For the inaugural show in the new space at Mercator Höfe on Potsdamer Straße inBerlin, Galerie Thomas Schulte presents a solo exhibition of recent paintings anddrawings by Cosima zu Knyphausen. Through varied techniques, formats andmaterials, zu Knyphausen draws on sources from the art historical, literary andpop cultural to the everyday, personal and self-referential. The works broughttogether here under the title ofMaestratrace fragmentary paths to learningand discovery across different realms of education and desire. What opens upis a layered reflection: on historical representations of women, as artists and inart; and the vocation of artist, its current models and canons, through the lensof her own artistic training and practice.Whether contoured in loosely sketched, yet bold lines or taking shape throughblurred atmospheres of vibrant colors in diffuse strokes, zu Knyphausen’s worksinvite us to draw close, as though peering into a book. In scenes frequentlyset in interiors, this impression is amplified by depictions and enactments ofcontemplation, analysis, reading, interpretation, and reinterpretation.A drawing offering a prelude, an invitation to the exhibition—which fittinglytakes place down the street from the former site of a historic painting school forfemale artists1—depicts the allegorical ‘Elements of Art’: Design, Composition,Coloring, and Invention. Here, zu Knyphausen looks to the motif realized inthe room-framing ceiling paintings of Angelika Kauffmann from 1778-80,which notably featured female figures in all four images. As representations ofintellectual and creative activity considered fundamental to art, they also reflectthe disciplinary pillars through which systems of organizing and categorizinghave been upheld. This referential quality, evident not only in the quoting ofanother artist, but also in the portrayal of the artistic process itself, is a threadthat runs through. Titles of works likeIbídem(2023) andLa Source(2024)—both of which show women in intimate pairings or groups as they pore over booksor images together—even call on systems of citation embedded in the materialof study. These, in turn, point to a certain place: to a beginning.Among recurrent subjects like the artist’s studio or the revisiting of worksby historical figures like Artemisia Gentileschi, there are allusions to zuKnyphausen’s own education—a kind of beginning: from attending an all-girlsCatholic school to studying painting at art school. The latter at times appears inlighthearted, discrete references to the scathing mark left by an authoritarianprofessor. The figure of the professor is present and repeated in different works.InBoden der HGB (dreckig)(2022/23), for example, she stands at the end of acorridor facing a window, almost a shadow. What gives definition to the scene,however, is the black-and-white tiling of the art school’s floor. A moment framedby place, the pattern is not only reproduced in the small image at the center of thecanvas, but is also blown up around it, extending to its edges. It could continueon, or perhaps open up to reveal something else entirely.
Such works—in which an image substantially smaller than the canvas isframed by, or layered with, an abstract pattern—often recall medieval miniaturesand motifs. While the image fills more of the surface in other paintings, it is attimes also vividly outlined, or contained within a rough oval, like a thought bubbleillustrating a daydream. And still others comprise multiple scenes placed sideby side, or stacked on top of one another, similar to a comic strip. Throughout,presented as vignettes, their pictorial framing is clear.Further themes related to role models, complicity, and lesbian desire cropup. From snippets of a music video by t.A.T.u (“All The Things She Said” from2002), framed by the motif of a chain-link fence; to a playful inversion ofDeathand the Maiden(2024), in which a naked figure stands confidently before a bed,presenting herself to the reclining skeleton of a lover; or a hazy scene in theinterior of Möbel Olfe, a beloved queer bar in Berlin. Individual moments big andsmall, profound and mundane, fictional and real, across time and space, hereoccupy the same plane.This fragmentary, patchwork approach is also reflected in zu Knyphausen’suse of materials that have been left over or produced through her time and workin the studio. These include more explicit references to painting production,such as strips of canvas and used staples, as well as more metaphorical ones, likeegg shells.How difficult can it be(2024), for example, comprises a spatteringof loosened staples on a dark teal background with a rugged piece of canvasapplied to the center. In it, a small image in succinct black outlines shows anartist engaged in building a stretcher frame. While the egg shells similarly lendthemselves to textured surfaces, they are also used for more elaborate, irregularpatterns of tiling, like mosaics. InEgg Mosaic VI(2024), the broken shells areassembled, from randomness, into a specific grid: a chessboard. Left open andblank, it holds the potential for actions both planned and unpredictable. It offersa framework: for the configuration of different parts, rules, roles, strategies, andrelations; for a kind of world-building.In Maestra, we are invited to contemplate our notions of trajectories to befollowed, sets of rules to be mastered, and what is taught, learned, and oftenleft out of such structures. More than an attempt to accumulate knowledge,achievements, or recognition; through continuous repetitions, reworkings andreimaginings, it is the desire to understand, (un)learn, create and transform,that is conveyed. A desire to seek out new narratives and representationalpossibilities, to pick up the pieces and build the frame anew.
Text by Julianne Cordray
Cosima zu Knyphausen (born 1988) is a Chilean artist based in Berlin. Shestudied at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig from 2009 to2017 and was a participant of BPA Berlin Program for Artists in 2018. Acatalogue with her graduation work was published in 2017 as a collaborationbetween Hamburger Bahnhof and 50Hertz. During the outbreak of theCovid pandemic, she was an artist in residency at Fundación Casa Wabi,Puerto Escondido, Mexico, in 2020. Cosima zu Knyphausen has been aguest lecturer at HfK Bremen (2023) and guest mentor at BPA (2021).Recent solo exhibitions include Sebastian Gladstone (2024), Museo de ArteContemporáneo, Santiago de Chile (2022), Weiss Falk, Basel (2022), pilotopardo, London (2021), and stadium, Berlin (2020). Furthermore, she hasparticipated in group exhibitions at Galerie Wedding, Berlin (2019), Vereinfür zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2021), Kunstverein KunstHaus Potsdam(2022), Berghain, Berlin (2020), Briefing Room, Brussels (2023), and XYZcollective, Tokyo (2023). Her monographCentowas published with Bom DiaBoa Tarde Boa Noite in Berlin in 2023
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Galerie-Thomas-Schulte_Cosima-zu-Knyphausen_inquietud-scaled.jpgPrescribed Insomnia by Noemi Pfister
19 April – 22 June 2024
Tunnel Tunnel
Place du Tunnel 24
1005 Lausanne
Photo credits: Julien Gremaud
Exhibition text:
Prescribed Insomnia sounds like the promise of a waking dream, an insomnia both suffered and longed for. This half-awake state lures us into dreamlike spaces populated by mutant creatures prey to inner visions: a portrait of a generation on Xanax projecting themselves in desirable commonalities as a means of escaping an anxiogenic future.
Day breaks in a city square, where a body lies in a fetal position, its eyes wide open. Its posture is inspired by a scene from Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, in which the lead character wakes up from his nap to resume his journey. In Città Ideale, the body is depicted in a vulnerable position. At his side, a wolfhound seems attentive to his plight. Inspired by De Chirico’s metaphysical landscapes, the environment features the UN palace in the background, reminding us of the everlasting presence of power structures. Facing the canvas, we are placed in a situation of discomfort, conscious of our privileges, yet aware of our inability to act.
Anonymous Artists features a group of hybrid creatures in languid positions. Gathered in a circle to lick their wounds, they seek to help and reassure one another and give each other strength Confronted with the diktat of individual fulfilment in an inhospitable environment, they have chosen and accepted each other, despite their differences. The collective allows them to escape normative constraints and cheat their solitude, yet their gazes seem lost in the void. Some ricochet off the walls whose windows obstructed by blank canvases allude to an exhibition space, while others lose themselves toward the celling or stare at the void. Turned inwards, they are stuck in the prison of their mental space from which arise psychic disorders. The scene evokes a collective struggle and refers to the artists’ working conditions through the Free Britney T-shirt worn by one of the protagonists. Born after Spears’ placement under guardianship, the movement refers to a particular event, when in 2007, Britney Spears shaved her head, unable to reconcile her career and personal life. They are more accomplished than we are.
They have mutated, freed themselves from gender stereotypes, and embraced technological advances. The collective helps to counter the adversities of modern life but also the feeling of isolation. The characters are passive, but this passivity evokes the result of a defense mechanism rather than an acceptance of or an escape from powerlessness.
In Emma Kunz’s Grotte, the rock cavity offers a hospitable refuge, a sort of answer for those seeking to recharge their batteries away from the world. Nature, here considered in its restorative and compassionate dimension, serves as a therapeutic retreat for the artist. The protagonist, bathed in warm light, evokes the serenity of the present moment. Yet he seems to be in a transitory state. He has fallen asleep, letting his leg dangle to stay alert and not fall completely asleep.
Till the Morning Rises depicts two skateboarders facing a twilight mountain landscape. Sitting on the edge of a lake, they look in opposite directions, despite their palpable complicity. Their flesh is tinged with bluish light, reflecting the surrounding nature (Or is it the other way around?) in an entrancing mirror effect. Depicted from behind, they are both spectators and subjects of the work.
In the same way, No Counterpart invites us to take part in a 17th-century chess match between the protagonists of a painting by a Caravaggesque artist. However, here only the white pieces remain, placing the players in an asymmetrical confrontation – the game cannot take place. This image seems to allude to the search for meaning beyond binary conflicts, calling for a more nuanced understanding of human and social relationships. The vegetal figure on her left wears a T-shirt with the phrase ‘Talk to me’ and puts his arm around her neck, a kind of ricochet invitation to confide in him.
Through her works, Noemi questions our living conditions in a floating world and offers a poetic meditation on the contemporary human condition.
She addresses universal themes such as fatigue, vulnerability, companionship, and the quest for meaning, drawing on references to art history and mainstream culture in a highly personal way. She depicts the weariness of the world’s spectacle, of both external conflicts and inner conflicts that overwhelm us.
Is it a world of conflict and power dynamics, as well? Her visions at times turn into predictions of our near future, at others, they offer a distant look at our time, and in which the inner space merges with its environment. She invites us to come to terms with ambivalence and meditate on our condition. Through her phantasmagorical visions, history, like art, is repeated, only to be reinvented in a more humanistic dimension.
Tiphanie Blanc
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/TunnelTunnel-NoemiPfister-JulienGremaud-001-web-scaled.jpg
Beiss die Hand by Roman Selim Khereddine
19 April – 16 June 2024
Helmhaus Zurich
Limmatquai 31
8001 Zurich
Photo credits: Zoe Tempest. Courtesy: The artist, Helmhaus.
Exhibition Text:
The poster at the start of the tour shows (from top to bottom):
a police dog
a police officer
an artist
a white room
In the world of theatre, this would be called the play’s dramatis personae. The young Zurich artist Roman Selim Khereddine filmed a police dog and its handler roaming through the empty galleries of the Helmhaus. The film was shot in the same three galleries as those in which his first institutional solo exhibition is now taking place – a show in which dog and handler (and artist) perform the same routine in seemingly endless video loops. So what is going on here?
In earlier works, most of them video essays, Roman Selim Khereddine investigated the Moroccan peasants’ strategy of putting their goats in argan trees to attract tourists. He also zoomed in on the woeful condition of Gaza’s zoos, whose animals had been starving for years, driving the zookeepers, in the absence of further supplies, to have them stuffed instead. Dogs feature in many of Roman Selim Khereddine’s earlier works, as does the way they serve some dog owners as a bolted-on display of masculinity. The content of all these works was created by processing and appropriating found footage from the internet.
The works on show in this exhibition, by contrast, are all site-specific and were created specially for and with these rooms. And in them, too. The video shot in a particular room is also shown in that room. The footage, moreover, was not found, but rather developed by Roman Selim Khereddine himself together with two friends and helpers. While the artist often uses the subtitle line for text, he chose not to include text in these works – although he did have a hand in the creation of this text here.
Who’s playing?
Instead of bald footage, Roman Selim Khereddine found a dog for his shoot, or to be more exact, a Malinois or Belgian Shepherd. That was not so easy (more on this below) – until it was; for unlike other art institutions, the Helmhaus doesn’t just tolerate dogs but actually welcomes them. They are our very own Helmhounds. Naturally – naturally? – the dog did not come alone but brought its handler along too. A police dog handler from Zurich City Police clad in his blue uniform with the Zurich coat of arms on his upper arm and a pistol and baton on his belt. His face was deliberately rendered invisible and his voice distorted. Though it seems we had fewer scruples about the dog.
At the top (of the poster) is the artist himself. In his earlier works, Roman Selim Khereddine was just as interested in the dogs as he was in their owners. Specifically the hierarchy established between non-human and human animals. The control exerted over the animal – and the productive prospect of losing control that that implies. The instrumentalisation of the dog by its owner. A police dog and a police dog handler might be an especially good way of analysing this special relationship, thought the artist.
What also plays an important role both on the poster and in the film footage is the white space, and especially the Helmhaus’s white floors. This white livery is already twenty years old and dates back to an exhibition by Norma Jeane. And as it seemed to have a positive effect on how the rooms’ proportions were perceived, it was retained. Yet that decision also came in for fierce criticism as further reinforcing – along with the ubiquitous white walls – the white cube as a manifestation of a white norm. Which is why the artist Lynne Kouassi once painted the floor purple instead.
Where are we?
The floor is rarely as white and empty as it appears in the film footage (and in Roman Selim Khereddine’s exhibition). But that is how it had to be for the planned video shoot. Which because of this could take place only between exhibitions, one whole morning long (and even that was sketchy). Then a dog had to be found. Since the Helmhaus is an institution of the City of Zurich, Roman Selim Khereddine asked the curator Daniel Morgenthaler to ask the City Police if they would be willing to dispatch a dog handler and dog to the Helmhaus for the creation of a work of art. It helped that Daniel Morgenthaler had previously invited a police psychologist to speak at the Helmhaus’s Five-O’Clock Thesis event for a different exhibition. It was that psychologist who put him in touch with the police dog handlers. That dog plus handler happened to be available just when the Helmhaus was between exhibitions was a tremendous stroke of luck, given that almost every police dog in Switzerland would shortly be commandeered to guard the WEF in Davos and with it a rather different (snowy) white space.
