Author: Regina Regina

Monument Error

Posted on by Regina Regina

Du warst in allem einer ihrer Besten,
erschrocken fühl ich heut mich dir verwandt;
du schwelgtest gerne bei den gleichen Festen
und zogst wie ich oft wochenlang durchs Land.
Es füllte dich wie mich der gleiche Ekel
vor dem Geklügel ohne innern Drang,
vor jedem Wortgekletzel und Gehäkel;
nichts galt dir als der schöne Überschwang.

So zog es dich zu ihnen die marschierten;
wer weiß da, wann du auf dem Weg ins Nichts
gewahr der Zeichen wurdest, die sie zierten?
Du liegst gefällt am Tage des Gerichts.
Ich hätte dich mit eigner Hand erschlagen;
denn unser keiner hatte die Geduld,
in deiner Sprache dir den Weg zu sagen:
dein Tod ist unsre, ist auch meine Schuld.

Ich setz für dich am Abend diese Zeilen,
da schrill die Grille ihre Beine reibt
wie du es liebtest, und der Seim im geilen
Faulbaum im Kreis die schwarzen Käfer treibt.
Daß wir des Tods und Ursprungs nicht vergessen,
wann jeder Brot hat und zum Brot auch Wein,
vom Überschwang zu singen wie besessen,
soll um dich, Bruder, meine Klage sein.

Theodor Kramer: Requiem für einen Faschisten, 1945

 

Monuments cast shadows, depending on the light and time of day, as much as the course of history, either as hard-edged contrasts or as faint and blurry shapes of fading light and time. Meanings of, and relationships to, particular monuments are in flux alongside socio-political or cultural changes within the society they are embedded in. Old and new discourses, reactions, and conflicts arise around certain personalities on bronze-cast public display while others remain tolerated, ignored or forgotten, often in plain sight.

One such monument, placed on a public square in close proximity to the gallery, throws its shadow onto the exhibition space and becomes the distant anchor around which the works by Zuzanna Czebatul and Jobst Meyer oscillate. The memorial bust in question, positioned less than 200 meters from the gallery on Schillerplatz, was created in 1940 by sculptor Josef Bock and shows the head of the novelist and poet Josef Weinheber.

Weinheber’s blurry image, a side product of the rendering process for Czebatul’s work Untitled (2022), becomes the exhibition’s access point and invisible ghost – on one side asking question about the role, urgency and legitimacy of the specific persona on public display, on the other, broader questions around meaning and handling of static monuments as signs for politically enforced systemic doctrine and dominance in contrast to shifting values in transitional times. Arranged in two rooms, the selected works in the exhibition by Zuzanna Czebatul and Jobst Meyer approach such questions. 

The ground floor space is confined by two large-scale paintings by Jobst Meyer, entitled Zelt, Kreuzfahne und Sicheln (1973) and Kreuzzelt und Spaten (1973). Both works show lazarett-like hospital tents placed in a nondescript landscape. Each tent is decorated with a cross symbol, either painted directly onto the tent or attached to the tent in the form of a Red Cross banner. Placed in front of the tents, or attached to them by rope, are either a single spate or a set of sickles. These collected iconographies of battlefields, war, civil unrest or other traumas cover most of the canvas and act as barriers that block deeper insight into the landscape behind. Painted in the early 1970s, the imagery of such temporary tent structures remains familiar from various global war-zones, refugee camps or increasingly also as aftermaths of natural disaster. What is happening inside the tent is visually hidden, yet known to the viewer regardless. In a sense, these tents act like mirrors reflecting back onto the viewer, turning them into the actor within this otherwise static setting.

Placed in a straight line inbetween the two paintings are Zuzanna Czebatul’s quite monumental Columns of Empire (2021). Assembled from various parts of protective sports and riot gear, these punching bag-like structures hover low above the floor. Spray-painted black and in scale relational to the human body, their appearance is reminiscent of ancient warrior uniforms or indigenous ritualistic artifacts while simultaneously suggesting contemporary riot gear police uniforms. In Columns of Empire as well as in the paintings by Meyer, the individual is subsumed beneath a meta structure with the unclear purpose of protecting or harming the individual. 

In the second room, Weinheber, until now only present as a ghost within the exhibition space, appears in the form of a replica of the source memorial on local display on Schillerplatz. Produced via a digital 3D printing process, the originality of the source bust becomes a mundane, low-tech replica. Czebatul’s oxidized copper application process though gives Untitled (2022) the surface of a painterly, almost hyper-real, or battered patina, as if the source bust’s precious metal was projectiled into a distant, uncertain future. 

The replicant bust is placed on top of a low floating pedestal whose black and white, marble-esque pattern and shape suggest the original pedestal’s integrity as disrupted, melted or in the process of dissolving. Untitled (2022) liquefies Weinheber’s stale bronze-cast authority, though instead of morally denouncing Weinheber, the work deliberately trivializes the source bust’s authority and asks questions about the legitimacy of the original memorial. With Untitled (2022) Czebatul asks which version, if any, is the appropriate monument. 

Placed alongside the work by Czebatul are five Untitled (1978) works on paper by Jobst Meyer. These show various conical or pyramidal forms, always cut, pierced or otherwise distorted by thorns, spikes or bent shapes. Similar to Meyer’s paintings downstairs, the artist asks about the socio-political meaning of such structural shapes that are deeply ingrained in human history and conscience. Viewed collectively, the works in this room appear as if presenting the results of an architectural competition for a fictional monument that asks the viewer how to respond and relate to the current debate about such problematic monuments on public display. 

Zuzanna Cebatul’s and Jobst Meyer’s works, as much comical phantasies of absurdist monuments as serious metaphors for social injustices, allegorically point to the complexities, challenges and difficulties of any monument on public display. No singular reading, no clear opinion, no monolithic response, no black and white answer is certain within such a memorial  itself. Instead, an open and critical discourse is required around each monument within the public sphere. To physically remove a monument is easy, to deal with its complex legacy is a continuous challenge. The ghost of Weinheber remains, yet it is Theodor Kramer’s poem that this text began with and refers back to. 

 

Theodor Kramer (1897-1958) was an Austrian poet who was forced into exile in 1939. In May 1945, in response to his former peer’s Josef Weinheber suicide, he wrote Requiem für einen Faschisten. Kramer returned to Vienna in 1957 and is buried in Zentralfriedhof.

Josef Weinheber (1892-1945) was a popular German-language poet under the Nazi regime. An early member of the NSDAP, Weinheber was a passionate anti-Semite and devout Nazi. Ideologically blinded, and unable to face the defeat of the Nazi regime and ideology, he committed suicide in advance of the Russian troops to Vienna in April 1945.

Zuzanna Czebatul (b. 1986, Międzyrzecz) lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the Städelschule Frankfurt in 2013, and later attended the MFA program at Hunter College as a Fulbright Fellow. Czebatul has had solo exhibitions at Kunstpalais Erlangen (2021); CAC Synagogue de Delme (2020); Sans titre (2016), Paris (2020); GGM1 Municipal Gallery, Gdańsk (2019); FUTURA Center for Contemporary Art, Prague (2018); CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2017) and others. Czebatul has participated in group exhibitions at Athens Biennale (2021); Baltic Triennial, Vilnius (2021); Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2021); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2021); Wrocław Biennale (2021); CAN Centre d’art Neûchatel (2020); Somerset House, London (2019); Muzeum Śląskie, Katowice (2019); Kunsthalle Lingen (2019); Kunsthalle Bratislava (2019); BWA Lublin (2018); Muzeum of Modern Art Warsaw (2017) and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2016). In 2022 the artist will participate in the Geneva Biennale: Sculpture Garden, curated by Devrim Bayar, and will have a solo exhibition at Arthur-Boskamp-Stiftung, Hohenlockstedt amongst others.

Jobst Meyer (1940-2017) studied at Akademie der bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe (1960-63), and at Hochschule für bildende Künste, Berlin (1963-68). From 1982-2010 Meyer taught at the Hochschule für bildenden Künste, Braunschweig. In 1973, he received the Villa Romana award and residency in Florence, Italy where the two paintings on display were created. Meyer exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions, amongst them Galerie Junge Generation, Hamburg (1967); Forum Stadtpark, Graz (1969); Galerie Klang, Cologne (1973, 1974), Galerie Thomas Wagner, Berlin (1975), Galerie Niepel, Düsseldorf (1981, 1991) and Landesmuseum Oldenburg (1998). He participated in many group exhibitions, amongst them at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (1966), Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (1967, 1969), Kunsthalle Nürnberg (1968), Kunstverein Salzburg (1970),  Haus der Kunst, Munich (1970), Akademie der Künste, Berlin (1973), Kunsthalle Kiel (1977), Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (1982), Ludwig Forum, Aachen (1992), and Kunstmuseum Mülheim an der Ruhr (2016). His work is in the public collections of Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Berlinische Galerie, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, and Bundeskunstsammlung, Germany.

Further research
→de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Kramer_(Lyriker)
→theodorkramer.at
→Requiem für einen Faschisten read by Kramer
→de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Weinheber
→weinheber.net
→Weinheber Memorial location

Press
→Nicole Scheyerer: Fragwürdiges Denkmal in Reichweite, FALTER 07/22
→Domen Ograjensek: Threatening Tips and Protective Films; The Gothic Ontology of Political Strife

Features
→OFLUXO
→Mousse Magazine
→Art Viewer
→Contemporary Art Daily

 

10×1000

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE and the participating artist have taken the ongoing global crises as a starting point to offer selected artworks at a reduced price to directly support various charitable causes. The ten selected artworks were offered at a fixed price of 1.000 EUR to be donated directly by the buyer to the cause selected by the respective artist donating the work.

We would like to thank everyone for taking initiative, acquiring an artwork and donating to the causes selected by each artist. Thank you!

The offered artworks of 10×1000 were:

Kinga Kiełczyńska: Hidden interface (beaver and Andrii), 2022. Garden waste of hand-carved hazelnut shoots, beaver-worked driftwood, reclaimed cables, 90 x 60 x 60 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2022
1.000 EUR to be donated directly to →Polish Humanitarian Action

Erik Niedling: Future 01/19/17, 2017. Tin, Lead, 8 x 53 x 18.5 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2017
1.000 EUR to be donated directly to →Doctors without Borders

Nschotschi Haslinger: Untitled, 2019. Color pencil on paper, 30 x 42 cm
Features on the cover of →Index Nr 86, Jan 2019
1.000 EUR to be donated directly to →Doctors without Borders

Kerstin von Gabain: Pear I & II, 2022. Wax, 13 x 6 x 6 cm each
500 EUR each to be donated directly to →Caritas Ukraine Funds

Gwenn Thomas: Standard Candles, 2017. Wood and black acrylic paint, 52 x 46 x 26,5 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2017
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Fight for Right Ukraine

Martin Kohout: Coll., Mongolia-Cambodia, 2016. Wood, stamps, plastic grid, 52 x 34 x 7 cm
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Fight for Right Ukraine

Sine Hansen: Bohrer mit Birne, 1970. Screen print, 61 x 42 cm.
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2021.
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Medeor Fund for Ukrainian hospitals

Pauł Sochacki: Waiting for the rainbow, 2022. Oil on canvas, 27 x 27 cm
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →United Nations Refugee Agency

Nazim Ünal Yilmaz: Tare, 2010. Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2020
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Palestine Children’s Relief Fund

Tess Jaray: Untitled (Navy Blue), 2010. Unique inkjet on archival paper, 20.2 x 24.2 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2019
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Red Cross Ukraine Funds

Imitation

Posted on by Regina Regina

Reproductions, casts and miniatures are false objects, but they possess a genuine psychological objectivity. They imitate, mimic, take as inspiration another object, but are not the same thing. They fictionalize their model, the possible functionality, thus allowing a playful curiosity to emerge.

The works in Imitation were created through an examination of proportions, the imitation, casting and alienation of a (supposed) original. A small-format stove on unsteady legs conveys a comical seriousness: being imperfectly made, even made of cardboard – it would go ablaze, if you actually wanted to use it to make fire. A ladder lies on the floor, slightly bent and deformed, it rather creates a tragic image instead of representing steadiness, linearity and construction. Both works are larger versions of originally made miniatures, but still they don’t match the ‘original’ size, something is slightly off. They imitate, try to get as close to their model as possible; but the proportions don’t fit, they can only point towards, but never become the thing itself. Not only do they imitate another object: they also mimic the human body, its gestures, clumsiness, posture. Their current positioning seems to be preceded by an autonomous movement, as if they were briefly animated, alive, only to finally remain in their place.

When objects come alive, when something very ordinary, an every-day thing, changes its way of being, the German word unheimlich comes to mind. The uncanny, in psychoanalysis, is the kind of frightful which goes back to the long-known, familiar¹, the Heimelige. It produces fear when something familiar has been estranged by repression. Initially evoking a sense of childlike play and conjuring up familiar images, but then distorting and disrupting these images and likenesses, the works in the exhibition create a sinister atmosphere. Perchance, dear reader, you will then believe that nothing is stranger and madder than actual life, and that this is all that the poet can conceive, as it were in the dull reflection of a dimly polished mirror.²

Mimesis is Greek for imitation. In aesthetic theory, mimesis can also connote representation, and has typically meant the reproduction of an external reality, such as nature, through artistic expression. The act of mimesis contains questions regarding true or false, superior (original?) and inferior (copy?). But imitation can also be linked to inner experiences and emotions, not just objective reality or nature. To imitate, mimic, emulate also has to do with social practices and intersubjective relationships. It means to learn, practice and grow. Maybe an imitation can never refer to an original source, since it is always ‘doubled’–always already deconstructed.

In Imitation, mimesis is used as a tool. It mediates between the outside world and its reflection within an artistic work. The works refer to concrete bodily and material forms that are put together differently through ruptures, disturbances, and displacements, thus creating a situation in which the disjointed and alienated come to the fore. Their appearance has an untimely character; in their composition they become simultaneously futuristic and historic. Imitation as a dead end. Always already different, almost doomed to failure. A tragi-comical loop.

¹→https://literaturkritik.de/id/21719
² E.T.A. Hoffmann, Der Sandmann

Inga Charlotte Thiele

→EXILE Vienna, Elisabethstrasse 24, 1010 Vienna, Austria

Walder

Posted on by Regina Regina

In Romanticism, the forest serves as a timeless refuge from the modern world. The group exhibition Walder assumes that the forest is no longer an antipode, but the dominant reality. Ingo Niermann and Erik Niedling’s video of the same title shows a lonely middle-aged man strolling through the Thuringian woods, imagining himself as the law, the power and the people. This work is complemented by paintings, drawings, photographs and artefacts, also by Fabian Reetz, Genesis P. Orridge, Kazuko Miyamoto, Kinga Kiełczyńska and Thomas Bayrle, in which the word for world is again forest.

→EXILE Erfurt, Kartausengarten 6, 99084 Erfurt, Germany

Wall Drawing 731 and five inserts by Martins Kohout

Posted on by Regina Regina

In July, 1993, GALLERY ONETWENTYEIGHT presented Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 731 as part of the gallery’s exhibition program. Now, twenty one years after its first and only installation, EXILE and GALLERY ONETWENTYEIGHT collaborate to once again install this particular Wall Drawing in its original space.

Wall Drawing 731 consists of three individual parts: A, B, and C. 731 A (two black diamond shapes with white bands on blue and red ink-washed split wall) and B (one blue and one red ink-washed diamond shape with white band on black wall) are installed on opposing walls in the front room of the gallery and, through their symmetry and color scheme, form a visual dialogue with each other. Part C (red ink wash diamond shape with white band on yellow wall) ruptures this symmetry with its singular location on an irregularly shaped wall adjacent to Part B and it’s newly introduced yellow color.

The re-installation of LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 731 in its original and architecturally almost unchanged location presents an exceptional opportunity to re-evaluate the piece within an otherwise completely different cultural, architectural, social, as well as art-historical sphere. The two versions of the drawings, both in 1993 and now in 2014, if to be understood in their material sense as two thin layers of paint, can be seen as a beginning and an end in which twenty one years of history are encapsulated. But the exhibition’s cyclical reappearance is in fact a lure. While the conceptual source of the work remains unchanged, its re-execution is always unique due to a constantly shifting set of variables.

When imagining the two drawings of Wall Drawing 731, as if they are transparently one on top of the other, for example, in form of their photographic reproductions, their subtle differences would become evident. These differences represent the identity of the drafts people who execute the work, as well as the subtlety of LeWitt’s thought and artistic process. Each viewer is invited to approach the exhibition on a cultural, personal, as well as social level reflecting upon myriads of changes that have occurred since the first drawing of the original work in 1993. Repetition becomes a strategy for reflection upon continuity and change.

The five insertions by Martin Kohout create complexity beyond simple historical reconstruction. While referencing the work of LeWitt, Kohout’s insertions provide a kind of quiet irritation – the artist’s personal response and contemporary interpretation to the work on display and the process of Lewitt.

