chicago, Illinois. Beachler attended the Kansas City Art Institute from 2001 to 2003 and graduated with a BA in art history from UMKC in 2012. Recent exhibitions include Weatherproof and LVL3 in Chicago, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park Kansas, Granite City Art and Design District in Granite City Illinois, Haw Contemporary in Kansas City Missouri and numerous other spaces in Missouri. Beachler’s work is in the collection of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park

Sam Dybeck (b. 1998 in Seattle, WA) is an artist, curator, and print production worker living in Chicago. In 2020 he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Photography and Experimental Media from California State University Fullerton. Additionally, Dybeck co-directs Weatherproof in Chicago with Milo Christie. Dybeck’s works have been exhibited in Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Paul, and Kansas City.

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Involution is an exhibition that brings together new commissions and existing works across painting, sculpture, installation, video, and sound. It includes works by Panos Alexiadis, Elli Antoniou, Valerios Caloutsis, Lito Kattou, Julian Komosa, Petros Moris, Thomas Van Noten, Sofia Dona, Roxane Revon, Johnna Sachpazis, Theo Triantafyllidis, and Lina Zedig.

The term “Involution” originates in mathematics, where f(f(x)) = x refers to a function that is its own inverse. This concept is rooted in symmetry and reversibility, suggesting a stable, predictable process. Yet, here, Involution departs from its mathematical roots, drawing instead on the philosophical frameworks of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. From the reversible, we move toward poetic complexity, critiquing linear thinking and fixed identities. Involution does not describe a linear or circular movement that returns to its origin; rather, it signals a process of differentiation and relationship-building that resists the idea of evolution or progress. In close alignment with the logic of rhizomatic multiplicity, it challenges hierarchical and teleological structures. In rhizomatic thought, there is no center, no fixed reference point. Instead, there are myriad, divergent connections, where each element evolves through its interactions with others. Involution, then, is not about return, but about integrating heterogeneous elements into an ongoing, dynamic becoming.

The works echo this shift, transforming the inversion of “evolution” into “revolution”—both as transformation and upheaval. It becomes a process that highlights experimental connections and transformations, underscoring the potential for rupture and reinvention. Becoming is involutionary: becoming animal, becoming machine, becoming insect, becoming imperceptible, becoming molecular, becoming death, becoming escape. It represents a moving horizon of exchanges—a relationship in which the system of equations becomes a game, a continuous process of transformation. Teleological order and immutable identities give way to the fluidity of multiple, co-existing becomings. Involution is the evolution between heterogeneities, a transmission that is a creative process rather than a succession of inherited forms.

This exhibition is a meditation on the inhabitation of multiplicity: on modes of dissemination, occupation, and cohabitation. It engages with forms—human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, animal, plant—that are not necessarily distinct from one another. It explores forms that lose their volume and become surfaces, and surfaces that maintain, almost animistically, the potential for subterranean (anti-)action. Matter here is not approached devoid of sensation, motion, or life. The exhibition questions the political conceptualization of the fragile divide between the living and the non-living. It reopens the political potential of imagination, of speculation through poetry, while re-reading art history and archives askew. Rather than finding patterns of evolution between generations or geographical locations, it provides space for the branching of ideas and symbiotic gestures.

Curated by: Panos Giannikopoulos

Graphic Design: Bend.gr

With the financial support and under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture

Organized and produced by: Wild Reeds

Venue: Paraskevopoulou 13, Athens, 104 45 (Next to Attiki station, accessible via Line 1 & Line 2).

The space, currently under construction, will soon transition into the artist studios of Lina Zedig and Julian Komosa. At present, it operates in a transitional form, adapted to meet the needsof this exhibition.

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A table, a chair, a clock, and a light walk into a gallery.

The curator looks up and says, ”What is this? An art installation?”

The clock replies, ”No, we’re just killing time.”

The light flickers and adds, ”And brightening up the mood!”

The chair grins, ”I just needed a place to sit this one out.”

The table shrugs, ”Well, someone’s gotta hold things together “

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A bell I never hear

Centre Clark, Montreal, QC
October 31, 2024 – December 7, 2024

Cindy Hill’s exhibition A bell I never hear delves into the subtleties of gendered spaces and of the coming-of-age experience. Through sculptures and videos, Hill engages with stereotypes of girlhood while reimagining environments traditionally marked by masculinity. Her material-based practice often involves the transformation of objects—a deconstructing, reconstructing, or repurposing that challenges their associations and connections to the human body. 