The parallels between dog and space are striking. Both are apparently bound by a very strict efficiency imperative. The white space must not be left empty for as much as a whole day and scarcely a day goes by when the dog is not on duty. Both are civic tools of distribution – of attention, in the case of the white space, and of control and even violence in the case of the dog (which can indeed be deployed as a weapon in extreme situations). Both are also screens (quite literally so in the case of the white walls, which in this exhibition play the part of the screen) onto which viewers can project their own imaginings – about art in the case of the (very) white cube and about the role of the police and their monopoly on the use of force in the case of the dog.
But both dog and room can also bite. While the white gallery implies a kind of super-neutrality, the police dog implies the opposite, namely absolute loyalty, as is evident from its fixation on the handler. And before the dog could be unleashed, the lighting had to be dimmed to make it more amenable to canine eyes, just as there had to be anti-skid socks on hand to slip onto the front paws. There also had to be breaks during the shoot so that the dog could go outside to have a drink. Because there really is something not just inhuman but actually inanimal about the extreme white cube. Which raises the question: What changes would the dog demand to make the Helmhaus more of a dog house – that is, dog-friendly? But: “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him,” opined the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. And perhaps that is true of dogs, too.
So what happens?
Heel! Sit! Down! The commands resonate through the empty white (video) spaces. “Bite the hand”, which is also the exhibition title, is not among them, but the artist’s own addition. Side by side, dog and police officer set off on patrol at a steady pace, come to a halt, kneel or lie down. Then set off again. The only barking is that of the commands. While the dog, obedient as ever, keeps glancing up at the police officer.
In some shots, when the dog is walking between the handler’s legs, it seems as if they were symbiotically connected, making it impossible to say who is leading whom. And then there is the artist Roman Selim Khereddine himself, whose presence in the footage reveals what we all knew in any case: that he, too, was there, orchestrating the shoot all along. Instructing the police officer who in turn instructed the dog. And giving him stage directions as to how he, the police officer, should march through the galleries. Here, the police monopoly on the use of force no longer applies, the artist having manoeuvred himself into a position in which, for once, he is the one giving orders, even if only for two hours. Maybe in this exhibition space, the police officer is on the artist’s own turf and must do what he is told?
The videos certainly show the artist at work – at work in a very unpolice-like uniform of trainers, hoodie, tracksuit bottoms and beanie. Visible on the floor are the taped markers for a camera tripod, which instantly call to mind the impression made by a horseshoe. But police horses are not so common in Switzerland. Then there is the audible squeaking of the dolly on which the camera was mounted as it trundles through the Helmhaus. Roman Selim Khereddine himself in the act of filming is frequently in the picture.
The police dog, too, is on duty, as is his uniformed master, even if the shoot was not exactly a typical day at work. The two of them are not there to guard the white cube, even if they are shown patrolling it. In the third video, much to our surprise, we notice that the handler is holding a yellow toy. So was this all just a show? Well for one thing, no one dared stroke the dog during the shoot – not even when he was just sitting there quietly, as in the video projection in the first room. In any case, assistance dogs and police dogs should probably not be stroked when they’re working.
What part are you playing?
The protagonists of this video work by Roman Selim Khereddine have long since left the rooms in which you, our visitors, are now standing. Rooms you might be guided through by one of our art educators or curators, or that you might prefer to patrol yourself, perhaps sitting down from time to time (even without a command), though perhaps taking fright at a loud command barked by the handler in the video.
The work that remains – as a visible and audible echo – consists of three videos projected onto white walls. And a poster on which the dog is panting and the artist is baring his teeth. After a job well done. The poster photo is an out-take, a video still capturing the moment the performers stopped performing, though the camera was still rolling. The moment when the police officer and dog left the Helmhaus with its white galleries.
No hands were bitten in the making of this video work. Although dogs are certainly not the only ones proverbially accused of biting the hand that feeds them. We are all capable of that.
– Daniel Morgenthaler and Roman Selim Khereddine
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/00.jpgRodrigo Hernández / Conchita
17 May – 30 July 2024
CarrerasMugica
Heros Kalea, 2, Abando, 48009 Bilbo, Bizkaia, Spain
A coat of arms changes over time with new elements being added or others being dropped. In addition, the meaning of one or various of the parts can be modified. And sometimes all these things happen at the same time, and can be repeated several times over the course of the years, without there always being a record to clearly explain the reasons behind these changes. By the same token, it is almost impossible to know the real meaning of what we see, or, even more so, what it originally intended to mean. And so, when we look at a coat of arms, we look at an image that has accrued a number of transitions that have become progressively more opaque and, to a certain degree, contradict themselves. At the same time, the biggest surprise is that the images you can see are elementary, almost archetypal: a tree, a tower, a bridge, two wolves, a mountain.
A while ago I came across this sentence in a novel I was reading: “memory is like a stray dog that follows no rules and does exactly whatever it pleases, refusing to be domesticated.” I would say it is more like a wolf: a wild creature that stalks the human world and infiltrates it with fears, conjectures and endless questions.
I adored my grandmother Conchita. She lived with me and my mother for a number of years and when I came home from school she was always waiting for me. She would prepare lunch and we would sit down together to eat. During those years and later on as well, I learned things about her past; the few things she wanted to or was able to share; like the fact that she was born in Durango, a few kilometres from here, where this exhibition is taking place. Did she really remember so little? What was it that undermined this narrative and made it so wanting? What is it that prompts us to remember certain snippets of the past and, when it reappears, why does it take on the specific form in which it is rebuilt? I stored up these details without any specific purpose in mind, never realizing that in the future I would need more elements to tie them together and give them a certain coherence and allow me to form some kind of more or less overall image of her life, which I am still unable to form. The little I have been able to salvage of Conchita’s life story are isolated scenes, flashes of bits and pieces that come to mind and leave me with a sensation of discontinuity, very similar to when you try to remember a dream, with the same fear that its memory is erased forever, and hidden in a far away corner of your mind.
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/01.jpgBehzad Dehno / This Way, Paris
05.04 – 06.01.2024
Beau Travail
Skånegatan 108
116 35 Stockholm
Photography by Thea Giglio
This Way, Paris
According to the standard view, the world of contemporary art is one of peaceful
internationalism, a world of free and equal access in which recognition is available
to all participants. It is an enchanted world that exists outside time and space and
so escapes the mundane conflicts of history. Such a view was fabricated in nations
where the belief in a pure definition of art is the strongest: art removed from history,
from the world of nations, political and military competition, economic dependence,
linguistic domination—the idea of a universal art that is non-national, non-partisan,
and unmarked by political or linguistic divisions.
However, nothing is more international than a national state: it is constructed solely
in relation to other states, and often in opposition to them. National rivalries arise
from the fact that their political, economic, military, diplomatic and geographic his-
tories are not different, as one might presume, but rather unequal. Competition de-
fines and unifies the world system while monopolists set limits between metropole
and periphery. So, while not every artist proceeds in the same way, all attempt to
enter the same contest and, despite unequal advantages, all endeavor to attain the
same goal: legitimacy. The globalization of contemporary art depends on the entry
of new contestants intent upon adding to their stock of artistic capital: each new
player, in bringing to bear the weight of their national heritage helps to unify the
spaces of contemporary art and extend the domain of cultural rivalry.
How might one map this world? The artistic and intellectual map cannot be super-
imposed upon the political map, neither are reducible to political history. Nonethe-
less, art remains relatively dependent on politics, especially in countries without
artistic resources. On the one hand, one sees the world with its profusion of facts,
political, social, economic, ideological; and, on the other, the artwork, a phenome-
non that is apparently solitary, always ambiguous for the fact that it can carry more
than one meaning at a time. These two geographies seldom coincide.
At one point in recent history, one might have located Paris as the world capital
of art. To Gertrude stein, “Paris was where the twentieth century was” and Walter
Benjamin claimed it as the capital of the nineteenth century. Beginning in 1789, Paris
became a capital for a world republic that had neither borders nor boundaries, a
universal homeland exempt from all profession of patriotism, a kingdom of art set
up in opposition to the ordinary laws of states, a transnational realm whose sole
imperatives are those of art and literature: the universal republic of culture. Victor
Hugo writes in the 1867
Paris Guide
:
Without 1789, the supremacy of Paris is an enigma: Rome has more majesty, Trier is
older, Venice is more beautiful, Naples more graceful, London wealthier. What then
does Paris have? The revolution of all the cities of the earth, Paris is the place where
the flapping of the immense invisible sails of progress can best be heard.
Paris combined two sets of apparently antithetical properties, bringing together the
historical concepts of freedom. On the one hand, it symbolized the revolution, the
overthrow of the monarchy, the invention of the rights of man. On the other hand, it
was the capital of letters, the arts, luxurious living, and fashion. Paris was at once the
intellectual capital of the world, the arbiter of good taste, and the source of political
democracy: an idealized city where artistic freedom could be proclaimed and lived;
a destination, as Octavio Paz once expressed, that could be remembered in advance
of one’s arrival.
One could additionally, like Valéry, describe Paris as the imperial bourse of aesthetic
judgement. Or, per Bourdieu, describe its symbolic politics as “an imperialism of the
universal” for having used denationalization for national purposes. Paris’ incessantly
proclaimed universality produced two types of consequences: one imaginary, which
helped construct and consolidate a Parisian mythology; the other real, associated
with the inflow of foreign artists, political refugees, and isolated artists who came to
get their start in Paris—and its impossible to say which were the consequence of the
other. This twin phenomena increased and multiplied, each helping to establish and
support the other. Paris was doubly universal, by virtue of both the belief in its univer-
sality and of the real effects that this belief produced. An ideal Parisian would be one
whose horizon extends far beyond their city and who is not content to be from Paris.
This is so that nothing may be foreign to Paris, so that Paris may always be in contact
with everywhere in the world, that it may become a capital beyond all local politics.
It was through this very process of emancipation from national politics that Paris
became the world capital of art in the nineteenth and twentieth century. It was able
to manufacture a universal art while consecrating works produced in outlying terri-
tories, impressing the stamp of culture upon works that came from far flung lands;
thereby denationalizing and departicularizing them, declaring them to be acceptable
as legal tender in all the countries under its cultural jurisdiction. Yet this power to
universalize hazarded a unilateral structure of judgement that interpreted periph-
eral context as anachronism, evidence of a blindness peculiar to metropoles that
assumes the burden of a tax on artists from the antipodes.
It would be hard to argue that the Paris that has been described so far is recogniz-
able in the present. The image of a cultural flatland littered with cheap souvenirs
and unmerited snobbery is hard to square with a once-revolutionary imaginary. Was
it the fallout of 1968? The repudiation of 1789 by the collapse of Soviet Union and
the decline of movements for national liberation? Or perhaps the Fifth Republic’s
provincialization by an American-lead international order which transformed con-
temporary Paris into something like a third-century Athens when it was dominated
by Imperial Rome, minus the benefit of imperial citizenship.
It is with the living memory of this world capital that the present exhibition assumes
its form. A series of painted arrows mounted to the gallery’s walls each orient its au-
dience’s attention in the direction of this world historical city—what if la promesse
de bonheur bore a dedicated a sign post? This is accompanied by an unedited ar-
chive of state-mandated broadcasted interviews with American lottery winners, a
literal community of fate.
By drawing a map of the contemporary world and highlighting the gap between
great and small nations, one may hope to be delivered from the prejudices incul-
cated by the center. The dream would be to reverse continental drift; that, distant
though they are from each other on the map, the world and the artwork can none-
theless be brought together, be interlocked with each other. One might imagine a
world to compliment the following remark by Brancusi to Tzara: In art, there are no
foreigners.
– Sam Pulitzer
Behzad Dehno (DK, TR, IR) b. 1993 Aarhus, is a transnational artist, cur-
rently based between Geneva, Switzerland, and Stockholm, Sweden.
Behzad explores the imaginary in his artistic practice. He works with
art based on an interest in perceptions of reality and time – both their
boundaries and moments of blur. His works consist of fragments that
form a playful encounter with pre-existing systems, often situation-
specific, and where the viewer becomes a participant.
Links:
Behzad Dehno
Beau Travail
Julia Selin / julia selin knows nothing about the trees
05.04.2024 – 18.05.2024
Matteo Cantarella
Rådmansgade 45
2200 Copenhagen
Matteo Cantarella is pleased to present Julia Selin knows nothing about the trees, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Swedish artist Julia Selin. The exhibition is Selin’s first with the gallery, and first solo show in Denmark. Returning to landscape motifs as a source for intimate reflection, in this exhibition Selin debuts a new body of paintings that formally and conceptually hearken to a world that upsurges from below.
Much like ascending through the murky waters of a swamp with only a single light, or looking at the world from the perspective of a crawling snail, Julia Selin’s work is characterised by a desire to make visible something present but unseen, to look beneath the surface of our physical and incorporeal surroundings. In this pursuit, Selin contends an ongoing correspondence between the natural world, romantically contextualised as a repository for inner longing, and a deeply existential, turbulent disputation with the lived moment. Her work coalesces these impressions within the same space, suggesting the idea of an holistic affinity on the one side, and an abrupt feeling of alienation on the other – a turmoil that stems from the artist’s memories and unresting preoccupations.