Works on display:

Sol LeWitt
Wall Drawing 731: A diamond with color ink washes superimposed, within a 1″ (2.5 cm) white band.
Color ink wash
First Drawn: Kazuko Miyamoto and others
Installation: GALLERY ONETWENTYEIGHT, New York, NY, July 1993
Second Drawn: Hidemi Nomura and Michael Benjamin Vedder
Installation: GALLERY ONETWENTYEIGHT in collaboration with EXILE, New York, NY, August 2014

Martin Kohout
Insertion #1
Untitled, hot-glue on paper, 46 x 34 cm (framed), 2014

Insertion #2
Untitled, hot-glue on paper, 46 x 34 cm (framed), 2014

Insertion #3
Untitled, hot-glue on paper, 46 x 34 cm (framed), 2014

Insertion# 4
1B. untitled, hand-made railing of elastomer and metal,
5 x 59 x 14 cm, 2011

Insertion #5
1C untitled, hand-made railing of elastomer, metal and wood,
5 x 107 x 8 cm, 2012

Batears

Posted on by Regina Regina

We are happy to announce the fourth solo exhibition by Martin Kohout entitled BATEARS in collaboration with Adrienne Herr.

 

I had a dream where I was behind glass, flying and flying along with the rest of the warnings. Monk, Anthropomorph, Dog, Harpy, Devil, and Plant monster were all there. Many gates, all protecting one another in spiteful rows. It felt like a place very near here, and somewhere I never go. All of a sudden there was a pen attached to my wing, that started a tricky move like one I remember before the joining of seasons…

If no sickness is, O God, what fele I so?
And if sickness is, what thing and which is she?
If sick be good, from whennes goeth my baleful thought?
But if that I consente that it be?
And if that I consente, I dutyfully
Allas! what is this wondre maladie?

→Click here for all chapters of Adrienne Herr’s text flight log

 

BAT EARS

BAT NEARS

BAT FEARS

BAT REARS

BAT TEARS

BAT GEARS

BAT YEARS

BAT HEARS

BAT WEARS

BAT NEARS

BAT EARS

Das stille Leben des Sammlers Kempinski

Posted on by Regina Regina

You are cordially invited to the inaugural Private Viewing of the imaginary collection of Mr Kempinski. This exhibition brings together works by over 60 artists, now presented for the very first time for collective viewing.

New York-based curator Mr Miller and Berlin-based Mr Siekmeier were asked by Mr. Kempinski to create a collage of artworks that reflects upon the relationship between art and collecting.

The Kempinski collection is by definition fluctuant and can move freely from one context to the next.

Exhibition events:

Sat, May 31, 7pm
Kinga Kielczynska: Power point lecture introducing
ARP- Art Related Progress. A business proposal for an art residency program to be set up in Colombia on a self-sustainable property

Sat, June 7, 7pm
Film screening with curator Billy Miller

Fri, June 13, 7pm
Martin Kohout: One-year anniversary of Kohout’s Gotthard Tunnel Run in Switzerland during LISTE Basel in 2013 and artist booklaunch

Participating Artists: Nadja Abt, Aggtelek, Joseph Akel, Peggy Ahwesh, Anonymous, Francisco Berna, Douglas Boatwright, Matt Borruso, Matthew Burcaw, Elijah Burgher, Luke Butler, Anders Clausen, TM Davy, Mark Dilks, Discoteca Flaming Star, Paul Gabrielli, Robin Graubard, Markus Guschelbauer, Frank Hauschildt &Valentin Hertweck, Adrian Hermanides, Dan Herschlein, Benjamin Alexander Huseby, Monika Paulina Jagoda, Stephan Jung, Vytautas Jurevicius, Renata Kaminska, Saman Kamyab, Kinga Kiełczyńska, Lisa Kirk, Martin Kohout, Marcus Knupp, Ulrich Lamsfuss, Cary Leibowitz, Hanne Lippard, Mahony, Katharina Marszewski, Darrin Martin, Rachel Mason, Howard McCalebb, Kazuko Miyamoto, Bob Mizer, Erik Niedling, Hugh O’Rourke, Joel Otterson, Rob Pruitt, Johannes Paul Raether, Annika Rixen, Matteusz Sadowski, Salvor, Dean Sameshima, Pietro Sanguineti, Fette Sans, Wilken Schade, Jason Seder, Barbara Sullivan, Gwenn Thomas, Goran Tomcic , Rein Vollenga, Jan Wandrag, Fresh White, Tara White, Norbert Witzgall, Carrie Yamaoka

 

LISTE, Basel

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE’S group presentation at LISTE art fair re-envisions the exhibition Homo Decorans from 1985.

Homo Decorans – det dekorerende menneske was an exhibition at The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark in 1985 featuring works by architects, designers, folk and craft artists as well as fine artists. Among the participants were Mario Botta, George Sowden, Aldo Rossi, Michele de Lucchi, Keith Haring, and Nathalie Du Pasquier. The exhibition’s title and concept referenced the book Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga from 1938. In line with Homo Ludens, the exhibition Homo Decorans focused on the post-modern use of material, aesthetic and referential sampling with a certain playful expression at its core.

The grandiose, more than eight meters long painting Viva Pertini by Nathalie Du Pasquier from this particular exhibition forms the visual back-drop and historical link. Viva Pertini, which is one of du Pasquier’s earliest and certainly largest paintings, has not been seen in public since exhibited in a room alongside a mural by Keith Haring as part of Homo Decorans. Now, reconfigured through the works of a younger generation of artists, all works collectively emerge as a re-sampled collage of art works that reflects upon the painting’s expressive contend as well as the cross-disciplinary approach of Homo Decorans: at the core of all works on display stands a playful and personal creative expression without discursive limitation and boundary.

Nathalie Du Pasquier, born 1957 in Bordeaux, lives and works in Milan. She was a founding member of Memphis Design in 1981. Until 1986 du Pasquier designed numerous textiles, carpets, plastic laminates as well as furniture. In 1987 painting became her main focus. Recently, a monograph entitled Don’t take these drawings seriously 1981-1987 was published by Powerhouse. Concurrently to LISTE du Pasquier holds her first solo exhibition at the gallery entitled The Big Game.

Aggtelek is a collaboration of Gema Perales, born 1982, and Xandro Vallès, born 1978. The artists live and work in Barcelona. In their videos, sculptures, paintings, drawings and performances the artists investigate theoretical and practical developments of art production and its repercussions on creative practice. Issues of Globalism, Commodification of meaning, mass production paired with the current economic crisis (especially in Spain) and a current trend of hyper-individuality and artist fetish are transcribed to at times tense, at times surreal but always quite ironically dark projects. Aggtelek currently holds two solo exhibitions in Spain: at the Capella de Sant Roc, Museu de Valls in Valls and at the Museo de la Universidad de Alicante in Alicante.

Erik Niedling, born 1973, would like to be buried in Pyramid Mountain, the largest tomb of all time: A pyramid at least 200 meters high carved from a natural mountain that will be reburied under the excavated material after his internment, restoring it to its original mountain shape. To make this goal a reality, he lived one year as though it were his last. He has recently shown works for the burial chamber in an institutional solo exhibition at Haus am Luetzowplatz in Berlin. The exhibition entitled Eine Pyramide fur mich brought together the current state of production for the pyramid and included the tip of the pyramid, paintings and panels, leather curtains as well as documenting material.

Katharina Marszewski, born 1980 in Warsaw, lives and works in Berlin. Her artistic practice begins with screen-print, collage, photography and objects and extends to temporal assemblage, immersive collaboration as well as scripted performance. She has recently participated in the exhibition Duties and Pleasures with Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Błażej Pindor at The National Museum in Warsaw and the Muzeum Wnetrz, Otwock Wielki, Poland, 2014.

Martin Kohout, born 1984 in Prague, lives and works in Berlin. in 2013, his participation at LISTE included a run through the Gotthard tunnel. His work is often based in video but also includes objects, photographs as well as sound performance. He performs under the name TOLE and opened the publishing house TLTRpress. In 2014, Kohout was nominated for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award and exhibited at The Veletržní Palace of the National Gallery, Prague.

Patrick Panetta, born 1977, lives and works in Berlin. His practice critically dissects and reflects upon modes of representation and contexualization of contemporary art. Recently, Panetta offered his solo booth at abc artfair for sale via an advert he placed in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The booth was consequentially sold to another artist which turned the usual cycle of creation and commodification of an artwork on its head. Panetta recently had his first solo exhibition at the gallery entitled House of Cards in which he documented the on-going shift of perception and consumption of artworks: Videos of artworks viewed online became the artworks themselves, empty shelves point to the loss of actual engagement with an artwork’s physical presence.

Booth: 0/8/3 (ground floor)

East of the West

Posted on by Regina Regina

In collaboration with Karsten Schubert London, EXILE is pleased to present a two-part solo exhibition of Vienna-born, London-based artist Tess Jaray entitled East of the West. It is the artist’s first introductory solo exhibition in Vienna.

The first part of the exhibition, opening on Sept 12 at EXILE, presents some of the artist’s most recent paintings together with a selection of early drawings. The second part of the exhibition, held at VIENNA CONTEMPORARY artfair from Sept 26 – 29, will focus on early paintings paired with a selection of contemporary works on paper.

As a common strain in Jaray’s practice, all works have architectural abstraction/reduction at their core with many of the exhibited works in both parts of the exhibition relating to Viennese architectural details, specifically the patterned roof of Vienna’s Stephansdom cathedral.

By splitting the exhibition into two physically distant parts within the same city, the viewer will be able to experience the earliest stage of the artist’s career as well as the current. Yet the biography of the artist itself, who fled Vienna in 1938, is absent within the social and artistic landscape of the city.

Tess Jaray studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (1954-57) and University College London (1957-60). Her works are included in numerous private and public collections, amongst others the Tate, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Sainsbury Center, Norwich, the Museum of Modern Art, Szépmüvészeti, Budapest, and the Museum of Modern Art, mumok, Vienna.

Jaray has previously shown at EXILE in Berlin in 2018 with a solo exhibition entitled Aleppo.

→East of the West. Exhibition text (PDF)

→East of the West at VIENNA CONTEMPORARY

FEATURES
→Artmirror
→Artviewer

 

ART BRUSSELS

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present a dialogue between the works of Stuart Brisley, born 1933, and Jo-ey Tang, born 1978. While coming from very different generations and backgrounds, both artists have in very distinct ways performative actions and interferences at the core of their practice.

For Stuart Brisley, his body and its physical, emotional and social limitations stand at the center of his practice. In his oevre he has pushed, extended and challenged his own body to reveal issues of alienation and social injustice. The selected vintage and contemporary works will focus on a kind of physical experiencability of the artist as the creator of the work.

Jo-ey Tang shifts his focus to the objects and their limitations themselves. For example, Tang lit a candle under a thin, long mirror piece which, over the course of the opening evening, broke the mirror. For his recent solo exhibition at Exile, he filled the gallery space with a 10-hour sound therefore making it impossible for the viewer to experience the full extent of the work. In a sense, his body is the instigator of a kind of ‘invisible performance’ that leaves the objects themselves as traces.

Introesque

Posted on by Regina Regina

Ich sehe mir deine Tasche an
Daran denken
Es wieder vergessen und nicht gleich lachen
Lass mich bloß
Darauf warten
Nach vorne und hinten
Es war eigentlich noch gar nicht so weit
Die Haut ist aufgerissen, meine Beine jucken
Dein Kopf ist voll mit Kindergartenläusen
Ich muss dich kratzen
Die weißen Dinger aus deinem Haar sammeln
sie springen umher und wir tanzen in der Küche 
Das Licht ist aus
natürlich
Wir tanzen mit den Läusen und es riecht nach Spülmittel
Du wartest auf einen Anruf
Ich trinke deinen Kaffee und mir ist schlecht von gestern
Eins, zwei – es gibt dich nicht
Nur das Toilettenpapier nicht vergessen
Wo sollen jetzt die Gäste schlafen da ich hier bin? 
Sauer wird die Milch nun auch nicht mehr
Zusammen können wir mehr essen, mehr trinken 
Und die Toilette öfter benutzen

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America’s Greatest Hits

Posted on by Regina Regina

With the exhibition Americas Greatest Hits the London-based artist duo kennardphillipps are responding to the rise of right-wing populism, not just in Austria but around the globe. The fragility of democracy and the dangerous undercurrents of current political speech and institutional violence stand at the center of this exhibition produced specifically for, and in response to, EXILE’s space and close location to the seats of power of the current right-wing ÖVP/FPÖ government.

Entering the wooden, ground floor space of the gallery a large, almost wall-sized image is depicting a pictorial night shot of the brightly-lit Austrian Parliament building flying the Austrian flag. On the opposite wall hang three individual banners showing red-white-red colored horizontal stripes, as in the Austrian flag. All works are printed on extremely thin dust sheet not intended for printing on and appear smeared if not at times obliterated. Between the wall works a record player is playing a single track, manually set on repeat.

The image of the Austrian parliament building with its panoramic perspective and scenic lighting could be sourced from countless amateur tourist smartphones or stock-photography websites. It’s generic but well-composed pictorial quality is only ruptured by the fragility of it’s own printing material which yet again seems to enhance the image’s appearance as almost skilful and, to a degree, oddly painterly. As a combination of perspective, lighting, scale and technique the work refers to a particular genre of large-scale representational painting found in most buildings of socio-political powers aiming to underline the owner’s or institution’s importance and, as a final goal, their longevity.

Installed on the opposite wall are three banners depicting the colors of the Austrian flag. These seemingly life-size representations of an actual flag seem to allure to all too common nationalist sentiments felt not only in Vienna but across many cities and countries. Only loosely attached to the gallery’s wooden wall onto wooden bars, their vernacular identity reminds uncomfortably of traditional Trachtenvereine, nationalist Burschenschaften or patriotic party congresses. Though here, the pictorial and painterly smears of the image of Parliament have turned into tracks or traces diluting the distinct color blocks of most national flags. The red color at top and bottom quite literally bleeds into and across the center white. The unabsorbable ink is looking for ways or channels to attach itself onto a hostile surface not meant for such purpose. A simple technological failure metaphorically questions national identity and individual socio-political responsibility.

Central in the ground floor space is the evolving, process-based work that gives the show its title. In response to kennardphillipps’ artwork the album sleeve Americas Greatest Hits lists all unarmed fatalities of US police shootings since 2015. London-based intermedia artist Mukul Patel has initiated the recording of an LP as a memorial to the victims. This initial edition contains a single track produced using the police body cam recordings of violence perpetrated against citizens who were neither armed nor attacking.

Images and audio together form two aspects of an environment in which visitors are invited to reflect upon the current crisis of our democratic institutions in relation to the global rise of right-wing populism. It is a reminder that history can all too easily repeat itself if we do not learn from it.

The gallery’s upstairs space features two related series of works on paper depicting full-page portraits of political figures. These portraits, printed onto the pages of the Financial Times, are in various states of abstraction and disfiguration.

In a first part of the series (2012), portraits of male world leaders were selected by the artists due to their questionable human-rights record and relation to totalitarian structures. Yet, all of the portraits have their sensory organs erased. The specific identity of the politician portrayed subsumes itself behind the reductive representation of the portrait’s purpose and essence. Individuality and political relevance are removed, revealing the typology of masculine pathological power itself.

The second part of the series (2016) extends this erasure repetitively on the portrait of always the same politician. Increasingly these erasures rip into the actual portrait and turn into powerful tears revealing underlying pages of the newspaper issue. This physical and forceful rupturing turns the traditional process of paper collage on it’s head. Instead of assembling new meaning, in the classic tradition of e.g. John Heartfield, these works disassemble the pages of the newspaper at large, revealing a torn, fragmented landscape that seems to allow a view inside the person of power’s agenda and mindset.

The aim of our second exhibition by kennardphillipps is to take action within the means of an contemporary art exhibition space to contribute to the challenging political discourses of our time. The exhibition takes the local political situation as an entry point to the global problem of right-wing populism. It is not a local or national problem as it is a global danger of an erosion of democratic values and liberties we are facing.

 

Additional Event
Nov, 29, 7 -9 pm: As part of this exhibition, Mukul Patel will produce a second track to the album Americas Greatest Hits in a live collaboration with Vienna-based intellectual Fahim Amir. Further tracks will be created with other collaborators at future exhibitions until the LP is complete. The final LP will later be released, with proceeds from the sale going to support the legal cases being brought by families bereaved through police violence.

 

kennardphillipps is a collaboration between Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps working since 2002 to produce art in response to the invasion of Iraq. Their practice has evolved to confront power and war across the globe and is made for the street, the gallery, the web as well as newspapers & magazines. The artists also lead workshops that develop peoples’ skills to help them express their thoughts on what’s happening in the world through visual means. The work is made as a critical tool that connects to international movements for social and political change.

