Author: admin

String Constructions, 117 Hester Street, 1972-73

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EXILE is pleased to announce a research presentation of early String Constructions by Kazuko Miyamoto in Berlin.

The three exhibited String Constructions were last installed in 1972-73 in Miyamoto’s studio building at 117 Hester Street, New York. The presentation focuses on Miyamoto’s pivotal transition from the pictorial plane to these early wall-based spatial constructions, with the aim of further exploring Miyamoto’s creative evolution towards her distinctive and expansive artistic practice.

After a brief period of painting (1969-1972), Miyamoto turned to the creation of these ephemeral, wall-based works using only industrial nails and readily available cotton string. These early works are in many ways transitional, and their relationship to Minimalism as experienced through her (predominantly male) peers contrasts her later presentations as a member of the women’s art collective A.I.R..

The specific identity and conservation of the works on display will be explored between their understanding as an extended form of painting and as site-specific architectural intervention.

→Kazuko Miyamoto

→Kazuko Miyamoto, String Constructions, KW Berlin, opening Oct 18, 2025

Brishty Alam

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Born 1988 in London, lives and works in Vienna.

→brishtyalam.com

David Gruber

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Born 1989 in Linz, lives and works in Vienna.

→davidgruber.net

MIART, Milan

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EXILE returns to MIART with a presentation of works by Kazuko Miyamoto, born 1942, Gwenn Thomas, born 1943, Brishty Alam, born 1988, and David Gruber born 1989.

In her move from painting to early string construction work, Kazuko Miyamoto replaced the confined space of the canvas for the architectural  expanse of her studio wall at 117 Hester Street. This move transformed the inconspicuous brick from a motif, as in the painting Progression of Rectangles (1969), into a site of measurement, structure, and spatial intervention. The visual field, in its immediacy and transparency, harbours a complexity that tends to spill from under its allocated borders or limits. The presentation expands on this very quality.

David Gruber’s paintings oscillate between the tactile immediacy of the microphone and the abstract detachment of material landscapes, employing pigment and composition to effect a kind of alchemical transmutation—rendering the familiar intangible.

A similar convergence of media occurs in the photographic practice of Gwenn Thomas, where the chemical processes intrinsic to photography extend the perceptual capacities traditionally associated with painting.

Whereas Brishty Alam furthers this trajectory through sculpture, translating the painterly surface into synthetic polystyrene forms that assert a presence at once corporeal and otherworldly. In each case, the painterly fails to remain a fixed category and is treated as a mutable field—expanded, translated, and reconfigured across material, spatial, and conceptual registers.

→Kazuko Miyamoto

→Gwenn Thomas

→Brishty Alam

→David Gruber

The Secret Life of Puppets

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There are a lot of people, but even more faces, because everyone has several.*

The procedure seems simple: the scalpel cuts a part out of one image and inserts it into another in such a way that it fits perfectly into the composition. For decades, John Stezaker has been deconstructing the mass media-generated glamour of 1940s and 1950s Hollywood film stars in his photo collages, merging disparate elements and assembling image layers into surreal hybrids that alienate the seemingly familiar. Sections are changed, rotated, layers penetrate each other, images are positioned above and next to each other.

A collage’s actual meaning, however, arises in-between a particular cut, when identities merge into new characters without negating their difference. Male and female film stars become one, landscape postcards cover faces like masks, or the eyes of a mannequin replace the human gaze preserved in the photo. The disruptive intervention in the photography, often by cutting right through the head, creates a paradoxical unity of opposites, an irritatingly precise synthesis beyond calculatedly applied dissonance.

The focus of these surreal transformations is predominantly on the eyes, that is, the gaze, and thus the active relationship between the person in the picture and those who are looking at them, between seeing and wanting to be seen. Through the collision of contrasting elements John Stezaker tries to restore the liveliness of the frozen-in-time photographic portrait, which – not only in its Hollywood version – reduces the expressive diversity of the human face to a stoic mask. The viewer’s desire for eye contact with the image’s other becomes the works’ thematic core. 

In his new series entitled Comics, the radical redefinition of the portrait leads to the superimposition of photos of comedians looking into the camera with tragic seriousness by images of painted Gothic sculptures, angels and saints. It is a fusion through space and time that resembles a role reversal as the sculptures, whose faces cut through the photographs in a jagged, crystalline manner, seem more alive than those who professionally want to make us laugh.

The statuesque heads look as if animated, while the photographed actors and comedians seem to have withdrawn themselves to their own lifeless shells. The gender-fluid, flamboyant angels penetrate the actors, who themselves have fallen out of time, and breathe new life into them. The static nature of the image is activated through interlocking perspectives with the process of this merger intensified by seemingly ill-fitting proportion and scale.

This irritatingly convincing synthesis of sculpture and human refers to a general ambiguity of film stars, who are typically merely a projected (moving) image defined through the sum of their acting parts rather than a genuine person. Because the photographic image derives ontologically from the loss of the moment—it is the present, separated from duration—the camera essentially converts the momentary presence of the object it is focused at, projecting into the future, into an everlasting permanent present. The film star as a mediated being is therefore in a sense a double of him/herself: a pure configuration of an optical world. This phantom-like quality places him/her in a zone outside of time, beyond past and future. This is also the space in which the angels and saints live, who look down on our world with an all-seeing gaze, even if only as polychrome wooden sculptures. 

The images’ layered fusion is anything but merely formal. John Stezaker’s manually created photo collages reveal something that is often overlooked in the computer age: the ruptures in the photographic image are actually seams between different worlds, categories and levels of meaning, and the transitions between them are more fluid than the respective image claims.

*Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge

Vanessa Joan Müller

→German Original (PDF, 41 kb)

EXILE TV
→John Stezaker, She, 2025, digital video, 10:14min

ARTIST TALK
March 13, 11 am
→Vanessa Joan Müller in conversation with John Stezaker
University of Applied Arts, Vienna
Flux1 (VZA7, 3.OG), Vordere Zollamtsstraße 7, 1030 Vienna

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with →The Approach

Solid Mesh

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domen Ograjenšek

 

Brishty Alam (born in London, lives and works in Vienna) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and holds a degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge. Her exhibitions include Palais des Beaux Arts Wien (2024); Baba Vasa’s Cellar, Shabla, Bulgaria (2024); SET Kensington, London (2024); Lady Liberty Library, Berlin (2024); Ve.Sch, Vienna (2024); the Office, Vienna (2023); Belvedere 21 – Museum of Contemporary Art, Vienna (2023); Festival der Regionen, Lungitz/Gusen (2023); GOMO, Vienna (2023); Memphis, Linz (2022); Neuer Kunstverein Wien (2022); Ajker, Tati, London (2022); French Riviera, London (2021); Haus Wien(2021); Austrian Cultural Forum Warsaw (2019); and Center for Contemporary Arts Celje (2019). Her works are part of the collections of the Austrian Federal Arthotek and the Wien Museum.

David Gruber (born in Linz, Austria, lives and works in Vienna) studied painting at the University of Applied Arts Vienna with Prof. Judith Eisler and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt with Prof. Monika Baer and Prof. Amy Sillman. Recent exhibitions include Maebashi Art Practice, Maebashi, Japan (2024); Klausgasse, Vienna (2024); UA26, Vienna (2023); EXILE, Vienna (2022); and Trust, Vienna (2021).

Domen Ograjenšek (born in Celje, Slovenia, lives and works in Vienna) is a writer and curator specialising in contemporary visual art. Her writing has been featured in art magazines and online platforms such as PASSE-AVANT, Artalk, Blok Magazine, Fotograf Magazine, all-over Magazine, etc. Magazine, Maska Magazine, ŠUM Journal, Borec Journal, Tribuna and Radio Študent. Her curatorial projects include exhibitions at Aksioma –Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana; New Jörg, Vienna; Ravnikar Gallery Space, Ljubljana; Center for Contemporary Arts Celje; Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana; Kresija Gallery, Ljubljana, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana, SCCA Ljubljana, and Museum of Madness, Trate.

Works from Suitcases

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

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

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

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

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

 

Participating artists:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

→Gallery Onetwentyeight

→Hofkabinett

→Kazuko Miyamoto at Belvedere 21 (until March 2, 2025)

Astrid Proll

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Born 1947 in Kassel, Germany, lives in Berlin.

This page gives an introductory overview into Vorlass Astrid Proll which aims to archive and preserve visual artefacts in relation to the work and life on Astrid Proll.

→Astrid Proll, Wikipedia

→Astrid Proll, Pictures on the Run

→David Zane Mairowitz: Fragmente eines Bildungsromans

→Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe: Dispossessed: Portraiture and property in the case of Astrid Proll

Schleifen II

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Schleifen II was held on Sunday, October 13, presenting works by Elke Denda (*1956) in dialogue with works by Kerstin von Gabain (*1979).

 

→Elke Denda

→Kerstin von Gabain

dilithium, chapter 2: doppelgängers

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EXILE is happy to participate in this year’s edition of curated by with an exhibition curated by Jen Kratochvil. Participating artists: Hynek Alt, Nikola Balberčáková, Květoslava Fulierová & Petra Feriancová, Laura Gozlan, Martins Kohout, Astrid Proll, Jelisaveta Rapaić, Anna Rusínová, Sráč Sam, Miriam Stoney

i wrote jen this summer from paris, while overlooking the seine. i have no idea where jen is. somewhere in the us, i guess. but she (she?) could be anywhere. jen and i are google-doppelgängers. jen has my email. she (let’s settle with she for simplicity’s sake) beat me to it, getting my address earlier than i did. she has one “k”. i’m using two, like a crazy person, just because of her. but it’s not her fault. she didn’t know about me. i opened my account in 2011. three or four lifetimes ago. jen receives a lot of my mail. i got a single one from her, by accident. did you know when you were setting up your gmail that it would stay with you forever? i’m afraid jen is a terf. or even worse, a trump voter. why does one always need to fear the worst? that obviously says more about me than about her. jen might be my friend. even though my over-cluttered brain and overflowing heart can’t physically encompass more human beings. even though i still try. i love them. human beings. i love you. all of you. mostly. if you’re not terfs, or trump voters and such, that is. and this show was supposed to be about doppelgängers. about shadow images whose stories we don’t want to, can’t, or are not willing to tell. doppelgängers of who? not important. of us. all of us. the rest of us or the last of us mushrooms. we keep fighting binaries. binaries are winning though. just look around. winner/loser. harris or trump. poor and proud or a hypocrite. east and west, still, can you believe it. a delicious sweet energizing beverage or boycott. morality, or not. no left, no right anymore, yet still searching for luke skywalker at every step. it’s her or him and don’t you dare to think otherwise, hide in your little corner and pls just shut up. punch. punch. crying. boxers, i mean, shouldn’t sport be just? why, oh why. i really hope jen is not my mirror image and we don’t live in a multiversal simulation because this one life is too much already. overwhelmed. that’s what i am. and tired. and that’s ok, they keep telling me, memes. do i need jen? nope. i don’t. simple as that. does she need me? probably the same. but how would i know? i’m not her and have no idea what she’s dreaming of, what flowers she likes, how much the concept of the so-called traditional family means to her, or what’s her favorite conspiracy. do i fear jen? tbh, i don’t know. fairytales say doppelgängers are scary and ominous. but does that apply to email addresses too? one can’t even ask these stupid llm things anymore, because. i want to hide, i want to hide in anna’s armor; transform myself with nikola, one way or the other; levitate with hynek, oblivious; love deeply with petra and květoslava; pierce walls by threads with jelisaveta, live through times made mythology with astrid; age endlessly with laura; and simply curl up and dive in those nostalgia fetishes with martins. a warm embrace. calming. reassuring. i was afraid of being too loose. so i did my best doppelgänging be-a-western-gurl act to make this proper. and now i’m trying to smash the whole thing to pieces. but it is a gallery show at the end of the day. too proper actually. i’m disappointed with myself, but also, who cares. i just hope jen would come.

jen

→curatedby.at

→dilithium, chapter 2: doppelgängers, exhibition text

ARTISSIMA, Turin

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EXILE is pleased to participate in this year’s edition of ARTISSIMA with a dialogue presentation of works by Vienna-based artist Brishty Alam (*1988) and Erfurt-based artist Erik Niedling (*1973).

The works by Nielding and Alam engage in a dialogue on fragility, transformation, and the forces — both material and immaterial — that shape how we remember, understand, and preserve our histories and knowledge.

The transmutation of the artist’s archive into a molecular image mirrors the changing and evolution of the biological body, where molecules shift and redefine what is preserved and what is lost. Just as memory is ephemeral and subject to fragmentation, the body of work, much like the biological body, undergoes a continual process of transformation. This interplay of molecules — whether in art or science — shapes the delicate balance between what is passed down and what dissolves in the process.