Selin’s process begins by working the unstretched canvas with an impasto of pigments applied in layers of varying thickness. Pushing the colour around the canvas while still wet, she approaches the surface with brushes, scrapers, fingernails and hands, immediate means that allow her to imprint gestural lines and markings into layers of coagulated paint. To further challenge the medium’s possibilities, her palette is restricted to a few constricting hues which, depending on the modulation of the colour, reveal distinct shifts in texture and gradations. The direction and depth of the colour paste, and Selin’s subsequent actions on the pictorial surface emphasise areas of light and darkness, two poles that the artist finds herself drifting between.
Just as the process invokes Selin’s bodily relation to what she sees, the paintings here suggest a way of seeing through the world. From painting to painting, there are incessant leaps in directions and motifs: in some works vertical bands demarcate the picture space to create a mirroring image, a double that alternatively reveals and expands atmospheric underworlds through a play of surface and chromatic depth. In others, lines dissolve in a burst of undulating, quivering forms that delineate an obsessive tension underlying the passages of loosely gestural movements. As if the images were on the brink of breaking past the picture plane, the paintings envelope the viewers into a sublimity that Selin once beheld, and that they are now inextricably ushered in. Julia Selin conjures environments where the unsettling leads us to resonances otherwise inaccessible – painting experienced as a transitory convergence of bodies – human, natural and otherwise – resurfacing in a perpetually encircling emanation.
Julia Selin (b. 1986, Sweden) is a Swedish artist living and working in Malmö, Sweden. Selin graduated from the Umeå Academy of Arts (2013) in Umeå, Sweden. Her work has been exhibited at Tara Downs Gallery (New York, US), Malmö Konsthall (Malmö, Sweden), Porte (Leipzig, Germany), Galleri Cora Hillebrand (Gothenburg, Sweden), Wanås Konst (Knislinge, Sweden) and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Stockholm, Sweden), among others.
Links:
Julia Selin
Matteo Cantarella
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/IMG_007.jpg‘Memory Beacon’ / Natacha Donzé
24 May – 6 July, 2024
Parliament
36 rue d’Enghien
75010 Paris, France
Parliament is pleased to present “Memory Beacon,” the second solo exhibition by Natacha Donzé at the gallery.
“Memory Beacon” could refer as much to the virtual universe as to a human nostalgic feeling. It is not the ambivalence of those two iconographies that fuels Natacha Donzé’s reflection, but their porousness: how the codes of living beings have become those of machines, coexisting with equal relevance in both realms, as if they were a logical mutation of our realities and an extension of our sensory experiences. Our contemporary iconographies replay the codes of living beings and ancient traditions. The same warning of danger is ultimately issued to our eyes when an animal adorns its body red as when an electrical device uses this code to warn us of a malfunction or risk.
The exhibition took as its starting point the flocks of birds (corvids), shaped by their communications, heralding events to come For birds, signals along the network are passed from eyes or ears to brains pre-wired at birth with the accumulated wisdom of the millenia. For humans, signals are passed from screen to screen, news feed to news feed, along an artificial superstructure designed by humans but increasingly mediated by at-times-unpredictable algorithms. By relying on this phenomenon of “murmuration,” the exhibition explores the emergence of those connections between living organisms and technological devices, with each action impacting the structure and behaviour of the network, in a perpetual cycle of stimuli and information.
This back-and-forth between primordial signals and ultra-contemporary relics stretches time, situating the present within a much vaster geological chronology, and bringing contemporary human closer to their ancestor from the past, questioning the self-proclaimed uniqueness of each generation. “Memory Beacon” could serve as a sigil, drawing us towards the past and acting as a discreet warning about our potential futures. The paintings become interfaces between reality and our mental zone of representation. Each painting imbues the retina with a familiar strangeness, leading to a passage from sign to signal. Through this movement, Natacha Donzé denaturalises our logic of associations and frames of thought, opening a new grid of understanding of the real.
Artist’s solo exhibitions have recently been held at Kunst(Zeug)Haus in Rapperswil-Jona (2022), the Musée des Beaux-Arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds (2021), and Unit110 in New York (2018). Her work has been exhibited in group shows at MCBA in Lausanne (2023), the Kunstmuseum Appenzell as part of the Vordemberge-Gildewart Scholarship (2023), CAPC in Bordeaux (2022), and Hagiwara Projects in Tokyo (2021), among others. In 2023, Natacha Donzé received the Swiss Art Award and the Kiefer Hablitzel Prize for young artists in 2019. She also received the Young Artist Prize from the Musée d’art de La Chaux-de-Fonds in 2018, awarded during the Contemporary Art Biennale.
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‘And then the arrows of desire rewrite the speech’ is a line from a song by Kate Bush, The Sensual World from the eponymous album (1989). Under the spell of these words the exhibition forms around a central feeling: the erotic as a disruptive and infinitely generative force.
To Romanticize with Indecision
For this year’s edition of Gallery Weekend Berlin, Meyer Riegger shows works by the New York based painter Santiago de Paoli (b. 1978, Buenos Aires) for the first time in Germany.
Words, it seems, are hardly the best intermediaries when it comes to capturing Santiago de Paoli’s paintings. A critic went so far as to describe them as “beasts” some time ago, noting that they “escape any readymade classification or description”. Perhaps de Paoli’s paintings are better grasped in terms of temperature and weight, states of aggregation and compositions of materials, than description in words – words evoking meanings that can only lead us away from the reality of the painting itself, as opposed to toward it. Towards a reality that wants to be felt.
It is, after all, a closeness that de Paoli’s paintings demand. They arch, pulsate, rear up; they fever, stagger, bud and surge. They are erotic, intimate, warm – and yet they are never just one of these, but always already something else as well. They are metamorphoses. Unconventional formats and unusual materials (copper, felt, plaster, recycled textiles or wood) often lend them the look of sculptural objects in space.
In de Paoli’s oeuvre, painting is a link to what lies beyond the visible – which is not to say the invisible, but rather what we see with our eyes closed, what we feel as we vacillate between sleep and wakefulness, between unconsciousness and consciousness.
Dawn is Now Once Again / Curated by Emma Papworth, Louise Oates and Yasmin Vardi
Šimon Chovan, Estefanía B Flores, Janina Frye, Lidija Kononenko, Maya Masuda, Georgio Van Meerwijk, Louise Oates, Francesco Pacelli, Emma Papworth, Bo Sun, Valentino Vannini, Yasmine Vardi
15th May – 26th May 2024
Janina Frye, Call and Response , 2021
There is no such thing as a beginning, a tabula rasa. All residual
molecules are restless with the memory and particulars of what has come
before.
The protective atmospheric layer requires thickening once again in
order to combat the relentless advancement of warming. Now saturated
by perpetual twilight, a subtle delirium holds this place firmly in its
grip.
Amidst the subdued light and dampness, pious structures reach altitudes
of past achievements, inevitably melting as they near the sun. Mercurial
clouds swarm the evening stratosphere, hanging low and heavy; thick
with brooding introspection that tethers them firmly to the ground.
Remnants on the surface appear motionless. Threads lie strewn, barely
connected in a soup of broken bonds: tentacular lifelines clinging to
the potential of rapid re-absorption.
Then, almost by chance, murmurs of re-form shudder awake as though a
current has sparked nearby; first a twitch and then distinct vibrations,
silently oscillating in the deepest crevasse. Amino acids begin to find
one another in waters that were once less sour.
Sensory inputs and pheromonal exchanges contribute to this discernible
self-organisation: irregular trials and errors flesh out novel structures
until there emerges a system. Here, organs and tissues seem to grow
outside of their chassis and aggregates coalesce into unfamiliar bodily
forms, conditioned by this world of atmospheric transformation.
While the weeks pass, each one seemingly a little brighter, everything
is moving once again. Via a familiar set of steps, not made by one but
by many, the totality pulsates and ticks in rhythm. This cadence is now
our measure of time.
In closed isolated spaces I can be myself. There I don’t suffer from the projections of others onto my body and their readings of my mental state. I can inhabit other bodies and I can be wherever I’d like.
A girl finds a monster in the pigsty on the farm where she lives. The inability to domesticate or train the monster creates a relationship like one she’s never had before, challenging her perception of belonging and understanding.
Anthropomorphic princess Sophie and her maid Jessica prepare for a new day in the royal court. Sophie’s struggle to play her role propels the two protagonists forward and backwards in time, through worlds and identities to find a way to live together.
A mouse finds herself reciting childhood memories in a sterile living room. Shards
of an alienating past paint the portrait of a human life. A sense of loss pervades the atmosphere as she’s torn between being human and being mouse, between being alive and being in a simulation.
A humanoid fox is locked inside the confession booth of the Big Brother Mansion, a room where contestants are invited to confess their secrets to the camera. The fox is seemingly drifting around with their eyes closed, vocalizing sounds, and exploring their internal being.
Philip Ullman is a Swedish artist and filmmaker, living and working in Amsterdam. By capturing human movements and voices and applying these to non-human characters within fictional, 3D-animated realities, they question the grounds on which value and sentience are prescribed, why one life is more valuable than another, and what it means to be human.
Painéis, 2024, Exhibition view, Galeria Cavalo, Rio de Janeiro.
Maroons (solitary column number 1), from the velho novo mudo mundo series, 2024
Twists and bindings of brown clothes on cedar rafters and accessories. 308 x 20 x 20 cm.
Maroons (solitary column number 1), from the velho novo mudo mundo series, 2024
Twists and bindings of brown clothes on cedar rafters and accessories. 308 x 20 x 20 cm. (Detail).
Bege A, from the Painéis series, 2024
Wooden plywood, felt, pins, paper cut-outs, monotypes and oil paintings on paper. 207 x 136 cm.
Caramelo A, from the Painéis series, 2024
Wooden plywood, felt, pins, twists of clothing, monotypes and oil paintings on paper. 207 x 136 cm.
Marrom A, from the Painéis series, 2024
Wooden plywood, felt, pins, twists of clothing, monotypes and oil paintings on paper. 207 x 136 cm.
All images courtesy and copyright of the artist and gallery.
Painéis, Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos’ first solo show in Rio de Janeiro at Galeria Cavalo, showcases three felt-covered panels in brown, caramel, and beige hues. Raylander aims to emulate notice boards commonly found in schools, hospitals, public spaces, and bureaucratic environments, which typically serve to disseminate information to students, workers, and service users.
Within these panels, Raylander arranges a collection of monotypes and oil paintings on paper, affixed with pins crafted by the artist to match each panel’s color. In these artworks, the artist employs words, diagrams, and simple figures to construct a theoretical framework that underlies her practice. The juxtaposition of the paintings and monotypes mirrors the arrangement of notices on traditional boards at the same time that merges Raylander roles as an artist, researcher and educator, a framework that has evolved over the past eight years.
Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. Artist, educator, researcher, and clown, Raylander explores sculptures, installations, drawings, photographs, videos, and texts. She delves into the accumulation of her individual experiences, intertwined with collective experiences, to challenge various aspects of current social contracts.
Utilizing symbols of bureaucracy and institutionalism from everyday life to formalize her artistic endeavors. She looks to the material and immaterial flows engendered within these contexts, where diverse information converges and overlays, giving rise to new needs and urgencies within specific dynamics and environments. Raylander offers a broad view that encompasses past, present, and future aspirations.
Arian de Vette, Jan Hüskes, Varda Caivano / Curated by Alfons Knogl & Lukas Schmenger
FLⒶT$
Avenue Charles-Quint 293
1083 Bruxelles
Photography by Kristien Daem
Photo Credits:
Exhibition Text:
As the result of a 4-months residency, Sihl Delta is pleased to present Sylvain Gelewski’s Spieglein, Spieglein, a multi-disciplinary and site-specific installation spreading over two spaces. Its title is inspired by the repeated phrase of a witch from a popular children’s story.
The phrase is used here literally, as an advertising slogan, in reaction to Sihl Delta’s location in the heart of a shopping complex. It is also applied in a physical way, through the mirror effect created by the installation and the pieces that make it up, repeated or duplicated from one room of the exhibition space to the next. The project deals with the circulation of money, superficiality and working environments in the cultural world.
What do we see reflecting in the mirror? We project beauty, health, careers, and money onto ourselves. We tell ourselves to be careful, to keep smiling, but also to secure a house, a job, and a planet. In the face of a challenging world, what are the true battles to fight? What happened to the carefree days of flowers?
“The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it,
namely the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor.
But the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face.”
– Carl Jung, Archetype and the Collective Unconscious (1935)
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” Around us, a myriad of billboards and promotional videos bombard us with well-being punchlines, the latest trends and must-have items to buy at any cost. This consumerist frenzy is unsettling, if not anxiety-inducing. Let’s put on our beauty masks, hoping they will disguise our inner conflicts.
Geneva-based artist Sylvain Gelewski spent four months at Sihl Delta, an artist residency space in the heart of Sihlcity, Zurich’s vast shopping mall. Inspired by this consumption epicentre, he creates a double-installation with multiple interpretations, perhaps as a strategy of withdrawal or escape from an overly oppressive reality. The two exhibition rooms, juxtaposed and contrasting, embody Zurich’s heraldic colours: white and blue. For the artist, this is a given condition which reflects the hosting city. An earlier version of this body of work was presented in Sandviken in Sweden in 2023, where the installation Tempus Fugit was displayed in yellow (gold) and blue. Often bridging resonance and dissonance in his work, Sylvain Gelewski evokes the similarities between Sweden and Switzerland; two pseudo-neutral countries vaunted for their image of good students, places of compromise and cleanliness, yet concealing a far more complex reality. Let’s put our exemplary masks back on.