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Burial of the White Man

Posted on by Regina Regina
Every year since May 8, 2017, Erik Niedling and like-minded individuals ascend Kleiner Gleichberg near Römhild, the mountain Niedling has chosen for the realization of Pyramid Mountain, to celebrate the symbolic Burial of the White Man in anticipation of future events.
Erik Niedling and Ingo Niermann cordially invite people of all genders and colors to meet on the summit of the future Pyramid Mountain at 12 pm on May 8, 2020. We will discuss conditions for overcoming the dominance of white men and jointly rebuild a stone pyramid on the summit plateau which usually gets dismantled over the course of the following year. 
No one enters the realm of the dead empty-handed; proper provisions are a must. Bearing this in mind, artist Jeronim Horvat has invited the following artists to pack their rucksacks that will be opened on Kleiner Gleichberg on May 8: Vela Arbutina, Marie Matusz & Cassidy Toner, Maya Hottarek, Anna Walther, Paul Otis Wiesner, Johanna Blank, Bob Schatzi Hausmann, Tobi Keck, Nellie Lindquist, Anica Kehr, Julius Pristauz, Ernestyna Orlowska, KOTZ (Don Elektro, Marian Luft and Salvador Marino), Lotte Meret Effinger, Ronny Szillo, Lucie Freynhagen, Matyáš Maláč & Julius Reichel, Jiajia Zhang, Cyril Hübscher
Further reading:
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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

Posted on by Regina Regina

These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (1) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies. Jorge Luis Borges: John Wilkins’ Analytical Language(a)

Organised in lists, departments, compartments, definitions, dictionaries, meanings, boxes, crates, files, folders, encyclopaedias, and memory drives lies everything you’ve ever described, known, felt, and seen. Borges’ nod towards the tautological absurdity of analytical philosophy can be summarised by the serious joke of Wittgenstein’s The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.(b) In this vein, one recognises that language is both access to the world as well as a prison.

It is in this spirit that Nazim Ünal Yilmaz paints a sharp critique of the analytical universe, and the awkward moment where it comes into contact with the physical world. The title of the 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 replaces the absurd encyclopaedic boxes for all the different types of animals quoted above. His subjects and colours, contours and shadowy purple hues continue the lineage of Borges’ magical realism through the narrative construction of painting and installation. A wave of chaotic eruptions, ever-moving evolutionary changes, biological degradation, and the will to break out of the confines of definition give his compositions explosions of colour – a proper parallel to the circular drama of a planetary society that lives from pain, survival, and death. 

The whole exhibition is a cinematic construction. The succession of pieces builds a compilation of stories that tie a string from point A to point B. The first room introduces this logical formula through the connection between two large canvases of dolphin and human species. In Big Fish, Small Fish (2019), a chain of dolphins catches increasingly smaller dolphins in mid-air. Leaping from the waves, the dolphins appear choreographed and recall the use of dolphins in aquatic circuses or theme parks. As they catch each other with their sharp teeth, the spectacle becomes a circuit of violence inflicted from the outside on each and every member of this choreography of abuse. The image parallels the structure of our capitalistic society, all of us participants with no option but to grind to the rhythm of exploitation of this dog eat dog world.

Across the way is Dolphin with a Woman (2019). This painting follows the dolphin motif in a similar manner as the creature, itself a victim of exploitation, catches a nude woman in its powerful clutches. The woman, fleshy and full, is revealed to also be a participant in this violent entertainment business. Like the dolphins, it is the properties of her body that give her value to audiences to gape and gawk. This series of paintings reveals the oppressive regimes of physicality, the prisons of our bodies, and the classifications which make some of us uninteresting, and some of us valuable. Although at first glance both canvases are rife with violence, they also emit the coming of a new era, one of inter-species solidarity between the oppressed, the rejection of the label and the show, and the acceptance of the other. An insurrection is rising. 

Unique in this selection of paintings is the absence of Yilmaz’s typical self-portraits. He is staunchly opposed to representing the other and normally insists on the gesture of self-portrait. In this room however, he is present in other forms. A pink carpet and a casual clothing line represent the stereotypically feminine labour of the interior. He creates gestures of the domestic space and transversal identification with his subjects. The critique of spectacle rests on the pillars of feminism, animal rights, and queer theory all of which demand an end to the exploitation of bodies and express a common lack of freedom.

While the ground floor introduces the intersection between gender and species-based exploitation, the exhibition as a whole has the form of an expanded film. While criticising the spectacle, Yilmaz is conscious of the history of painting with its loaded implications and its role as image-making. One of painting’s most painful associations for him is that to the Catholic church. Religious organisations have been at the forefront of persecution of otherness for centuries, but the Catholic church also gave rise to the most famous compositions and artists whose legacy in painting is undeniable. How to confront this inner contradiction to denounce exploitation through a medium which has benefitted from its implementation?

Moving up the stairs, a minimal room presents the painting Theological Time (2014), one of the namesake pieces of the exhibition’s title. Yilmaz describes of this painting as a symbol of the crossroads between truth, reality, religion, fiction, and the cycle of life. It reveals the depth of each canvas which traverses the social structures from today back to the dawn of time. The painting shows the still hands of a clock stuck in time. 

In the time of the Ancient Egyptians, time was believed to be kept by the destruction of energy. Time based on the oscillation between night and day, digestion, life, and death, came from theological principles and became science. As a result of the industrial revolution, capitalist time took on a strikingly similar meaning described as secular wear and tear.(c) 

Today, seconds are based on the vibration frequency of the cesium atom in the construction of an atomic clock. Here, Yilmaz sees a reversal of thought processes in which science comes first, and Christian and Muslim theologies try to prove the existence of God through scientific fact. The silent clock hands in Theological Time neither create nor destroy energy. They are frozen on Duchamp’s staircase in reference to his nude which recurs in Yilmaz’s symbolic reservoir. These stairs go neither up nor down. For Yilmaz, it is a symbol of stoppage and flow, the coexistence of heaven and hell, the cycle of life and death. In this painting, all life happens at once without any trace of linear progress. 

The relation of theology to everyday life is consistent in all of Yilmaz’s works, and it is from where this void emerges. Although it is said we live in a secular world, traces of theology remain rooted all around us, and Yilmaz dissects and questions this lineage that still surrounds our everyday.

The final room presents a series of canvases arranged like stills of a film. Hung tightly together, the installation incentivises a narrative reading to the chosen selection. Each painting acts like a short story within a compendium of tales. Here, recurring signifiers in Yilmaz’s work collide off each other. The rapid succession of wild drooping paint sets the film reel in motion. The compendium simultaneously compresses and expands each individual short story into a contemporary Decameron (d) or Canterbury Tales (e,f). 

The title of the exhibition is a simple list but the content of the paintings expands its meaning into the boundless possibilities of short narration. If the compression of time into a constant and the strange coexistence between queer theory, popular culture, and the Catholic Church, existed within one person, it could well reside in the camera-holding, film-making, tableau-vivant of Pier Paolo Pasolini (g). A thinker too complex to define in any straightforward way. Delicate philosophical criticism and an eye for raw aesthetics of popular life proliferate his cinematic sequences, as do the short stories of Borges. Full of contradictions and interspersed with jokes, these are stories that speak of the true qualities of poetry – creating not the simplicity of dry analysis, but the infinite complexity of life’s imagination.

If the title of the exhibition is a replacement of the absurdity of categories, it is then the singularity of painting which ends this exhibition in the form of the brilliant sunset of the apocalypse. All the boxes explode into one. Art has become the religion of modern times. The very medium of painting, in its art historical uniqueness, as the pinnacle of what is called Art and enmeshed in its dramas of image-making and power is the format chosen in which the broken human and animal marionettes of the individual tumble. Broken and unhealed, they plummet towards the audience.

Àngels Miralda: The Brown Mountain, 2020

a) Jorge Louis Borges: The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, 1952 (https://www.crockford.com/wilkins.html)

b) Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921.

c) In a long passage quoting Lardner, Marx discusses the progress of time on the constant capital of machinery this section introduces the need of maintenance and, complementary, additional labour power. There is a striking similarity with the ancient Egyptian understanding of the “destruction of energy” and their quest to build monuments that could last into eternity. Karl Marx: Capital: Volume II, Penguin Classics. (pg. 260)

d) Boccaccio: The Decameron, 1353.

e) Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, 1392.

f) In an exhibition I curated in January 2020, I set up the metaphor of curator as compiler. Based around the figure of Pier Paolo Pasolini and his series of films under the title The Trilogy of Life. The Sea Monster, The Bear, (Jüri Arrak, Nadia Barkate, Vytenis Burokas, Beth Collar) lítost, Prague. January – March 2020. (https://litost.gallery/en/programme/smb/)

g) Pasolini’s profile has persistently puzzled academics, as a queer communist, he was awarded by the Vatican for his filmic interpretation of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew – regardless of the fact that the Church had officially excommunicated all communist sympathisers. He created for himself an awkward yet forceful position both antagonising and recognising the Catholic church for its sins and for its cultural importance.

→ The brown mountain. Text by Àngels Miralda. (PDF, 44 kb)

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Spannungszangen

Posted on by Regina Regina

Following the fist solo exhibition in 2021 focusing on Sine Hansen’s works from the 1960s, EXILE is pleased to now present the exhibition Spannungszangen featuring six of the artist’s paintings from the 1970s. Many of the works in this exhibition have not been exhibited since the time of their production.

Sine Hansen’s Spannungszangen Series (1974-1979) take on tension as a formal technique and an embodied phenomenon in vibrant portraits of acrobatic pliers. These paintings are tightly wound, highly precise. Their dancing forms appear caught mid-step, as if preparing for a pirouette in almost-rainbow hues. I think of a rubber band pulled taught: something about to spring into motion. Painting tools and other household objects throughout the 1960s—light bulbs, safety pins, scissors, Hansen developed a bright, popish visual language by juxtaposing pared-down depictions of these instruments in egg tempera, acrylic and screen print.

The Spannungszangen, to which she devoted much of the 1970s, were a breakthrough, harnessing a potent and playful energy. Now working in acrylic, she animated these fastidiously flat, monochrome shapes with a kind of life force, contouring their green and red forms with thin stripes of high-contrast chroma. Alongside their contrasting colors, these anthropomorphized tools derive their power from enacting a series of tensions: between levity and control, razor edges and rounded curves, biomorphic and mechanical, masculine and feminine.

In casting these tools as feminized bodies, Hansen sharpened her work’s feminist edge in concert with the transnational feminist art movement burgeoning at the time. Sine Hansen transported her own experience and observation into a colorful and imaginative, yet highly controlled, painterly register. She amassed a collection of pliers and clamps that she looked to as source material and was also influenced by images of force- field experiments that she had seen via a friend working at a scientific-technology company in Braunschweig, where she graduated from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in 1966 and lived and worked until her death in 2009.

On a basic level, these paintings mess with gender binaries, as stereotypically masculine tools take on feminine curves. The works may have reflected her own confrontation with the patriarchy, as her immediate success with numerous exhibitions and accolades after art school was soon challenged by the deeply misogynist milieu in which she found herself. Despite such personal resonance, however, Hansen was after a kind of artwork that shed subjectivity to tap into what she described as the anonymity of a system of signs. There is something glyph-like about the Spannungszangen – I imagine bodies stretching to shape letters, or something of the bend in a graffiti tag. When the personal is political, it’s also a sign or a symbol. And a form of tension.

Where the feminist thrust of Hansen’s work comes immediately to the fore and could be compellingly situated in dialogue with other practices with parallel concerns (from Margaret Raspé’s camera-helmet films to Mira Schor’s punctuation paintings), her exploration of tension in these paintings also transcended sociopolitical context. In a statement on her work published in 1970, she wrote, “Controlling aggression is a key dimension of my practice. Things produced in this way carry a certain kind of information.” Like a kind of body language, the Spannungszangen manifest a form of non-verbal communication. To borrow Prunella Clough’s turn of phrase, these are paintings that “say a small thing edgily.”

Camila McHugh

 

Parallel to this exhibition EXILE is pleased to inaugurate a new exhibition space in the German city of Erfurt, Thuringia on March 18 presenting a solo exhibition of Sine Hansen’s partner Jobst Meyer. The exhibition is entitled Konstruktionen der Neunziger and features paintings created during the 1990s in response to the fundamental socio-political changes due to German unification.

→Sine Hansen artist link

→Jobst Meyer: Konstruktionen der Neunziger at EXILE Erfurt

→EXILE Vienna, Elisabethstrasse 24, 1010 Vienna, Austria

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nameless

Posted on by Regina Regina

Isolation as practice. An act of physical withdrawal might refer back to ancient times of aiming to achieve ulterior states of self awareness through utmost reclusion. The historical figure of the hermit remains the most prominent narrative in various cultural and predominately religious contexts. With advancing societal secularization such performative acts of seclusion were increasingly considered redundant if not trivial. Within the late 18th century Habsburg Empire the practice was outlawed, while in 19th century English aristocratic circles it was considered fashionable to hire a so called ornamental hermit to enact isolation as part of a romanticized notion of solitude. In its contemporary form, the practice of social withdrawal possibly relates less to spiritual but ecological motives as an escapist attempt from the complexities of destructive capitalism. Forms of self-sufficiency, of self-sustaining reintegration into the environment might appear as the only way forward if not to join the accelerating global extinction rally.

Isolation as artistic practice. The works by Ulrike Johannsen and Anton Stoianov metaphorically relate to the figure of the reclusive hermit and appear as if created in a self-reflexive echo chamber, an inaccessible, therefore non-contextual cave. Though, what just a second ago seemed so familiar through established art historical trajectories, is in fact a rather unknown and refreshing visual. Within the harshly neon-lit gallery space the works seem somewhat misplaced as if to rather aspire to be seen within a dimly-lit, ornate art history museum. Upon closer inspection the familiar lure of the works’ initial appearance shatters and reveals a specific relation to the contemporary. Possibly it is this juxtaposition of the works’ material presence to the bleak global reality that allows the viewer another, more visceral response. These two strongly independent creative visions offer some, if not devotional, but immediate  and magical, almost hallucinating pleasure. We must be tripping or how else can we grasp these works’ contemporary relevance and inherent complexities?

The small-scale but intricately crafted objects by Johannsen, some recent, some from the early 1990s, don’t refer to, but confidently are themselves travel reliquaries set in a historical lineage dating back millennia. Seemingly identical to their historical predecessors in material, craft and precision, what makes these works different is their relation to feminist practice expressed through inscriptions and phallic form as well as their context of presentation. All sense of mystery, of status and knowledge that the historical predecessors projected onto their owners has been transformed by the artist into a pop-ritualistic procession. Within the fully deciphered, analysed and exploited contemporary, these works are poignantly anecdotal and encourage an open, humorous and playful reading. Historical mystery has given way to irony or even tragic comedy. Where and with whom should these works travel to? Who might need their protection? What do we want to carry to the grave? Johannsen’s works harbour an unexplainable magic, a metaphorical weight as much as a comical narrative, a playful precision that leads any attempted conceptual deconstruction ad absurdum. On life’s inevitable rollercoaster crashing due to technical fault, Johannsen’s travel reliquaries can give necessary guidance, identical to the magic embedded in these works’ historic predecessors. 

Painted during the calming isolation of the recent pandemic, with the contemporary art world on relieving pause, Anton Stoianov spent endless hours creating what appears reminiscent of orthodox christian artefacts commonly found in ancient churches of far away, mountainous and hard to reach territories. Painted on heavy blocks of wood, Stoianov’s works show priests of an ancient religion, dressed in elaborate and ornate clothing. Painted in a flat, as if pre-perspective spatial setting, the painted deities seem to address the viewer through a long lost, but familiar gestural code. The paintings’ colorful and precious opulence, the priests’ elaborate clothing and auratic body gestures almost make the viewer overlook the core distinction from the historical reference. The deities’ human heads are painted as, or have been replaced by, heads of various insects. While the isolation experienced during the pandemic might have evoked a Gregor Samsa-esque experience, it remains a question what these insect heads actually mean in relation to the otherwise devotional appearance of these works. Do these works address a historical past, critique the anthropocene, or predict the future? A critical analysis in relation to past religious practices seems somewhat dull while a relation to a post-human future seems more fruitful. In such a future, insects, having survived human-caused oblivion, have retouched themselves into human archeological artefacts as replacement goddesses of a trippy insectoid iconography.

The exhibited works oscillate between a wunderkammer-esque notion of magic, mystery and ancient tradition as well as fear, precariousness and outsiderist production. Isolationist artistic strategies becomes metaphors for social hermit-like withdrawal. At the end of another challenging year, we might need to refer back to their protection, to their comforting support to navigate the many melting icebergs ahead. By rephrasing the superstitious, yet colorful bleakness of ancient dark ages, these bodies of work could be seen as praying mantises of wishful thinking or as soothing offerings to prevailing gods of war and destruction. Though likely, we collectively sit way too deep inside a pitch-black artificial cave, too removed from the entrance to turn back.

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Rare Earth Magnet

Posted on by Regina Regina

Rare       Earth     Magnet

Rapid     Eye        Movement

Dear Visitor,

I am writing this text that was commissioned for the exhibition Rare Earth Magnet by Gwenn Thomas with inserts by David Gruber and Alexander Jackson Wyatt while looking out of a window, thousands of kilometres removed.

I browse the streets attached to information zipped down from an immaterial sphere while colliding not only with my fellow walkers. My walk became directed the further I am in need of rare earth circuit boards as an organ permanently affixed to my palm. The world is my oyster, or so I am told, the window in my hand is my hand. On my path, I am an atom, colliding and producing information out of information.