→Brishty Alam

→Erik Niedling

→artissima.it

VIENNA CONTEMPORARY

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Two tall towering structures both entitled Wächter dominate Kerstin von Gabain’s scenographic solo presentation. At first sight they can be described as a mixture between a bird house and an obelisk, however their scale, materials, and proportions subtly shift them away from being mere hybrids, turning them into ghostly and somewhat frightening as much a comically-trippy deliriums made of untreated cardboard.

The two towers’ tenants themselves are absent, existing only as mere hypothetical shadow of a former self. An artist-made silicone rubber band attached to a Pinocchio-like nose seems to hint to a previous tenant’s physicality. The opening and prolonged perch are uncanny allusions to bodily functions such as mouth or nose and pose questions concerning inside and out, surveillance or protection for whom from whom and vice-versa.

The stead like presentation of the neon sign on the floor seems a further spin on nesting, shelter and dwellings, but here it’s content spoils the group. Finally, an isolated black monochromatic, cathedral-like window on an otherwise blank white plain appears as entrance to, or exit of, a tunnelling escape that leads nowhere.

Works on display:
Wächter, 2024
, cardboard, wood, silicone, 217 x 30 x 60 cm
Wächter, 2024
, cardboard, wood, silicone, 330 x 35 x 70 cm
rotten apple, 2024
, neon, metal, wood, 20 x 70 x 106 cm
Fenster, 2023
, oil paint on cardboard, 67 x 29 x 3 cm

→Kerstin von Gabain

→viennacontemporary.at

→Max Henry, In the Wake of Vienna’s Autumn Art Leviathan, Spike Magazine, Oct 18, 2024

Białowieża Chapter 3

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The exhibition marks the next iteration in Kinga Kiełczyńska’s continuous exploration of one of the last remaining primeval forests in Europe: Białowieża, situated in the northeastern region of Poland, stretching across neighbouring Belarus. The concise “environment” comprises of recent as well as recycled works, which focus on the specific location and offer possibilities for interpreting the wild and unknown, drawing on personal narratives and observations.

Upon entering the gallery, viewers encounter a wall-sized work on paper entitled Swamp (after Wajrak) (2019), selected from the series, whose reference points are photographs by journalist and nature conservation activist Adam Wajrak. The piece, intentionally created with charcoal, is loosely attached to a section of metal fencing, reminiscent of barriers erected along construction sites to conceal emerging developments or to newly erected border fences along the eastern Polish border to Belarus. On closer inspection, the seemingly half-abstract, frottage-like composition reveals unruly contours forming trunks, leaves, stems, bushes, and the titular marshy landscape in the lower part.

The bas-relief objects, titled Understory 01-03 (2024), are crafted entirely from wood, which is partially coated in an asphalt- rubber compound (Pol. ‘abizol’). Found in the basement of the artist’s father, it was used for waterproofing surfaces in the past but now remains a toxic oil-based residue, no longer serving any purpose. This narrative forms the backdrop of the series, which was initially created in 2016 and subsequently modified now in order to highlight the journey of the sourced primeval wood. First, it was transformed into floorboards, then framed in a showcase painted with processed petroleum, also known as black gold—a substance derived from the organic remains of plant and animal organisms that serves as a primary component of plastics, a common packaging material.

The exhibition continues in the upstairs space, presenting Tipping Point (2024), a sparse single object resembling a children’s swing typically found in every playground: an oblong board resting on a rough log of wood. On each side of the ramp, there are charred and uneven shapes of wooden trunks, barely balanced as they swing on a log. The ghostly object evokes nostalgia by replicating the vernacular aesthetics of the past, or, ironically, by bearing a resemblance to locally manufactured, environmentally friendly crafts.

Białowieża is one of the few remaining areas of untamed wilderness in Europe. Self-renewing processes shaped the forest, which remained untouched for many centuries, and a variety of plant and animal species inhabited it, creating an environment in which life, mostly non-human, remained largely undisturbed. In Kinga Kiełczyńska’s series on this theme, we’re reminded not only of depictions of the wilderness but also of the conflicts that arose around 2016. Political decisions prompted management interventions in the forest during this period. Consequently, loggers entered the forest, felling and uprooting trees labelled as infested, marking a significant departure from historical preservation. In fact, locals processed and sold these trees, deemed commercially worthless, as firewood or flooring, marking a turning point in the forest’s history.

The artist recalls a time when she lost her way in the forest and her cell phone ran out of power, imagining what the experience of walking outdoors in the past would look like. It can also be related to the notions of “bewilderment” described by Jack Halberstam in his 2020 book Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire.

We can find several expressions there that stem from encounters with an untamed nature that defies man-made systems of morality and normalisation, creating “disorientation” rather than providing tools to monitor the “other”. Halberstam also looks at different ways of understanding humans’ binary relationships with nature, illuminating past attempts to domesticate it and looking at the modalities of the wild and desire through a queer lens.

As explored in the work of Kiełczyńska, Białowieża is also a site of the other—an unknown, unpredictable, and unstable environment in which everything can occur; it can serve as a refuge as well as a danger. The act of recognising the wilderness as something to tame leads to aberrations, or rather disastrous consequences, neglecting the living layers of Białowieża, including the lives of humans. Her long-drawn investigation of the eponymous forest manifests this reflection on our perception and interaction with the natural world.

By revisiting the mythical forest, the artist reflects on the transition from a rural to an urban mentality, a reminder of an early moment in her life. She speculates on alternatives to the formerly agriculturally-oriented society, which has now been transformed into an information society. This transition has led to a binary relationship between humans and nature. This relationship often alienates them from it, viewing nature through the filters of investment potential rather than recognising it as having its own subjectivity or as the driving force of the carbon cycle, which allows the forest to constantly decay, mutate, and revive.

The words articulated in Kinga Kiełczyńska’s Reductionist Art Manifesto (2009), stating, ‘There is too much art on the planet, and it needs to be reduced,’ resonate with the reduced number of works presented in the exhibition. In the approach proposed by Białowieża Chapter 3, the laconic exhibition serves not only as a contemplative space but also as a metaphor for our dystopian present. In this case, the artist’s installation reflects a world where nature, subjected to human control, leads to a disconnect. We can interpret it as a warning, reflecting the reduction of the wild around us. Shall we see it as a cautionary tale or mirror of today’s view of Białowieża?

Romuald Demidenko

 

Kinga Kiełczyńska’s exploration of the wild in Białowieża, Chapter 3, builds on her previous work showcased at exhibitions like Place of Power during NOT FAIR, Warsaw, and Białowieża: Ebay Meditation Room in Berlin (both 2017).
Together with Ernst Logar, Kiełczyńska is currently a recipient of the On the Road Again grant from the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Austrian Cultural Forums, in cooperation with the Künstlerhaus Vereinigung Wien, investigating the speculative lifestyle of a post-oil society.

 

→Białowieża: Ebay Meditation Room

→Place of Power

→Kinga Kiełczyńska

→Romuald Demidenko

Recent Press

→Aleksandra Lisek, Top 10 emergent Polish female artists, Contemporary Lynx, April 16, 2024

 

 

Look Up!

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EXILE is humbled to be invited to the first gallery exchange in Warsaw entitled Constellation. Hosted by BWA Gallery, the exhibition entitled Look up! will feature works by Agnieszka Brzeżańska of BWA Gallery, Kinga Kiełczyńska of EXILE, and Anetta Mona Chisa of Anna Poterasu Gallery, Bucharest.

→constellation.org.pl

→BWA Gallery

Magisch depressives Badezimmer

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Magisch depressives Badezimmer, was held on Sunday, April 28, presenting works by Sine Hansen (1942-2009) in dialogue with works by Nschotschi Haslinger (*1982).

 

→Sine Hansen

→Nschotschi Haslinger

Alltag und Epoche

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Alltag und Epoche features works by different generations of artists who either lived and worked in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) or who deal with its heritage in their artistic practice. Invited by Oskar Schmidt participating artists are Tina Bara, Wilhelm Klotzek, Erik Niedling, Josefine Reisch, Oskar Schmidt, Sung Tieu, Jasmin Werner, and Doris Ziegler.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marlene Militz

→Read German original (PDF, 57kb)

Schleifen

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

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

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

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

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

Viewed as reproductions, squinting, or at a distance, Denda’s works appear to share a hard, inhuman manufactured edge, produced in collaboration with machines. Looking more closely, however, slickness breaks into a wholly more bodily facture: in the paintings uneven blooms of colour are subtended by loose underdrawings coming out at the sides – ‘subtle eccentricities’, as one commentator put it. The lines of the reverse glass paintings bubble and fizz; their painted wooden surrounds are not frames but part of the pictorial composition. Painterly application oscillates between manufacture and facture – between machine and human hand – the personal and impersonal – the physical and the embodied – in a way that is deeply affecting. Denda has an extraordinary ability to conjure a certain irreducibly human emotionality in a commodity language of graphic reproduction. 

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

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

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

 – Josey

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

Denda has last exhibited in Vienna in 1989 as part of the group exhibition →Melencolia at Galerie Grita Insam

EXILE TV
→ZIB, 2008, video montage, 00:52

ART DÜSSELDORF

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EXILE is pleased to participate in this year’s Art Düsseldorf with a presentation of works by Tess Jaray (born 1937), Kerstin von Gabain (born 1979), Nschotschi Haslinger (born 1982), and Jobst Meyer (1940-2017). You can find us at booth F06.

 

 

→Tess Jaray
→Kerstin von Gabain
→Nschotschi Haslinger
→Jobst Meyer
→Art Düsseldorf

 

Jobst Meyer

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The Estate of Jobst Meyer (1940-2017)

Symptom Couverture

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EXILE is happy to announce our first exhibition for 2024. Entitled Symptom Couverture, it is the second solo exhibition by Nschotschi Haslinger at the Vienna gallery and will be accompanied by a text from Kaya Haslinger:

Symptom Couverture – an intrusive, deceptively tasty appearance that indicates a hidden disorder. Forced to react, Nschotschi Haslinger’s works show different ways of dealing with symptoms of overload, somewhere between healing and repression.

Modernism’s dream of progress is over; it has left behind destroyed landscapes and inescapably precarious living conditions -though production continues mercilessly. The illusion of satisfaction through consumption offers a retreat from the madness of reality. For a brief moment, the products seem to fulfil the unfulfillable desire for perfection, until they themselves rot in the ruins of capitalism. Haslinger’s motive of the burning handbag becomes a symbol of this desire, but its organic, fleshy shape suggests that it is more than just an inanimate object.

The overwhelming abundance of stimuli cuts off every connection. Haslinger’s Puppen, lying with their faces to the ground, appear to have been slain by this flood. They regenerate by taking root and drawing new strength from the earth – an essential step to be able to participate in the outside world again. Contrary to the idea of progress and constant self-renewal, Haslinger’s Puppen are adapted to – and by – existing circumstances: they are made up of old scraps such as children’s clothing, synthetic hair and ceramics.

With their dark, shimmering, bubble-beating figure, Haslinger’s Wächter resemble an intelligent physical mass from the depths of space that is mentioned in numerous sci-fi films such as Prometheus or Venom. It represents terror and a loss of political autonomy, but it also represents the archaic fear of one’s own shadow that the oily substance produces when surrounding us. Some conspiracy theories warn against it for this reason, others see it as a cure for the darkness of human nature. But the Wächter, with their harmless, tired eyes, do not seem really threatening. 

Coming from psychology, the figure of the inner guardian, moves in an area of tension between ‘bringing to light’ and ‘hiding’. It splits the original, authentic self into different personality strands and adapts them according to the respective demands of the environment. In this way, the inner guardian protects against pain, but also blocks access to it.

These objects are also reminiscent of liquid slag, a by-product of industrial metal extraction, which can be seen as a symptom of resource exploitation and industrialization. In the end, maybe it’s not about extraterrestrial takeover, but about the liberation and healing of the earth itself. From the ruins we leave behind, it forms the foundations of new spaces of existence in which there is no room for our way of life.