Immersed in a baroque-contemporary setting with scent and sound, Spieglein, Spieglein brings us face to face with a profound interiority. As words resonate through space, visitors find themselves propelled into the artist’s psyche, his inner voices speaking at different levels of consciousness, between childhood memories, fears and existential reflections. The two rooms depict distinct states of mind: on one side, the self’s relationship to ambition, social behaviours and superficiality. On the other, a more isolated and introspective voice manifests.
Like a living sculpture, a performer in a white and blue dress, wearing a double mask, traverses the spaces and wanders gently like an apparition. The “persona” – a term deriving from ancient theatre that describes the mask worn by actors on stage – becomes the project of a fictitious identity, a social facade worn in public. In Carl Jung’s psychiatrist model of the psyche, the persona lies between the ego and society. By invoking different sources from Venetian masks to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Sylvain Gelewski addresses the ambiguity of identity, what is visible, revealed, or hidden.
All around, objects wrapped in scraps of canvas recall a “benestante” milieu, where social conventions proliferate. These objects, dehierarchised by their chromatic uniformity, seem to transcend their primary function in favour of an enigmatic staging. Gleaned by Sylvain Gelewski in the streets or collected through a non-commercial Telegram group, these objects take on an obsessive character, revealing an emotional ambivalence but also a recuperating practice intimately linked to the artist’s precarious situation.
At the centre of the two rooms is a table, a symbol of norms of good conduct which marks the onset of the social game. In a famous scene from Luis Buñuel’s film The Ghost of Liberty (1974), the surrealist director overturns bourgeois conventions by undressing his guests and having them sit around a table on toilets instead of chairs. Comedy, with its exaggeration and referentialtactics, offers a means of distancing, even extracting from reality. In particular, humour as a critical tool can be used to highlight social dysfunctions. Especially cherished in Commedia dell’arte, this genre transforms situations into ridicule, just as it caricatures its characters in extreme archetypes, underlining their often mediocre position on the social ladder.
Within this comedic tradition, the jester, or king’s fool, finds its incarnation. The small paintings on the wall from Sylvain Gelewski’s series The Court Jester portray various jesters or jokers. Known in the Middle Ages for amusing the noble courts, this marginal figure was uniquely permitted to mock the sovereign. They performed at great banquets, where opulence and extravagance reigned. Queer, marginal, grotesque, neurodivergent (or rather “neuro-diverse” as Sylvain suggests) but essential to social amusement, the fool cynically becomes the antagonistic mirror of a society, revealing its symptomatic use and rejection.
For Sylvain Gelewski, the contemporary jester is today’s artist: an emblem of dissidence and marginalisation. And yet, despite a profound desire to break away from conventions, artists find themselves instrumentalised by the same system that sustains them. In the entertainment industry, artists become their product but also their prophecy.
In an age of fast-paced consumption, technology and quest for self, isn’t it time to extract oneself and value the benefits of solitude? Between conforming and subverting, Spieglein, Spieglein confronts us with ambiguities and questions encapsulating the perpetual, interdependent and complex duality: „I’m an artist, I am not”.
After all this, mirror, mirror, do you still dare to judge?
– Camille Regli
Photo credits:
© the artist, David Gagnebin-de Bons & CIRCUIT Centre d’art contemporain, Lausanne
Exhibition text:
Emmanuelle Lainé is an artist. She draws on her own experiences and observations to make art. She has worked a lot for the exhibition at CIRCUIT Centre for Contemporary Art. In the exhibition, Emmanuelle Lainé talks about work. She asks the questions: what is the place of the human in the workplace? What is the place of humans and objects on the marketplace?
Emmanuelle Lainé uses contemporary objects. Contemporary means of today. In the exhibition at CIRCUIT Centre for Contemporary Art, Emmanuelle Lainé uses ring lights. Influencers use ring lights to take selfies and make videos of themselves. Influencers work remotely, for example on social media. Influencers promote their experiences and observations online. Influencers sell objects or their art.
Emmanuelle Lainé also uses other objects. There are rocks in the exhibition at CIRCUIT Centre for Contemporary Art. Rocks often prevent people from taking possession of territories. Emmanuelle Lainé also uses grids made from steel. Grids prevent people from taking possession of objects. Not all objects and people can move freely between territories and on the marketplace.
Emmanuelle Lainé takes photos of contemporary objects and the people who use them. The objects also take possession of people: of Emmanuelle Lainé; of her partner and lover, artist Benjamin Valenza; of the artist collective CIRCUIT and of the artist Geoffroy Clop, who is doing part of his civil service at CIRCUIT; of the artists Samantha Steele, Anna Litomina, Cyprien Schaffner and Valentin Pasquotti Pirollo of whom Emmanuelle Lainé took photos.
This project is possible thanks to the support of the Institut français, the Collectivité de Corse and the stone cutter Sébastien Frémy.
Support
Ville de Lausanne, État de Vaud, Loterie Romande, Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel
Stiftung, Fondation Casino Barrière Montreux and Profiducia Conseils SA
Steven He and Seongeun Lee / Curated by Jia Yeu He
19th April – 5th May 2024
49 Staffordshire St,
London,
SE15 5TJ
L
Solo exhibition by Erik Swars
curated by: Nadja Geer and Frank Holbein
6/4/2024-5/5/2024
One Minute Space
Marathonos 71, Athina 104 35
One Minute Space announces the opening of the solo exhibition titled ” L” by Erik Swars. The exhibition includes 7 works by the artist, forming a narrative through the presence and the essence of the color red. The aim is to create a dialogue between the viewer and the installation, visual and spatial.
The work of Erik Swars, born in 1988, is linked to the field of purism and experimentation, bringing to the forefront a spirit of change inspired by minimalist art in the late 60s and early 70s.
Among the works presented in the exhibition is “Ohne Titel (pieces)”, a 16-minute video depicting two people in a landscape, enhancing the viewer’s experience through the distortion of cinematic flow and the use of stroboscopic light.
“Behind the red curtain, Untitled (pieces) takes up an entire room. The 16 minute long
work gives the whole exhibition a background noise. It is the beginning and the end. Red the
dominant color. Strobo. Two people in a landscape. Red is also the color of the windows.
Beginning and end.” (Erik Swars)
The exhibition “L” begins on Saturday, April 6 at 7 p.m. and will run until May 5. Visitors will have the opportunity to attend One Minute Space and freely engage with the different aspects of Erik Swars’ work in an exhibition of an inherently participatory nature, as stated by one of the exhibition curators Nadja Geer.
“L” is a situative constellation creating communication the moment you enter. Victor Burgin describes Situational Aesthetics as a kind of aesthetics where the form gets rather determined by the message not by the materials; therefore the concrete forms are intentionally only partly located in the real exterior space but partly also in the psychological, interior space. It is this form of aesthetics that Swars works with – so it is not astonishing that he describes “L” as a “Kare-san-sui” – a dry artificial landscape.
Exhibition curated by: Nadja Geer and Frank Holbein
Production: Nikos Katsambanis
Photography: Frank Holbein
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Anténa
Solo exhibition by Martin Chramosta
Curated by g. olmo stuppia
3 April – 18 May, 2024
Cassata Drone Expanded Archive
Via Malta 21, 90133, Palermo
THE EXHIBITION
An owl, a swallow, a triton, a snake and other mythological animals surround an iron ‘Anténa’ – a sculpture produced ad hoc for the exhibition – faithfully following the line of the sea horizon that overlooks the Khalsa, our neighborhood. The monumental sculpture, after which the site-specific exhibition nucleus of Chramosta is named, once again opens up the space of Cassata Drone in Via Malta 21, teaching us how to inhabit and to transmit peacefully. The terracotta medallions act as totemic activators as they challenge the verticality of the over 3,5 m high “Anténa”. They defy time and represent new zodiacs, deconstructing the necessities of the Gregorian calendar. The exhibition of the Swiss-Bohemian artist feeds on reminiscences: Journeys home and memories from the family archive are being welded into the symbolic architecture of Prague. With “Anténa”, Chramosta presents his first solo exhibition in Sicily. The antenna is the dominant apparatus of our age: From Niscemi, MUOS antennas propagate data fluidised into the ether to satellites that guide machines and ideas of death. Antennas spread signals of cabaret and 5G.
The Internet of Things relies on antennas, from where it is spreading and from where it pretends to unite us. It is the new electricity. A fibre cable of light that becomes air and then returns. Partner in crime to the ‘damned’ repeaters on the ground, crashing us to the same ground. The rest is taken care of by ‘the blood of our flats’, the tamed light force. An “antennification” that glues us to the era of “overflow politics”, anaesthetised by information trauma.
The sculptural elements present a primordium: a soaring transmission to the sky. Iron welded by fire and the shapes of an inner alphabet, from which one sees a swan – the White Swan.
A sculpture that becomes a radio antenna also transmitting in fm and via web, a continuous vocalisation: Bohemia, a desert country near the sea….
An Easter ritual like the Palermitan ‘cassata-quas’at’. It was filled and decorated with pistachio and ricotta arabesques by the hands of Knight Guli for the Universal Exhibition in Vienna at the end of the 19th century. To turn around is the only way to a future of optimism and peace. To broadcast is always also to welcome, to pile up words, to listen to Radio, to love enemies and friends, to review the more than eighty writings of Radio Benjamin or Carlo Emilio Gadda.
In Palermo, Chramosta presents his monumental yet delicate iron sculpture in the centre of the attic, inspired by the antenna of the famous Czech shopping centre ‘The White Swan’ in Prague. It comes with a Soviet-fantastic flavour, telling us a sublime and private odyssey. The intimate memory of a paternal tale that becomes a counter-postcard; the need to disenchant borders and aggression through the use of forms and metal. A filiform volcano.
A new cosmogony materialises around the public, between slender elements and transmissions obscured by the intrigues of power. An existential gradient between landscape architecture and urban tension in the space of the ‘crooked palace’ bombed by the RAF in 1943. An exhibition that tries to stitch together the lacerations between south and north, east and west, welcoming the best ingredients like a fine ricotta paste. From the sanguine iron to the sweet taste, from the shape of the rational architecture of the ‘Palazzo Storto’ to the ‘geological basin’ of the Cassata Siciliana and the need to transmit and radiate. An inalienable force of the human being: the fury of utterance. From tribal totems to the deadly antennas of MUOS, for example: a need to communicate with the celestial, today like in ancient times: a need for community and single glances that channel the magical impulses of history.
Once again, ‘quas’at’, a colour-sensitive bowl with an Arabic name, becomes a refined aesthetic container; unfolding before the eyes of the audience, accompanying them on an imaginative, fantastic, delicate journey.
THE PROJECT AND ITS ALPHABET
Anténa is an artistic research project between Bohemian and Sicilian culture curated by g. olmo stuppia. It insists to unravel the violent game of politics of all mythological, technological and ethnographic transmission, which it aims to turn into an artistic apparatus, a device for diffusion and education. The device configured by Martin Chramosta for Cassata Drone is like edgy nostalgia returning home. Like tasting an ancient food, nourishing one’s heart and body. A sculpture that embraces and propagates a signal. It dialogues with the history of the Cassata Drone Expanded Archive and its political and iconological attempt to dismantle piece by piece the necessities of the armed gaze, to make art beyond simplifications and polarisations.
Let us propose an intimate moment with the art instead, let’s touch the sculpture and look at it in a nonbelligerent way. Look how the largest and most militarized island in Europe is perceived from a multiple eye: Trinacria.
Chramosta diffuses his signal with the language he holds most dear: sculptures of metal and terracotta. If it was proto-artists who painted the caves of Marettimo and Lascaux, it is in a prism of ‘primitive’ decomposition that Chramosta’s visual alphabet is inscribed, flowing from the Danube to the Mare Nostrum. Symbolist medallions surround his Anténa. They seal a magical time and create a fantastic pseudology capable of self-attraction, of charging even the architectural schematism of the Soviet era with affection and to offer it a singular reinterpretation.
Around the docile signs, a new existential coinage: a cycle of terracotta medallions. The artist states:
A series of medallions depicts motifs from the Mediterranean environment, birds in flight, beings beneath the waves. This is a templum that we are defining in the space of Via Malta, and whose signs we are perhaps trying to read. We point our metaphysical antennae at their messages. The antenna also listens.
The augur used to use the crozier to designate a square area in nature, called a templum, which – sometimes facing east – was used for observation. Here, the augur practised contemplatio, i.e. he was attentive to the various signa (“signs”). There were two main classes of signa, auguria impetrativa
(“requested signs”) and auguria oblativa (“unfavourable signs”). There were also five different types of signs, one of which was ex quadripedibus (“of the quadrupeds”).
Like the pagan gods before Hermes stole knowledge from the nymphs, Chramosta plunges into a delicacy, into a long savouring of the sculpture’s ferrous perfume – into an almost ephebic and playfully erotic tension, slouching along the swan’s neck, immersing himself in a reverie that manufactures a furtive gaze. Like the gaze of the owl probing the dark, looking for prey – yet, no bloodshed shall take place, only rites of liberation of the mind and the body.
Transmission occurs by touch, ‘the sanguine smell of iron’. The hand of Hephaestus beating in the heart of Etna.
g. olmo stuppia
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SPRING BREAK
Solo show by Florent Frizet
Curated by Sylvia Sachini
21.03.2024 – 11.05.2024
MISC
MISC invites you to step into a realm of transcendent abstraction with Florent Frizet’s solo exhibition SPRING BREAK.
Frizet explores the intricate, sometimes delicate intersections of transversality, time, absorption and theatricality, drawing inspiration from the theories of Michael Fried, historical imagery, scenes of everyday life, the Lascaux caves in southern France, and the elusive dance that occurs when shadows are cast on earthly ground.
Spring Break is part of a long-term, ongoing work in development since 2016 when the artist first moved to Athens. The primary body of the work is exclusively presented in large-format canvases of 180×120 cm, which is displayed in the main gallery space.