In order to quiet my restlessness I open a book I never finished reading. The page the bookmark is left on, begins with a sentence I now decide to quote: “All of a sudden, as if a surgical hand of destiny had operated on a long-standing blindness with immediate and sensational results, I lift my gaze from my anonymous life to the clear recognition of how I live.” Written in 1930, published in 1982, in 1994 the sentence brought my reading to a stop, in 2022 I am caught by its poignant description of the contemporary human condition.

Thomas’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, includes inserts by two invited artists, with me, as the writer of this commissioned text, as the inevitable fourth participant. The flawless digital presentation of the works I received weeks ago is hovering in another window on my screen. Let me introduce, frame, create connection and meaningful content of the displayed works. I try to imagine the works’ collective physicalities, presence and setting within the white-walled gallery space I never visited.

Alchemic experimentations of color, shape and form, collectively considering the inner perspective in relation to an orbiting, partially fractured marginal frame. My device is seriously failing me, not connecting the atomic fractions of content orbiting around my mind. These are restless times and in accelerating speed, do you also feel as in constantly fracturing explosive fear? My job to introduce, to create context and to formulate in times that can’t be formulated I fail to fulfill.

It all began with a collision. A sudden, seemingly unimportant encounter, be it emotional or physical, results in a drastic change of course. At highest speed, particles collide. The mundane shape of a window seen a decade ago in my hometown of Lisbon, has burnt itself into the work of Gwenn Thomas. The artist’s windows into the self are deeply explored by new alchemist experimentation of glittering formulas of precious glass. As much fragile as infinite, these intricately precious, yet mundane materials held in metal encasements allow for the light of day to reflect its glittering mystery caught within. Metallic gold photographic paper, expired over two decades ago, is painted upon with chemicals revealing shapes and structures that abstract the three-dimensional Rare Earth shapes found in the gallery space.

Reassembled frames from frames filled with collaged content from previous content, somewhat precariously held together. Alexander Jackson Wyatt’s inserts into the exhibition are as individual as they are repetitious variations of form. The casual fragility of the collage is juxtaposed by a frame made up of seemingly discarded parts of wood. The frame makes its presence known, not unlike a medieval protective wall, sheltering the fleeting collage from all outside elements. The result is a battle for attention between margin and centre, between exposure and protection.

Sections of left-over beige frames, seemingly held together by painted brown tape are attached to beige paintings of almost classic comic appearing grey explosive devices. With their explosion near, the bombs circle towards a black abyss, smoke appears. David Gruber’s inserts into the exhibition allure to the precariousness of individual mental states. These paintings are like clairvoyants predicting what we all know all too well.

Obsessive repetition, repetitive obsession. Alchemist experiments, paintings of gold, collaged fortresses, explosive disasters with no miracle cure at hand. Looking out of a window as if a crystal ball into meaning and content, I am certain you will find your own sense, your own conversation with the works and their relation to ourselves.

“It was just a moment, and I saw myself.”

Yours faithfully,

O. Seraos

→Windows in our hands. Review by Robin Wart published by passe-avant.net

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Bonus stage of evolution is being constantly thirsty

Posted on by Regina Regina

What’s the opposite of progress? What’s another word for progress? What defines progress? Does progress require change? Does change equal progress? Why is it important to know the difference between change and progress? What is progress in history? And what is the cost of it? What is the relationship between change and growth? What does growth mean to you? Are there limits to it? Why is change important to growth? Why is growth important in biology? How natural is it? How natural is an algorithm? And how algorithmic is nature? Does growth always come from within you? And what is ‘you’? Is it your body? Or is it your mind? Or is it also the air around your skin and the light it reflects?

Bonus stage of evolution is being constantly thirsty is an environment made up of two movies, two sculptures and a curtain. You are invited to meditate on the interconnectedness of materials.

→Respect what you have. Interview with Kinga Kiełczyńska for The New Institute

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Neophyte II

Posted on by Regina Regina

When did we start counting days? It might be that blue lights whirled us up and having removed the blindfold we found ourselves on this glade… It’s a looking-glass world, a forest with eye-like lakes where time moves in a loop and echo circles over tree crowns to get back to the throat.

– When sacred pancakes are fried by sunbeams in the name of photosynthesis, mirrors are juggling data, catching it in the eclipse.

– When the spring shoots appear they burn like a green fire, leading to exaltation and regeneration.

– When the young hearts are pumping green blood by the veins of liminal space a new form of life is waiting to be awakened.

Jura Shust

 

It has been almost a year since the violent crackdown of the Uprising in Belarus. By now the ongoing protests were forced to morph from the mass demonstrations of 2020 to clandestine partisan activities operating from within a dispersed underground. Secret gatherings, temporal displays of the illegal opposition flag and establishing decentralized infrastructures of care, mobilisation and support have since taken center stage in maintaining the protest against the current illegitimate regime.

With this ongoing political crisis as well as the Covid-19 pandemic as the given socio-political reality, the Belarusian-born, Berlin-based artist Jura Shust returned to Belarus to film a group of Zoomers hiding deep inside the forest where they find themselves in a parallel universe. Their precarious temporality rejects and escapes the present and instead freely mixes elements of past and future situations, hence becoming a dis-, as well as utopian community at the very same time.

In Neophyte II, a group of young people go through a series of mysterious rituals that reference pagan myths as well as purposeless pastimes of contemporary youth. They aimlessly draw onto the soil, burn a dead tree stump, sing, dance and beat each other with nettle to later decode their respective burns. In quiet and randomly appearing actions, they displace various natural matters such as fungi, nettles, wood, and bark to accumulate their transcendental qualities and abilities to influence a social and escapist current. For the film’s protagonists, the forest becomes a shelter for magical and partisan forces, a space of non-linearity and freedom. As a temporal community, a brigade or a gang, they seek autonomy and protection against a hostile political order.

In the centrally-placed object entitled Preventing distress; Averting misfortune, a glass unit is filled with nettle and smashed into pieces. The membrane liner however keeps the integrity of the glass, freezing the moment of disintegration. According to a popular Slavic beliefs, nettle was spread around one’s house to protect it from negative energies. The composition emphasises two apotropaic – protective – functions, a metaphorical and physical ones, keeping the aggressive energies and gestures of violent break-up still and motionless. 

The surrounding wooden panels, collectively titled Solar Plexus depict pyrographed portraits of the film’s protagonists with their faces covered by pancakes. Not unlike the sun, the pancake functions as a symbol of circular temporality that restlessly produces seemingly infinite amounts of light and energy. The opacity and anonymity of the protagonists hidden behind their organic veil points to the complex interplay between various layers of physical and digital (in)visibility in the course of the protest with the image of the pancake/sun referring to both, a solar eclipse and a balaclava mask. In the Belarusian protests, masking one’s identity was essential for protestors to protect themselves from prosecution and recognition from surveillance systems as well as for the security forces to remain anonymous against peoples’ rage and revenge.

Upstairs, two embossed mirror trays, each containing an apple, refer to popular slavic fairy tales in which the spinning of an apple on such a tray resembles a natural vortex phenomenon which allows the viewer to predict of the future.
Two wooden panels demonstrate a pattern appearing on the skin after being burned by nettle and the chemical formulas of chlorophyll and hemoglobin. Chlorophyll is a substratum of vitality and rejuvenescence, whose formula is almost identical to the one of human blood. 

The exhibition culminates with a new, two-channel video installation which gives the exhibition its title. In the first part of Shust’s film Neophyte I from 2019, the protagonists went into the forests searching for crypto objects, either in form of metaphorical, magical fern flowers or so called zakladki, where ordered illegal drugs are dropped off at a prearranged GPS location, just like the current forms of protest, through multiple decentralized telegram chats.

Now, in Neophyte II, the same protagonists explore the forest as a space of opacity and regeneration. Presented on two vertical screens, one screen follows the group’s activities during the day, the other captures their unsettling and hypnotic world at night. Fragments of the forest uncannily flash at the viewer from one screen, while on the other, the protagonists appear seemingly submerged in a peaceful, arcadian pristine forest. At some point during the night, an untagged car covered in nettle slowly drives through the dark. Similar unidentified cars were used by special police forces to kidnap and arrest protesters during the 2020-21 protests in Minsk and other cities in Belarus.

The linear time is looped, referring to the narration of a fairy tale and creating an endless spiral of day and night, of a parallel dis-, and utopia. Neophyte II creates an a-temporal space where camaraderie and affinity is based not only on human affection but also on the relation with entities and powers exceeding human agency. This ontology of time is grounded in ideas of revival and structural recomposition of the social relations in the nexus of political and natural powers. 

At first sight, Jura Shust distances himself from the political immediacy and ongoing confrontation, but for the artist political agency is deeply rooted in the processes of regeneration in the struggle that will always be going on, in the past and in the future.

Aleksei Borisionok

Features
→OFLUXO
→Artviewer

 

Overgangen

Posted on by Regina Regina

We are pleased to invite you to a solo exhibition by Brussels-based artist Philippe Van Snick entitled Overgangen. All works featured were made exclusively for, and in response to, EXILE’s specific exhibition spaces. The exhibition will run until June 1, yet the site-specific installation Temperature Raising, 2019 will remain installed until mid August.

For Overgangen, Van Snick focused on three distinct shapes found within the gallery space and interpreted these within his particular color concept. Outside, on the gallery’s facade and visible at all times, Van Snick replaced the regular logo found in the gallery’s square-shaped light-box with a new light-blue and black graphic pattern. Inside, the artist responded to the wooden walls with their particular vertical linear dynamic and, upstairs, to an receding arch built into one of the walls. Overgangen is the artist’s second solo exhibition in Austria following his retrospective at Grazer Kunstverein in 2016.

 

If time is a bitch I have always imagined it to be wearing fierce black lacquer strap-on heels while holding a whip. An absolute clichéd representation of what one considers it to be except in this case it takes on the shape of a circle. The circle, with its endless projections, is tiresome. It’s part of our standardized and obsessive system, which dominates our daily life through numbers, shapes and colors in order to rationalize and give meaning. From the primary (circle, square, red, yellow and blue) to the secondary, everything we do is related to abstract representation.   

The hallway of my apartment in Berlin is pretty much empty except for a chair and one of those Ikea side tables with a lamp on top. Above the chair hangs a small-framed piece of paper on which an elastic band is taped. The color of the piece of paper has faded and the tape, that is holding the elastic band into an ellipse shape, is barely functional. The purpose of the chair is to place my bag on upon returning home or to lace my shoes when departing. It’s a frozen moment that represents movement, similar to the shape of an ellipse – a circle in motion.

The piece of paper is in fact part of a study that has defined and fueled the practice of Belgium artist Philippe Van Snick since the early 70’s. The movement of daily life translated through standardized formats sits at the core of Van Snick’s practice. Through cosmology, the artist developed an interest in systematic methodologies that lead him to formulate a consistent color and numeral system. Each “coincidence,” whether a flock of birds, a broken window or a walking path formed in a garden, is being analyzed in order to develop a language that could speak about the universe.

This observation is one of a painter, in which light and color are both scientific, objective descriptions as well as subjective codes inspired by our everyday experience. The concept of time, specifically the dualism of day and night and the lightness and darkness that signifies its passing, is often explored in works that underline the experiential relationship between the viewer and his surroundings. In the late 1970s, Van Snick created a specific color system by reducing his palette to ten specific colors: the primary colors red, yellow and blue, the secondary colors orange, green and purple, the non-colors white and black (representing the immaterial) and gold and silver (referring to materialism). Later, in 1984, the artist introduced one additional color to his system that now comprised of 10+1 colors. Together with the existing black this newly added light-blue color functions now as a bracket around his color system. Van Snick began to work with the particular duality of the phenomenon “day” and “night” which was symbolically represented by a light blue and a black rectangle.

Van Snick likes “flattening” reality, as if to be seen in two-dimensional form and from one perspective. This is perfectly illustrated in the work displayed onto the facade of the gallery, in which the reoccurring theme of Day/Night is implemented. Over the past decades, Van Snick has been producing abstract signs that incorporate his systematic language as a form of communication. The light box presented outside of the gallery juxtaposes the black and light-blue colors with black square and rectangular shapes while leaving gaps between them in order to present the bare structure of the apparatus itself. 

The artist’s interest in human scale and perception is underlined in his new commissioned work, which responds to the wooden paneling in the gallery. By accentuating the standard formats of some of the wooden planks with basic primary and secondary colors, Van Snick turns the space into a painting in which movement and scale defines its presence.  

The representation of a system is often one of strict and rigged form, while its subject matter is often an organic one. The depiction of time (the circle) and its movement (the ellipse) is investigated in a new series of diptychs, which portrays the so-called inbetweenness, a passage that leads from thing another. Van Snick rationalizes this ‘passage’ by exploring all the variations within his operational system. 

To come full circle, we execute our daily routine through a repetition that guards and haunts us on a day-to-day basis. I, myself, bike everyday from home to work passing through the cityscape of Berlin to finally arrive at KW in order to be greeted by a work by Philippe Van Snick – the doors of the main entrance painted black and light-blue. 

Krist Gruijthuijsen 

 

Philippe Van Snick, born 1946, is one of the precursors of conceptual art in Belgium since the early 1970s. The artist held solo exhibitions at Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp (BE, 1972, 1974, 1975), BOZAR, Brussels (BE, 1988), Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp (BE, 1990), Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (CA, 1999), S.M.A.K., Ghent (BE, 2001), Museum M, Leuven (BE, 2010), Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (BE, 2011, 2012, 2017, 2018), Nuno Centeno, Porto (PT, 2013, 2018), Arcade, London (UK, 2014), Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (BR, 2015), Grazer Kunstverein (AU, 2016), De Hallen, Haarlem (BE, 2016) and M HKA, Antwerp (BE, 2017). His work is included in the permanent collections of MoMA, NY (US), Mu.ZEE, Ostend, M HKA, Antwerp, S.M.A.K., Ghent (all BE) and many private & corporate collections. Currently, works by Van Snick are on display at S.M.A.K., Ghent until September 2019. The artist lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

→Conceptual Fine Arts Interview: Maria do Campo de Pontes with Philippe Van Snick

FEATURES
→Artmirror
→Mousse Magazine

this is a love poem,

Posted on by Regina Regina

We are happy to participate in the 2021 edition of curated by, the gallery festival with international curators in Vienna, with a group exhibition curated by Cindy Sissokho.

this is a love poem, is a group exhibition that reclaims the language of humour through a Black feminist perspective as found articulated in contemporary performance and poetry. It offers a response on how political satire is an unapologetic and poetic tool for resistance and laughter, a measure to provoke unconscious discomfort from the receiver.

The exhibition allows us to question how, through time, the Black body has fed colonial imaginaries within comedy through inappropriate representations, roles and caricatures. It is a statement of how it is reappropriated today as a virulent tool for testimony, shifting narratives from mainstream to traditional formats.

From a theatrical reappropriation of the figure of Pierrot the clown, to a TV show of irrational improvisation, the exhibition moves away from the historically hegemonic forms of satire. It is through complexified narratives, in which the performative Black body exists, that it offers nuanced critiques on colonialism, nationalism, identity, and belonging.

Awkward gestures, exaggerated facial expressions, the body as a prop are all a part of the staging of humor with the virulent words that accompanies it. A virulent love language.

Participating artists: Autumn Knight, Mona Benyamin, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, and Tanoa Sasraku.

The exhibition will present works both inside the gallery space and online with the parallel launch of the new platform EXILE TV.

→EXILE TV

→this is a love poem, (extended exhibition text, PDF, 2 pages)

→curated by

→Spike Magazine by Vanessa Joan Müller

→Mousse Magazine

→Der Standard by Katharina Rustler

Features
→Mousse Magazine

On Demand

Posted on by Regina Regina

 

The battery dies at 30 %, again. Mischieving nature compressed to gadget, performing things on its own, clogging seamless communication. Cut off from the network, a body reclines on spring grass while staring into a starless sky. Across blue-hued layers are other bodies, unreachable but abundant with recourses, asteroids, like lonely gas stations reverberating in immense space.

Bodies in landscapes. One – on the spring grass with a dead phone battery. Others – in scapes beyond human comprehension. Bodies as landscapes provide recourses for expansion. Transformed by technology, wired for efficiency. Bodies who have never yet met, but are already connected through capital and high-res images of their bodily surfaces. Distant surfaces – the dead phone’s screen savers.

Pakui Hardware is the collaborative artist duo formed by Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda. In their work, the duo traces Capital traveling through bodies and materials.

Partner of the exhibition: Lithuanian Culture Institute
Special thanks: Ona Lozuraityte and Petras Isora

Features
→Mousse Magazine

Halfway House

Posted on by Regina Regina

plain tables shabby furniture and dizzy swans sipping red winez
let’s have a crash course for car crashs and train wrecks gold tooth pick a boo

I have so much respect for social workers but capitalism bores me
I don’t even realize advertisements around me anymore and my boyfriend bought pistachio rice pudding What a disgrace. Unfollowed.

I love refrigerated food
I swear it’s just like a pill
can make you feel better can make you feel ill
My kitchen usually smells of burnt onions and weed
but today one of my room mates cooked fish and the smell makes me sick

I want a pair of designer shoes I also wanted to stop smoking
Maybe I’m going to snitch

My face is the front of shop
My face is the real shopfront
reminds me of the last time someone called me a copycat
honestly I don’t give a fuck

RIP Karl

I <3 YOU MOM

I <3 YOU HALFWAY HOUSE

$$$

 

I

In criminology, the purpose of a HALFWAY HOUSE is generally considered to be that of allowing people to begin the process of reintegration with society.