One of the key works in the show, Bridle fantasy, is a leather couch arm that has been remodeled into a saddle. The brown leather couch, a symbol associated with masculine spaces such as man caves or dens, is historically linked to passive pleasure and relaxation. Hill reconfigures it into an active, dynamic object that evokes a girl’s burgeoning sexual curiosity. The work echoes the provocative images the German-Australian photographer Helmut Newton captured in the 1970s, where equestrian gear served as props in stylized scenes of submission and domination. In Newton’s work, saddles and harnesses transcend their functional roles to become potent visual metaphors for control, power, and desire—an erotic connotation that still pervades. Bridle fantasy taps into this fetishistic charge, while also commenting to the often-hidden ways in which girls discover intimate pleasure, and how the subdued, secretive experiences of female desire contrast to the open discussion of male sexuality. The piece also reflects the cultural trope of the “Horse Girl,” the mostly derogative archetype of an introverted and socially awkward horse-obsessed girl. Reflecting on personal references associated with her sister’s experience, Hill critiques how female passion and self-confidence are often shamed or ridiculed.

The exhibition also features a large hanging chain wrapped in a textile that resembles plaited hair and adorned with oversized ceramic charms. This piece, Keepsake, evokes the act of braiding hair—an intimate gesture of care deeply rooted in the experiences of girlhood and bedroom culture. The heavy charms symbolize the weight of societal expectations and the way identity is shaped through objects and practices tied to femininity. Hill’s work often bears traces of manipulation to address the complicated relationship between the body and used objects, which oscillate between allure and revulsion, pleasure and shame, empowerment and discomfort. 

The video piece titled “Jean and Herela’s 50th Anniversary Celebration”, shot by the artist and displayed on a vintage television set presents a sequence of slow, deliberate hand movements washing a saddle inspired by actual YouTube instructional videos. The actions in the video take on a sensual, ambiguous quality, straddling the line between educational and erotic. The VHS format lends a dreamlike quality to the piece, suggesting memories of early sexual awakenings marked by curiosity and confusion.

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Lights Through the Cave

In Lights Through the Cave, Ádám Ulbert and Róza El-Hassan invite viewers into a contemplative exploration of nature and the spiritual connections that underpin our existence. The duo exhibition combines the artists’ distinct yet complementary practices, revealing pathways through hidden networks of meaning, from the ecological to the metaphysical. 

Róza El-Hassan’s works draw on her ongoing series, Hommage á Anonymus, which meditates on the quiet, often overlooked, traces of being. Her intimate sculptures—small wooden cave relics attached to glass—serve as ethereal portraits of anonymity, blending personal and collective memory. At the heart of the exhibition is her sculptural wallpiece, Crossing, a mixed-media composition that visualizes the invisible energies and bonds that weave through our daily lives. This poetic depiction of human connection asks how we might perceive and navigate the unseen forces that shape our shared experience. 

Ádám Ulbert’s paintings expand on his research into ecological sensibility through the lens of science fiction and speculative narratives. In his Before Going Under Earth series, Ulbert interweaves his fascination with ancient organisms, such as lichens and cave-dwelling crabs, with references to literature and art history. These recent works channel his investigations into systems of ecomorphological relations—an imaginative framework that bridges biology, geology, and human perception. His neon piece, part of the earlier Unnamed series, complements the paintings, exploring the geological and ecological roles of algae as an anchor for ecological thought.

Both artists find inspiration in the elemental forces of the Earth. El-Hassan’s wooden relics evoke the sheltering intimacy of caves, while Ulbert’s imagery calls upon the primal landscapes of Iceland.

During his recent fellowship, Ulbert revisited the volcano Snæfellsjökull, a pivotal site in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and the ecological significance of Icelandic lichens, as imagined in Max Ernst’s surrealist collages. His paintings bring these layered histories to life, presenting surreal botanical creatures that embody the intertwining of the organic and the mythical. 

Together, El-Hassan and Ulbert craft a vision that is both introspective and outward-reaching. Their works traverse the realms of the seen and unseen, illuminating the caves within ourselves and the ecosystems that surround us. Lights Through the Cave is an invitation to journey inward, rekindling a sense of wonder and reconnection with the natural world. In a time marked by environmental precarity and fractured human connections, this exhibition suggests that by embracing the spiritual and ecological ties that bind us, we may geta a glimpse of a brighter and more harmonious future.