This large format is considered by the artist as the equivalent of an A4 canvas expanded to human proportions. In these works, suggestions or outlines of human figures emerge like echoes from the cosmos, a reflection of the timeless, yet perpetually embryonic nature of existence. Here, Frizet takes on the role of a cosmogonist, delving into the very creation of universes within the confines of each canvas.
Erotic tones underpin the abstract narratives that play out in the works, evocative of Gustave Courbet’s famous dissection of the myth of Eros in L’Origine du monde. The artist’s practice, which encompasses live drawing sessions, enables him to infuse the space with the immediacy and weight of Creation. Using photographs both as references and as blended elements, Frizet further enriches the layers of meaning within his works.
This process is deliberate, resolute, requiring time and patience. As a result, the artist considers no painting to be either finished or ongoing; instead, they exist in a liminal space.
Moving from the main gallery space to the subterranean level, we are challenged by a new format, Frizet’s choice of horizontal canvases. A new series created for MISC, the canvases were originally worked on by the artist Nicolas Melemis; using this as his basis, plus elements of collage, Frizet transformed the canvases into expressive all-new works. The horizontal format serves a dual purpose: first, it symbolises the artist’s interpretation of the event horizon, the astrophysical boundary beyond which an event is no longer able to affect an observer and all elements cascade into a singular hole. Second, in painting terms, the horizontal format offers an expansive landscape in which to transform self-portraits into compelling self-contained narratives, creating a poetic constellation that is uniquely, elegantly and profoundly moving.
An omnipresent anima courses through each painting, serving as the element that unifies the individual compositions while creating a strong sense of continuity and connection. Inspired by the intricate geometries found in the 3D atlas of the universe, each painting is a microcosm, a universe unto itself. The shapes within, reminiscent of black holes and collapsing stars, are an immersive experience where events converge upon a solitary point – like the inexorable pull of a cosmic singularity.
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March 30th – April 6th
Testimony for the Future / Curated by Zhu Zhu
Artists: Gao Lei & Li Nu
2024.3.30 – 2024.6.30
Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art (BMCA)
Catherine Park, No.1 Beijing East Road, Nanjing
China
The concept of the exhibition is inspired by the difference between the space of Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art and that of the “White Box”. As an artistic space transformed from an air-raid shelter, the art museum retains the previous structural characteristics and sense of historical relics as well as its geographic environment that is inseparable from the Jilongshan Mountain. The space of the “air-raid shelter” is treated as a place where Gao Lei and Li Nu store and exchange their works. One day, far in the future, upon looking back, the door of the “shelter” would be opened, displaying testimony for the collective memory and reflection of the two intersecting individual lives as well as of the present era.
In the specific structural arrangement of the exhibition, works of the two artists are organically grouped together to form direct thematic dialogues, superimposed visual tensions, or understandable interconnections, weaving the two independent forms of individual creations into a bare thread in the tunnel of time and space. In terms of their respective methodologies, Gao Lei’s expression has the constant appearance of rational thinking, while Li Nu constantly shifts between lightness and heaviness, silence and explosion. Their works are both witnesses to reality and metaphysical inquiries. Compared with the local conceptual artists of the previous generation, Gao Lei and Li Nu avoid excessively-symbolic production and respond to the common circumstances by focusing more on art itself.
Artsits
Gao Lei’s art practice spans multiple media, including installation, sculpture, photography, and painting. Gao often adopts everyday objects and “standardized” industrial products as the essential component, whose works are manipulated through synthetic or abstract regulatory forms, in which the functions, properties, and meanings are tampered with or added through blurring transformation. Thus, they become a scale or model for measuring various domains such as the body, power, consumption, and religion. Through precise material testing and vectorization of graphics, Gao’s works, along with the objects they confront and the questions raised, alternate between spatial and conceptual dimensions, allowing the viewer to re-examine and remeasure our inherent boundaries with the world using a standard other than that of experience.
Li Nu graduated with an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art. He is a winner of RBS (Royal British Society of Sculptors) Bursary Awards 2015, and as a member of RBS, lives and works in Beijing. Li Nu’s practice is rooted in everyday life. He subverts the perceived boundaries between documentary and fiction, representation and abstraction to explore and achieve a poetic language in art. Through capturing the details of everyday life, he aims to reflect the individual’s mood swings and the menials state of the population in the evolution of macro-society. The seemingly unpromising materials of everyday life are transformed into something metaphorical, poignant, humorous, poetic, and dramatic, challenging us to question our received experiences about life and see the world afresh. The concept that he wants to express is never what you have seen. It is always wandering between void and solid.
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The Book of Ma / Organized by Keith J. Varadi
April 11 – May 4, 2024
Jenny Hata Blumenfield, Michael Kennedy Costa, Patricia Fernández, Luc Fuller, Andy Giannakakis, Susanna Kim Koetter, Hyungi Park, Keith J. Varadi
Sarah Brook
5229 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles
On Thursday 8 February, 2024 Quartz Studio is pleased to present a special project conceived as a dialogue between Isabell Heimerdinger (Stuttgart, Germany, 1963) and Jonathan Monk (Leicester, UK, 1969).
Heimerdinger and Monk, partners in life and art, reflect on Italy, starting from their experience in Rome several years ago to create an exhibition where their memories mingle with visions of grand tour travelers. A multitude of inspirations and techniques pile into the space: the Le Silence neon, Heimerdinger’s mosaic diptych, Monk’s collection of magnets, a boot-shaped wooden board, après Luciano Fabro (which becomes a base for Heimerdinger’s ceramic works). Themes of sacredness and irreverence, play and death are sparked by the powerful intersection of Heimerdinger and Monk’s work in this two-person show at Quartz in Turin.
Isabell Heimerdinger (Stuttgart, Germany, 1963) lives and works in Berlin. The central theme of her work is the cinema and the condition of its production. In photographic, sculptural as well as cinematic works, she inquires the subtle differences between acted and authentic behavior, between role and identity. While the settings of her films are always real, the various characters keep their secrets well to themselves. In 2020, she received an award for her experimental short film SOON IT WILL BE DARK at the FIDMarseille International Film Festival. Since 2016, Heimerdinger has also been running a ceramics studio in which she explores the tightrope walk between functional ceramics and art. Her works have been shown in solo shows at the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2016), MNK Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe (2008), Western Front, Vancouver (2007), Swiss Institute, New York (2003) und FRAC Fonds régional d’art contemporain Pays de la Loire, Nantes (2000). Screenings of her films have taken place at Videoart at Midnight (a project by Olaf Stüber and Ivo Wessel) #59, Isabell Heimerdinger, Kino Babylon (2014), Art Film / Art Basel, Stadtkino Basel CH (2012), Experimental Shorts, Short Experiments, Kino Arsenal, Berlin (2011), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Louvre Auditorium & Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2021), Soon It Will Be Dark, Belvedere 21, Wien (2021). In addition, the artist has taken part in numerous group shows, including Daimler Collection, Berlin (2021), Kunsthalle Erfurt (2017), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2013), MNK Museum für Neue Kunst, Frankfurt (2012), Malmö Konsthall (2005), and at Bergen Kunsthall (2003). The artist is represented by Mehdi Chouakri gallery, Berlin.
Jonathan Monk (Leicester, UK, 1969) lives and works in Berlin. Monk often appropriates ideas, works, and strategies from Conceptualist and Minimalist artists of the ’60s and ’70s. With photographs, sculpture, film, installation, and performance, his works recontextualize and rework these quotations, often infusing them with Monk’s personal history and working-class family upbringing. These aspects add a humanizing and down-to-earth sensibility to the original works’ utopian ideals and notions of artistic genius. Monk’s reinterpretations of seminal works by John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, and Sol LeWitt, among others, challenge authenticity, authorship, and value in art with quirky humor and wit. Monk’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the world, including in solo shows at CAC Malagá, W139 in Amsterdam, Artpace in San Antonio, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Tramway in Glasgow, Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, Centre d’Art Contemporain in Neuchatel, Museum Kunst Palast in Dusseldorf, Institute of Contemporary Art in London, and Kunstverein Hannover. Group exhibitions are numerous and include the Taipei Biennial, Berlin Biennale, Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, Prague Biennale, and Panama Biennial. In 2012, Monk was honored with the Prix du Quartier des Bains in Geneva. His works have been exhibited in many museums and international collections, including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Norton Collection, Santa Monica, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Statens Museum für Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Tate Modern, London, England.
Schadekgasse 6, 1060 Wien
DELLE… sometimes the only thing left to do is to curl up into a ball and just laythere.Stumbling around, tipping over and bumping into each other – exchangingenergy by coming together in the same place at the same time. Maybe adent is a physical data carrier, or a trace of communication between twoentities interacting with one another through tension and release. Dentsare short moments preserved on a surface.There is this intuition to create spaces to separate oneself from theenvironment. Spaces of comfort, protection, preservation. They’rebubbles that encircle something that is to be secured. Dealing with primalintuitions in an urbanized environment and balancing the duality of theso-called natural with the artificial seems to be a state of constant andseamless fluctuation.https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/delle-at-waf-wien.jpg
Matthew Brown / Museum (DP)
April 7 – April 27 2024
Disneyland Paris
Perth (Boorloo), Western Australia
Photography bt art_doc
Diamond Collection
2024
Collection of 37 ‘Dialga’.
Simon Risi / Ein ganz normaler Tag
24 February – 23 March 2024
Photo credits: Philip Ullrich
How to capture the moment of a first encounter? Does a first impression disappear at the second impression, does it dissipate with time or remain forever unchanged?
In the course of a research trip to Brussels last year, we met artists through fortuitous relationships. It all started with a first impression, an unusual connection that made us want to see each other again.
Some of these artists were invited to KRONE COURONNE, interlaced in a spatial constellation with no specific theme but a certainty: their radiance in Switzerland. For some, this means being exposed to a first impression, or perhaps a second or third impression. Based on the exchange and apparent flux between Brussels and Biel/Bienne, the collective exhibition FIRST IMPRESSIONS delineates an encounter. Indeed, the two cities share a similar character, whether through their bilingualism or their industrial and heterogeneous history – a whole that nurtures a dynamic artistic and musical culture.
With no premeditation as to the works chosen, the exhibition is inhabited by an anachronistic aesthetic that shies away from classical codes. It oscillates between organic and architectural forms, ornament and functionality, mutation and simulation. Walls speak and open to other worlds. Objects metamorphose and weave connections. A multitude of narratives intertwine within the space, giving shape to intriguing poetry.
The title of this exhibition refers to a work by artist Wim De Pauw created at WIELS Brussels after an encounter at his exhibition in Lokal-int in Biel/Bienne in 2021. Drawing from different definitions of a first impression, the artist invokes the image of the “ouroboros”, the snake that bites off its own tail as a symbol of eternal return.
The exhibition is a tandem project with open space for contemporary art Komplot in Brussels, which hosts Bieler artists during Brussels Gallery Weekend in September 2024.
Copper is a soft, red-orange pure metal that due to its high conductivity feels every touch impressed on its form across its entire body. It is tough and malleable. In recent years, an abundance of copper ore has been found on the lunar surface, which draws on deeper connections and closer ties between different celestial bodies. Copper plays a supporting role in Monika Stalder’s sound installation that consists of two sound bodies that come together in the BACKROOM of KRONE COURONNE. Three copper records with three different compositions conceived by Monika phase in and out of tune with each other, creating a meditative, rocking motion; to and fro. Abaove, three piano strings are drawn across the space and their length and tension condition the sound. On the other side of the room a Jura stone grounds a copper cymbal. A moment of release comes with Monika’s activation of this site-specific instrument through plucking and stringing techniques.
SOMA 24/25
Sound is a powerful medium. It’s omnipresent. It has a material-affective power of socio-cultural and political significance. How do you listen? When do you really hear? In 2024/2025, the BACKROOM accommodates the practice and research of sound artists in the framework of the SOMA series. As a result of a curatorial research that investigates the emancipatory and transformative potential of different listening practices, SOMA invites to listen, linger, vibrate and hear collectively in a shared, plural, response-able and care-full context. The first episode of SOMA welcomes Monika Stalder.
Monika Stalder lives and works in Zurich. Process is a key element in the artist’s work. Monika Stalder moves fluidly between different media in her practice, from smaller pencil and ink drawings of minimal, geometric forms to large-scale painting, sound and video works. Her works are multi-dimensional, with subtle attention to detail and technique, while drawing the viewer deep into her imaginary universe. She explores alternative realms, countless parallel existences of undiscovered celestial bodies. An endless cosmos internalised in the mind, unrestrained by time and history, gender and origin. Her seemingly perfect, quiet forms have a wild inner life that echoes beneath the linear surface – a movement that she can only control to a certain extent, allowing spontaneity to guide her.
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O Rose is a collective exhibition, which grew out of a collegial relation and friendship between Danish sculptor Marie Lund and British-Palestinian filmmaker and painter Rosalind Nashashibi. The two artists work in different media and with different aesthetics. But there turns out to be methodological overlaps in the way they conceive their works and in the way their works open up to and absorb the lived life in which they are created.
The conversation between the two artists takes its starting point in Rosalind Nashashibi’s film Denim Sky. In this domestic sci-fi film, Rosalind Nashashibi explores ways of forming a community around her single parent family through, amongst other means, journeys into space and non-linear time. With this film in mind, Marie Lund created a new series of sculptures, Daily, which, through repetition and variations, similarly collapses the expectation of a linear time. Made from residual materials, paper pulp and rubber granules, the sculptures – in their own way – also speak of fragility and strength.