Between the recreation of capitalist concepts and treating economic and social necessities, this scenery positions itself as an experiment, shaped by duality.

Spatially separated with slight and divine intersections it looks closer into the overlapping of two aspects in nowadays art world: commerce & community

Multilaterally, the history as well as the coined function and capacity of EXILE, of independent art spaces in general, within their prevailing surroundings, are being addressed.

It should be clear that artworks hold a different responsibility than designed mass products.

Yet, sometimes we find undeniable similarities. The selling of originality and individualistic forms of expression can only be argued when we invade the integrity of the shown works and their authors. We are confronted with a spectrum of commercial co-existence here. Within such an environment each piece starts to blend in while still poetically claiming a title for its own. We’re facing products which through their purchasability can be resocialized. They want to exceed the display that was pushed upon them and create narratives on and for their own. These works are ultimately given a new place in society. But are there also seeds of thought planted with them? Is there space for further ideas to grow?

Without approval, visitors are turned into a performative element enjoying the voyeuristic gaze of outside passengers. Located in a ground level shop front, on the edge of the fancy first district, one finds an exhibited social situation. A similar setup awaits the spectators upstairs, where works are impatiently waiting similarly staged and performative but ready to be looked at.

Besides the more subtle artistic interventions on the ground floor such as the posters that were exclusively commissioned and which can be bought by visitors of every class, the room should further function as a place of exchange and communication. Somehow reminiscent of a youth center or a teenager’s coming of age home, it creates a pseudo-institutional and -intellectual setting for socializing without actually touching what is considered an exhibition space. Especially within commercial spaces, we need to reintroduce discourse and a sense of being there for each other. A lack of moral & financial sustainability within a hypercapitalist system is to be witnessed.

Emphasizing on the mixture of realities and expectations when entering a contemporary art context and the mixture of approaches within EXILE itself, HALFWAY HOUSE is an aim in blurring borders. It offers itself as a seceding act towards the frequently imagined purpose of a gallery space in times of turbo acceleration. Mixed up realms and professions demand a move of repurposing.

Despite solely viewing art as a product we were animated to reflect on how these objects continue to lead people inside a haziness amid the lucid areas of commerce & community. (Julius Pristauz)

 

II

Recently I was transported to a scene somewhere in the near future, shortly after the end of the first global nanoware and the partition of the world in ghettos controlled by postfacist microenhancement monopolists and retrofacist prepper paramilitaries. Society’s erosion had left only wasteland, sweeping away institutionalized cultural practices and their preceding markets. What was called “contemporary art” beforehand had collapsed to a form of trickster survival practice. This space I found myself in seemed to be a refuge, a non-site of precarious community without any fixed qualities besides shared desperation and some collective comfort found in pharmacological self-defense. ⠀

Confusion overwhelmed me, I felt strangely old and at the same time thrown into a hallucinatory teenage heterotopia. Did I reach the next level? Or was it all just a cynical joke? The futility of the question made me laugh. I decided that it wasn’t about the red or the blue pill but about the orange one that I found in a cupboard upstairs. The interregnum had fallen, “the old” had decomposed, the descendants of monsters had established their neofeudal reign. Now it was all about the right equipment. Deal with it, I told myself, and better get dressed accordingly. (Nada Schoer)

 

Works by Amanda Ross-Ho, Core Pan, Diana Barbosa Gil, Fette Sans, Johannes Büttner & Raphaela Vogel, Kamilla Bischof, Malte Zander, Martin Kohout, Nschotschi Haslinger, Patrick Fabian Panetta, Rafal Zajko, Tatiana Defraine, Tenant of Culture, Tilman Hornig & Paul Barsch, Vlad Nancă, Wieland Schönfelder.

Curated by Julius Pristauz.

FEATURES
→Artmirror
→Mousse Magazine

 

The Big Game

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to announce the first gallery solo exhibition by Nathalie Du Pasquier. The exhibition entitled The Big Game is a non-linear trip through 35 years of artistic practice. Focusing exclusively on works on paper, The Big Game begins with drawings from the early 1980s – done for the design group Memphis of which Du Pasquier was a founding member – and follows her creative journey until today.

The arrangement of the drawings forms an insight into Du Pasquier’s creative mind and working process. Instead of focusing on defining periods within her oeuvre, The Big Game describes the artist’s creative universe, pointing to connections, references, re-visits, fragmentations and quotations. The imaginative and imaginary world created by the artist continues to evolve, morph, cross-reference and expand until the most recent drawings, finished just in time of the opening.

Concurrently to The Big Game, Exile presents the 8,10 meter long painting by Du Pasquier entitled Viva Pertini at LISTE art fair in Basel. The painting was created by Du Pasquier in 1985 for the exhibition Homo Decorans – det dekorerende menneske at The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark and has not been seen in public since.

Prior to the opening, on Saturday May 30 from 6 – 7 pm, Nathalie Du Pasquier will give a guided artist tour through The Big Game. RSVP required.

Artforum Critic’s Pick by Travis Jeppesen

artnet interview with Hili Perlson

Spike Magazine slideshow

Taz Berlin review (German only)

Purple Diary

Features
→Mousse Magazine

The Big Game

Posted on by Regina Regina

Nathalie Du Pasquier: The Big Game
Soft-cover, 24 pages
Color print, 29,7 x 21 cm
Signed, stamped & limited edition of 50 copies
Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition The Big Game, June 2015

Sold Out

 

Extraneous

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to participate in this year’s curated by gallery festival with an exhibition curated by Zasha Colah with Valentina Viviani entitled Extraneous. Participating Artists are Margherita Moscardini, Milica Tomić & Grupa Spomenik, Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe:

 

In arid soils, people put matkas at their doorsteps, on the street.
A lidded terracotta jar, and a tumbler to drink from
For the thirsty.

The extraneous domestic gesture of placing a pot of drinking water on the street outside for the stray passer-by creates a small space, the tiniest space of reprieve, a narrow opening for the not-quite encounter. This extraneous, extra act – puts a foot – in the doorstep, in the piazza, the courtyard, leaving open space for territories out of territory to emerge, or extra-territories.

The artisanal water pumps recycled from old washing machines in refugee-camp courtyards in the work of Margherita Moscardini, the fountain in the window- shattered piazza in the work of Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko, and the matka at the doorstep are extraneous. They are sites of meeting, capable of encounter, capable of reimagining affiliation, the polis, citizenship, refuge. They fuse with the possibility of extraterritoriality exceeding national ideas of jurisdiction, sovereignty, constitutionally given identities and monumentality. Moscardini’s clay models of Arab courtyards, many unfired, are fragile copies of fountains refugee-designed, and community-built by Syrian refugees in Jordan. The real fountains and square courtyards are miniaturised into clay reproductions, one-tenth in scale, of the immaterial negative space of the courtyard. They are also models for future fountains to be built in full-scale on European soil. Legal documents need to add to existing national law, in order to render these zones of refuge, or vacuums in the law, black holes in national soil.

In The Fountains of Za’atari, the courtyards are semi-public squares, and their central fountains are theorised as akin to private monuments. Moscardini’s models have a gravitational weight when one holds them, they are foundation stones of another way to define citizenship, based not on territorial belonging, but its opposite, based on exile of belonging to a polis, emancipated from ideas of nationality and territorial belonging, and the political order, defended by military forces, that rules the planet. Her work rehearses the recovery of the nation from the nation- state. The nation does not need a territory. Whereas the commons, common resources and common lands are sanctioned by the sovereign state, Moscardini argues for the res communes omnium, the international commons, surpassing any idea of nation- state. The extraneous artistic act in Moscardini’s whole project is in how illegally concrete unsanctioned water pumps in the temporary cities of refugee camps, are converted into the drafting of illegalities into binding legal documents of international jurisdiction for the projected real-scale fountains.

Children’s watergames in the annotations by Strelyaev-Nazarko, shoot water at happy parents in bathing suits playing in the ruins of a statue, are many histories and times combined within the Plóshcha Svobódy (or Freedom Square) in his hometown Kharkiv. The Derzhprom building in the background—the first constructivist skyscraper of the Soviet Union; children playing with water around a missile that failed to explode; and the ruins of Lenin’s hulking statue—toppled and demolished in 2014—coexist in an imaginary Romantic landscape under exploding meteor showers. When the towering monument of Lenin was pulled down, first statue, later pedestal, Italian architects were commissioned to design a European public fountain.

How does playing a game, over and over again, rehearse resistance? An oily salesman pitches this to us in the Instruction Handbook of the Musée d’art Moderne Yawnghwe. Quoting Duchamp’s objet trouvé, a wine box contains a dice and circles to move across a canvas according to the roll of fate. The Video Demonstration begins with stylised Chaplin mannerisms, in a double role miming player and opponent, counting moves to himself. His striped t-shirt recalls the mime, the juggler, photographs of Picasso, or the antics of Dada.
Extraneous space is created each time the game is played, where potential acts of re- imagining and rehearsing possible futures open extra-territories of resistance. The game we are invited to play in the space, is based on a 2022 report on happenings since the coup in Myanmar that began on 1/2/21. The titles of the various squares lay bare the stratagems of resistance armies, civilian and people’s armies, climbing up ladders and sliding down snakes against the state military and state-funded militias. “… the chance to win, or die”, in an asymmetric war with loaded dice.

The installations by Milica Tomić and Sawangwongse Yawnghwe that run parallel on the upper level of EXILE, both stare into the making of genocide; in particular the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s; and the world’s longest-running civil war in Myanmar in South-East Asia between state forces and persecuted ethnic armed rebel groups; among whom are the Rohingya, rendered stateless after the citizenship act in 1982.

Written constitutions and juridical contracts design identity. They impose identifiers onto populations which begin to be accepted as natural through the social contracts—the unwritten Instruction Handbook of the nation-state we were never invited to sign—whether so that each ethnic group is ensured representation and power within the state, or to isolate people as minorities, second citizens, or even stateless, they always codify people to self-identify according to neat labels. The legal scholar of contemporary South African law, monuments and post-apartheid museums, Stacy Douglas, theorises (in Curating Community: Museums, Constitutionalism, and the Taming of the Political, 2017) that art spaces and museums can create ground for exceeding the constitutionally-derived labels of identity, and nation-state narratives of history. She exhorts that ethnocultural identities be exceeded by counter-monumentality. This excess, opens up space for new forms of belonging, association and encounter. The Monument Group’s project addresses the act of identifying victims of genocide based on human remains from a mass grave in Srebrenica. “Are a femur, a tooth, a rib and part of the skull enough for you? What is the bare minimum you would identify as a body, would call a body?”, asks Damir Arsenijević (in Gendering the Bone: The Politics of Memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2011). Genocidal governments impose an identity, also to those which can no longer reclaim their own, an identity that facilitates the naturalisation (they are re-named “missing persons”) and the justification (often invoking ethnic minorities) of violence and the politics of terror.

What extraneous space is opened by the extraterritorial (Moscardini) or the unidentified (Tomić)? Can a fragment of recovered bone from mass graves—a failed forensic identifier, contain also an excess, open space for abstract, infinite possibilities of identification (Grupa Spomenik)? Could the infinite possibilities of identity, rejoice against identity politics, and constitutional, nationally-sanctioned minorities or borders?

Text by Zasha Colah and Valentina Viviani

 

Zasha Colah is co-artistic director at Archive Milan/Berlin/Dakar (Milan, 2021–). Lecturer in Curatorial Studies, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (Milan, 2018–)and on the editorial board of Geoarchivi (Meltemi, 2021–) a series of books reopening rebellious archives. She co-founded the curatorial collaborative and union of artists, Clark House Initiative (Mumbai, 2010–2022).

Valentina Viviani is an artist and researcher and a member of Poly Marchantia art collective. She focuses her practice on notions such as plant-thinking, reading sites as ecosystems, and conversation as a method of research. She lives in Turin where she collaborates with different editorial and curatorial projects.

 

→Extraneous on EXILE TV

→curated by

 

Extraneous Practices
→Wednesday, Sept 28, 3-4:30pm: Nora Sternfeld, Margherita Moscardini, Milica Tomić and Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Zasha Colah, and Valentina Viviani in conversation

 

Selected Press

→Artforum: Extraneous by Kate Sutton
→Artforum: Must see
→Parnass: Curated by Highlights
→Gallerytalk.net: Best of curated by
→echogonewrong.com: The true story of Kelet by Àngels Miralda
→moussemagazine.com
→Spike Magazine: Do what is necessary, not because it is written by Ewa Borysiewicz

Features
→OFLUXO
→Mousse Magazine

Unnecessary Warsaw Correspondent

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to participate in this year’s European Month of Photography with a solo exhibition by artist Katharina Marszewski entitled Unnecessary Warsaw Correspondent.

The exhibition reveals an array of visual material and sources of non-linear events assembled during the last 15 years. Marszewski’s small-format photographs, previously glued into notebooks, depict façades, gazes, acts, lines of text and locations for possible scenarios. On the streets of her native city of Warsaw, the artist found the material for a language that she didn’t want to forget.

One can see a longing for expression – or perhaps for another identity? ‘The city I couldn’t live in became my muse.’ Her self-imposed role as fictional correspondent reads like an unusual report, rich in associations. At the same time, Marszewski breaks with conformist expectations for a uniform narrative and uses her photographs to visualize other planes of reality in collages and arrangements. 

Click here to read an interview between Melissa Canbaz and Katharina Marzewski

Click here to view the artist publication Unnecessary Warsaw Correspondent

Click here to read Artforum Critic’s Pick by Elvia Wilk

Click here to read Berlin Art Link review by Brit Seaton

 

For further information please visit: http://www.emop-berlin.eu/en/

Work Together Stay Alive

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is happy to invite you to an exhibition curated by Moscow-based curator and writer Natalya Serkova and artist Vitaly Bezpalov entitled Work Together Stay Alive.

Is it a mistake to say that a lemon slice in your teacup always tends to float towards your lips as if to deliberately ruin your tea drinking experience? Sometimes we may even rapidly rotate the cup 180 degrees assuming the slice’s gonna stay where it was. However, no matter how fast we are, the lemon is always faster to turn up on that exact side of the cup we take a sip from. What is it? Is it some kind of lemon conspiracy? For this to pass as a conspiracy, there’s going to be a global communications network binding a swarm of lemons. I guess they all work together with an element of surprise on their side. Each as yellow as a minion, a team worker. A dog pack is working together in order to…

What are we talking about when we talk about group show? Is it a work done together? Bananas are as yellow as lemons, but do they also communicate? Even if they do, it sure doesn’t look like it. And there is no way for us to know. For the most part a banana split is made by a human, not a banana. A banana split is definitely not the same thing as a lemon slice position in your tea cup, these things can not be compared. Are lemons alive? Alive because of yellowness or because of their ability to act correspondingly? A communications network and being alive – these two things are interlinked.

Things that work together qualify as living things. What about the non-living? Can non-living things work together? I don’t know. Can something work together just because it’s yellow? To be yellow—is it a reason enough to be alive? Wait. It is us who see the color yellow. A lemon will give it to you straight: it is you who sees things living. So who’s right? Work together? Stay alive?

Participating Artists: Caro Eibl, Genevieve Goffman, Guillermo Ros, Julius Pristauz, Philipp Simon, Sarah Księska, Vitaly Bezpalov, Vladimir Kolesnikov, Yein Lee

 

Natalya Serkova (b. 1988) is a philosopher and art theorist, currently based in Moscow, Russia. She has received a B.A. in Philosophy in RSUH, Moscow. Her book ‘That What Might Be Given’ («То, что может быть дано»), written in a genre of theory fiction, was published in 2017 in Russian. She is a contributor to Moscow Art Magazine, e-flux journal, RevistaArta, isthisit?, OFluxo and others.

Vitaly Bezpalov (b. 1985). Lives and works in Moscow. Artist, co-founder of Tzvetnik. Selected exhibitions include Sans (t)rêve et sans merci, Cube, 2019; Hands of Doom VI, Storage Capacite, Berlin, 2019; Tilt, In.Plano, Paris, 2018; Obvious-incredible, 427 Gallery, Riga, 2018; No Where/Now here @Jim Morrison Room/Ultrastudio, Los Angeles, 2018; Ruminations of the Midnight Stroll, Harlesden High Street, London; The Rhythm of the Night, Center RED, Moscow, 2017; Paradise on Mars, OJ, Istanbul, 2017

TZVETNIK is an independent online curatorial platform founded in 2016. TZVETNIK is aimed at documenting and archiving the international contemporary art process. It facilitates curated aggregation of the cultural output coming from various creative communities, individual artists and visual art specialists. TZVETNIK was founded and is currently run by Vitaly→Bezpalov and Natalya Serkova.

→tzvetnik.online

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Self-reflection

Posted on by Regina Regina

For Berlin Gallery Weekend EXILE is happy to contribute a new solo exhibition by Paul Sochacki entitled Self-reflection.

Dear Visitor,

self-reflection, or the contemplation of our inner state, may seem to be a preppy practice of detachment for the most average person imaginable.