Péter Bencze

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WORKS FROM SUITCASES 

Nov 14 – Dec 14, 2024 

EXILE 

Concurrent to Kazuko Miyamoto’s retrospective exhibition on view at Belvedere 21 in Vienna until March 2025, Works from Suitcases presents a first, introductory insight into the creative exchange initiated by Kazuko Miyamoto in New York, and Paul Fischnaller in Linz, Austria. From the mid 1980s, Miyamoto’s loft, her community art space Gallery Onetwentyeight, and Fischnaller’s alternative art space Hofkabinett provided the locations for a flourishing artist exchange. Works from Suitcases takes its title from the eponymous exhibition held at Hofkabinett in 1987 and focuses on the initial exchanges until 1990. Rarely, or even previously unseen artworks by Austrian artists Peter Hauenschild, Karl-Heinz Klopf, Ilona Pachler, and Othmar Zechyr are exhibited alongside video documentation by Markus Fischer as well as a music video by the Austrian pop band Die Mollies. A collection of recently uncovered mid 1980s slides taken by Miyamoto of the Lower East Side give an insight into time and location. 

While being the unrivalled centre of the commercial art world, downtown Manhattan and especially the Lower East Side provided opportunities for an immense variety of alternative creative venues ranging from the infamous CBGB, where Die Mollies performed in 1987, to art spaces such as ABC No Rio, No Se No, and from 1986, Miyamoto’s own Gallery onetwentyeight. Some of the exhibited works are by, or in reference to, the Rivington School, an alternative artist group founded in 1983. Predominantly involved in immersive social practices such as large- scale, waste-metal sculpture, performance or street painting the Rivington School fostered an artistic practice beyond the limitations of the white cube and deliberately integrated itself into the local neighbourhood. 

It is no coincidence that Miyamoto opened her own art space in 1986 on 128 Rivington Street. Here, she supported not only members of the Rivington School through numerous exhibitions but was able to envision and create her very own, inclusive artistic universe. Being a historically diverse and immigrant-based neighbourhood, Miyamoto identified her own biography, having moved from Tokyo to New York in 1964, with the identity of the Lower East Side and integrated its specifics into numerous of her artworks, some of which, such as the 6 o’clock Kimono are on display in this exhibition with other examples concurrently on display at Belvedere 21. Likewise, some of the exhibited works by Austrian artists were inspired either by Miyamoto’s practice or by other local creative movements. 

At the same time in Linz, an alternative art world existed beyond the institutional and often exclusive one found in Austria’s capital Vienna. Artist-to-artist movements, spaces for experimentation and self-organised initiatives paralleled the developments in the Lower East Side, with Fischnaller’s art space Hofkabinett and Miyamoto’s Gallery onetwentyeight sharing many characteristics. Returning to Linz, Miyamoto might have enjoyed the consistency of the artist environment as her own home drastically gentrified becoming financially as well as creatively increasingly inaccessible to expanded creative visions. 

Works from Suitcases gives an initial insight into the activities and results of the early years of this artist exchange between New York and Linz. The exhibition and its set-up should be seen as a tribute to self-organised artist activism and celebrate expanded ideas of creative practice beyond commercial or institutional filtration. 

Participating artists: 

Austrian filmmaker Markus Fischer accompanied Die Mollies to New York in 1987 and filmed video interviews as well as the music video of Hot Love all of which are included in this exhibition. 

Paul Fischnaller has been working in the Linz-based art space Hofkabinett since 1982. In 1987 he organised an exhibition of Linz-based artists at Gallery onetwenteight in New York. He is a member of a rock band Die Mollies. 

Peter Hauenschild graduated from Hochschule für künstlerische und industrielle Gestaltung, Linz in 1987. Consequently, he traveled to New York where he stayed with Miyamoto. His work is predominantly based in painting and drawing. As part of the exhibition a set of drawings created in New York and shortly thereafter are on display. 

Austrian artist and filmmaker Karl-Heinz Klopf graduated from Hochschule für künstlerische und industrielle Gestaltung, Linz in 1982. During his stay with Miyamoto in 1987 he created a set of miniature works entitled Works for a Suitcase that are included in this exhibition. 

Kazuko Miyamoto, is a New York-based artist whose practice emerged from minimalist influences of the 1970s upon which she expanded her oevre across multiple disciplines. Since 1986 she is directing the alternative art space Gallery onetwentyeight in New York. Concurrently to this exhibition Miyamoto is awarded with a retrospective solo exhibition on view at Belvedere 21 in Vienna. 