Sources:
Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna, The Mushroom at the End of the World, USA, 2015
Curtis, Adam, The Century of the Self, UK, 2002

→Ramona Heinlein, The sleeping ceramic dolls of Nschotschi Haslinger, Frieze, Feb 2024 (PDF, 1.5 MB)

ART COLOGNE

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EXILE is returning to Art Cologne with a presentation of works by Astrid Proll (*1947), Jobst Meyer (1940-2017), Sine Hansen (1942-2009), and Zuzanna Czebatul (*1986) as part of the fair’s Collaborations sector. The presentation interweaves various political times and artworks to create a web of interferences that collectively point to contemporary challenges:

1945
Josef Weinheber (1892-1945), a popular German-language poet and devout Nazi commits suicide in advance of the Russian troops to Vienna in April 1945. His exiled peer, Theodor Kramer (1897-1958) writes Requiem für einen Faschisten in response to his former peer’s suicide.¹ 

1969
Astrid Proll collaborates in the escape of Andreas Baader from the German justice system. Together with Gudrun Ennslin, Peter Borsch, and Thorwald Proll they escape to Paris and take the images later known as Pictures on the Run at a café and private apartment in Paris. Consecutively, the camera is taken away from Proll and disappears.²

Early 1970s
Influenced by the appalling atrocities of the ongoing Vietnam War and repressive domestic politics in Germany, Jobst Meyer paints a series of large-scale canvases picturing tent-like structures depicting charged symbolisms reminiscent of battlefields or war zones. Kreuzzelt and Spaten, 1973, exhibited at the fair, is a rare remaining example.¹

Mid 1970s
The roll of film taken away from Proll in 1969 reappears at Der Stern magazine who markets the images as part of their picture library. Proll lives undercover as Anna Puttick in London and works as a car mechanic.² 

Late 1970s
Following her early success, Sine Hansen increasingly withdraws from the artworld and paints her Spannungszangen series out of which two examples are on display at the fair. The large-format painting entitled Die Rote, 1979, arguably a commentary on the repressive political situation of late 1970s Germany, has not been shown since production.³

1980s
The negatives of Pictures on the Run disappear again. Proll receives a set of press prints from Der Stern and further collects images from this roll of film from various other sources.² 

1998
Astrid Proll publishes Baader Meinhof: Pictures on the Run ’67-77. Alongside other images taken by arresting police officers and newspaper journalists the publication includes the 1969 Paris photos. Concurrently to a feature in British life-style magazine Dazed & Confused, Proll is invited to create an exhibition alongside the publication which is curated by influential German photographer, curator and collector F.C. Gundlach (1926-2021).²

2021
A statue of Joseph Weinheber remains prominently displayed near EXILE’s location in Vienna igniting the exhibition Monument Error with works by Jobst Meyer and Zuzanna Czebatul. As part of the exhibition, Czebatul digitizes the statue and renders a distorted monument from the source.¹

2023
Astrid Proll exhibits at EXILE Erfurt.²
Perpetual (Weinheber), 2023 by Zuzanna Czebatul, Kreuzzelt und Spaten, 1973 by Jobst Meyer, Die Rote, 1979 by Sine Hansen, and Astrid Proll’s original set of Pictures on the Run, last seen in 1998, are exhibited collaboratively at Art Cologne. Please find us at Hall 11.2, booth A 212.4

The exhibited works collaboratively aim to apply parallels of past repressive political climates to today’s realities.

This presentation at Art Cologne is kindly supported by Wirtschaftsagentur Wien. Ein Fonds der Stadt Wien.

 

¹→Zuzanna Czebatul and Jobst Meyer: Monument Error

²→Astrid Proll: Pictures on the Run

³→Sine Hansen: Spannungszangen

4→artcologne.com

 

ARTISSIMA, Turin

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EXILE is pleased to announce a dialogue presentation of works by Kazuko Miyamoto and Kerstin von Gabain for this year’s ARTISSIMA artfair.

The dialogue between the artists touches on the ephemeral quality of structure; be it the ephemeral quality of power structures and the means of countering them, as with Monument (2023) by Kerstin von Gabain, or the ephemeral quality of material structure, the structure of space, as in the case of Kazuko Miyamoto’s Untitled (1979). The stability and firmness of the works are achieved with delicate, readily available materials, paper and string, respectively, as well as with manual, tactile and attentive, means of construction. Structure stands in close connection with continuity and permanence, both of which tend to be questioned in times of societal division and change.

As monuments reenter public discourse, raising the question, what role should a monument play in contemporary society, and whether its symbolic ties to the powers that be should be upheld or severed, monumentality (both in toughness and in scale) becomes a subject of contention.

Kerstin von Gabain’s paper miniatures contrast the grandeur of large figures or busts and the permanence of their stone or metals. Monumentality is replaced by non-monumentality, proposing anti-monumentality. Kazuko Miyamoto, on the other hand, challenges the analytical side to minimalism and its aesthetic vocabulary, constructing spatial structures that seem ever more embodied. Last exhibited as part of the exhibition A Great Big Drawing Show curated by Alanna Heiss at P.S.1. (now MoMA PS1) in 1979, the string construction echoes the artist’s move to incorporate dimensions of her body into intricate patterning of nail and string prominent in her work from the early 1970s onward.

Their joint presentation focuses on withdrawn conceptual and aesthetic gestures that through subtlety and programmatic attention to detail reach pointed and engaged artistic expressions.

Ostreport

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Karol Radziszewski’s exhibition Ostreport opens on the occasion of EXILE’s 15th anniversary. In 2008, the gallery inaugurated its space in Berlin with the archival exhibition Straight to Hell, presenting a selection of materials from the eponymous publication as well as the personal collection of STH editor Billy Miller.

EXILE is pleased to present Ostreport, the first solo exhibition of Polish artist Karol Radziszewski in Vienna. Continuing his research into queer historiographies, the exhibition brings together a series of new paintings and archival material gathered by the artist during his research for the 14th issue of DIK Fagazine—a periodical published by Radziszewski since 2005 with a focus on male homosexuality and queerness in Central and Eastern Europe. Dedicated to the city of Vienna, the most recent issue¹ of DIK reflects upon the city’s historical and geopolitical role as a gateway between Europe’s East and West, and traces a journey—from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the 21st-century—across two floors of the gallery space.

The exhibition borrows its title from occasional columns and annual reports on homosexuality in Eastern Europe published by Austria’s lesbian and gay organization Homosexual Initiative Vienna [HOSI Wien] and its initiative Eastern European Information Pool [EEIP]², informally referred to as “Ostreport” by some. While the contacts between HOSI Wien and organizations in neighboring cities such as Budapest were further consolidated with the establishment of EEIP in 1981, the organization also played a crucial role in the development of the Austrian AIDS Aid [Österreichische AIDS Hilfe] in 1985. A key figure in this context was the LGBTQ+ and AIDS activist Kurt Krickler who, in the 1980s, smuggled blood samples on a motorbike from Budapest to Vienna to provide anonymous HIV tests to members of Hungary’s gay community. Emerging from a brightly colored red background, Radziszewski’s large-scale portrait shows Krickler on his motorbike, honoring not only the protagonist’s remarkable engagement but also referencing the broad network and intense exchange between gay activists in Vienna and neighboring countries in the East.

A selection of archival materials in two vitrines testifies to the scope of publishing activities at the time and the transfer between Vienna and other Central and Eastern European countries. Featuring a number of publications by HOSI Wien, this first vitrine introduces the organization’s own magazine Lambda Nachrichten as well as a copy of the book Pink Love Under the Red Star. On the Situation of Lesbians and Gays in Eastern Europe [Rosa Liebe Unterm Roten Stern]. In addition, copies of EEIP’s annual reports make evident the initiative’s role in sharing information and providing a bridge for activists between East and West. In the second vitrine, copies of Etap magazine evidence how activist groups operated across borders: founded by Polish activist and former EEIP president Andrzej Selerowicz in 1983, the Vienna-based magazine was initially a one-page bulletin distributed in Poland. The people involved in distributing the zine in the Polish city of Wrocław later on formed an activist group of the same name—Etap. Letters sent to Selerowicz from gay people in Poland bear witness to the mutual exchange between queer communities in his homeland and Vienna. Another case in point is an issue of Polish gay magazine Filo published by activist and photographer Ryszard Kisiel between 1986 and 1990. One of its covers features a poster of the International Lesbian Gay Association [ILGA] conference held in Vienna in 1989 and organized with the help of HOSI Wien and EEIP. The materials presented in the vitrines also bear evidence to the artist’s longstanding methodology of excavating stories from queer archives (and other sources) including the LGBTQ+ organization Lambda Warszawa, or the Center for Queer History [QWIEN]. An interview with Sabrina Andersrum, the initiator of Vienna’s notorious queer BallCanCan parties, held since 2005, is another example of Radziszewski’s involvement with archival materials.

With the ground floor of the exhibition dedicated primarily to the stories of queer figures from the 20th century, the first floor centers on the Hungarian aristocrat and paleontologist Franz von Nopcsa during the time of Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born in the Transylvanian town of Deva (present- day Romania), Nopsca became an internationally renowned expert on dinosaurs, following his discovery of the first dinosaur remains in Hungary at the age of 18. He also became an expert in Albanian studies and travelled extensively across Albania and the Southern Balkans together with his lifelong partner and secretary Bajazid Doda. A large-scale portrait of Nopsca in traditional a traditional Shqiptar warrior costume, depicts him as Albanian warrior—referencing not only his fascination with the country’s culture and traditions, but also his passionate commitment to the country’s independence. Painted in the style of the artist’s ongoing series Gallery of Portraits (2020 -), the vividly-colored portraits of Nopsca and Doda mark Radziszewski’s longstanding interest in exploring and subverting the prevalent modes of representation. Painted onto the gallery’s walls, figures of dinosaurs based on sketches attributed to Nopcsa echo his paleontologist interests as well as present Radziszewski’s queer archaeology as a literal excavation site. In another painting—seemingly abstract shapes against a red backdrop—, the artist combined two views of a carapace of an extinct genus of turtle, discovered by Nopcsa in Romania in 1923 and named Kallokibotion bajazidi—a singular homage to his partner Bajazid Doda whose “beautiful box” (his arse) the paleontologist compared to the shell of this newly recorded fossil, thus immortalizing it and stirring the imagination of those who have seen neither one or the other.

Ostreport unfolds as both a report on and from the East, bearing witness to the fragility of history writing and geographic affiliations, as well as highlighting the diverse roles the city of Vienna played over the past centuries. The works and objects on view chart an incomplete map of a city in transition, its borders shifting, and its identities in flux.

Fanny Hauser

1DIK Fagazine is published by the Queer Archives Institute (QAI) founded by Radziszewski in 2015 as “non-profit, artist-run organization dedicated to research, collection, digitalization, presentation, exhibition, analysis and artistic interpretation of queer archives, with a special focus on Central and Eastern Europe”.
2Initiated by HOSI Wien, the EEIP supported the development of lesbian-gay movements in Eastern Europe, with the goal of building an informal network of contacts between homosexuals—potential activists—in the larger region.

 

→Nov 16, 7pm: Launch of DIK Fagazine #14, Kunsthalle Vienna, Karlsplatz

→Straight to Hell, EXILE, 2008

Unfair Game

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EXILE is pleased to participate in this year’s curated by gallery festival with a group exhibition entitled Unfair Game curated by Pınar Öğrenci at the gallery’s Vienna location.

Participating artists: Sena Başöz, Burak Delier, Fatoş İrwen, Pınar Öğrenci, Şener Özmen, Nazım Ünal Yılmaz, and Nalan Yırtmaç.

When I was invited to curate an exhibition on the theme of neutrality, I was besieged by the impossibility of the theme. We were being asked to make an exhibition on neutrality, as if there was no war going on around us, as if social injustice and inequality, xenophobia had been left behind, or as if we had achieved an absolutepeace and consensus. On the same days, while the lives destroyed by the earthquake in Turkey were still under the rubble, there were two soccer matches that attracted attention in the news. In one of the matches, nationalist fans were throwing explosives on the pitch, and in an attempt to psychologically break down their Kurdish rivals from Amed (Diyarbakir) they unfurled posters of counter-guerrilla leaders of the 90’s and a white Renault poster which was a symbol of the secret service of the same violent period in Turkey. At another match, this time in Istanbul, the crowd showed solidarity with the earthquake victims by broadcasting the traffic license plate codes of the affected cities on the scoreboard and throwing dolls for earthquake-affected children onto the pitch. It was as if the soccer field was a performance space that turned into a place of both violence and solidarity and compassion. These two football matches, which haunted me while I was thinking about the themes of neutral, sides, opposites, play, action, inaction, noise and silence, compassion and conscience and so on, became the inspiration for the exhibition. Can the game, which both connects and confronts communities, creates oppositions and dualities, and has the capacity to create an emancipatory space open to action, be a metaphor for political dissent, a method for an agonistic confrontation with the dominant power structures in the world? When players perform within the safe and pre- negotiated rules of the game, can they dislodge power structures, even for a time, by taking over the world in order to transform it, without losing touch with the real world?