Though somehow, to reach the divine level of self-reflection is difficult and unlikely in this world: A world where constructing and consolidating comfort is what interactions within society are essentially based on. Facing comfort can be an encounter of high gravity – and of great boredom.

Most humans are forced into the deepest state of self-reflection when arriving from a different world, sphere or community, finding themselves in an under-privileged position. Caught in there, they are forced to reconsider the value they embody and represent.

The exhibition combines self-made paintings and vintage posters of political and social demands. Together they turn into metaphors for the struggle of self-determination, that existential exercise that paves the consciences of our time.

Here, and at some point, this question might rise: Is there any other event beyond the exhibition that could retaliate the relation of truth and nature for us as a radical force of togetherness and singularity?

 

→Publication: Arts of the Working Class. First Issue

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May the bridges I burn light the way

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is happy to invite you to our ten-year anniversary exhibition entitled May the bridges I burn light the way.

Is a gallery anniversary dedicated to commemorate a space, a brand or artists the gallery has worked with? In the case of EXILE, founded on Oct 18, 2008 in a small courtyard in Berlin-Kreuzberg, the commemoration is to the way EXILE has been aiming to build communities. Over the last 10 years, EXILE has initiated various formats to expand and democratize access to the exhibition space. A yearly exhibition entitled Summer Camp (2009-2011) was based on an open-call for creative proposals, while Irregular Readings (2013 & 2016) focused on immaterial creative actions. Both formats have the same core principle: to initiate a collective experience, ignite dialogue and create community.

Departing from this May the bridges I burn light the way takes the definition of community into a polyphonic level. The exhibition starts as an extension of EXILE’s participation in the Manifesta 12 collateral program called 5x5x5, and runs parallel to the launch of the second issue of the street newspaper Arts the Working Class; all of them carrying the same title: May the bridges I burn light the way.

EXILE X Summer camp May the bridges I burn light the way: As a title, it implies a certain pessimism; anticipating the worst outcomes from a given situation. However, it reveals also the unfortunate desire to (always) be right. Thus the final exhibition in the gallery’s Berlin space looks at both ends of the revolutionary act: the will to conquer utopia and the urge to provoke dystopia. May the bridges I burn light the way has been conceived with the purpose to create a dialogue between social activism, art practices and Berlin’s socio-cultural reality, responding to different examples of anarchistic behaviour.

The conceptual and aesthetic choices of the artists EXILE invited to join in this exhibition are examples of subtle gestures fostering a change for the definition of the artwork as an artifact to which the world can relate itself to:  A hanging mandala by Lauryn Youden, a painting of a dystopian private garden by Louise Thomas, an old neon lamp brought to expire in the gallery by Iris Touliatou, the embodiment of an invisible community by Raffaela Naldi Rossano, or an audio conversation piece about the end of the world placed in a car outside the gallery space by Ayami Awazuhara & Christopher Burman.

The main room of the gallery, whose windows look out to Kurfürstenstrasse, presents a composition of works that may take you through the doors of perception. Artworks confront themselves; cognition, concentration, hallucination and remembrance. The artworks engage as catapults to past events, obsessive memories and to lost and found images, useful to the questions of functionality, reproductivity and appropriation of the visual. Stream of consciousness is not only something you could put in words, like James Joyce once enacted as a creative act for the very first time with Ulysses, but in scrabbles and drawings, just like Heiner Franzen. Franzen’s motif of a human/animal floats in a state of constant mutation. Flashing details from movies or Franzen’s cartoonesque figures emerge in new forms and materiality. Thus, Franzen examines the removal of boundaries of his materials by constantly updating them. Every image is the reflection of another. 

Sarah Lehnerer, whose work navigates through methodological rigor and associative openness elaborates on social and historical connections through a drone video loop, a polaroid depicting herself on her knees, and a  plaster cast for which she squeezed the material with her legs. Her texts, images and objects defy the oppositions of reality and fiction, of objectivity and subjectivity. 

Playful, defiant, cautious, Kazuko Miyamoto portraits herself in the studio of the artist she worked for, Sol Lewitt. Naked, wearing a mask, the female body performs an experimental take, choreographing humorously what could be an innocent way of turning upside down the hierarchies, not only within LeWitt’s studio between the master and the apprentice, but as a formal separation from her interests from structuralism. So to speak, the self-portrait shows a goofy yet violent situation.

But it is the bold work of Maria Thereza Alves, which encircles the exhibition’s orbit, showing a moment of staged transcendentalism with the head of a hawk held by a masculine, strong hand covered in indigo color, ready to bury the death bird, ceremonially. Her ongoing body of work entitled Urban Rituals consists of a series of photographs taken throughout the years and in various countries of dead birds that Alves has encountered in the city or in the countryside. As an urban dweller with no communal rituals that would mark the death of these beings, Alves decided to create her own possibilities of remembering and honoring them.

EXILE X Summer camp May the bridges I burn light the way is, last but not least, a cordial invitation to join us once more and for us to say thanks to the community, for the support the gallery received in the last decade. As a next step, EXILE will reopen in September in a new space in Vienna.

Artists: Ayami Awazuhara & Christopher Burman, Carsten Höller, Club Fortuna, Heiner Franzen, Iris Touliatou, Kazuko Miyamoto, Lauryn Youden, Louise Thomas, Madison Bycroft, Maria Thereza Alves, Nschotschi Haslinger, Paulina Nolte, Patrick Fabian Panetta, Raffaela Naldi Rossano, Sarah Lehnerer, Zoë Claire Miller.

Text by María Inés Plaza Lazo. May the bridges I burn light the way is curated by María Inés Plaza Lazo and Christian Siekmeier.

Slides

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is very happy to present Martin Kohout’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition entitled Slides features Kohout’s film by the same name, shown in combination with newly created works which were sourced from within the film itself:

Hey, how are you? Did you sleep ok?

A final, daily browse through excessive information: Before falling asleep, I need to let go off my phone. My device followed me into bed and I have an incessant urge to get a final hit of information that would otherwise get outdated, or even worse, lost. I find out how a new species was found underneath the melting Arctic ice, while I navigate through what my thousands of friends on Instagram have liked or posted.

Following this nightly routine, I do a final refresh of my inbox, looking for emails that clearly can’t wait until morning’s dawn. Only now, my knowledge feels temporarily satisfied. Oh, no, wait, I should use that →twilight.app that Martin recommended to me. This extra hit of information won’t hurt my sleep-cycle anyways, as the screen of my device has long turned into a muggy yellow color.

Yet again, I browse into his website, →martinkohout.com, but am greeted by a disclaimer on his homepage telling me that access is restricted during the night. I totally forgot about the real-time opening hours on his website. My lack of access turns into frustration, and frustration turns eventually into relief, as I am reminded to let go of my device. I’m able to get off the hook, plug my phone into the charger and turn to sleep, while dreams bind together with fragments of endlessly absorbed information.

CLOSED
This web is closed now.
Opening hours:
Mon-Fri 7-23
Sat-Sun 8-24

Since 2008, Kohout’s website remains inactivated during the night. A simple script regulates the access to his website, simulating a rest of eight-hours, which humans need to recover from daily exhaustion. This simple interjection between a biological necessity (sleep) and a technological command (on/off) has given an enigmatic life to his work until today.

Following previous solo exhibitions entitled →Glare Inland, Quiet Attachment (2011) and →5006 years of daylight and silent adaptation (2014), EXILE is pleased to present Kohout’s third individual appearance entitled after his recently completed short film Slides. The film is part of an ongoing research project around issues determining nocturnal labour, sleeping patterns, algorithms, daily use of technology and our sensual and mental response trying to cope with it. Under the name of a larger project called Night Shifts*, Kohout invites artists, academics, nocturnal workers and union representatives to come together, to engage and exchange their experiences and knowledge.

The show Slides is set in an archaic-looking, diy-esque courtyard movie projection setting, which seems to exist without much influence nor contact to the outside world. Once inside the gallery, one seems sheltered from the regulating dictatorship of the 24-hour-clock. The gallery has been barricaded into a rejective almost squat-like space. Additional wall-mounted metal and fabric works stand in direct dialogue with the film.

The shops around here, look at them. Nothing is what it looks like, it’s all changing. […] The owners don’t even bother updating the shop sign or decoration. They just post a message to the network and their shop window.

We see that the two main characters of Kohout’s film are never awaken at the same time. One works at night, the other one during the day. They sleep next to another, have opposing use of digital tools to adjust their surrounding color temperature to their professional work schedule. Their communication relies on apps which overlaps with bodily communication, lingering in the ambivalent nature between the new channels that enable humans to stay in touch and live together without having eye contact. The voice messages they leave at times for the other, sometimes intimate, sometimes random, are finally a wrapping whistle for contemplation.

See you soon! End of message.

 

*The Night Shifts project has been developed through collaborations with a wide range of contributors across its multiple outputs including: Bora Akıncıtürk, Phanuel Antwi, Josie Berr, Jean Bridger (and partner), Anna Coates, Defensa, Warren Digance, Jamie Gull, Ayesha Hameed, Arjun Harris, Leela Harris, Caroline Heron (AQNB Productions), Yoshitaka Hikawa, Jan Horčík, Monika Janulevičiūtė, William Kherbek, Sophie Lapalu, Barney Lewer, Dafydd Lloyd, Kareem Lotfy, Steffen Martin, Sue Merrell, Dan Meththananda, Aslı Özdemir, Jeff Perkins, Jason Pine, SERTUC (Laurie Heselden, Megan Dobney and Hugh Robertson), Ruben Sewkumar, Vasi Shaikh, Sukh Sidhu, Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford (Russell Foster with Christopher- James Harvey, Kate Porcheret and Vladyslav Vyazovskiy), Sung Tieu, Bubbly Virdee, Georgina Voss.

The artist and EXILE would like to thank Ana Alenso, Cornell Collins, Piotr Drewko, Jordan Jacobs and Jahsiya Oliver for their support on this show.

 

Further information:
→http://www.aqnb.com/2018/01/08/martin-kohout-explores-the-night-shift-labour-model-in-daylight-management-at-auto-italia-jan-13-mar-18/

→http://blokmagazine.com/looking-for-an-invisible-layers-martin-kohout-in-conversation/

Slides Trailer:
→https://vimeo.com/238542532

Martin Kohout’s film Slides is concurrently screened as part of his solo exhibition entitled Daylight Management at Autoitalia South East in London until Mar 18, 2018:
→http://autoitaliasoutheast.org/project/daylight-management/

From Apr 19-22, Martin Kohout will be presented with his film Slides as well as other works at Art Brussels in a collaborative presentation with Polansky Gallery, Prague:
→https://exilegallery.org/exhibitions/art-brussels-martin-kohout-christophe-de-rohan-chabot/

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Dead End Galaxies

Posted on by Regina Regina

For the lack of better knowledge galaxies are infinite, endless spaces, which will always offer an ever so imaginary escapist niche, somewhere. Such magical spheres where Siri or Alexa are just poetically named starlets, where a ‘Hello Alexa’ remains unanswered, where there is silence beyond entrenching reason.

The longing to escape to such a non-defined, free space is as ancient as contemporary relevant. In times of seemingly endless reason, it remains the ultimate desire, yet ultimately results in a dead end. No form of contemporary escapism can any longer provide an idealized, naïve notion of a lost paradise. Escapism is at its end as it is en vouge. Parallelism or Internalism can provide relief yet, in the very end, it is the here and now.

Anyone who has thought about parallel universes will know that it is hard to figure out which one of them is ‘real’. The denominators of what we call ‘reality’ have become blurred, a new flexibility of ‘truth’ rules even over the galaxy we currently reside in. The ‘fake-news’ of the day is poking holes in the sensitive skin of our very own filter-bubbles and within the blink of an eye your day can vault you into the ‘upside-down’.

Maybe it is time to travel. Where could we go from here?

‘Introspection’ is the new long distance journey, as we slide through the endless feed of information and images that busy algorithms have chosen for our fingers to scroll through: A gentle touch, a ‘reaction’ of sorts – like staring into the abyss of binary code.

The afterimage of a world seen from outer space, the alienation of the self and ‘the other’ in a dense habitat we share with the digital creatures of our own making. Looking at the remainders of the world we produce and consume, light years filled with the human trace of artificial goods, it is time to enter the void.

The inscription of a seminal painting by the French artist Paul Gauguin reads “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (P. Gauguin / 1897), a question still unaccounted for as of today. A promise has been made, and for the longest time it remains unfulfilled.

Dead End Galaxies is a single exhibition running parallel across two different cities connected via a time tunnel.

Opening: Sat, Mar 10
Dead End Galaxies at EXILE, Berlin
Artists: Angelika Loderer, Bitsy Knox, Christophe de Rohan Chabot, Core.Pan, Hanny Oldendorf, Nicholas Riis, Phillip Mueller, Real Madrid, and Studio Furthermore.

Opening: Sat, Mar 17
Dead End Galaxies at POLANSKY, Prague
Artists: Bitsy Knox, Christophe de Rohan Chabot, Erik Niedling, Jura Shust, Pakui Hardware, Patrick Panetta, Pauł Sochacki, Sarah Pichlkostner, and Sarah Schönfeld.

Dead End Galaxies is curated by Marlies Wirth, Curator for Digital Culture and Design at MAK Vienna, and Christian Siekmeier, EXILE.

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Grotto Capitale

Posted on by Regina Regina

But still, built into me was this button – when pressed, the button would save me. I don’t know if I was in charge of this button, or if someone somewhere praying for me was in charge of it. I would abandon myself, like when I took the super pill. I would return though, I would recover. Others stayed out there, in a lovely but remote place. (Grace Jones)

Grotto Capitale: Beatrice Balcou, Kathe Burkhart, Zuzanna Czebatul, Nschotschi Haslinger, Nona Inescu, Anna Jandt, Hanne Lippard, Katharina Marzewski, Kazuko Miyamoto, Chiara No, Nathalie Du Pasquier, and Pauł Sochacki

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Standard Candles

Posted on by Regina Regina

Gwenn Thomas’ exhibition entitled Standard Candles, oscillates between two bodies of work – Moments of Place and Standard Candles – visually related, yet manifested in different emotional tones.

Moments of Place is a series of laminated photographs, presenting the same window from various angles and at different times of day: morning, late afternoon, and dusk. Irregular trapezoidal framings evoke changes in perspective, while color and tone express variations in daylight and weather. Each work insists on the moment of its inception, as if extracted from another place and time.

These asymmetrical photographic objects allude to actual windows in their construction, recalling Marcel Duchamp’s window of 1920. Thomas reveals complex spatial relationships, within and outside of the two-dimensional plane, accounting for each available axis of space.

Standard Candles exists in a similar conceptual space, creating the illusion of infinite depth beyond its windows. The largest piece in the gallery operates much like a standard candle in astronomy, its placement determining the constellation of all the other works. The known luminosity of its color measures the tone for each subsequent piece. These other hues radiate softly from their interior spaces, projected as light through glass.

The smallest works in the exhibition become recalls/signals of memory as the viewer moves through the space. Considering the philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s concept of lived space, the works contemplate a mode of inquiry into our environments, their spatial dimensions and emotional character. These qualities are absorbed by the individual, making each an extension of the space they occupy. Environment mediates the works from Moments of Place in a similar manner, coloring the act of perception. They create this environment, and their viewers project it back onto them.

 

Gwenn Thomas has previously shown at the gallery in selected group exhibitions as well as in two two-person exhibitions: in 2013, as part of a dialogue exhibition entitled →Gwenn Thomas <> Hanne Lippard, and, in 2009, together with Birgit Hein, as part of the exhibition →Jack Smith: Cologne, 1974.

→Mousse Magazine review by Ginevra Bria
→Artforum Critics’ pick by Mitch Speed

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LISTE, Basel

Posted on by Regina Regina

The room installation The eye-balled Walls by artist collective FORT shows a room in which a game of statics is being represented by its takers. There is hardly any actual motion left inside. The only exception is a pair of shoes behind a curtain, resembling a classic symbol of a controlling (or intimidated) force in the hiding. Someone is standing in the shoes, moving them slightly from time to time and watching the visitors through a tiny hole in the curtain.

Five billiard cues were sharpened up to the form of a speer, revealing a slightly violent outlook on their function. The title “Suitors” bears a double meaning, as the word can take the appearance of an admirer or (in law terms) an accuser. Two meanings are also present in the title of the painted curtain with the shoes. The word “Velvet” obviously refers to the fabric but is also used as a word for a huge, unexpected win in a game – a giant gain.

In the center of the room stands a vitrine which covers the starting situation of a billiard-like game. There’s a triangle of hand polished black coal eggs and a golden fabergé-esque base holding a hard-boiled and peeled chicken egg that resembles the cue ball.

 

The concept reads the following:

As defined in the concept and title of “Threeway Pass (Draw Ball / Dead Ball / Follow Shot )”, there are three moves of handling the egg after the piece has been installed:

1. The “Draw Ball” which is to exchange the egg for a new one as soon as it shows the first signs of decay (at least every three days).
2. The “Dead Ball” which is to have the egg frieze-dried and sealed with varnish, so that it remains in fresh appearance. (This will of course add an unnatural gloss to it’s surface.)
3. The “Follow Shot” which is to let the egg decompose and disappear in an amount of years.