Ilona Pachler graduated from Hochschule für künstlerische und industrielle Gestaltung, Linz in 1981 and consequently moved to New York. She has been engaged with the work of Miyamoto ever since and in 2020 became the artist’s archivist. She is a conceptual artist, living and working in Santa Fe, New Mexico. An unrealised exhibition proposal from 1990 is on display as part of the exhibition. 

Othmar Zeychr studied at the Staatsgewerbeschule, Linz from 1952-53. He predominantly worked with etching or ink on paper. Initiated by Miyamoto, he exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York in 1987. Two ink drawings from the exhibition are on display in this exhibition. 

Rivington School was an alternative artist movement that emerged from the East Village art scene in the 1980s in New York City. The group started in 1983 and named themselves after an abandoned public school house building located on Rivington Street. Their practice focused on street performance, graffiti and large-scale public sculptures.

Die Mollies are a Linz-based music band founded in 1977 that in 1987 performed at CDBG during their stay with Miyamoto in New York. The screened music video of Hot Love was partially filmed on Miyamoto’s roof top. 

LIST OF WORKS

Downstairs (left to right)

Ray Kelly and the Rivington School, Demo or wat, mixed media on paper, 70 x 100 cm

Kazuko Miyamoto and Rolando E. Vega, 6 o’clock Kimono, 1987, spray paint on textile, 154 x 121 cm

6 o’clock (FA-Q), 1987, off-set print, 63,5 x 49 cm

Kazuko Miyamoto, Untitled, 1988, four direct photo copies of black wooden pieces on white paper, 27,5 x 43 cm each

Karl-Heinz Klopf, Works from a Suitcase, approx. 40 miniature mixed media works in custom-made crate, 94 x 66 x 19 cm (crate)

Upstairs front room (left to right)

Othmar Zechyr, Katastrophen Monument II, 1987, ink on paper, 37,5 x 24,3 cm

Othmar Zechyr, Lyong und Syrion, ink on paper, 36,6 x 25,8 cm

Monitor 

Markus Fischer, Hot Love (Music video Die Mollies), 1987, 03:00 min

Markus Fischer, Works from a suitcase (Exhibition opening at Hofkabinett Linz), 1987, 06:00 min

Markus Fischer, A Danube Waltz (Interview with Kazuko Miyamoto and Paul Fischnaller), 1987, 08:10 min 

Markus Fischer, Werkstattgespräch (Interview with Kazuko Miyamoto at her loft on 181 Chrystie Street), 1987, 14:00 min

Karl-Heinz Klopf, Typing on the Windy Film Set, 1987, 09:52 min

Upstairs back room (left to right)

Illona Pachler, Unrealised exhibition proposal, 1990, mixed media, 32 x 23,5 cm each

Kazuko Miyamoto, Missing Heart, 1995, pencil on paper, 20 x 12,5 cm

Peter Hauenschild, Untitled, 1986/87, mixed media on paper, 22 x 15,5 cm each

Kazuko Miyamoto, Woman in Kimono, undated, c-type print, 30,3 x 20,2 cm

Office 

Kazuko Miyamoto, Strings, 2002, ink on paper, 35,6 x 43,3 cm

Kazuko Miyamoto, Untitled, diapositives, 1986-87 

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Jester in Genk presents a duo exhibition with Julie Béna and Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel
The duo exhibition plays tribute to the figure of the Jester by following the structure of a tarot reading

Title: Yesterday (when there were no jokes left to tell)
Artists: Julie Béna & Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel
Curator: Koi Persyn 
Venue: Jester – Schachtboklaan 11, 3600 Genk, Belgium

Jester presents Yesterday (when there were no jokes left to tell), the first institutional exhibition presenting the artistic practices of Julie Béna (°1982, FR) and Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel (°1992, FR/MA) in Belgium.

Jester is a new organisation that was founded through the merger of FLACC and CIAP, two Limburg-based organisations that have grown into vital players in the (inter)national arts field since the 1970s. In 2023, Jester landed in three new pavilions on the C-mine site in Genk, where Jester is hosting residencies, providing studios and workspaces and organising exhibitions, screenings and performances. Due to the unique history of this mining site and its neighbouring, multicultural cités, social, economic, demographic and ecological issues are deeply rooted in Jester’s operation.

The exhibition Yesterday (when there were no jokes left to tell), curated by the new artistic director Koi Persyn, results from a dialogue between artists Julie Béna and Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel, and includes both new and existing artworks, of which Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel’s new body of work was developed during his residency in Jester.