In the new film The Invisible Worm, made for the exhibition, Rosalind Nashashibi explores the multiple personas and roles of the artist. Visual artist and co-writer on the film, Elena Narbutaitė, who is also one of the main characters in Denim Sky, appears in the film, together with Marie Lund, Rosalind Nashashibi, her son Pietro, a male model and a cat, each embodying artist and muse. The exhibition’s title refers to William Blake’s mystical poem The Sick Rose, 1794, which also guides the film’s poetic and inscrutable structure. Both Marie Lund’s and Rosalind Nashashibi’s studios appear in the film, as do Den Fries’ galleries.
Both paper and film are porous. Making works in paper pulp or with 16 mm film requires laborious processes that extend over time and are characterized by the unpredictability of the materials. Cracks can appear in the surfaces of the paper shells when the paper pulp solidifies, just as dust grains can get stuck in the delicate film emulsion or on the camera’s lens and infiltrate the images like small flickering, almost invisible worms. Similar to the material processes shaping Marie Lund’s work, the situations captured in Rosalind Nashashibi’s films are open to influence – initiated to then be allowed to unfold on their own terms.
Neither the sculptures nor the films are static, autonomous works. Rather, they are containers or frames for each other and a kind of host for the relationships that exist between them and that weave in and out of them. Rosalind Nashashibi’s collaged narrative flickers luminously between persons and narrators as well as physically between the exhibition spaces. Marie Lund’s mute sculptures spread out serially in the other galleries, they are not concluded objects either. On the contrary, the sculptures insist on a temporality that is not really unlike that of the film. The works of both artists are fundamentally deriving from thinking about relations and exchanges, about what continues and what changes.
About the Artists
Marie Lund’s artistic practice arrives from a contemplation on the interdependence between objects, space and bodies. Her sculptural works contain references to existing, functional objects, which she releases from their original use and transforms into abstract structures through tensile material processes. In resistance to sculpture as autonomous objects, they outline and activate their environments, turning to ideas of hosting and of exchange.
Rosalind Nashashibi is a filmmaker and painter living in London. Shot on 16mm, her films start from close observation of life and move into storytelling, often considering relationships in communities and extended families. In her paintings, overloaded motifs and existing paintings are treated with seriousness whilst wrongfooting the viewer into questioning themselves as to why they are engaged. Rosalind Nashashibi supports a free Palestine.
About the Exhibition Series at Den Frie
O Rose is part of Den Fries’ exhibition series Valgslægtskaber, which unfolds connections and conversations between artist colleagues. In this fourth edition, works by Marie Lund (DK) engage with the works of Rosalind Nashashibi (UK/PS).
Ctrl + ↑ for Coyote Time / Curated by Jen Kratochvil, Borbála Szalai, Maxine Vajt
Bassam Al-Sabah, Hollow (Gyula Muskovics, Tamás Páll, Viktor Szeri), Denis Kozerawski (with Kristína Jamrichová, Ondřej Mohyla, Martina Růžičková), Lawrence Lek, Paula Malinowska, Tabitha Nikolai, Sin Wai Kin
22 March – 7 April 2024
Liliom u. 41
1094 Budapest
Sin Wai Kin: The Breaking Story, 2022 (six-channel video, 4K, colour, sound, 6’31”)
Hollow: Letter from the Glass Desert, 2024 (mixed media, video, 3’40”) | photo: Máté Kalicz
Hollow: Letter from the Glass Desert, 2024 (mixed media, video, 3’40”)
Ctrl + ↑ for Coyote Time | exhibition view | Bassam Al-Sabah: I AM ERROR, 2021 (HD CGI film, 30’27”) |
Paula Malinowská: (Non)botanical bestiary, 2023 (3D printed objects)
Tabitha Nikolai: Ineffable Glossolalia, 2018 (unity video play)
We look down and realize that we’ve run over the edge of the cliff, the abyss is below us. What do we do? What can we do? Is there by any chance a keyboard shortcut for this?
Jumping forward from this moment of suspension, the exhibition Ctrl+Up for Coyote Time asks whether it is possible to imagine worlds – digital or physical – where the rules by which we ‘play’ can be redefined. Where the hegemonic play and the failed normative goals of videogames can be transcended, where the systems of rules can be reimagined, where individual and shared experiences -that are both political and deeply personal- can be lived.
Questions of how mainstream gaming formulates daily routines of our lives meet more specific challenges to the basic principles of gamification and world-building used as a toolbox for normalized existence in late capitalism – how to disrupt, take apart, and reconfigure them to counteract the system they originated from? The exhibition explores the boundaries and adjacent niches of the continuous bleeding of digital and physical reality into each other; a probe into hegemonic play and its deconstruction through queer and trans methods and strategies; an elaborate ploy to reach the state when time freezes, and you keep levitating, and a the second jump appears to be an option.
Professional partner: Háttér Society
Supported by: Háttér Society, United States Department of State, the National Cultural Fund of Hungary, Czech Centre Budapest, Káli Kövek
Photo Credits: Sebastien Verdon
The oldest drawing of a bird that we know of, was found in a cave in Vallon-Pont-d’Arc in France and dates back nearly 30’000 years: a painting of an owl. Maxi Ehrenzeller and Sima Naeimi love to paint birds. Gestures and narrations, as banal as they may seem, that take us back to the most essential aspects of civilization and the medium itself. and as I watch, I feel a kinship brings together two artists of the German and French speaking part of Switzerland. Evolving in different contexts, imbued with distinct references, they speak the same language: that of painting. If ornithologists and painters share a passion for contemplation, the stories Naeimi and Ehrenzeller are telling can teach us how to grasp living things in a different way: through their signs and senses.
Während des ersten Lockdowns der Corona-Pandemie wird Maxi Ehrenzeller (*1993) vom Gurren der Tauben auf seinem Balkon geweckt. Aus dem Bett seiner Amsterdamer Wohnung sieht der Künstler, wie sich dort eine Taubenfamilie einnistet und ihn morgendlich begrüsst. In einer Zeit, geprägt von Unsicherheiten und Ausgangssperren, werden die Tauben zu den stetigen Begleiterinnen des Künstlers – so auch in der Malerei. In einer Struktur die zu keinem Zeitpunkt wirklich aufzugehen scheint, lassen sich in Momenten der Dämmerung Plattenböden aus Kücheninterieurs erkennen. Grüne Neonfarbtöne lassen eine grelle Lichtquelle ausserhalb des Bildes erahnen. Es sind Szenen der Nacht, des Halbschlafs und der Absurdität, die der Künstler festhält. Die Taube bleibt als Protagonistin bestehen, im Schlaf wird sie zur Beschützerin des Künstlers. Ihr vielseitiges Wesen entwickelt sich zur Faszination. Tauben sind überall und werden doch kaum wahrgenommen. Tauben kennen keine Grenzen. Tauben werden in einigen Religionen verehrt und doch werden an Schweizer Bahnhöfen Stacheldrähte an den Dächern angebracht um sie fernzuhalten. Tauben verkörpern einerseits den Frieden und werden gleichzeitig als Krankheitsträger wahrgenommen. Zwischen Verehrung und Verachtung, Freiheit und Vertreibung, nimmt die Taube in Ehrenzellers Arbeit eine kritische Haltung ein und fragt nach Zugehörigkeit, nach Status, nach Identität.
Sima Naeimi (*1991) peint les cygnes du Léman. Née à Téhéran, elle s’installe à Paris en 2016 pour étudier les arts visuels. Cette nouvelle vie en Europe aura un impact considérable sur sa pratique artistique. Si bien que, depuis ce moment-là, les concepts de frontières, la communication – ou leur absence – sont au cœur de sa production artistique. Paradoxalement, l’artiste a, par la suite, habité plusieurs années sur une frontière; celle entre la France et Genève. Elle a, dès ses premiers instants sur ce territoire, posé ses yeux sur un paysage que nous sommes accoutumé-e-s à voir, à parfois reproduire et à assurément voir reproduit un important nombre de fois: le lac et ses montagnes. S’asseoir, observer le paysage et le représenter sur un support pourrait sembler trivial; pourtant ce geste appelle la question troublante que nous pose Naeimi dans son atelier: Est-ce qu’ils voient la même chose que moi ? Radicalement ancrées au bout du lac, ses peintures suggèrent un autre regard sur l’image de carte postale à laquelle on semble parfois accidentellement adhérer. Sa vision souligne le fait qu’il n’existe rien de neutre, pas même les paysages. Si, comme chez Ehrenzeller, les oiseaux – ici les cygnes – occupent une place qui frise avec l‘obsessionnel, on ne comprend pas aisément s’ils sont nos alliés ou nos ennemis. En les répétant à l’infini, ils deviennent des lettres qui s’énoncent elleux-mêmes: “les cygnes blancs du lac léman, hiver 2024”.
– Katia Leonelli & Marius Quiblier
The exhibition comes with an original publication, featuring both artists‘ personal visual references as well as unpublished poems. Special thanks to Virginie Sistek for the cover‘s visuals and to Clovis Duran for his help.
ERMES ERMES
Via Dei Banchi Vecchi 16
00186, Roma
Beatrice Bonino’s background is in ancient languages and in particular in
the duality – philosophical and grammatical
(therefore structural) – of the Mādhavīyadhātuvr̥ tti,
an ancient
commentary on the grammatical roots of Sanskrit. The vestiges of an attention
towards the morphological and metaphysical doubleness of things can be gleaned between the fog-like layers of what
look like elevations of materials which might
have otherwise been lost. Bonino’s first solo exhibition at Ermes Ermes
reflects upon the dynamics of disappearance
and that which lingers in the wake of dissolution, in spirit or material form.
In fact, it seems as if the stratified matter in Bonino’s
compositions are memories
now embodied through
the works on view.
The evanescent forms and materials
employed by Bonino elude definition and are manipulated by the artist
in an effort to verticalize and hang what would naturally
rest differently. A white silk curtain segment
is incapacitated by a sheet of glass. This replica of the curtain that
has always hung in the bedroom of the artist’s grandmother, presents with an un-mended hole. Despite Bonino’s
grandmother being the seamstress who made the curtain, the gash has always been there suggesting that sometimes the material results
of an accident can be the proof of a life lived. While developing
the exhibition, Bonino came across a text written by Mike Kelley
in which the artist elaborated on the differences between a ghost
(someone who disappears) and a spirit
(a memory or something that is not there, but is). One result is a text-work in which Bonino
lays out her own interest in the nuances of existence in relation to
action, suggesting some connections between Kelley’s
ideas and ancient
Indian philosophical thought.
The viewer too is invited
to contemplate on different
notions—of being and of doing as well as of accident, and on how these relate
to the memory and preservation of
one’s existence. Each time the artist visits her grandmother, something new in
her bedroom has vanished: one half of the bed and the handwritten notes which used to populate
the surfaces of the room are
now gone. Like in a dance between inanimate things – a Fantasia – the sight is
disorienting, leaving a strong sense of
the presence of an absence. The curtain remains.
“Kill your darlings” is part of the methodological wisdom that comes from
creative writing processes. The advice
is to coolly edit out any writing that doesn’t serve the wider purpose of the
narrative, to renounce to and shed
any prose that doesn’t fit, no matter how exquisite it sounds – regardless of
whether it got you to where you are
now – it can be sacrificed. Bonino often finds herself killing her darlings,
storing them for the next time.
While waiting for a more appropriate context
in which to exist, they live on within the artist’s desire.
Chiara Siravo,
2024
On the notion of
existence
I saw a vase drawn on page five of Mike Kelley’s Existance Problems. The glimpse of a seemingly dormant
memory: the vase is mentioned as archetypical object
of existence in countless ancient
philosophical Indian texts. This is certainly due to its common
presence and clear functional purpose; it is also more specifically considered
to be a particular type of object. In Sanskrit this object is called vikāryam, it involves the appearance
of a new quality in the matter
which is subjected to that transformation. Just like in the example,
he transforms gold into a
bracelet, in the same way he transforms clay into a vase. It is an object which
exists only in its final phase – after the transformation of the original
matter – but also all along the action involving its creation since
the intention is present in the maker from the very start. In Kelley’s letter,
the vase is represented as falling off a surface, he wonders what is being
displaced by that vase taking up that space, he calls it ‘the living dead’ and
wants to knock it off. I won’t be any
longer.
This is not it. A few years back I translated a late medieval Indian
commentary about the notion of action and, in particular, that of existence
as action. The author says that the verb ‘to be’ (bhū-) is employed in the sense of ‘existence’ (sattā) and that this existence can
be explained as ‘the fact of carrying one’s own self’ (ātmabhāraṇam).
I was, again, struck when, in his letter, Kelley writes of ‘self perpetuating’ when he is concerned with proving his own
existence through the mirrors which are the others. What is existence if not
the the continuation of one’s self?
While I can’t neglect that the starting
point of Kelley’s
reasoning is an ontological (and visual?) one, I for once
want to enjoy the freedom
of not making any specific
point. The ancient
Indian philosophers in question were considering the linguistic aspect
of it all but I can’t help but notice
a similarity between
the dialectic tools that
both they and Kelley employ while demonstrating what existence is. Indian philosophers distinguish between
general and specific actions, the first being
actions such as doing and being, and the second
such as cooking or walking. When someone asks
‘what is he doing?’, the answer cannot be ‘he is existing’. Not because
existing is not an action
– the philosophers have proven
that existence is the action
par excellence because presupposed by any other action.
But it is not a particular one, such as the one expressed by ‘he cooks’ etc. One asks for the specific, unknown activity
of something whose existence is, on the contrary, already known, and not at all
for the known existence of someone. For this reason, one cannot reply ‘he is
existing’ since existing is also a general action just like doing. Kelley unconsciously (?) makes use of this meant-to-be
flawless question-answer method in his letter:
hi 1) fine, what have you been doing?