It is conceptually fixed that only the owner of the Eye Balled Walls may play the final passes of the game. He’s permitted to show the work in all three constellations.

In the left corner of the room two shoeshine have been mounted onto the wall in a wrong position, making it impossible to clean the soles of the shoes other than destroying the leather on top.

LISTE, Basel

Posted on by Regina Regina

For LISTE 17, EXILE is pleased to present a new body of paintings by New York based artist TM Davy entitled Strange Fire. His first European art fair solo presentation follows his recent solo exhibition at the gallery entitled Epithalamium.

The scenes within each of the painting of Strange Fire are lit only from within by a weak and fragile ambient candle light creating a stark contrast between the brightness of the exhibition space and the fragility of the light within:

„All the paintings (for Liste 17) will work with the tension of self contained light… Whether that comes from a candle or a pipe being lit, or candlesticks being blown out… Direct gazes… The strange space between the painting holding that idea/feeling of ‘forever’, and the sense that the entire room could be blown out by the weakest breeze. To me, there is a sort of restrained visual ‘anarchy’ in this.“ (TM Davy per email dialogue, Dec 6, 2011)

Selected Press

→Baseler Zeitung June 12, 2012 (PDF, 180 kb)

→Monopol June 15, 2012 (PDF, 120 kb)

→Tagesspiegel June 16, 2012 (PDF, 70 kb)

Neutral

Posted on by Regina Regina

Robin Mackay: Figuring ‘Space’

I’m betting you can’t remember a time before ‘space’, although it’s a fairly recent abstraction—not space as transcendental form of experience, but the space that is the condition for the intertwined operations of the architecture–retail–real-estate–contemporary art complex. The light and airy expanse of daytime TV property porn, with its clean architectural lines—as homes become ‘property’, rooms become ‘spaces’, open receptacles for self-realization—and the layout grid for retail outlets and corporate campuses, it is also that tranquil three-dimensional support for arty action in all its hysterically multifarious forms—project space, research space, gallery space, club space as armature for indeterminate creative potencies.

A metaphysical ersatz whose costly, energy-intensive processing and refinement feeds the supply chain of the creative self, ‘space’ is the indifferent corridor through which whitewashed scenes of violence communicate; it both satisfies a demand for the realisation of subjective freedom and incites that same demand. For it is also disseminated as image, a dream-image saturated with the hi-res allure of self-creation, the promise of fusing one’s gestures with the space that enfolds them, in a serene streamlined integration.

This dream is the only place the cybernetic nomad really feels at home. All the better if there is grit in the workings, the off-white residue of another violence clinging to the walls. Energising spatters of local colour activate its latent tracts: There is nothing that Berlin really stands for, except being cheap and cool, and drunk and druggie…it’s the potential to shape something, says a tech pioneer of his proposed ‘startup campus’ in the city. Despite its ex nihilo veneer, ‘space’ is always overtly parasitical upon prior conditions. (Unless maybe it was this monster of blank inscription that created the prior conditions, in order to ensure its emergence….)

NEUTRAL’s museum of contemporary spatiology involutes the artisanal violence that constructs ‘space’, tapping Berlin’s clotted semio-sump to distil and precipitate poor-but-sexy into a few sparse crystals of depleted cultural energy that operate as basic orientation points: ribbons of scat and squalor applied directly from the semiotic palette onto the white-overpainted surfaces of a dilapidated urban infrastructure whose use-value flaked away to reveal a blank canvas onto which were daubed non-scenes that became scenes that became photopathological simulacra laminated onto their own re-re-re-representation.

These rooms are endgames where the imposition of containment, the pure hard fact of being in a room, condenses a generalized claustrophobia: that of free space and absolute fluidity become a fatiguing institution of subjectivation, a festive confinement for a New Hanse: that hard-living superfood-guzzling grindr-swiping concept-hungry pitch-shifting multi-desking gentry for whom every glancing encounter is a creative opportunity; the last human generation to be able to derive some privileged enjoyment from its assimilation into a hysterical machinism. You know the score. You probably are the score.

Remember how, along with the forlorn call for an authentic return to place as a counter to the deracination of international styles and the serial homogenization of franchised units, the contemporary laundering of space also provoked a turn to the specificity of site? Under interrogation, works were forced to renounce their autonomy, to recuse anonymous space, and to swallow the circulatory systems that produced them, so as to glue them to where they were, as if this adhesion would enable a critical separation. But now the site is mobile: it’s you who are glued to it, carrying it on your back like a snail’s airbnb, stowing it as hand luggage on Easyjet, necking it as you wait in line at the club, putting it aside for later in the nth browser tab…. The site has exploded, the blank mask of space has peeled off to reveal the machinic death’s head beneath: an ever-present gigantic bit-switching global exchange; the walls have become self-conscious, or at least possessed of some cryptic cybernetic intent; everything’s as superfluid as a T1000; there’s no separation, no room.

You try to hold on to some vestige, to keep the lines clean; you alternate between reckless affirmation and the guilty pleasures of cosy self-security. Create, possess, reflect, enjoy. But do you really have anything to add? The open space you tried to make for yourself is closing in. At this point, isn’t n+1 just n again? In which case, maybe the best response is—can’t be arsed.

Steven Warwick: NEUTRAL
Exhibition Opening: Saturday, Jan 30, 7 – 9pm
Exhibition Duration: Jan 30 – Mar 5, 2016

Click to read review by Alison Hugill for AQNB (external link)

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Jugendzimmer

Posted on by Regina Regina

The first time I visited Sharif’s studio I couldn’t see any works of art. Suddenly, they began to appear everywhere. He pointed towards the blinds that filtered natural light, they were full of drawings and marks. The cloth draped over the studio couch turned out to be a painted textile with the motif of a tiger. The couch on which it lay was, in reality, a hand-made object made from reclaimed wood. The carpet on the ground was a collaboration with his son of painted purple flowers populating a floor-bound garden. Here is an artist who lives with material as vital energy. The work of Abdul Sharif Oluwafemi Baruwa is more than separate pieces of art coming together in a gallery – his work is a material philosophy.

It follows a non-linear archive of thoughts, influences, and aspirations. The re-usability of matter as personal archive is something characteristic of his work. An image of his teenage bedroom references back to the youthful source of his ideas. It signals a moment in life of growth, fragility, and uncertainty. Our teenage years define who we are through the development of more complex identities that we develop rather than inherit. In the photograph of his bedroom, painting materials litter the floor next to basketball paraphernalia, revealing his top two career aspirations. 

Sharif notices traces of orientalism and othering all around Vienna. The Zebra logo on his tubs of wall paint – the Julius Meinl logo shows a young Ottoman in a red fez. It is the everydayness of these materials. 

In 2003, Sharif attended the Venice Biennale and began painting public benches across the city. It was an action done as a painter, but also as a performance in which action and material inherently play on silent postcolonial discussions. There, he met with the artist Július Koller – someone who had already been influential to his work and now became even more so. The relationship developed by Koller between individuals and society performed through various rules and operations as well as the attitude of positive change and anti-hierarchical structures follows through in Sharif’s work when he looks for slippages in the designed city.

The basketball somehow made its way back into Sharif’s artistic practice. Curator Jeanette Pacher invited him to contribute a birdhouse for Claudia Märzendorfer’s project For the Birds, an outdoor sculpture project for the garden of a psychiatric hospital. he ended up using a deflated basketball as the starting point for the new commissioned work.

“Pee Flowers” or the natural trickles of urination that follow gravity across the floor to wherever it leads the yellow liquid. Like a shadow. These unintended patterns adorn Vienna and leave a bodily trace and an unlikely social interaction. This focus on materiality as mark, and on viewing the unviewable is characteristic in the artist’s practice. 

Accessible materials like toilet paper, cardboard, and beetroot juice are also ingredients in his papier-mâché forms stuck onto chicken wire. These poor materials coat the city and exist in our homes as well as the bloodstream of the city’s living organs. In Sharif‘s scenography we are given a transparent glimpse into an animated world of personal imagination.

Àngels Miralda

 

Abdul Sharif Oluwafemi Baruwa, born 1975 in London, lives and works in Vienna. Recent exhibitions include Land, property and commons, curated by Hedwig Saxenhuber at outdoor spaces across Semmering, Austria in 2021 as well as the Artist in residence at Fogo Island Arts in 2019. Baruwa’s most recent solo exhibition in Vienna was held at →Neuer Wiener Kunstverein in 2021. The artist is currently also on view as part of the exhibition →Hier und Jetzt.

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Epistemic Heartbreak

Posted on by Regina Regina

A picnic blanket on canvas, a casual group with cake (or cheese?) sitting around it, a bottle, a few glasses of wine: Here they are, mouse, caterpillar, colorful bird. Dolphin, snowman, octopus (with half-bald head). A dog, saying something, namely: “we are human”. And then: “no nationality”. Smoking Kills (2015) is the name of this painting by Paul Sochacki. It is part of an exhibition that is titled Epistemic Heartbreak, which somehow seems to make sense: It’s crawling with breaks. Animals that claim to be humans and therefore resist the nation state; drinkers that smoke and somehow argue that smoking kills; humor and cuteness, thwarted by the cynicism that comes with this chiseled, calculated way of breaking. But just at the first glance; at second glance: complex and paradoxical, up to the point where you suspect that it might not be thought out all the way. The breaking of comprehension and the breaking of the heart. I would be lying if I said that I knew what this is all about.

This feeling carries on as I look at the other paintings in this exhibition. A few other examples, first and foremost the series Le Monde est un portrait (2015). It serves as a structure for the exhibition (like a planetary system): moon faces with eyes and mouths wide open (except according to the title they are world faces and according to Paul they are actually sun faces). Inside of these faces there is a white something – Cumshotplanetportraits. Or the mouse disco in Untitled (2015): a big, holey cheese with a vicious-looking bouncer in front of it, and some tarted-up night crawler mice standing in line; the problem here is not the combination of cuteness with topics of power and exclusion within the pictorial language. The problem is that the analogy itself is (intentionally?) flat. A mouse trap for people? No idea. And then there is the big stomach, laid on so thickly that the paint crackles. Inside there is a delicate fountain – the title: Being hungry is a human right (2015); again, it’s at skewed and folded on many levels – inside-outside, hunger-thirst, human right-basic instinct – and brushes past the politically correct, leaving a slightly uncomfortable feeling. One step back: Who says that the mice want to go into the cheese for dancing rather than eating, because maybe they are very hungry?

In short: There is more than just one crack running through these images. They gape open – between not-verifiable claims and the expectations that they raise; between humor and tragedy; between embracing the world and separation; between complexity and simplicity. The world’s heart is breaking in the image. And puts it back together as a holey cheese. If only the stomach could quench its thirst with its own water fountain! But it cannot. Only on the canvas.

Text by Dominikus Müller.
Translation to English by Nina Franz.

View PDF of Exhibition Opening Lecture (Dec 5, 2015)

Click here to view the artist publication Epistemic Heartbreak

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Białowieża: Ebay Meditation Room

Posted on by Regina Regina

Białowieża, is one of the last and largest remaining parts of primeval forest in Europe, and historically a place of many violent occupational histories, the most recent being the German occupation during WWII. At a size of 141,885 ha it extends across the border between Poland and Belarus, and today, it is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site. A primeval forest, such as Białowieża, is a forest that has attained great age without significant disturbance by humankind and thereby exhibits unique ecological characteristics. One of the most noticeable characteristics of a primeval forest is the amount of dead and decaying wood, which undisturbed provides, in the case of Białowieża, a habitat for approximately 50% of the estimated 12,000 species found in the forest.

Primeval forests have the potential to be extremely lucrative for many industries, especially the logging industry. The deforestation of these forests has been a point of contention between the logging industry, national politics and environmentalists. In 2016, Poland’s State Forestry Board approved a three-fold increase in logging, argued as an unavoidable preventive measure against an invasive infestation by the European spruce bark beetle, a controversial measure that has been contested by many environmentalist. The trees which are labeled as infested are cut, processed, and sold locally as firewood or as flooring.

The exhibition, entitled Białowieża, by Kinga Kiełczyńska, pays homage to this threatened primeval forest. The installation further utilizes the wood as a metaphor for recent right-wing movements in Polish and global politics. Set in relationship to her own body, the floor is meant to connect private and personal body politics and their attempted erosion in a regressive political climate; a tree’s purpose is to live, die, decay, and finally create new growth. This progression is set in context to micropolitical freedom of choice and expression.

The gallery’s front room is entitled, Ebay Meditation Room. Wearing clinical polypropylene shoe covers, Kiełczyńska invites the viewer to enter the room and walk upon a cut-down, imported, primeval tree from Białowieża, which now functions as temporary flooring for the gallery space. A detailed plan of the floor is placed on the wall. Each element within the space is the consequence of the previous one; a tree is cut down, processed, made into floorboards, shipped from Białowieża and installed in the gallery space. Post show, the wood will be sold once again, through Ebay; the Ebay advert appears within the space opposite a mediation pillow. The pillow hosts a speaker playing a meditation on connectivity and decay. A sample color taken from the wooden floor is extended onto the wall behind the pillow. Atop of the painted wall hangs a line of masking tape that was used to mark the border of the wood-color against the gallery’s white wall.

These deceivingly minimal gestures of Kiełczyńska’s, Ebay Meditation Room, point to a dramatic cause-and-effect beginning with a mundane, but consequentially profound, act of cutting down a tree. Such conflicting use of resources ignites a potentially tragic, irreversible chain-reaction in which each individual body, as instigator, is confronted with its own downfall. Kiełczyńska’s, Ebay Meditation Room, becomes a mediative space for many relevant social, political, as well as ecological problems.

The single wall-sized charcoal drawing in the opposite gallery space depicts a net of inter-connected lines and of looping motives that appear in form of overlapping human figures. For the artist, this drawing is the result of an extensive meditative process based on personal feelings and memories of being present in the forest of Białowieża.

The borders between each single element vanishes. Nothing can be perceived as an isolated event, the cyclical motions of growth and decay provokes a strong sensation of connectivity and complicity. The border between each element’s identity vanishes and can no longer be perceived as an isolated event.

→Białowieża: Place of Power / Miejsce Mocy. Chapter 2/3

→Białowieża Chapter 3

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Richard Jaray

Posted on by Regina Regina

Following many months of renovation closure and various lockdowns we are happy to invite you to the reopening of our physical space with a presentation of the estate of Richard Jaray (1902-1942) conceived by Tess Jaray, artist and niece of Richard Jaray, Sebastian Hackenschmidt, curator for furniture and wood work, Museum of Applied Art, Vienna, and Christian Siekmeier, founder of EXILE.

The presentation will give insight into the work and life of the architect Richard Jaray and was originally scheduled to be held parallel to Tess Jaray’s first institutional solo exhibition in Vienna at Secession which closed on April 18, 2021 entitled Return to Vienna. Born into the Jaray family furniture business in Vienna in 1902, Richard himself became a furniture designer and architect but was unable to escape Austria in time. He was deported in 1941 to Łódź and murdered during the Shoah.

The remaining estate, limited to 70 drawings, few photographs and documents, was given to Tess Jaray by her parents. The majority of the drawings appear to be from a portfolio produced in the mid 1930s and taken to the UK by his younger brother Francis, who escaped, with his wife Pauli and eight months old daughter Tess, in 1938. Deliberately called a presentation and not an exhibition, we hope to stimulate dialogue and encourage academic research into these works as well as their historical context.

A collaborative effort of many, we are very happy to have achieved placement of the estate in the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna. The museum collection also holds a complete room furnishing by Richard’s grandfather Sigmund Jaray from the late 1890s making the museum the most suitable place in preparation for future research.

Within the context of Tess Jaray’s exhibition entitled Return to Vienna, EXILE is honored to present these works and return another member of the Jaray family to their city of birth.

→Tess Jaray: Uncle Richard

→Sebastian Hackenschmidt: Richard Jaray and his furniture designs

→David Misteli: Richard Jaray. Artforum Critics’ Pick, May 2021

→ Secession: Tess Jaray: Return to Vienna

→Museum of Applied Arts: Furniture Collection

 

Following the presentation, we are honored that the estate of Richard Jaray, consisting of 76 drawings and documents has entered to collection of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. For further information please contact Sebastian Hackenschmidt. All drawings and documents are also now available online. We hope this will encourage further search into Richard Jaray. Access via below link.

→graphikportal.org

I’ll See You When I See You

Posted on by Regina Regina

In lieu of an exhibition text, the mating call of the last male Kaua’i ‘ō’ō, recorded in 1987 for Cornell Lab of Ornithology played at random within the exhibition. To listen to his sound while browsing through the exhibition images click →here.

The Kaua’i ‘ō’ō or ‘ō’ō’ā’ā (Moho braccatus) was a member of the extinct genus of the ‘ō’ōs (Moho) within the extinct family Mohoidae from the islands of Hawai’i. The last male Kaua’i ‘ō’ō was recorded singing a mating call to his female life-partner presumed to have died in a previous Hurricane. The last of his species, he died in 1987. Subsequently, the species was declared extinct.