The exhibition follows the structure of a tarot reading and mirrors the cards that were pulled for this project: The Wheel of Fortune, The Hanged Man and Death. These three cards are embodied by the spaces, the artworks and its premises while connecting the past, present and future as a vehicle to discuss and understand unresolved questions, both individual and collective.

Yesterday (when there were no jokes left to tell) offers the stage of the exhibition space to the figure of the jester, who plays an important role in the artistic research of both artists, while transforming the space itself into a jester. Departing from the name of the organization, the attitude of this historical phenomenon is now embodied by (the format of) the exhibition, but also by the vernacular space itself, inhabiting the walls and extending to the architecture of the building. The jesters make their appearance and promptly enter the stage to manifest their attitude by attributing their revolutionary skills to the arts organization. Yesterday (when there were no jokes left to tell) thus introduces itself as an alter ego, a shapeshifter, a trickster and (above all) a jester, who welcomes you to discover the visual multiverses of Julie Béna and Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel. Who is this jester of yesterday?

Visual culture is currently being disrupted heavily by AI and censorship. Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel and Julie Béna weapon themselves with the graphical tropes of digital mass media as a survival mechanism for the rise of deep-fake imagery. Their artworks blur and balance on the thin border between digital and analogue, metaphor and statement, versatility and immobility, high and low culture, dream and reality, to carve out a space of opportunity for the jester to escape the fatigue, colondrum and hopelessness of today’s existence. Bouzoubaa-Grivel’s and Béna’s drawings, texts, sculptures and videos encourage the jester (and you) to leave the nightmare of yesterday behind, and to look forward to the dream of tomorrow.

Opening hours:
From 26.10.2024 – 19.01.2025
Wednesday- Sunday, 13:00 – 18:00

For information, please contact:
Koi Persyn T: +32472590650
E-mail:

Dimitri Vossen T: +32476220783
E-mail:

Website: https://jester.be/

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Ha-Ha (Ah Ah, Ah-ha, Foss, Fosse, Ha ha, Ha! Haw): Sunken fence, blind fence, ditch and fence, deer wall or foss.

Ha-ha is a French word for an impasse. Ha-ha is a recessed landscape design element that doesn’t obscure one’s view. Ha-ha, as a word, is quite literally named for the interjection upon encountering the obstruction of a ditch. Ha-ha! you’re below, or ha-ha! you’re above. Ha-ha there’s a barrier!

A ha-ha place has an effect of coming-up-against, minus a physical presence to bump into. As any fence, it operates as a defense mechanism, it produces blockages and controls movement. A fence is also a support: it keeps the livestock from roaming too far, enforces boundaries and concretizes relationships between those on either side. Bodies penetrate walls through doors (sanctioned) and holes (illicit), probe their fingers into mail slots and between slats. A garment can be thought of as a wall between the body and the outside world, a conscious masquerade of the self. A ribbon becomes a temporary barrier, whether cut to reveal a ceremony or hinged on a picture to commemorate. History too is a fence: it keeps us in our lanes, too many conflicting narratives make it hard to remember if you’re above or below, or fallen in a ditch.

Los Angeles, a place whose hills are lined with infinity pools, or water ha-has, also houses this ha-ha of Leroy’s, nestled into the base of Hill & Ord St, and entered by descending stairs below grade. Leroy’s presents a nested trinity of not’s: the not-restaurant reveals a not-bar, which, in turn, functions as a not-gallery. Here, for the time being, are works by Tanya Brodsky, Merideth Hillbrand and Ellen Schafer. The works in the exhibition emerged largely through informal conversations between the artists, held across walls that enclose the live and workspaces that they have occupied together. This exhibition is not about commonwealth barriers, nor land demarcation, haha.

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The solo exhibition present pendulum by Niko Abramidis &NE explores a mythology of the present marked by artistic analysis, comic-like exaggeration, and a hopeful aesthetic. Following the euphoria for entrepreneurship and financial economics that characterized his installation works of recent years, his new paintings, drawings, and objects outline a reflection on the status quo of a hybrid reality and a pause in the face of an open future. They propose a deconstruction of the old world order and question the promise that technology and progress will solve all human problems. Great attention is paid to the medium of drawing in order to express the fragility of this liminal state and to emphasize immediacy, sensitivity, and poetics. Based on the concept of „metamodernity“1 , Niko Abramidis &NE‘s current works create visual worlds of an undecided future, oscillating like a pendulum between utopia and dystopia, in search of a new equilibrium.

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