The use of play as an artistic expression with a critical mind forms attitudes and ways of thinking which create contrasts between people, places, situations, in temporary, playful ways that allow to break the existing structures in the world and remake them like a jigsaw puzzle. The exhibition Unfair Game explores the potential of ‘play’ to elicit experiences that expand our capacity to reimagine the contradictions suppressed in everyday discourse, the paradoxes of the world around us, and our relationship to the universe. By carefully negotiating the purpose of the game between pleasure, leisure and the political, the artists in the exhibition engage in a transformative act, at times changing the roles of the players and creating new identities, or subverting the conventional space of the game and proposing new spaces and positions. Instead of winning and competition, the exhibition sees the game as a symbolic experiment in coexistence and survival. For populations such as Kurdish ones and many others, who are constantly forced to defend their existence and for individuals looking for a way out of the cramped metropolitan city life, could ‘play’, as a repeated practice of daily life and a means of communication, be a way to combat violence, corporate capitalism and other power structures that surround us? Does ‘play’ can create a free space of movement, even though its framework and rules are usually clear? The Unfair Game exhibition invites to reflect on the conditions of taking sides, equality, balance, non-violence, struggle and the political implications of the theme of play in general through the works of artists from Turkey; Sena Başöz, Burak Delier, Fatoş İrwen, Pınar Öğrenci, Şener Özmen, Nazım Ünal Yılmaz, and Nalan Yırtmaç.

The playful content of the game, both inside and outside the real world, associated with leisure time, opens up a space of free expression for artists, especially in countries like Turkey where censorship and supression are heavily practiced. Unfair Game welcomes its audience with Fatoş İrwen’s video Sur Fragments (2016), which is on display in EXILE’s show window. In her performance video, İrwen emphasizes the ongoing violence in her hometown Diyarbakır, in which she paces back and forth on a street in Sur neighborhood, as if walking in a prison courtyard, unaware that one day later she will be thrown into jail and imprisoned for three years.

Upon entering, we encounter Nalan Yırtmaç’s print work Darkness, produced during the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul (2013). Yırtmaç depicts a girl who has to wear a mask to protect herself from the uncontrolled use of pepper gas and carries a skull instead of a toy. The park, which used to be a place of leisure time and playground, has turned into a space of resistance and solidarity, and the demonstrators have transformed aesthetics of resistance by developing tactics and strategies and by turning resistance into a kind of game. By setting up a library in the park, practicing yoga, handing out roses to the police, or setting up barricades with urban furniture and buses, the protesters revealed the playfulness of the protest and responded to the police’s acts of violence by playing games.

Moving from Istanbul to Diyarbakır again, we continue to the exhibition with Şener Özmen’s video Women Jumping Rope (2017). While three young girls in the video are jumping rope as usual, gradually an increasing amount of dust comes out from under their feet. Towards the end of the video, the dust increases so much that girls becomes invisible. When the artist shoots the video in Diyarbakir, the city where he was born and lives that time, was still reeling from the recent military attacks. The dust in Özmen’s work is a symbol of the political uncertainty in the Kurdish geography, the murders that are constantly covered up, the injustice that makes it impossible to see the future, and the rant system that sees the Kurdish geography as a development site instead of the land of a culture rooted in the area since centuries. Özmen decides to leave the country in same days and lives in Chicago now.

The characters in Burak Delier’s video Crisis and Control (2013), exhibited in the office space, bring yoga into the office environment, eliminating the categorization between work, private life and leisure. Delier turns the long poses of yoga into a kind of sighing session to talk about the injustices of working life. Delier redefines yoga as an aesthetic and critically reflective way of experiencing the political. With office workers in ironed white shirts and high-heeled shoes, the aesthetics of yoga are turned upside down, using the game as a means of grounding a political stance in an aesthetic way of being in the world.

When we go upstairs, we encounter two video works by Sena Başöz. While criticizing the unfair and competitive working conditions of business life in the performative videos she shot when she was working in another sector in the early years of her art life, Başöz actually seeks a new way out for her own body by revealing the performative characters of these spaces. In one of the videos, she tries to swim on the floor, and in another she fences with a coworker. Başöz’s body, alienated from its environment by crawling on the office floor, wanders among the furnitures like salesman Gregor Samsa who transformed to insect in Kafka’s novel The Metamorphosis. Başöz’s bodily searches will eventually cause her to quit the job and become an artist.

Sena Başöz’s struggle in the office now turnes into struggling with the dilemmas of daily life in two paintings called Liars and Complicated Offer by Nazım Ünal Yılmaz: Cunning, calculations, plans, little lies, tactics, problems and solutions… The lies of children or adults in his Liars painting cause their noses to growlonger like the character Pinocchio. Ünal’s works treat play as a tactic of everyday life for both children and adults, connecting the child and adult games in theexhibition.

With my new video work Hotel Miks, I wanted to take the audience back to the rural at the end of the exhibition, to Miks (Bahçesaray in Turkish) where my father was born. Avalanches are a regular and deadly occurrence in this small Kurdish town, which roads are blocked by snow for 9 months of the year. Cut off from the rest of the world during these months, playing chess in the coffees is a daily ritual for people to survive. Slightly inspired by Stefan Zweig’s last novel, The Royal Game (Schachnovelle, 1941) – in which the main character is imprisoned by the Nazis in a hotel room and chess becomes a survival mechanism in the face of fascism, the hotel is also a compelling metaphor for authoritarian states like Turkey; although having some alluring amenities, it is never intended to become a home for opponents, non Muslim and non Turkish communities.

*Text by Pınar Öğrenci

→curated by

External Event
Saturday, Sept 9, 6:30-9pm: Film Screening
Bani Abidi, The Song, 2022 & Hiwa K, PIN-DOWN, 2017
Blickle Kino, Belvedere 21, Arsenal

→Blickle Kino at Belvedere 21

Selected Press

→Artforum: Must See

→Raimar Stange: Thema verfehlt, artmagazine.cc

→Markus Greussing for ZIB 3, Sept 8, 2023

→Raimar Stange: Was heißt hier neutral?, Monopol Magazine

→Nicole Scheyerer, Die unfairen Spiele überstehen, Falter 39

VIENNA CONTEMPORARY

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EXILE is pleased to participate in this year’s VIENNA CONTEMPORARY with a solo-presentation by Vienna-based artist Abdul Sharif Oluwafemi Baruwa.

If you are absolutely certain of something, you could make an assertion that something is like this or like that. If you are not quite sure and only think of the possibility that something could be like this, you will not make an assertion but will take the thought as a mere thought. These thoughts are as aware of their temporality as of their implied immutability. They change, manifest themselves for a moment and can be discarded again in no time at all. If you look at Abdul Sharif’s work, then it is more connected to thoughts and their knowledge of an alternative possibility than to actual claims. When they come together to form a construction from recognizable material fragments, then this never conceals their fragility and irreversible nature.

Upon first instance, Abdul Sharif’s work appears as a sculptural sketch. What remains is an impression of a sculptural and painterly reality that breaks away from the assertion of a manifested environment making a plea for the transformative. What appears for a moment as an expansive possibility, at the same time suggests the alternative of falling back into thought in order to reconfigure oneself anew. With this in mind, Baruwa creates chimeras, sculptural ghosts. This temporality has the charm of film stills, which one never gets to see when watching a film and only perceives as unseen. Once they emerge, fixed in the picture and for the moment, they mask the time they don’t have.

Text by Andreas Spiegl. Translation by Christian Siekmeier.

EXILE and the artist are very grateful to have been awarded the Bildrecht SOLO Award. The jury statement reads: “Abdul Sharif Oluwafemi Baruwa (*1975) impressed the jury with an installation of video, sculpture, drawing and object. In it, his own identity appears as a reflection of conflict-ridden socio-political structures. The homeliness suggested by the images and objects is fragmented and refers to current divisions in society. Abdul Sharif Oluwafemi Baruwa formulates charged topics, such as everyday racism, nationalism and migration, with ease and combines the poetic with the politics. With this gallery position, the booths represents the commitment of EXILE, which consistently bridges art and political history.”

→ Bildrecht SOLO Award

→Vienna Contemporary

Selected Press

→Max Henry, spikeartmagazine.com

Pictures on the Run

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EXILE is pleased to invite you to the opening of the solo exhibition Pictures on the Run at the gallery’s Erfurt location. The exhibition will present Astrid Proll’s widely-known photographs taken in November 1969 in Paris and is accompanied by a text from Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe.

 

Autumn passed me by, and I did not notice
the entire season had passed. Our history passed me on the pavement…
and I did not notice.1

Photographed in black and white, mouth open, Astrid Proll laughs. Two hands appear from the edge of the frame pressing teaspoons to her closed eyes, feeding them, or threatening to scoop them out. Taken in a Paris Café in November 1969, the snapshot teeters on the edge of absurdity and violence. The boundary of pleasure and horror that in The Story of the Eye Georges Bataille defined as seductiveness. In this photograph and others taken of and by Proll in Paris, she and her companions including Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin are shown lying languidly or in animated conversation, they’re young and beautiful. These are not photos of the Red Army Faction; they are images of people who went on to form the RAF. Here, they still just about belong to the world of radical counterculture, and are not yet the property of the Federal Republic of Germany’s carceral system or the political imaginary of would-be revolutionaries. 

The photographs have the appearance of casually snapped pictures, taken by Proll, who had studied photography at Lette-Verein in Berlin, using a Canon Dial 35-2 – an unusual camera which shoots 18mm x 24mm half-frame images on regular 35mm film, producing a total of 72 images from a full-frame 36 negative film. However, the negatives that show the dynamic of these images are no longer in Proll’s possession. In the exhibition, the singular images are stilled, cut out from the dialectic motion of the two exposures, making each image, in its singularity, falsely iconic. But even when framed and behind glass on a gallery wall, looking at Proll in this photograph, you can almost hear the chatter of the café, the laughter of her peers, or the plop of an eye gouged from its socket.

Despite the claims made for photography’s immediate and indexical nature it is not a punctual medium. The photograph is always attached to other institutions which frame, define, and mediate the image. In a picture album or on a mantel piece photographs belong to the domestic and the personal sphere, in a magazine to mass culture, in a gallery to the art market, or on a wanted poster to the police. Publication schedules, archive access, generalised interest or disinterest, drag and retract images from visibility. The genealogy of the distribution and reproduction of Proll’s Paris photographs is characterised by a stuttering latency, and at some point in the early 1970s the story of the Paris photo splits from Proll’s own.

Following Proll’s participation in the freeing of Baader from police custody in 1971, and a time spent on the run, her own relationship to photography became even more fraught. The camera could betray, a photograph could lead to identification and arrest. In the early 1970s Stern magazine bought the negatives. In the following years, these images were widely publicised by the magazine and other publications. The most frequently reproduced photographs were of Baader and Ensslin, often these images were cropped to show them individually and not as a couple.

After a a period of incarceration which included sensorial depravation in solitary confinement, Proll escaped Germany and lived underground in London from 1974-1978. Re-arrested in 1978 and awaiting extradition, friends she had made in the left-wing counter-cultural circles in London organised an independent media campaign to protest her deportation. In the same year Stern interviewed Proll, portraying her case in a sympathetic light. Released from German prison in 1981, Proll studied film in Hamburg and eventually went on to work as a picture editor for the cultural and lifestyle magazine Tempo. 

Eventually, in 1998 Proll published Baader Meinhof: Pictures on the Run ’67-77 with both Steidl and Scalo Press. This publication included the Paris photos alongside other images taken by arresting police officers, and newspaper journalists. Printed as a coffee table style publication, with a red-for-revolution cover and design scheme, these photographs run across various registers and categories of documentary photography. The book features photographs of kidnap victims, crime scenes, dead bodies, and graves. A portrait of Ulrike Meinhof in sunglasses reads as fashion editorial, while side-by-side police portraits of Horst Mahler – in one his bald head covered by a wig, in the other with it removed– are documents of juridical realism. Following the publication of Pictures on the Run, Dazed and Confused magazine ran an editorial review and organised an exhibition presenting the book and a selection of the photographs in their gallery. Since 1998 Pictures on the Run has been republished twice. 

Thirty years on from Proll’s trip to Paris, what did the protests and the crimes of the RAF mean to the readers of Dazed and Confused? Twenty-five years on from that exhibition what does the RAF mean today? When Stern interviewed Proll in 1978, after the violence of German Autumn of 1977, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, Holger Meins and Jan-Carl Raspe were dead. The Stern feature, along with the volume of grass-roots protest literature published in London, including ‘The Friends of Astrid Proll’ pamphlets, and a cover-story on Peace News, decried the state apparatus of the German Federal Republic. An op-ed in Peace News states “The West German government have accepted that she is not a “terrorist” yet they seem determined to destroy her life here at least, if not destroy her completely.”2 The Dazed and Confused article opens by contextualising the historical images within modern terrorism “A few months ago, the Labour government passed the most draconian anti-terrorist legislation ever seen in this country. Bombs explode in Nairobi, Dar-es-Salaam and Cape Town, and Astrid Proll published a collection of photographs titled Baader Meinhof: Pictures on the Run.” It’s difficult to perceive terrorists of today- Islamic fundamentalists or aged Irish republicans- as being in touch with youth culture, yet for a short period in the 1960s and 1970s a number of self-mythologised urban guerrillas spoke directly to an unfocused, nascent rebellion, bubbling within the children of the western world.”3 Despite her friends’ fears Proll survived her prison sentence in Germany, and unlike her former comrades she lived long enough to work in re-unified Germany, return to Britain, and be featured in a fashion magazine. 