2) not much. Just hanging around
yea, just being here
1) just existing
2) yes, I exist
me too
There is only one exception, according
to the philosophers, for which one is
allowed to answer ‘he exists’ to that question, namely if one is
concerned with the disappearing of one’s self, through death. If existing is
understood as I am still
alive, I have not disappeared yet, I linger.
Is it possible Kelley had this in mind while questioning existence? And don’t we
all.
This unrequired comparison finds its reason
in a simple appreciation for common and time transversal mental human categories.
Beatrice Bonino,
2024
Beatrice Bonino (b.1992, Turin) lives and works in Paris; holds a PhD in
Sanskrit at Université Sorbonne- Nouvelle.
Solo and group exhibitions: 2024 (upcoming) Cosetta
at Bonner Kunstverein, DE; Galerie Molitor
(solo show), Berlin, DE; Post Scriptum. Un museo
dimenticato a memoria at MACRO, Rome, IT; 2023 Living Spaces at Galerie
Molitor, Berlin, DE; Cosetta at MMXX, Milan,
IT; If I did, I did, I die at Jacqueline Sullivan
gallery, New York,
US.
Somehow there is a fundamental gap between the sensory perceptions of material surroundings and their translation into mental experiences. POV reflects on this surplus between the weight of our brains and our consciousness, known as The Hard Problem. Our maps have reached the fringes of the micro and the macro, yet somehow the mind and its lineaments remain an undisclosed frontier. From material, philosophical, and abstract perspectives, POV examines why, despite our growing understanding of world functions and mechanisms, we still can’t fully account for the presence, or even absence, of consciousness, intelligence, and experience. The exhibition proceeds with a commitment to the complexity and multilevel nature of the problem, and in particular an acknowledgement that, in order to map out the questions of intelligence and consciousness in all of its aspects and its multiple scales, one has to assemble and articulate different modes of knowledge.
As the title suggests, POV is concerned with the contingency of how one apprehends their environment, and how this interaction generates habits and models of the world at large. This inquiry is part of a long critique of perspectival representation, where the subject dissociates themselves from perceived objects, and orients their environment with themselves, the human, at the centre. Yet it is not simply a question of subjectivity and personalized experience, at best a partial perception of material reality, a limited viewpoint, or how these projections onto the environment are selective and altered representations of the world that can have pernicious effects. Rather the exhibition explores how shifts in perception, cognition, and consciousness yield fundamental changes in the subject, impacting how we think, communicate, and understand reality.
The exhibition choreographs a set of unstable viewpoints and representative paradigms to explore not only histories of cognitive estrangement and transcendence that break through social and phenomenological barriers, from mystical traditions to psychedelia to meditation to psychosocial therapies etc., but also to reveal how these practices and ways of knowing are rooted in specific technologies and techniques. The focus is not on concepts, but on percepts. The suggestion here is that rapid changes in our information environment provide new orientations, which must be attended to, and that such shifts may offer a possibility for the affirmation of a renewed planetary and collective consciousness. This notion is as visionary as it is practical and political.
Anecdotally, astronauts have reported that by leaving our atmosphere and looking back on Earth, they’ve experienced what has been called The Overview Effect, a sense of overwhelming awe and profound emotion triggered by the perceptual and conceptual vastness of infinite space and a sense of veneration for Earth as a complete and unified whole. The transformative experience of this perspectival shift was not unlike transcendental feelings in religious and spiritual traditions. The recent capture of the first-ever image of a black hole, stands in stark and perfect contrast to the now famed and faded belief in the image of our globe, seen from that outside vantage point.
POV proceeds from the understanding that changes in our self-conception necessarily lead to the transformation of our collective modes of acting. It is a program for artificialization, a scheme dedicated to exploring an outside or distanced view of ourselves. The exhibition is a complex diorama with a villa-like scenography that continuously confuses determinations of inside and outside. Drawing on cultural, psychological, and phenomenological tropes of the interior and exterior and private and public space, the works appear in an entangled manner, dislocating time and space and our embodied positions within this field. Allusions to the domestic environment and its interchange with the “outdoors” places us in our element, the human domain. But this comfort is continuously interrupted not only by the manifest artificiality of the constructions, but also through conflicting experiences of place and distance, where imminent experience contains a kernel of the infinite, the cosmic in the mundane.
The home, our ‘world,’ enclosed yet open, is here nested within a larger world, the biosphere, our universe. There is a simultaneous sense of particularization and generalization, where the assemblages at hand are seen as both representations and as autonomous and present sensible structures.
One can understand the presentation as a testing of models, in terms of physical models and representations, as well as the cognitive and ideological models through which we frame our environment. Here, each artwork apparatus unpacks, reduces, aggregates, and materializes a system, exteriorizing and making palpable dynamics that otherwise would be too complex, lofty, mundane, or tripped out to comprehend. By testing ideas as material forms, they make the invisible visible, and situate the viewer as an active co-agent in the production of meaning by making one aware of one’s own capacities and limits of awareness. When we encounter a human mannequin perforated with holes, it functions as a surrogate, a stand-in for ourselves and our permeability, but it also stands as an autonomous, immediate, figure which we confront 1:1 as another body in space. Familiar objects and scenarios, like a well or an information board, call us to act in a certain way, yet they also elicit immaterial qualities within this material reality that completes this “point of view” by generating an atmosphere, a vibe, what phenomenologists and consciousness researchers call qualia.
More than mere blueprints or tools for publicizing, materializing, or simplifying knowledge, the model here is treated as a tool that mediates between the mind, hands, and eyes, mingling the activities of discovery and manipulation. Models displace thought from the individual human mind, they are a prosthetic device that transports information from one domain or subject to the next and generates information about larger systems through enclosed representations that are projected out into the world. They are a technique that allows for a perceptual shift, a move from one’s entrenched perspective to an outside position. At the same time, this exteriorization is an emblematic perceptual mode, particularly in the West, which imagines one can only know the world by abstractly distancing ourselves from it.
Contesting the supposed neutrality of our models, the exhibition uses modelling as a key technique to not only explore specific dynamics, histories, and concepts around perception, but also to make visible the abstraction and manipulation of the model itself, the various ways our maps re-orient our practices and picture of the world. In our time of intense ecopolitical crisis and increasing global computation, models and simulations have become central to our daily lives. They map, and more and more determine, where we are and where we are going. As the sociologist Donald MacKenzie has observed, models today are “an engine not a camera,” they do not simply represent, they are a performative driver shaping how we interact with our world and the ways in which this interaction takes place.
Indeed, it is through models, language, and images that we process our being-in- the-world. Our perceptions are abstractions of sensory information, produced to operatively interpret and modify reality, ordering it as an image. Thinking does not just happen in our heads, but moves imaginatively across the boundaries of brain, body, and world. Yet the problem remains: what is this excess between the mechanistic functioning of our bodies and what we can call phenomenal experience, consciousness? Spirituality, science, and philosophy have long endeavoured to solve this hard problem by proliferating models and frameworks that help us discern these interactions. Yet awareness of a system does not mean one fully comprehends it.
One recent attempt at modelling consciousness, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), proposed by the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, derives a mathematical calculus to measure the presence of conscious experience. Instead of looking at physical and neurological systems and searching for its presence from the outside, the theory looks from the inside out by acknowledging that consciousness is a fundamental property possessed by any system that has certain causal properties and a certain degree of complexity and self-awareness. In doing so, it suggests the presence of consciousness in places one would least expect it, and have come to understand consciousness and intelligence as an emergent property that arises through the complex organization of information, matter. This model harmonizes with the premises of panpsychism, a view shared in numerous mystical and philosophical traditions, that the entire universe, across every scale from micro to macro, has a certain spirit and awareness that is dynamic and part of an interconnected whole.
The fundamental building blocks of our world have a sort of rudimentary experience, everything feels something about its world and its relations to others all the way down to the most minute manner, and more complex intelligences, like our brains, are built up from these basic modules of consciousness. Along with this is a critique of the bifurcations of subject and object, man and nature, mind and matter, self and other. It “re-enchants” the universe by merging physical and mental properties, a view that functions as a counterpoint to the detached “coldness” of scientism, and allows us to reconstruct our place within an interconnected and non- dualistic ecology, and to recognize a certain consciousness, a universal vital force, what Hindus call Prana, as intrinsic to us and everything around us.
Today, there is much anxiety about the emergence of artificial intelligence as a threat to the exceptionalism of the human, and one of the main arguments goes that machines can never be conscious, only functioning as artificial imitations of human values. Yet, as POV suggests, isn’t it through models and artifices that we interact and construct our worlds? We have modelled our global computational systems after ourselves, and now that these formalisms are beginning to generate their own autonomy, they’ve started looking back at us and modelling us in turn. The optimists have noted that the dynamic and widely distributed exchanges of information in our increasingly computational environment may be revealing what was there all along, expanding our notions of what intelligence and consciousness is, even outside ourselves, in the words of the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, “Silicon is nature calculating itself”.
One could say that the proliferation of memes on the internet, for example, is a demonstration of novel forms of distributed consciousness which gives us a view on the role imitation, artificialization, and collective intelligence may play in our processes of meaning-making and world-building. Though there is an appropriate fear that potentially all our relations may be absorbed into a techno-capitalist dystopia where all intelligence is co-opted and controlled, isolating us from a universal consciousness, the changing coordinates of experience from digital media and mass computation are yet to be mapped, and are giving us new views on old hard problems.
Perhaps this is why psychedelic and esoteric cultures and practices have seen a revival in our age. As a response to times of crisis and change, such attempts to expand the mind and explore the limits of perception and consciousness are a means of smoothing cultural transitions and the shocks of new mediated experiences. The blurring of boundaries, feelings of universal connection, and hyper-associative points of view in the psychedelic or transcendental experience are like the cognitive and perceptual leaps endemic to the electric vortex that is our increasingly techno- biological environment. And through these forms of expanded and empathic perception, we are observing an evolution of cognitive acquisition and collective, distributed, consciousness, a certain “collective effervescence” which is opening the doors for new models and modes of being and perceiving to emerge.
Tapping into the omnipresence of ‘awareness’ in cultural discourse today, full of political, conspiratorial, and practical associations, POV is critically ambivalent to these technological and sociological changes, while at the same time, curious about how such transformations play a part in the continual conception and transformation of ourselves. Through scenographic constructions and the production of arcane gadgets and models, the exhibition maps the deficiencies of our technological, scientific, philosophical, and spiritual paradigms to account for consciousness and takes its own turn into a more fluid and abstract inner realm.
Text by Post Brothers
Lukas Danys (1988, Kaunas), lives and works in Copenhagen. Education, selected: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts; Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. Exhibited work, selected: Obsession, Nida Art Colony, Lithuania; Archway Nightlands Connector Jennifer-See Alternate, Copenhagen, Denmark; Belas Artes, Lisbon, Portugal; West Germany, Berlin; Kreuzberg Pavillon, Berlin, Germany; Kabinetas, Kaunas, Lithuania. Residencies, selected: Nida Art Colony, AqTushetii residency. Grants/awards, selected: Grosserer L.F. Foghts Foundation, Sozziparken and Council of Visual Arts, Copenhagen Municipality. Curatorial work: Rewild, Copenhagen, Denmark; In Situ, Copenhagen, Denmark; Paranormal, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Jan S. Hansen (1980, Haderslev), lives and works in Copenhagen. He is one of the founders of Simian. Education, selected: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts; The European Graduate School, Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought, Saas-Fee, Switzerland and Copenhagen University, Faculty of Humanities, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, Copenhagen, Denmark. Exhibited work, selected: O – Overgaden, Copenhagen, Denmark; Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark; Kunsthal Nord, Aalborg, Denmark; Huset for Kunst og Design, Holstebro, Denmark; Hvidovre Main Library, Hvidovre, Denmark; CCA Andratx, Andratx, Spain and The Danish Institute in Rome, Rome, Italy. Curatorial work: Co-director, Simian, Copenhagen, Denmark; Co-director, IMO, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Images: courtesy of the artist and Meyer RieggerJohn Costi / PAPER WORK
March 3 – March 30, 2023
St Chads
43 Wicklow St,
London, WC1X 9JS
EACH SATURDAY EVENING AFTER ‘BANG UP’, UNCLE RECALL, AN I.P.P* INMATE RESIDING IN HMP PENTONIVILLE, ASTRAL PROJECTS INTO ST. CHADS PROJECT SPACE TO HOLD A SEANCE WITH A PAST SELF.
A 3 WEEK PROGRAMME OF SHARED RECITALS INCLUDING RAPS FROM FELTHAM, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PLAY READINGS AND LETTERS SHARED WITH COSTI’S MUM, St. Bridget, WILL OCCUR IN THE PROJECT SPACE.
BY ANALYSING RESTRICTED DOCUMENTS FROM YESTER-LIFE COSTI CLEANSES WRONG DOINGS, ADDRESSES PAST TRAUMAS AND CRITIQUES GOVERNMENT AGENCIES.
ENACTMENT AND RITUAL ARE THE MEETING PLACE OF PARA-POSSIBILITIES WHERE TIME LINES CROSS AND ALTERNATE REALITIES MERGE.
THE COULDA-BEENS AND THE SHOULDA-BEENS HOLD COURT IN SHARED REGRET AND RESENTMENT.
ARBAG is delighted to present Blind Taste, a group exhibition opening in Lisbon on March 14, 2024. Curated by the artists Pedro Ventura Matos and Ricardo Passaporte, this exhibition combines an eclectic assembly of 47 artists working in a myriad of mediums and styles unified by a singular constraint: the use of A4 paper in a vertical orientation.