Dazed and Confused is one of the most successful British cultural magazines from the 1990s. Preceded by ID and The Face, Dazed’s founders Jefferson Hack and the photographer Rankin were slightly younger than the punk generation who grew up through DIY culture. Famously ID founder Terry Jones started the magazine as a photocopied zine, that collated “straight-up” images of young Londoners’ street-fashion in the style of August Sander’s typological portraits. Slick and professionalised from its conception Dazed’s aesthetic and remit encapsulates a certain spirit of British cultural production that combined a punk-ish irreverence with Thatcherite entrepreneurialism. The New Labour government cited in the Baader-Meinhof piece had come to power, primarily due to the collapse in confidence in the Conservative party, but under the fanfare of “Cool Britannia” which claimed a resurgence of Britain as a cultural and economic force. This political marketing strategy was so popular that in 1997 the American publication Vanity Fair ran a cover feature declaring that London “swings again”. Featuring photoshoots with singers, actresses and models including Liam Gallagher, Patsy Kensit and Damon Albarn in bright 1960s, Kings Road-esque clothes. Future prime minister Tony Blair was also interviewed for the piece, in more sombre but still relaxed attire, appropriate for one third of the triumvirate of the neoliberal Third Way, represented by Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schröder. Karl Marx famously corrected Hegel’s view that history repeats itself, with the addendum that the second coming of a world event is as farce not tragedy. In Britain in the 1990s, Generation X proved that history can also be made to return as pastiche. 

Proll has noted the influence of the earlier generation of British alternative music and lifestyle magazines on German publications, including Tempo4. However, unlike the British upstarts Tempo was backed by the large publishing house Jahreszeiten-Verlag, and so was less reliant on advertising and had bigger budgets for journalists and commissions. Suitably Tempo’s editorial tone was less frenetic than their British counterparts. Proll was focused on reportage documentary but did work with a young photographer named Wolfgang Tillmans who went on to make his name in London through the club scene and fashion world, eventually becoming the first photographer to win the prestigious Turner Prize. The September 1993 issue of Tempo includes a spread of photos by Tillmans from gay club nights in Hamburg, and features an interview with Felix Ensslin, Gudrun Ensslin’s son. Photographed by the Magnum represented photographer Thomas Höpker, smoking in a New York café talking about his experience as a child of the RAF, interviewed by Astrid Proll. How to trace German history from the fractured violence of the RAF to the economic and cultural confidence of re-unified Germany of the 1990s? It’s via Proll.  

In the second half of the twentieth century magazine publishing played a significant role in connecting and producing both mass and counterculture. It was a media designed for widespread distribution, affordable but not as disposable as a newspaper. Neither day-by-day nor long-term in their scheduling, magazines formed communities of interests and contained multiple temporalities within their perfect binds. The era in which Proll was at Tempo, and then latterly with The Independent daily newspaper, saw the arrival of digital printing technology and the internet, changing the way media was produced and ultimately the way it was consumed. At Tempo in the early 1990s the publication was still overseen by an office manager; the bodies of the employees were required in the office to physically pull together the issue. Proll says that digitisation came quicker to the British publications, staff were trained to use the new technologies, physical labour slimlined.5 Today, the ubiquity of digital and social media foregrounds user-generated content, making it possible, even recommended, for every individual to be their own publisher and subject. This collapse of labour into representation, and the foreshortening of processes of distribution, has fundamentally changed our relationships to image-production. Without the mediating structure of the mass press events are either made immediate and unbearably close or instantly forgotten. The famous statement by Walker Evans, that “America is really the natural home of photography if photography is thought of without its operators.”6 is now more generally and universally applicable. 

One photograph from Paris shows Proll shooting from the Canon Dial into a mirror, the camera itself is central to the image, she is in profile, concentrated, and behind her brother Thorwald Proll and Peter Brosch are out of focus and in conversation. Here Proll is both photographer and photographic subject. Her life and work straddles and synthesises this division, from photography student, to surveilled criminal, the focus of intense media attention, filmmaker, picture-editor, curator and exhibiting artist. Today, we meet her possessing all those identities, and as a representative of all of those categories. In these photos in Paris, she was only just becoming some of those things. These are not photographs of some of the most notorious European terrorists of the twentieth century, they are photos of people who became these historic figures. No future CEO is a captain of industry in their high school yearbook photo, only Kings and Queens are born into complete representational bodies and there was no royalty in 1960s Germany. Outside of the frames of these images is a fifty-year history of distribution and the formation of meaning and value. 

The protests on the streets of Paris in 1968 hold a mythic position in the history of left-wing activism but as an event it was time limited. Infamously, May ’68 was over by June. Proll, Baader, Ensslin and their friends weren’t there. They arrived in the autumn, there had been enough to do in Germany that spring. The German Autumn occupies an equivalent space in the leftist imaginary, but Proll, Baader and Ensslin weren’t present there either. Baader and Ensslin were already dead and Proll was in London. The killings of Siegfried Buback, Jürgen Ponto and Hanns Martin Schleyer were carried out by a later “generation” of the RAF, contingent on the politics and decisions on the first group but separated by time and geography. The history of the RAF is often written as a cultural theory. Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2005) specifically over-inscribed the story of the RAF as a media sensation, producing two exhibition catalogues one with artist pages and critical responses, and one that was a facsimile of the all the German reportage on the RAF the researchers could gather. In this dense chronological document, there is no alternative path from the Spring of ’68 to the Autumn of ’77, but the story of Proll— who did not feature in the KW exhibition or publication— tells us something different.  

In his 1972 essay The Metaphor of the Eye, Roland Barthes described Bataille’s metaphorical erotic vocabulary as such: “…the cycle of the avatars it passes through, far removed from its original being, down the path of a particular imagination that distorts but never drops it.”7 Returning to the ambivalent and ambiguous image of Proll and the spoons, the spoons becomes an avatar which stand in place for – even anticipates – two forms of violence. The symbolic or allegorical violence of the potential scoop of the eye, but also the political violence that the photographs precede; the crimes of the RAF and the disciplinary force applied to the perpetrators of these crimes. The Paris photos are amputations or biopsies; cut from the roll of film, slices of a moment of history that occurred just after and just before significant world events, from which violence would unfurl. The task of the historian is to mark out the patterns left by everything that escapes and everything that returns to these images. Which are themselves separated by the missing half-frame negatives, irrevocably split, and cleaved open. 

1Darwish, Mahmoud, Eleven Stars over Andalusia in Grand Street, Oblivion, No. 48, Winter, 1994, pp. 100-111
2 Jefferies, Phil, Friends of Astrid, in Peace News, For Nonviolent Revolution, No.2088,  January 26, 1979, p.6
3 Grove, Izzy, Baader-Meinhof Gang’ Revolutionary Fiction &/Or Friction Romance in Dazed and Confused, Issue 48, November 1998, p.84
4 Proll, Astrid in conversation with the author, July 30, 2023
5 Proll, Astrid in conversation with the author, May 2, 2023
6 Evans, Walker https://photohelios-team.blogspot.com/2009/02/essay-walker-evans.html
7 Barthes, Roland, The Metaphor of the Eye, in Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye, Penguin: London: 1967, p.119

Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe is an art historian, writer and curator. Her work focuses on histories of documentary, film, dance, and performance. Currently, she is completing a PhD at Birkbeck University London on British portrait photography from the 1970s and 1980s.

 

The exhibition in Erfurt will present a set of 13 photographs printed in 2008 for the exhibition MAN SON at Hamburger Kunsthalle together with various research material. The unique, one of a kind silver-gelatin vintage press prints from the archive of Der Stern Magazine will be on view at this year’s Art Cologne, Sector Collaborations, together with works of the same period by artists Sine Hansen (1942 – 2009) and Jobst Meyer (1940-2017).

→MAN SON, Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2009

Astrid Proll has previously screened her film Der Zug aus Leipzig, 1988 at EXILE Berlin in 2009.

→Der Zug aus Leipzig, 1988

 

A weekend with Sabina Maria van der Linden

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EXILE is pleased to invite you to a weekend with Berlin-based artist Sabina Maria van der Linden (born 1952) in New York.

A weekend with Sabina Maria van der Linden consists of a re-edited and never before shown body of work by the artist that centers around her relationship to male-dominated art-stardom and youth fetishism in contemporary art.

Through quickly collaged posters and text works as well as a specifically edited selection of her videos van der Linden embraces a phantasy of intimacy with a dominant male artist figure. Appearing in Calvin Klein ads, the artist projects the desire of being the youthful, fashionable, male, successful and celebrated artist onto herself, turning continuously existing chauvinism and machismo in contemporary art on itself.

→EXILE@ONETWENTYEIGHT
128 Rivington Street, NY 10002
Opening hours: Wed – Sun, 1 – 7 pm
Tea with the artist: Sunday, Mar 29, 3 – 6pm

 

Theological Time, Mean Landscape, (…)

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Nazim Ünal Yilmaz: Theological Time, Mean Landscape, Circumcision Throne, Burping Bird, Auto-censure, Nose as a Walking Stick, Tare, Nite Smoking, W15, Measuring the Corner, Dolphin with the Woman and The Big Fish, Small Fish

24,6 x 16,6 cm, 42 pages, Leporello
Full-color illustrations
Hard cover with custom slipcase
Texts by Àngels Miralda and Necmi Sönmez
Edition of 400
Published by PamPam Publishing
ISBN: 978-3-200-07378-4

Published following the artist’s solo exhibition Theological Time, Mean Landscape, Circumcision Throne, Burping Bird, Auto-censure, Nose as a Walking Stick, Tare, Nite Smoking, W15, Measuring the Corner, Dolphin with the Woman and The Big Fish, Small Fish at EXILE, June 5 – Jul 11, 2021.

18 EUR plus shipping

Untitled (Molly House)

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Untitled (MOLLY HOUSE)
96 pages, color illustrations, soft cover
Texts in English
Design by Hanako Emden
Edition of 250

Published by EXILE as part of the exhibition Untitled (MOLLY HOUSE), curated by Julius Pristauz as part of Hybrids for curated by Vienna 2020.

Contributing Artists: Anne Doran, Nicholas Grafia, Luki von der Gracht, Karolin Braegger, Dominykas Canderis, Meltem Rukiye Calisir, Georgia Horgan, Abby Lloyd, Breyer P-Orridge, David Lindert, Sophia Stemshorn, Davide Stucchi, Philipp Timischl, Robin Waart, Bruno Zhu.

Texts by: Caspar Heinemann, Enesi M., Simon Würsten Marin, Victoria Sin.

5 EUR plus shipping

Gurbet

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Paul Sochacki: Gurbet, 2019
96 pages, full-color print
Hardcover, 34 x 26,6 cm
With contributions by Melissa & Ozan Canbaz (Turkish), Habib William Kherbek (English), Dalia Maini (Italian), Katrin Mayer (German), Clara Pacquet (French), Kolja Reichert (German), Mohammad Salemy (Farsi).
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Gurbet, Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren, Sept 23-Nov 25, 2018
Edition of 333 copies
ISBN: 9783946770428
Published by →Strzelecki Books

25 EUR plus shipping

Halfway House Poster Edition

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Halfway House, 2019
Set of four posters by Core.Pan, Raphaela Vogel & Johannes Büttner, Malte Zander and Patrick Panetta
Digital Print, A2 (59,4 x 42 cm or 23.4 x 16.5 inches)
Edition of 50.
Exhibited as part of the exhibition →Halfway House.

120 EUR plus shipping

Burial of the White Man

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Erik Niedling with Ingo Niermann: Burial of the White Man

With contributions by Ann Cotton, Jakob Nolte

Burial of the White Man is a Bildungsroman about the friendship between artist Erik Niedling and writer Ingo Niermann. While in their thirties, they begin collaborating on a series of projects of ever-increasing ambition and scope: a tomb for all humans, a dissident replica of the U.S. Army, a German-Mozambican liberation movement, a ritual of living one year like it’s your last, a transformation of the oldest and most troubled German political party, a global fitness cult … Each failure is answered with an even more outrageous endeavor—culminating in the burial not only of themselves, but of the entire subspecies of the white man.

Burial of the White Man is an autofiction by Erik Niedling, interpolated by manifestos and proposals by Ingo Niermann and expanded by Austrian-American poet Ann Cotten and German novelist Jakob Nolte. The third volume of the Future of Art series, the book accompanies Erik Niedling’s web series, Pyramid Mountain: A Video Diary.

Design by Judith Banham

April 2019, English
12.5 x 19 cm, 288 pages, 81 b/w ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-426-1
Published by Sternberg Press

 

Arts of the Working Class. Issue 1: A city is a stateless mind

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Arts of the Working Class is published bimonthly and contains contributions by artists and thinkers from different fields and in different languages. Its terms are based upon the working class, meaning everyone, and it reports everything that belongs to everyone. By offering quotas at half price, everyone who sells this street journal can earn money directly. Developed by Paul Sochacki and María Inés Plaza Lazo, the street journal is published by Reflektor M.

Arts of the Working Class
First Issue: A city is a stateless mind
40 pages, newsprint, full-color, 35 x 26 cm
10.600 copies
Layout/Typography: Hans Löffler
Contributors: Sonia Boyce, Daphne Büllesbach, Club Fortuna, Michael Hakimi, Jiang Li, William Kherbek, Alina Kolar, Bitsy Knox, Nick Koppenhagen, Le Ying, Abhishek Nilamber, Ceylan Öztrük, Kolja Reichert, Laurie Rojas, Mohammad Salemy, Patrick Schabus, Christoph Sehl, Björn Wallbaum, Tobias Zielony, Steffen Zillig

Photographs by Akio V Tsuji Reichert

Gwenn Thomas

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Artist Monograph
112 pages, 70 images including 69 in color
Softcover
Published by Charta (Milan, Italy) in 2013
With texts by David Levi Strauss, Lilly Wei, Edward Leffingwell, Doris von Drathen, and Saul Ostrow

25 EUR plus shipping

 

Artist’s Portfolio

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Kazuko Miyamoto: Artist’s Portfolio
24 pages unbound, offset color-print
Softcover, 40 x 29,8 cm
Published by LA FÁBRICA in 2012
Sold out. These last remaining 20 copies are available solely through the gallery signed by the artist

250 EUR plus shipping

Constructions

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Nathalie Du Pasquier: Constructions
Soft-cover, 24 pages
Color and b&w print, 29,7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50 signed & stamped copies
Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition Meteorites & Constructions II, September 2016.

120 EUR plus shipping

 

 

Epistemic Heartbreak

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Pauł Sochacki: Epistemic Heartbreak
56 pages, color & black and white
Translucent soft-cover, 29,7 x 21 cm
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Paul Sochacki: Epistemic Heartbreak, January 2016

20 EUR plus shipping

Linear Manual

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Featuring Ms Bonneviot, Ms Cooper, Mr Droitcour, Mr Fabuš, Mr Haworth, Ms Laube, Ms Marszewski, Mr Mečl, Mr Pieroni, Mr Quack, Mr Roelstraete, Ms Spjut, Mr Tang, Mr Thumfart, Mr Weijde and more.

Designed by Mr Svensson, hosted by Mr Kohout.

Published by TLTRPreß. Co-published with PAF.  2013.

Order for ☛ 7€!

Sleep Cures Sleepiness

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For a major part of mankind’s history, time was not tracked and kept, but searched for and observed. It was understood by the pace of cyclic events and rhythms of bodies, crops, stars and solstices. When still measured by sundials, the length of hours changed throughout the year with the different inclination of Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

But with the increasing miniaturisation and mobilisation of time-keeping devices, time entered our bodies with the calculated precision of a laser cutter, letting in valorisation of heartbeats. Metabolism got worked around and natural cycles were either ignored or ‘genetically modified’. Time got flattened in a fashion pioneered by machines operating seamlessly around the clock and with speeds beyond human comprehension.

For this publication, contributors were invited to share notes on the gap that resists the unification of body rhythms, dreams and spontaneity with the tempo of machines, communication networks and calculable profit. Here is a song for the flesh under the attack of constant availability and no place to hide, information overload, omnipresent context advertising and fear of missing out.

 

Presenting texts and thoughts by Ms Van Brabandt, Mr Fabuš, Mr. Haworth, Mr Kohout, Ms Kubolkaite, Mr Palm, Ms Mitropoulos, Ms Salinas, Mr Bergman and Mr Stevenson.

Put together and designed by Mr Kohout.
Co-published with 1822-Forum.
ISBN: 978-3-945243-03-9

Read Review on aqnb.com

Order for 9 EUR

LISTE, Basel

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Once identities become #hashtags and bodies have merged with pixels, manifold new strategies were (and still are) needed in relation to artistic production beyond the interface of the monitor. As a result, and once rematerialized to physical form, artworks can hardly continue their art-historical trajectory as objects of aesthetic distinction based on a suggested ingenuity of its producer. The five artists showing in EXILE’s presentation at LISTE 18 aim in various ways to find such a path.

Aggtelek (Gema Perales and Xandro Valles) manifest their multi-dimensional works in one of the most loaded traditional mediums; oil on canvas paintings. Created as digital collages from internet source files in Photoshop, the finished hires TIFF file is sent to Shenzhen, China, to be painted in oil, executed by anonymous individuals in a factory of 5000.
The returned painting (Aggtelek calls these “photocopies”) is then analyzed by the artists and the original Photoshop collage is adjusted accordingly. The newly adjusted TIFF file is again sent back to China and the process of “dragging and dropping” on an international scale continues until a final painting is achieved to the required standard. All previous renditions are destroyed, resulting in what appears to be, and what in fact is, a single, unique painting.
The artists expand their modes of production by exploiting available resources in a kind of digital darkroom, or, more appropriately, digital inkjet sweatshop. Such acceleration of reproduction depletes the artists’ individual gesture and anonymizes the painter’s individual authorship and ingenuity.

Artie Vierkant diminishes the material importance of his artworks and an emphasis is instead made on the visual representations of materials and the processes used to achieve this. Primarily using Photoshop as the regular manipulator of his images, Vierkant spurs an uneasiness in the viewer; making doubtful the trust that is placed in images of documentation.
At LISTE 18, Vierkant’s Color Rendition Charts are accompanied by a pair of custom print-on-canvas Converse sneakers. Here, the circle seems to close in on itself; the return to the medium of canvas brings the digitally created work back to a history of its material. Simultaneously to the pristine presentation of this unique pair of sneakers, the artist proof of the work is worn as the utilitarian object by Vierkant on the streets of New York.

Martin Kohout takes various indexical sources out of which he creates his own agendas for the creation of projects and artworks. His extensive project Watching Martin Kohout consists of a YouTube channel of 800 videos, made over the course of 10 months, in which the artist filmed himself watching other YouTube videos (youtube.com/user/martin0kohout). The sheer multiplicity and scale of the project perpetuates, to some degree, an immortality, with the advent of the piece constantly changing through online comments or YouTube interventions on a daily basis. At LISTE 18, an edition of three static hard drives will store and present the entire archive of videos; Kohout’s YouTube channel returns to an apparent physical finality.

Parallel to the fair, on June 13, Kohout will instigate the event Gotthard. Here, the artist will run through the Swiss Gotthard Road Tunnel, which, at a length of 16.9 km, is the third-longest road tunnel in the world and is deeply embedded in Swiss and European history.
The event takes place in a monumental yet hypnotically monotonous space otherwise devoted solely to traffic. If such a tunnel is a masterpiece in an age of architectural engineering, then it can also be seen as a simple parallel from point A to point B. In all its monumentality, the tunnel becomes a metaphor for the disappearance of the individual within a mountain of matter. For up to date information and limited edition bus tickets please email the gallery.

Katharina Marszewski approaches artistic production from an otherwise fragmented angle. Her questioning relates not so much to a dilution of the body but to a critical commentary on the forces of artistic production in a late capitalist, western society in crises – one in which the occupation of “being an artist” has become convention. Her self-reflexive works on display at LISTE and her concurrent solo exhibition at the gallery in Berlin, entitled CV CE LA VIE, confront the viewer with her identity as an artist in its exposed, and at times, exploitative vulnerability. Starting with traditional silk screen, Marszewski pours lacquer over its surface and hand-writes the work’s title Drinking Ink onto it; a threat perhaps, of a physical reaction against the medium itself. Her works in Berlin seem to want to take on the appearance of artworks, but can in fact be better described as décor for the purpose of a gallery exhibition.

 

Past news old

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Aggtelek

Transformation
Group exhibition
Schafhof, Kuenstlerhaus Oberbayern
Oct 24 – Nov 29, 2015

Name Paintings
Solo exhibition
Ponce + Robles Gallery, Madrid
Sept 10 – Oct 30, 2015

Art Lima
with Ponce + Robles Gallery
Feria internacional de Arte Lima
April 23-26, 2015

Palma Art Brunch
Gerhardt Braun Gallery, Palma de Mallorca
April 11 – May 25, 2015

Paratext nº2
Hangar.org
April 22, 2015

Perturbacions
Solo Show
Curated by Jordi Antas
Capella de Sant Roc, Valls
May 24- July 31, 2014

Sobre gatos, sin títulos, happenings, masillas, bocadillos y otros conceptos.
Cyan Gallery, Barcelona
Jan 30- Mar 22, 2014

Les murs du temps
(with Quim Cantalozella, Pere Llobera, Mercedes Mangrane, Santiago Talavera and Michelle Weinberg)
Cyan, Barcelona
Oct 24, 2013- Jan 24, 2014

Summer Fete
Ceri Hand Gallery, London
Aug 17, 2013

Poéticas del Objeto
Schau Fenster at Schau Ort
Müllerstrasse 57, 8004 Zurich
Jun 1 – Jul 6, 2013

“Erratas. Zeitgeist, Variations & Repetitions”
Edited and published by Save As…Publications
Barcelona, 2013

Residency at Hangar.org
Passatge Marqués de Santa Isabel
Can Ricart, 08018 Barcelona
2013-2014

we/poo/r.glitch=oilDownloads.jpg (solo)
Galeria Jose Robles
Calle de Belén 2, 28004 Madrid
Feb 28 – Mar 27, 2013

Me, Myself and I (group)
Fundación Centenera. Sala La Lonja.
Paseo de la Chopera 10, Madrid
February 6th – 23, 2013

Critical Botox. In times of 2.0 feudalism (group)
Pavilion Unicredit, Bucharest, Romania
Oct 2012 – Jan 2013

Indisciplines! (Performance with Pere Faura)
Institut Ramon LLull
Mercat de les Flors
Sept 28 – 30, 2012

The Immutables
(with Raúl Díaz Reyes, Lola Lasurt, Rasmus Nilausen, Paula Mueller, Luís Vassallo)
DAFO Projectes, Lleida, Spain
Sept 22 – Nov 24, 2012

TOP. Tallers Oberts Poblenou
(Open Studios)
Hangar, Barcelona
Sept 14 -16, 2012

Spaces: Demolition
(Screening)
Abandoned pool in front of Chekhov Theatre
Vlaciu Pircalab str. 75, Chisinau, Moldavia
Aug 30, 2012

12 Mostra Internacional Gas Natural Fenosa
(group)
MACUF, LaCoruña, Spain
July 31 – Oct 28, 2012

claResil 2012mg
(with Julian Alvarez, Jimenez Landa, Cristina Calderon, Rafael Doctor and others)
La Capella, Barcelona
May 9- June 17, 2012

Barcelona Poesia 2012
(Poetry Performance)
La Capella
May 9, 2012, 8 pm

 

Erik Niedling
Spring Auction
Contemporary Arts Museum
St. Louis, MO 63108
Apr 23, 2015

Eine Pyramide für mich (solo)
Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin
Nov 14, 2014 – Feb 18, 2015

Erik Niedling and Ingo Niermann
Pyramid Dollar: Launch of an alternate currency
Haus am Lützowplatz
Jan 15, 6:30pm

Purchase Pyramid Dollars online

Das Maho Program
(with Caroline Bayer, Gabriel Braun, Wolfgang Flad, Janine Eggert,Stef Heidhues, Michael Rockel, Philipp Ricklefs and Johannes Weiss)
Lady Fitness Contemporary Art
Stromstr. 11-17, 10551 Berlin

Book Lovers 4.1 (Pop-up Bookstore)
De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam
28 Jan – 24 Feb 2014

About artist novels (Symposium)
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland
October 26-27, 2013

The Future of Art (Screening)
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London
May 13, 2013

The Book Lover Project
M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp
Curated by David Maroto and Joanna Zielinska

Art Cologne (with Galerie Tobias Naehring)
Chamber
Messeplatz 1, Köln
April 19 – April 22, 2013