Blind Taste embarks on an exploratory journey to transcend conventional art appreciation, inviting audiences to engage with the artwork’s inherent value and essence, devoid of any preconceived notions or external attributions such as status, networks, commercial or social value. In a bold move away from traditional exhibition practices, each piece will be presented anonymously, stripping away labels to foster an unmediated and authentic encounter with the work.
This initiative endeavors to cultivate a direct and unadulterated connection with the artworks, deliberately distancing itself from the customary evaluative frameworks that often cloud artistic perception. By focusing solely on the artworks’ visual and aesthetic merits, Blind Taste aspires to redefine the parameters of judgment, offering a sanctuary where art is liberated from the confines of context.
In its commitment to diversity and inclusivity, the exhibition eschews hierarchical structures and agendas, assembling a vibrant tableau of artists hailing from varied backgrounds, nationalities, genders, and stages in their careers. Through Blind Taste, ARBAG aims to construct a democratic and open platform, where the singular beauty and potency of each work can resonate freely, inviting viewers to experience art in its most pure and unadulterated form.
Exhibiting artists: Ada, Alexandre Camarao, Alexandre Farto (Vhils), Alice Browne, Andrew Birk, Bárbara Faden, Beatriz Capitulé, Chris Hood, Conny Maier, Erris Huigens, Fábio Colaço, Fabio Viscogliosi, Filipe André Alves, Fernando Travassos, Francesco De Prezzo, Francisca Jardim, Fredrik Åkum, Germes Gang, Gonçalo Preto, Henrique Pavão, Horácio Frutuoso Inês Raposo, Isabel Cordovil, Joana Coelho, Kaspar Oppen Samuelsen, Laura Caetano Lulú, Luísa Salvador, Madalena Hipólito, Mantraste, Matt Mignanelli, Miguel Flor, Nuno Patrício, Paulo Arraiano, Paulo Lisboa, Pedro Barateiro, Pedro Batista, Pedro O Novo, Rita Paisana, Roger Paulino, Rudi Brito, Rui Gueifão, Sandra Baia, Sara & André, Struan Teague, Timothy Hull, Wolfgang Voegele, Yorgos Stamkopoulos.
JANUARY 25 – MARCH 23, 2024
Then I awoke.
Responding to the theme of Making Kin, Making Place, Lucas Erin takes inspiration from the atmosphere of the Creole veranda and welcomes us into a landscape of sculptures and ready-made objects. A social space that has a special place within the Caribbean home and community, the veranda embodies hospitality and openness to the outside world, offering a space for exchange, rest and observation. As such, this exhibition invites visitors to settle in and turn their backs to the wall, evoking a sense of retreat, of keeping vigil.
Lucas Erin (*1990) is a Franco-Caribbean artist whose practice is rooted in a multicultural reflection that explores resistance to social normalization, human encounters and interrelations. Inspired by the ideas of Patrick Chamoiseau and Edouard Glissant, his work explores the cultural heritage of the Caribbean and themes of catastrophe. After completing his masters in Visual Arts at the École cantonale d’art de Lausanne in 2016, he devoted several years to exploring the collective aspects of his artistic practice and thinking, by getting involved in various independent art spaces in Paris, notably La Colonie. He is co-founder of the Happy Baby Gallery in Crissier, and his work has been shown at the Allstars gallery (Lausanne), the Musée cantonal d’art de Lausanne, the Sunsworks (Zurich) and the Helmhaus (Zurich) among others.
The exhibition is accompanied with texts by Jean Bourgois and Véronique Kanor.
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Thomaz Rosa
Thomaz Rosa
Thomaz Rosa
Thomaz Rosa
Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino
Lorenza Longhi
Lorenza Longhi
Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino
Lorenza Longhi
Lorenza Longhi
Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino
Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino
Lorenza Longhi
Lorenza Longhi
Lorenza Longhi
Li Li Ren / The World forgetting, by the World Forgot
26 January – 16 March 2024
Unit 1, 2 Treadway St, London E2 6QW
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Group Exhibition at MAIS WRIGHT / Sydney
Brodie Cullen, Gabriella Presti, Elisabeth Sulich
23 February – 22 March 2024
91 Stanley Street, East Sydney
GROUP EXHIBITION 24 is an exhibition by recent graduates of the National Art School, Sydney. However, what also coheres the exhibition is their friendship, the locality of Darlinghurst, their use of found materials, ready-mades, in a search for identity by circumstances, the personal and the domestic.
Erris Huigens / Passer-by
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Erris Huigens challenges conventional norms of perception. This project transcends a mere exhibition, unfolding in various phases that are both external and internal, revisiting different stages of a construction act. What is observed, in this documentation, is a work in progress, where it remains uncertain if the finished form is what is depicted in the photographs, or if there is ever a final form as opposed to phases relative to the viewer’s observation.
Photographing structures made of concrete, still in the midst of construction, Huigens, is not creating “a situation” in the conventional sense of the term. Rather, he is highlighting and revisiting the unintentional works that have been created by architects and construction workers within an evolving construction site. By suspending a normal building construction process for several hours, the intriguing part of the project lies in its subtlety.
The reinforced concrete structures, which seem to reference authors from minimalism like Serra, LeWitt, Carl Andre, etc., remain intact, unaltered, for a brief period before being reassembled into a new form functional to the dwellings they will soon constitute. However, the real momentary transformation they undergo is through the lens of the passer-by, who places them in an entirely new dimension, where they are recognized, recontextualized, and analyzed as central objects of the project.
Unlike a compact sculpture in a museum or a ready-made object in an art gallery, these artworks span vast surfaces, dominating cityscapes and drawing attention purely by their magnitude. They are a testament to the often ignored beauty of the mundane and the impermanence of human endeavors.
In this project, Huigens explores the theme of language, which serves as a conduit for transience within this context, effortlessly connecting documentation, sculpture and performance, this convergence culminates in a result that is both unique and indistinguishable.
The notion of language here is not merely a tool for communication but an integral component of the artistic process, blurring the lines between mediums and creating an experiential continuum. In doing so, it underscores the ephemeral nature of art itself, where the boundaries of expression are constantly redefined and reimagined, leading to a creative synthesis that defies traditional categorization.
The documentation and portrayal of paintings on blank canvases, along with a tangible sculpture, transcend materiality.
Whether created physically or manipulated by artificial intelligence, these works encapsulate the creative essences logically derived from photographs. They invite contemplation on the need for their physical presence versus the potential to exist solely through documentation, questioning their inherent reality. The project interweaves objects, surfaces, whiteness, concrete, materiality, ephemerality, and transience. Each exhibit by Huigens, inherently ephemeral, persists through its documentation. In this endeavor, he photographs, generates ideas, partakes in physical labor, constructs structures.
In
the depths of the sea, during the mating of anglerfish, the male– mere
centimeters in size– seeks out his significantly larger female counterpart. He
bites onto her belly, and eventually their tissues fuse; the male assimilates
into the female’s bloodstream as they become permanently united in the vast
ocean depths. Marine biologists believe this extraordinary symbiosis is driven
by the challenge of encountering one’s own kind in the remote oceanic expanses.
Xinan
Ran’s second exhibition at Essex Flowers Gallery, titled “Crumbs and
Lather,” draws inspiration from this moment of deep-sea bonding and uses
it as a quaint metaphor to mirror the frugal practice of joining a nearly
finished sliver of soap with a new bar– a common household act that conserves the
smaller piece and prolongs the utility of the soap. This act of merging,
familiar to many, harks back to a more challenging era when thriftiness was a
daily necessity.
“Crumbs
and Lather” delves into these acts of “cleansing”, bringing to light the often
overlooked “crumbs” of daily routine– the laundering of stains, the wiping away
of handprints, and the collection, melting, and display of used soap pieces by
various individuals. The exhibition aims to illuminate the collective imprints
we leave on unseen layers of our urban interactions, emphasizing this shared
act of mark-making in our collective presence.
Participating
soap contributors: Tsubasa Berg, Noémie Jennifer Bonnet, Miguel Alejandro
Castillo, Jamie Chan, Cynthia Chen, Patrick Costello, Maria Jose García
Estevez, Kate Fry, Kathleen Granados, Kristen Heritage, Patrick Mohundro,
Camilla Padgitt-Coles, Fangyu Liu, Xiran Luo, Tyrel Stokes, Micaela Varela,
Jerome Wang, Martha Wilson, Queenie Wong, Marissa Wu, Amos Yeung, Aman Zaeghum
and April Zhu.
Xinan
Ran received her MFA from Hunter College
(2022), and BFA from Pratt Institute (2017). Ranked “Highbrow and Brilliant” by
the New York Magazine Matrix, Xinan is a 2024 More Art Commission Artist, a
2024 New York State Council on the Arts grant recipient, was a mentee in New
York Foundation for the Arts’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program (2023), a
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Arts Center resident (2022), and an Ox-Bow
Summer Fellow (2016). Apart from her studio practice, Xinan is an art educator,
an art administrator and an aspirational set designer for new theaters. www.xinanran.work
Zhang Xinjun / Craft
The exhibit features the installation “Lot Index,” conceived specifically for this space, alongside a series of paintings, initiating a dialogue on land, growth, and the environment.Born in Zhengzhou, Henan, in 1983, Zhang Xinjun earned his Bachelor’s from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute’s Oil Painting Department in 2005 and his Master’s from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2009, and is now based in Beijing.
Starting from the creation concerning residence, migration, temporariness and instability during the Black Bridge era, to the sensations of bondage and endurance, and then examining individual existence amid urban-rural transformations, Zhang Xinjun utilizes materials from his daily life, across diverse mediums like installations, sculptures, paintings, and performance art, persistently investigates the dynamic between individual existence and the environment through time and space. This observation of the “state of living” has become the main thread through his practices at different times.
“Lot Index” perpetuates the nuanced interplay between agricultural civilization and urban culture, a contradiction and coexistence that has consistently intrigued Zhang Xinjun in his creative endeavors. Considering the special structure of the space, Zhang fills the sunken space of the exhibition site with soil, plants wheat, and then covers it with sewer manhole and paving stones commonly seen in urban landscapes. The wheat grows slowly during the exhibition time, in dark places under the city that cannot be clearly seen, growing within constrained, formalized, and solid modules. Some of them emerge through the grates of the sewer, while others may always remain underground. The crops and the land metaphor some of the living spaces that are gradually being replaced in the transformation of urban-rural structures, and the state of survival of individual lives in this situation is revealed over time.
In Zhang Xinjun’s paintings, the subjects of the images are some basic material elements that are not specific: wheat, cotton, clods of soil, coal blocks, either enclosed in containers, scattered, or resting in space, or can be considered as a substitute of human flesh. Through straightforward and sincere expression, Zhang Xinjun captures elemental materials tied to human existence, embodying his insights and interpretations of reality, and reconnecting with elements fading from everyday awareness.
1669 è il nuovo progetto scultoreo di Nicola Martini presentato e realizzato appositamente per gli
Exhibition view
Thomaz Rosa, Percorso cucito, oil and collage on canvas, 40 x 50 cm, 2021.
Juliana dos Santos, AO, Clitoria flower and watercolor on cotton paper, 76 x 56 cm, 2022.
Bruno Baptistelli, untitled (brown), leather belt, 2011-2023.
Bruno Baptistelli, untitled (brown), leather belt, 2011-2023 (detail).
Exhibition view
Juliana dos Santos, clitoria flower and watercolor on cotton paper, 76 x 56 cm, 2022.
Bruno Baptistelli, untitled (series AA), acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 40 x 50 cm, 2023.
Carolina Cordeiro, Time is, Zinc plate and handmade mirror in a steel frame, 76 x 38 x 27 cm, 2023. Photo by: Ding Musa.
Exhibition view
Thomaz Rosa, Topography of a staple, oil on canvas, 30 x 37 cm, 2021.
Carolina Cordeiro, Initial Signs, zinc discs and paper, 86.5 x 97 cm, 2023. Photo by: Ding Musa.
Carolina Cordeiro, Initial Signs, zinc discs and paper, 86.5 x 97 cm, 2023 (detail). Photo by: Ding Musa.
All images courtesy and copyright of the artists and gallery. Photos by Ana Pigosso.
‘Black People Are The Silence They Cannot Understand’, whose title is borrowed from the homonymous work by the recently deceased American artist Pope.L (1955-2023), takes as its starting point excerpts from art historian Darby English’s interview* with Folasade Ologundudu:
“For example, you can’t get to the reality of abstract art without engaging the discourse of abstract art, which, ironically, is the most discursive art of the modern era. And you can’t get to the reality of a Black artist doing abstraction without dealing with the abstractness of Blackness as a matrix of identifications and projections, equally real and unreal.
But most everything you can read about Black artists doing abstraction eradicates this complexity to produce a more cohesive, less conflictual narrative about race and representation. I’m afraid Black abstract artists won’t get the viewing and understanding they deserve until we relinquish the very categorial ways we look at things and categorical tones we adopt to produce and share culturally-specific knowledge. The true radicality of that choice needs a facilitating environment which doesn’t exist yet.
…
To me, the worrisome thing about a flood of figuration is the time and resources we aren’t spending on the part of us we can’t image, the part we won’t sell, the mysteries, the fractions, the freaks. So whenever I see a figure, the first thing I need to do is to determine what it is and what it’s for. Is it a good witch or a bad witch?”
Participating in the group show are Bruno Baptistelli, Carolina Cordeiro, Juliana Dos Santos and Thomaz Rosa.
*excerpt from the interview between Darby English with Folasade Ologundudu originally published on Artnet on 01/26/2021.
Paul Kolling / Nadir
exc – avate
February 24 – March 30 2024
FLⒶT$
Neuhöfferstrasse 12
50679 Cologne
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