The Future of Art (Screening)
MoBY, Museum of Bat Yam, Tel Aviv
Dec 06, 2012

Lost in Paradise (group)
(with Nobuyoshi Araki, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Fischli / Weiss, Thomas Florschuetz, Martin Klimas, David Lynch, Rémy Markowitsch,  Michael Wesely and others)
Möchhaus Museum, Goslar
Aug 08 – Sept 23, 2012

The Future of Art (Screening)
Kunsthalle, Rostock
Oct 04, 2012

Erik Niedling with Ingo Niermann
10/18/1973 – 02/29/2012 (solo)
Neues Museum, Weimar
Juni 24 – Aug 05, 2012

Groundbreaking of Pyramid Mountain
(with Ingo Niermann)
Steinsburg, Thuringia
Juni 24, 2012

 

Florin Maxa
Films about Objects
Florin Maxa, Dietrich Ebert and Verena Pfisterer
Scheeeule, Berlin
Sunday, June 7, 5-9pm

 

Gwenn Thomas
FESTIVAL ANEMIC CINÉCHAT
(with Michel Auder, Christian Boltanski, Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Chris Marker, Carolee Schneeman and others)
Anthology Film Archives, New York
Oct 28, 2015

Moments of Place
Art Projects International
434 Greenwich Street, Ground Floor
New York, NY 10013
Apr 4 – May 30, 2015

Moments of Place (solo)
Point of Contact Gallery, Syracuse, NY, 13202Oct 16 – Dec 12, 2014

FESTIVAL ANEMIC CINÉCHAT
(with Michel Auder, Christian Boltanski, Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Chris Marker, Carolee Schneeman and others)
Palais de Tokyo, Paris May 31 – Jun 1, 2014

Gravures contemporaines
(with Beth Ganz, Takui Hamanaka, Vijay Kumar, Lois Spitalnick and others)
Galerie Brun Leglise, Paris
Jan 7 – 25, 2014

A“Womanhouse” or a Roaming House? “A Room of one’s own” Today
(with Irina Arnaut, Sharon Louise Barnes, Kimberly Brooks, Pauline Chernichaw, Jacintha Clark, Marcia Cooper, Laura Crosby, Amy Finkbeiner, Parisa Ghaderi, Marita Gootee, Marcie Hancock, Nancy Grace Horton, Sara Jimenez, Jeanne Jo, Natanya Khashan, Alex McQuilkin, Dawn Nye, Kalena Patton, Dominique Paul, Katrazyna Randall, Kaitlynn Redell,Hayley Severns, Virginia Claire Sprance, Marianne Van Den Bergh, Rebecca Volinsky, Angela Voulgarelis, Jen Waters, Sasha Wortzel, Jayoung Yoon, Nancy Youdelman, Lu Zhangand others. curated by Mira Schor)
A.I.R. Gallery, New York
Jan 9 – Feb 2, 2014

Jack Smith: Cologne, 1974. Photographs
by Gwenn Thomas, Film by Birgit Hein
Space Studios, London
Nov 1 – Dec 22, 2013

Patterns of Interference
(with Ethan Ryman and Zachary Bruder)
ShowRoom Gowanus, New York
Oct 25 – Nov 17, 2013

News/Prints: Printmaking & the Newspaper
(with Miguel Aragon, Yuri Avvakumov, Jin Joo Chae, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Gober, Jasper Johns, Matt Keegan, William Kentridge, Leigh Ledare, Glenn Ligon, Suzanne McClelland, Claes Oldenburg, José Guadalupe Posada, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, David Shrigley, Skewville, Rikrit Tiravanija, Gwenn Thomas, Fred Tomaselli, Sweet Toof, Yoshiiku Utagawa, and others)
International Print Center New York
508 West 26th Street 5th Floor NYC 10001
Sept 5 – Oct 19, 2013

Gwenn Thomas, Published by Edizioni Charta, Milan, 2013, A survey of Gwenn Thomas’s work from the late 1970s to the present, this book traces the artist’s ongoing exploration of the ever-changing role of photographic reproduction in shaping our contemporary perception of painting. Texts by: David Levi Strauss, Lilly Wei, Edward Leffingwell, Doris von Drathen, Saul Ostrow

My Beautiful Women
Films By Brigitte Cornand
Brigitte Cornand in conversation with Joan Jonas, Carolee Scheemann, Gwenn Thomas, and Martha Rosler
FIAF, Tinker Auditorium
April 13, 2013

Gwenn Thomas and Sarah Mattes
Bull and Ram
1717 Troutman St. #226, Queens, NY 11385
April 14 – May 12

Abstraction and Empathy
(with Barbara Hatfield, Nancy Haynes and Jan Meissner, curated by Carl E. Hazlewood)
FiveMyles, 558 St.Johns Place, Brooklyn, NY 11238
Mar 16 – Apr 22, 2013

Bohemian Nights 4: The secret life of artists
Screening organized by Ingrid Dinter
(with Liza Bear, Dianne Blell, David Clarkson, Luigi Colarullo, Egan Frantz, Gerd Stern and others)
IMC Lab and Gallery
56 West 22nd Street, 6th floor, New York
Feb 23 – Mar 15, 2013

Number Six: Flaming Creatures
(with John Bock, Lizzie Fitch, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler, Paper Rad, Peaches, Ryan Trecartin, Ed Ruscha and others)
Julia Stoschek Collection
Sept 07, 2012 – Jun 29, 2013

I was a male Yvonne De Carlo
(with John Baldessari, Guy Ben-Ner, Julien Bismuth and Jean-Pascal Flavien, Birgit Hein, Stanley Brouwn, Allen Ruppersberg, Jack Smith and others)
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo De Castilla y Leon, Leon, Spain
Jun 25 – Jan 08, 2012

Accomplices. Artist and photographer in the 60’s and 70’s
(with Peter Hujar,, Eustachy Kossakowski, János Vető, Žarko Vijatović, Babette Mangolte, Yvonne Rainer and others)
Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw
Nov 17, 2011 – Jan 15, 2012

Cover image of new edition: Stefan Brecht: Queer Theatre, Methuen Drama, 2010

Cover and Feature: Mousse Magazine, Issue 24 (June 2010)

 

Katharina Marszewski
What is social? Activity of the Ujazdowski Castle in Public Space (1988–2014)
with: Paweł Althamer, Lene Berg, Black Market International, Christian Boltanski, Maurizio Cattelan, Peter Downsbrough, Christian Jankowski, Jenny Holzer, Martin Kaltwasser / Folke Köbberling, Tadashi Kawamata, Grzegorz Klaman, Andree Korpys / Markus Löffler / Marcus Kaiser, Barbara Kruger, David Mach, Teresa Murak, Jarosław Perszko, Leszek Przyjemski, Joanna Rajkowska, James Turrell, Lawrence Weiner, Krzysztof Wodiczko a.o.
May 13 – Sept 27, 2015

Kongress der Möglichkeiten
Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien
Apr 30 – May 10, 2015

Männer und Frauen
(with Ben Cottrell, Hbima Fuchs, Yuji Nagai and others)
Jagla Ausstellungsraum, Cologne
Sept 19 – Oct 24, 2014

Co widać. Polska sztuka dzisiaj (As You Can See. Polish Art Today)
Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw
Feb 14 – Jun 1, 2014

Part 1
(with Gerda Scheepers)
Galerie Warhus Rittershaus, Cologne
April 8 – May 31, 2014

Learning from Warsaw, Zurich Edition
(with Nino Baumgartner,Beni Bischof, Esther Kempf, Zosia Kwasieborska & Georg Keller, Michael Meier & Christoph Franz, Katarzyna Przezwańska, Karol Radziszewski, Joanna Rajkowska, Roland Roos, Konrad Smoleński, Iza Tarasewicz and Artur Żmijewski)
Kunstverein Zürich
Nov 7 – Dec 15, 2013

Residencies Unlimited, New York
Supported by the Mloda Polska Grant from Narodowe Centrum, Kultury, Poland and A-I-R Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw
September – November, 2013

Learning from Warsaw
(with Michael Meier, Christoph Franz, Konrad Smoleński and BNNT. Curated by Nele Dechmann, Nicola Ruffo and Agnieszka Sosnowska)
Porthos, ul. Marszałkowska 9/15, Warsaw, Poland
Aug 30 – Sept 8, 2013

Missliche Lagen (group)
JAGLA AUSSTELLUNGSRAUM, Hansaring 98,Köln
June 22 – Jul 26, 2013

We outsourced everything and now we’re bored (group)
L’Atelier, Berlin
Mar 23 – Apr 24, 2013

On the Golden Wire for Thirty-Four
A collaboration between Marysia Gacek, Natalie Häusler, and Katharina Marszewski.
NUTUREart Gallery, 56 Bogart St., Brooklyn NY
Mar 15 – Apr 12, 2013

Topp Shoppe (group)
Silberkuppe, Berlin
Dec – Jan 2013

Warschau 03: Extended Version Print
Parkhaus im Malkastenpark, Düsseldorf
Jul 20-22, 2012

Optik Boom (solo)
Galeria Stereo,Poznan, Poland
June 6 – July 14, 2012

Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle
Residency
Mar 15 – June 15, 2012

Linear Manual
Published by TLTRPreß
Available at Motto and Exile
Launch: Feb 23, 2012 at Motto Distribution
Skalitzer Str 68, 10997 Berlin

Squoters (with Thomas Rentmeister)
4D, Tower Center, Alexanderplatz
Panoramastr. 1a, 10178 Berlin
Dec 12, 2011, 7 – 10 pm

Katharina Marszewski (solo)
art berlin contemporary
Sept 7 – Sept 11, 2011

Piekna Pogoda (group)
Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw
Jul 30 – Aug 31, 2011

Plastische Positionen im Jetzt (group)
Galerie Ritterhaus Warhus, Cologne
Feb 4 – Mar 26, 2011

The Rest is History
Mike Potter Projects, Berlin
Apr 30, 2010

 

Kazuko Miyamoto
Migrating Forms and Migrating Gods
Curated by Valentina Levy
Kochi Muziris Biennale and Museum of Goa, India
Dec 12, 2014 – Mar 29, 2015

Bodily Tactics (solo)
Curated Luca Cerizza
The Japan Foundation
New Delhi, India
Jan 23 – Feb 28, 2015

The Pink Gaze
(with Atsuko Tanaka, Yoko Ono and Chiharu Shiota)
Palazzo Collicola Arti Visive, Spoleto, Italy
June 28 – Sept 28, 2014
&
Museo Nazionale d’Arte Orientale ‘Giuseppe Tucci’
in Palazzo Brancaccio Via Merulana 248, Rome
July 3 – Oct 5, 2014

Kazuko Miyamoto (solo)
Invisible Exports, New York
Jan 31 – Mar 2, 2014

Post-Op. Perceptual Gone Painterly / Du perceptuel au pictural. 1958-2014. Curated by Matthieu Poirier (with Louise Bourgeois, Claudia Comte, Émilie Ding, Piero Dorazio, Tillman Kaiser, Sol LeWitt, Heinz Mack, Agnes Martin, Kazuko Miyamoto, Florian & Michael Quistrebert, Nicolas Roggy, Dieter Roth, Philip Taaffe, Blair Thurman, John Tremblay, Dan Walsh, Richard Wright and others)
Galerie Perrotin, Paris
March 08 – April 19, 2014

Holiday Pop-up Shop
(with Tauba Auerbach, Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Jonathan Borofsky, Sophie Calle, Marcel Dzama, Robert Gober & Joyce Carol Oates, Sherrie Levine, Christian Marclay, Brice Marden, Claes Oldenburg, Charlotte Perriand & Le Corbusier, Raymond Pettibone, Paul Pfeiffer, Peter Schlesinger, Richard Serra, Laurie Simmons, Robert Smithson, Rudolf Stingel, Kelley Walker and others)
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Dec 7 – 21, 2013

Solo Presentation
Artissima, Torino, Italy
Nov 7 – 10, 2013

Solo Exhibition
Fukuyama Arts Festival, Japan

Kazuko Miyamoto
Artist Monograph, edition of 400. Texts by Luca Cerizza, Marilena Bonomo, Janet Passehl and LAwrence Alloway. Published by Exile
Available at Motto and Exile

Conceptual Tendencies II
(with Leonor Antunes, Wolfgang Berkowski, Klaus Jörres, Sol LeWitt, Brian O’Doherty, Sandra Peters, Stefan Römer, Fred Sandback, Anne Schneider, Uwe H. Seyl and Natalia Stachon)
Daimler Kunstsammlung Berlin
Apr 18- Sept 22, 2013

Nada Miami
with Invisible Exports
Deauville Beach Resort, Miami
Dec 6 – 9, 2012

Artist in residence
Stadtwerkstatt Linz, Austria
June – Aug, 2011

 

Klaus Lutz
Solo Exhibition
Curated by Matthew Lyons
The Kitchen, New York
Oct 30 – Dec 20, 2014

 

Martin Kohout
DungeonTT
with Lars Holdhus
Tromsø Kunstforening, Tromsø, Norway
Oct 15 – 15 Nov, 2015

Liturgie
with Karina Bisch, Ivars Gravlejs, Anežka Hošková, Anna Hulačová, Nicolas Chardon, Florian & Michael Quistrebert, Barbora Kleinhamplová, Jasanský/Polák, Václav Litvan, Justin Morin, Shanta Rao. Curated by Michal Novotný
Centre Tchèque České Centrum, Paris
Jun 19 – Aug 21, 2015

Aufloesung \ Neuordnung
with Sophie Aigner, Michael Bell-Smith, Josh Crowle, Harm van den Dorpel, Martin Kohout, Daniel Pauselius, Andrew Norman Wilson. Curated by Lena Brüggemann
D21, Leipzig
June 12 – July 12, 2015

Interview @ AQNB/ViC P.1

Berlin’s top new artists, Dazed & Confused, Magazine, May, 2015

Zizen
Berlínskej model, Prague

The Curator as Barman
with Keren Cytter, Renee Cox, Anne De Vries, Thomas Dozol, Joel Holmberg, David Horvitz, Ilja Karilampi, Daniel Keller, Yuri Pattinson, Antoine Renard, Rafael Rozendaal, Paul Sepuya, Ignacio Uriarte and others. THE CURATOR AS BARMAN collects 28 artists’ drink recipes, written by twenty eight artists chosen by twenty eight young curators. The chosen artists have given instructions to prepare mixtures which will be performed by the curators during the Rob Pruitt’s Flea Market in Venice.
May 5, 2015

Generation Smart
with Kryštof Ambrůz, Filip Dvořák, Jakub Geltner, Katarína Hládeková, Ondřej Homola, Martin Kolarov, Adéla Korbičková, David Krňanský, Ladislav Kyllar, Martin Lukáč, Kristýna Lutzová, Black Media, Andrea Mikysková, Richard Nikl, Olbram Pavlíček, Julius Reichel, The Rodina, Lucie Rosenfeldová, Barbora Švehláková, Ladislav Tejml, Nik Timková
Galerie NTK
May 13 – June 13, 2015

Telepathy or Esperanto?
Curated by Jan Brož with an accompanying essay written by Jan Zálešák
with Aleš Čermák,, Barbora Kleinhamplová,, Deanna Havas,, Irina Lotarevich, Micah Hesse, Peter Friel, Puppies Puppies, PWR Studio (Rasmus Svensson & Hanna Nilsson), Richard Nikl, Sara Magenheimer and Vojtěch Fröhlich

FUTURA
Holečkova 49, Prague 5, 150 00
Apr 2 – May 10, 2015

Jindřich Chalupecký Award
(Finalist with Richard Loskot, Lucia Sceranková, Roman Štětina, and Tereza Velíková)
Veletržní Palace of the National Gallery, Prague
Sept 26 – Jan 4, 2015

Sjezd (solo)
etc Gallery, Prague
Dec 12 , 2014 – Jan, 12, 2015

Other Visions
Curated by Marika Kupková
Festival of Film & Animation, Olomouc, Czech
Screening, Dec 5

Skip the door, save 4s.
1822-Forum, Fahrgasse 9, Frankfurt
May 27 Jul 5, 2014

ABBA: Art Books by Artists (with TLTRPRESS)
Vondelbunker, Amsterdam
May 9 – 11, 2014

Fragezeichen im unklaren Raster
(with Dirk Bell, Eva Berendes, Barbora Fastrová, Stanislava Karbušická, Kalin Lindena, Roman Liška, and Marek Meduna)
Czech Center Berlin
Mar 20 – May 3, 2014

The Meditative Relaxation Cycle
(with Ada Avetist, Anne de Boer, Aude Pariset, FourfiveX, Gregory Kalliche, Hrafnhildur Helgadóttir, Ilja Karilampi, Juliette Bonneviot, Luca Francesconi, and Sæmundur Þór Helgason)
Arcadia Missa, London
Jan 31 – Feb 15, 2014

Driving fast nowhere (curated by Martin Kohout)
(with Zoe Barcza, Melanie Bonajo, Chris Coy,
Harm van den Dorpel, Lars Holdhus,
Thomas Jeppe, Piotr Lakomy, Tan Lin,
Petros Moris, Niko Princen, Raphaela Vogel)
Polansky Gallery, Prague
Nov 30 – Jan 18, 2014

left eye, right eye (group)
V8, Plattform für neue Kunst
Viktoriastr. 8, Karlsruhe, Germany
Nov 22 – 26, 2013

say my name, say my name (Absolventen der Städelschule 2013)
(with Bianca Baldi, Khaled Barakeh, Zoe Barcza, Andreas Bülow Cosmus, Elisa Caldana, Clémentine Coupau, Zuzanna Czebatul, Elif Erkan, Christoph Esser, Genoveva Filipovic, Flaka Haliti, Daniel Hörl, Young Joo Lee, Vytautas Jurevicius, Jenny Kalliokulju, Anne Kaniut, Patrick Keaveney, Johanna Kintner, Tonio Kröner, Kristian Laudrup Hansen, Erik Lavesson, Jannis Marwitz, Melanie Matthieu, Seth Pick, Laura Schawelka, René Schohe, Sam Siwe, Youngin Son, Daniel Stempfer, Franziska von Stenglin, Jol Thomson, Moritz Uebele)
MMK Zollamt
Sept 18 – Oct 20, 2013
Opening: Sept 17, 7pm

ổn định động
Mobile Academy Hà Nội Hội An Sài Gòn Bá Linh (with Khaled Barakeh, Benedikte Bjerre, Elisa Caldana, Clementine Coupau, Jas Domicz, Adam Fearon, Andrew de Freitas, Bui Thanh Hieu, Daniel Jacoby, Rasmus Johannsen, Vytautas Jurevicius, Patrick Keaveney, Ellen Yeon Kim, Bui Kim-Dinh, Yuki Kishino, Tran Luong, Tri Minh, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Filippa Pettersson, Veronika Raludovic, Mahsa Saloor, Simon Starling, Franziska von Stenglin, Jol Thomson, Raphaela Vogel, Jasmin Werner, Veronika Witte a.o.)
Performances, Lectures, Workshops, Talks – a project of class of Simon Starling, Städelschule und District
Dong Xuan Center, Herzbergstraße 128, 10365 Berlin-Lichtenberg
Jul 3 -4, 2013

Gotthard
Martin Kohout runs through the Gotthard Road Tunnel from Airolo, Canton of Ticino, to Göschenen, Canton of Uri, Switzerland.
June 13th, 2013

Atlas 2013 (group)
Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn

Wandering Magazine #2

Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship (group)
A group exhibition stolen by Eva and Franco Mattes at Carroll / Fletcher, London

Wrong Step (solo)
Percival Space, Oslo

Jakob Schillinger: User Friendly
Artforum, November 2012. pp 127-128.

play_nature_work_future
(with Robert Bárta, Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkáčová, Pavla Sceranková, Pola Sieverding, Libor Svoboda and Philip Topolovac)
Tschechisches Zentrum Berlin
Nov 8 – 24, 2012

Glare Inland, Quiet Attachment 2 (solo)
Futura, Prague
July 24 – Aug 26, 2012

Unlimited GTI (group)
Art Basel online project
June 12 – 17, 2012

Hot Trigger (group)
The Newbridge Project
June 6 – July 27, 2012

Print Fiction (group)
http://printfiction.net/
May 31 – June 14, 2012

6th Zlín Youth Salon 2012 (group)
Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Zlín, Czech Republic
May 15 – September 30, 2012

SKINSMOOTH SUR+ (solo)
Headquaters, Zurich
May 4, 2012

In the shadow of the sun (group)
Bel Etage
Kunstverein at Linienstr 40 and Babylon Mitte, Berlin
Apr 26-29, 2012

Post studio tales (group)
District Kunst- und Kulturförderung
Bessemerstraße 2–14, 12103 Berlin
Apr 13 – 30, 2012

dotcom (group)
BSNP at Centre d’Art Bastille, Grenoble, France
Apr 7 – June 12, 2012

Gravity, Money, Concrete, Fabric (group)
Galerie Suvi Lehtinen
March 30 – April 21, 2012

Nobody Knows You’re a Dog (group)
Kalmar Konstmuseum, Kalmar, Sweden
Mar 17 – April 18

Astral Projection Abduction Fantasy (group)
curated by Standard Features
Monster Truck Gallery, Dublin
Feb 23- Mar 23, 2012

Linear Manual
Published by TLTRPreß
Available at Motto and Exile
Launch: Feb 23, 2012 at Motto Distribution
Skalitzer Str 68, 10997 Berlin

Material Conversion (group)
Grimmuseum, Fichtestrasse 2, 10967 Berlin
Dec 10 – 12, 2011

Resonance: Looking for Mr. McLuhan (group)
Pratt Manhattan Gallery
Oct 21 – Dec 21, 2011

Martin Kohout
Frieze TV (invited by Lucky PDF Artist Group)
Oct 13, 2011

The Prosumer Version. Art from the Masses (by Jakob Schillinger) p 86- 89
Flash Art International
October 2011

Nordic Artists’ Centre Dalsåsen
Artist in residence, Oct-Dec 2011

Virgins’ Lives (two-person)
Jiri Svestka Gallery, Berlin
Sept 3 – Oct 28, 2011

Point-of-presence (group)
TRUCK, Calgary (CA)
Sept 9 – Oct 6, 2011

Art Gwangju, Korea (group)
Aug 31 – Sept 4, 2011

Rat piss virus give it to me (group)
Yautepec Gallery, Mexico City
Jul 21 – Aug 20, 2011

Life on the Screen (group)
Joyce Yahouda Gallery, Montréal
Mar 31 – May 7, 2011

Liminal Work (group)
Galerie Suvi Lehtinen, Berlin
Dec 17 – Jan 29, 2011

Patrick Fabian Panetta
Under Construction
with Patrick Alt
Nicole Gnesa Gallery, Munich
Mar 13 – Apr 30, 2015

 

TM Davy
Purple & Gold (group)
Louis B. James Gallery, NY
Feb 7, 2014

Solo Exhibition
Eleven Rivington, New York
Nov 22 – Dec 22, 2013

The Temptation of AA Bronson
(as part of AA Bronson’s project: with Carlos Motta, Elijah Burgher, Marina Abramović, Michael Bühler-Rose, Nicolaus Chaffin, Nils Bech, Oisin Byrne, Reima Hirvonen, Ryan Brewer, Sands Murray-Wassink, Scott Treleaven, Sébastien Lambeaux, Terence Koh, Tom de Pékin)
Witte de With
Sept 5 – Jan 5, 2014

The Dorian Project
(with Matt Bollinger, Kerstin Drechsel, Marlene Dumas, Martin Eder, Eve Fowler, Anthony Goicolea, Pieter Hugo, Elizabeth Peyton, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Vicky Wright and others)
Ana Cristea Gallery, New York
October 16 – 20, 2012

Black Foliage
(with Ethan Cook, Cody Hoyt, Polly Shindler, Timothy Hull
and others)
Nudashank Gallery, Baltimore
Sept 22 – Oct 21, 2012

B-Out
(with Joshua Abelow, Erica Baum, Kathe Burkhart, Nancy De Holl, Jimmy Desana, Glen Fogel, Jonah Groeneboer, K8 Hardy, Tom Holmes, Timothy Hull, Ray Johnson, Bob Mizer, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, Adam Putnam, Desi Santiago, David Wjonarowicz and others. Curated by Scott Hug)
Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York
July5 – Aug 18, 2012

Summer Camps, Rêveries américaines sur l’adolescence
(with Larry Clark, Stephanie Dodes & Marshall Korshak, Laurel Nakadate, Tracy Nakayama and Ed Templeton)
Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris
Jun 2 – Jul 28, 2012

Whitney Biennial
(Painting included in installation by artist Sarah Michelson)
Mar 1 – May 27, 2012

Bob Mizer

Posted on by admin

Born 1922 Hainley, Idaho, USA. Died 1992 Los Angeles, USA.

The Estate of Bob Mizer is represented through the Bob Mizer Foundation.

bobmizerfoundation.org

 

Aggtelek

Posted on by admin

Aggtelek (Gema Perales, born 1982 and Xandro Valles, born 1978).

Live and work in Barcelona.

www.aggtelek.net