 

Exhibition text published on the final days of the exhibition:

Final Call –  Kerstin von Gabain’s first solo exhibition at EXILE is about to come to a close. Without the opportunity to experience the exhibition spatially we will rely on memory and story-telling. This text aims to put the exhibition, which deliberately offered neither text nor explanation during the run of the exhibition, into perspective, as not to allow for the experience to full fade. 

I’ll see you when I see you, the poignant title of the exhibition is a quote by professional tennis player Naomi Osaka, taken from the press conference following her enforced withdrawal at this year’s French Open tournament. Citing mental health issues, Osaka withdrew not from the sport, but from the press communication that comes as part of the obligations of her chosen profession. In the context of the exhibition, von Gabain pays homage to Osaka speaking out about mental health issues and extends Osaka’s quote to general questions of professional expectancy. 

By comparing art to professional sports, von Gabain hints at the expectancy of the artist to show her work to a visiting public which in response forms opinions that are supposed to ignite constructive discourse. Though this cyclical process all too often defines rank and status over contend. The differences between professional sport and art become marginal and few options remain except  to perform the in professional mantra to advance, to dance you jester, for the never-ending desires of a voyeuristic entertainment industry or to be sashayed away. 

On the outside of the gallery the artist replaced the gallery’s corporate identity display signage with a tumblr image of a sickle on a pretty in pink background. Dragged, dropped and rendered from it’s 35 KB ephemerality to a larger than life 500 GB file, the sickle itself, undefined if harvesting or killing tool, evokes neither harm nor help but describes a mood on which to enter the exhibition. Someone is watching and judging you, always. 

Inside, at first glance, a safe haven: white walls, clean looks, few repetitive works: predominantly birdhouses: first birdhouse, then another, yet another, a stump in-between. Covered in reflective mirror, in pink glitter or matte black, the birdhouses’ shape and scale are identical and so are their titles: Shelter for beasts. A birdhouse surely is a shelter by one species given to another. Yet does one species consider sheltering what is described as a beast? Do beasts deserve shelter? Who defines who and what is a beast? Isn’t the definition of beast left in the eye of the beholder?

The bird’s landing strip to its shelter, a rounded stick just below the round entrance to each birdhouse, holds in some instances a long rubbery band. Formally almost mundane and more likely industrial, these soft, anti-form, yet precious and incredibly tactile objects hold a somewhat mysterious relationship to the respective shelter. Undefined, if not on a merely formal level, are these (the remains of) the beast reduced to a piece of soft, non-spinal silicone barely held up by the safety and solid geometric construction of the birdhouse alone? Are they the pun in the joke that truly isn’t funny anymore? 

At random intervals, a bird song appears. In lieu of an exhibition text, the bird’s captivating call is the exhibition’s metaphor if not explanation. The bird singing is a Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, recorded in 1983 by Cornell University. The bird’s  song and story is as beautiful as it is heart-breaking. The recording is of the last know Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, he is the inevitable last of his species and kind, he sings for his already deceased partner, his dramatic call predicts extinction. A disturbing aria about loss and violence. 

Left exposed to all elements, two works in the first of the two upstairs spaces, decry forms of violence. An aluminum cast of the artist’s collarbone lays on the floor opposite a miniature of a first world war plank bed. Appearing fragile and unfinished, the miniature thrones on a pedestal elevated above the armor placed on the floor. A real-life cast of the artist’s collarbone and the miniatured war utensil. War but no peace? Shelter but broken?

The exhibition’s final act is another, though floor-based, sheltered beasts. A cute hedgehog of a birdhouse or an aggressive medieval fortress impossible to conquer despite for its tiny entrance. Another rubbery band, reduced to miniature, lays aimlessly, yet casually in front of its shelter. 

The exhibition ends as it began. Questions of scale, of shelter, of armor, of loss and relation, of dark phantasy and light glitter. Shelters for beasts. The lonely bird found none. I’ll see you when I see you. 

Further information 

→Wikipedia: Kaua’i_’ō’ō

→John Green: Anthropocene reviewed. Sept 2019

→Songbird: a virtual moment of extinction in Hawaii

→Cornell Lab of Ornithology

→Kaua’i ‘ō’ō birdsong

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Untilted

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is happy to return to ≈5 with the exhibition Untilted featuring recent paintings by London-based artist Tess Jaray (born 1937) together with new ceramics by Berlin-based artist Nschotschi Haslinger (born 1982).

The vitrines of ≈5, situated in Cologne’s Ebertpatz subway station, are defined by their post-war, brutalist architecture. Found within an underground concrete maze of walkways, piazzas and shop windows, the vitrines are fully immersed within the symmetric logic of such rational architecture of the time. The psychedelic hue of the surrounding red tiles evokes an almost aggressive or at least unnerving response. When walking by the vitrines, they recall a filmic take in two shots or, when viewed together from a distance, a kind of dialogue amongst them.

Contrasting the brute architectural rationality, the presentation’s title might be a typing mistakes. If not an error, the first analogy that might spring to one’s mind could be the eponymous 2005 album by the electronic music band Autrechre. Yet what is the difference between untitled and untilted? This dichotomy has most poignantly been explored in the visionary work Untitled (Perfect lovers), 1991 by Félix González-Torres. Two equal clocks are aligned, yet one quickly learns about their incontrollable individuality, their emotional differences, irregularities or imperfection. Any initially perceived synchronized duality will fade with the ticking clocks inevitably ending out of synch. Yet, as perfect lovers, they are defined by their individual identities and not their structural systemic perfection. The untitled perfect symmetric surface falls behind to reveal a complex and humane, an untilted, reading.

The two artists chosen in dialogue to one another work in very diverse practices. At first sight, their link might appear even vague resulting in an unclear, raw or even missing connection. Another programming error? It is not, as both artists address emotional qualities and longings in their works quite similar to the mentioned work by González-Torres. Might Untilted be an (un)intentional homage?

One work per artist per vitrine leaves the featured works isolated and exposed to each other as well as to the passing viewer. Beginning with the diptych by Tess Jaray, that is forcefully split across the two vitrine spaces, each painting consists of an essentially monochrome circular plane that is superimposed by a perfect thin line measuring from the outer edge to each painting’s circular center. Each line is painted in the color of its diptych other. With the lines set in horizontal position and facing one another, the work appears as a strict geometric exercise, yet it mutates through perceptions of color to ask about the interconnectedness between the two parts. One cannot exist without the other, an emotional interdependency expressed through rigid symmetric shapes of circle and line. If indeed an homage, Jaray’s work could refer to a pair of one-handed clocks that tick in mirrored synchronicity but aim to blend into relational belonging through the missing part of each other’s color plane.

A recent ceramic by Nschotschi Haslinger rests at the bottom of each vitrine. Relaxing on comfortable pillows, these beings continue her exploration into magical, dream-like spheres expressing diverse feelings manifested as physical identities evolved to some stage between gruesome monster, psychedelic tripping and post-human life form. Their relationship to one another, in explicit difference to Jaray’s work, remains unclear. The first being, Schwarzes Bunny (2022) alludes to filmic visions of teenage nightmares and somehow reminds of Donny Darko (2001). The ugly bunny, uncomfortably exposing its genital area, asks for attention, care or even love. Fear, isolation, loneliness and loss are integral parts of human existence. The other being though, entitled Vibrationen V (2022), does not appear in need of much attention but seems to have evolved. It confidentially acknowledges its own negative emotional darkness expressed through external feather-like and exposed organs while appearing as a confident, amorphous, poly-amorous, post-gendered identity. Without a need of a smooth surface Vibrationen V has morphed into a self-certain, self-sufficient self.

Jaray’s and Haslinger’s works are left to communicate in their isolated display cases to the passer-by through their self-reflexive, crisscrossing emotional interferences. The paintings by Jaray as much as the ceramics by Haslinger don’t guide us into linear belief, instead they point to fragility, emotionality and dependency as a basic human need and positive instinct. It is each viewer’s choice to sense relations between the works as much as – through the glass – to themselves. 

 

→≈5

→Tess Jaray artist link

→Nschotschi Haslinger artist link

→Gwenn Thomas: Jack Smith in Cologne, 1974 & 2018 at ≈5

 

Selected works, 1965-1970

Posted on by Regina Regina

We are pleased to present a first introductory solo exhibition of German artist Sine Hansen (1942 – 2009), focusing on painting and works on paper from 1965-1970.

In a second part to this introduction, held at this year’s Art Cologne, Nov 17-21, early works by Hansen will be set in dialogue with contemporary works by Kerstin von Gabain.

→Sine Hansen artist link

→The Estate of Sine Hansen

→Art Cologne

→Kerstin von Gabain artist link

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Fittings

Posted on by Regina Regina

The exhibition Fittings combines the works of the Dutch artists Kinke Kooi, born 1961, and Hendrickje Schimmel, born 1990, who operates under the synonyme Tenant of Culture. Fittings is part of an ongoing series of exhibitions combining artists of different generations and backgrounds.

Kinke Kooi abstracts internal, organ-like physicalities into elaborate dream-like, pastel-colored drawings. Fleshy organs together with pearls, plants, fruits and cotton buds are contrasted with sharp knives, rulers and square shapes. The inherent symbolism can be interpreted through gender definition as entangled in an organic, fleshy web of almost paradisian but subversive non-binary utopia. The works reference historical anatomic drawing as well as religious iconography but result in an intestinal physiological and psychological landscape of an organ‘s inner bowel movement. Kinke Kooi‘s work abstracts and subverts the internalised sphere of body and gender identity. Her work exposes a magic, yet vulnerable inside based equally on symbiosis and conflict.

Tenant of Culture applies millennial post-gender trajectories based on community and inclusion into three-dimensional hybrid artefacts. The artist upcycles used materials, mainly old clothing, into new sculptural works that disrupt the definition of garment as well as of sculpture. The works become hybrids, that function in the ephemeral in-between of fashionable fluctuation and sculptural monumentality. Her practice is further expanded through community workshops encouraging participants to re/upcycle rather than to simply consume clothing. Tenant of Culture creates new shields, partially protecting partially disguising the internal identity of the inside.

Fittings is in many ways a very special exhibition. While Kinke Kooi‘s work exposes and reveals the insides, Tenant of Culture creates a protective outside to an undefined inside. Fleshy vulnerability and post-fashionista sculpturality result in an undefinable hybridian de-gendered dissection of inside anatomies and outside shields. On top of the artistic dialogue the two artists are related to another on a family level as mother and daughter. Therefore it is not an exclusive curatorial vision that circumscribes the exhibition as more their personal dynamic and engagement with one another on a family as well as professional level.

With this being the first collaborative project by the artists, both will create individual pieces that communicate with one another. While each artist is able to select works by the other, there will be new productions that are specifically made for the exhibition and set a new intimate dialogue between their artistic and personal relationships.

→ Fittings. Text by Kinke Kooi & Tenant of Culture  (PDF, 25 KB)

→ Jesus is a pearl and a pearl is a bastard. Text by Jackie Grassmann (PDF, 28 KB)

The exhibition is kindly supported by →Mondriaan Funds

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Aleppo

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present a solo exhibition by London-based artist Tess Jaray entitled Aleppo. Jaray, born 1937 in Vienna, has investigated architectural structures and ornamental patterns in her work since the 1950s. A building’s particular structural rhythm, for example the patterned tiling of the roof of the Stephansdom in Vienna, remains a core inspiration and driving force for the artist’s visual translation into painterly abstraction. Yet Jaray’s perception of architecture frees its specific forms from their contextual site and elevates them towards a universal moment of aggregation and transcendence.

In the late 1990s Jaray was able to visit the city of Aleppo in Syria. Here, Jaray was fascinated by the particular contrast created between alternating light- and dark-colored stones that constitute the arches over the entrances to ancient local mosques. Though only in 2016, did Jaray revisit this specific pattern and turned it into the source and inspiration for a new body of work. Entitled Aleppo, Jaray created a series of wall-based works, each consisting of various flat wooden panels painted in muted, often pastel, monochrome hues. At irregular intervals, these precise laser-cut panels, have a zig-zag shaped vertical edge, formally reminiscent of the arches Jaray saw during her visit to the mosques of Aleppo.

With Aleppo Jaray pays homage not only to the specific Islamic Architecture experienced in Aleppo but urges the viewer to become aware of our own fragility, temporality and internal disjuncture. Between 2012 and 2016, the ancient Islamic Architecture of Aleppo was perceived as inappropriate religious content. Within the minutest historical second, an estimate of 33.500 buildings and historical monuments were destroyed through the hands of the IS regime. Aleppo, its architectural heritage and people were brutally shelled in front of a paralyzed world audience watching.

An initial response to the reductive quality of Jaray’s Aleppo series might be based on its pleasing formal composition. All works are of the same height, different alone in color rhythm, amount and combination of panels. However, within its reductive formal language, the works of Aleppo assume a radical shift. Each panel’s shape, when set in relation to one another, holds a vital tension capable of connecting and constituting different, often opposing gestures. There appears a particular tension, a kind of constant disconnection between presence and absence, between being and non-being. Considering the panels subtle three-dimensional volume, the attention is furthermore drawn away from the panels’ painterly surface to the spaces in-between them.

The Aleppo works can in fact be defined by these voids. Like canyons cutting deeply into a landscape, these voids speak of time, of absence, of memory and of loss. They allow for these works to be vast, to extend infinitely as they silently absorb the spectator in an impalpable atmosphere. At times, when in irregular compositional intervals two such zig-zag shaped panels meet, their collective gap forms not only a dividing canyon but creates a specific shape itself. This new shape not only resembles the architectural pattern seen by the artist in Aleppo but can also be seen as a reference to the Endless Column by Brancusi (1938) created as a memorial to fallen soldiers in Târgu Jiu, Romania.

These trapezoidal void shapes within the Aleppo series, also reminiscent of a human spine, presents a moment of infinite silence and of monumental stillness to the dramatic effects of destruction and forceful loss. There seems no possibility of reconciliation between each of the works separated parts with these seemingly simple formal ruptures generating numerous visual as much as emotional responses due to their core root in emptiness and vacuity as continuous efforts of memory recall.

Similar to Maya Linn’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. (1982), Jaray’s Aleppo series constitutes an immaterial memorial to all of humanity’s violent losses and despairs. Yet through the subtlety of the surface and formal composition the Aleppo works reflect back in hopeful motifs, personal response and collective experiences. Colors as non-verbal language thus can reach and penetrate the unconscious. Historical and individual memory for long being repressed can be experienced through this intensity and purity of trans-temporal shapes and volumes.

Born 1937 in Vienna, Tess Jaray moved to the UK in 1938. In 1954 Jaray moved to London where she continues to live and work. The artist studied at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (1954-57) and later at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (1957-60). Her works are included in numerous private and public collections, amongst others the Tate, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Sainsbury Center, Norwich, the Museum of Modern Art, Szépmüvészeti, Budapest, and the Museum of Modern Art, mumok, Vienna.

Text by Dalia Maini and Christian Siekmeier.

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Meteorites & Constructions II

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Nathalie Du Pasquier entitled Meteorites & Constructions II. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery following The Big Game in 2015, which presented an overview of her works on paper.

The exhibition combines extracts from two different bodies of work distinct in their relationship to gravity. Though the genesis of these paintings is identical; each comes to life via what the artist describes as her alphabet of forms and shapes. These usually wooden blocks, shapes, and cut-offs are stored in the studio and become assembled by the artist as if the beginning for the most traditional of still lifes. In the course of the artist’s painting process, this source sculptural assemblage, while physically remaining unchanged in front of the artist’s eye, is modified in the painting until satisfactory to the artist.

Du Pasquier begins her works by utilizing one of the most traditional genres of painting, but is increasingly liberating herself, as if booting an internal 3d rendering device. From source assemblage to final painting, the resulting works contain multiple layers, classically defined as underpaintings, though maybe better understood as 3d formal re-renderings or spatial warps.

While beginning their existence as sculptures, these paintings are each a chapter’s ending, with the assembled sculptural forms dismantled and returned to the artist’s alphabet once completion is reached. When looking in detail at a painting, some of these layers can become visible as the artist applies different levels of blending and at times, opacity. The resulting paintings share a common heritage but become autonomous individual formations of their common source. Once a painting is finished and its source assemblage is dismantled, the process starts again, hence allowing comparative viewing and re-discovery of particular forms in multiple paintings. Each painting is part of the same formal cosmos, with a ongoing recycling procedure at its core.

 

The exhibition is accompanied by a signed artist publication entitled Constructions available in a limited edition of 50 copies.

Meteorites & Constructions II parallels the artist’s concurrent survey exhibition Big objects not always silent at Kunsthalle Vienna (until Nov 13) and the specifically produced room installation White model for a big still life premiering at Frieze London (Oct 6-9). Select publications and works on paper by the artist will be available at the New York Art Book Fair at PS1 (Sept 16-18).

 

Click here to view the artist publication Constructions

Click here to view Big objects not always silent at Kunsthalle Vienna

Click here to view The Big Game at EXILE

Click here to view White model for a big still life at Frieze London

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Aktionen an Arbeiten von Verena Pfisterer

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present rarely-seen Super8 films by Verena Pfisterer (1941-2013). These films were edited together onto 16mm by Pfisterer herself and are entitled Aktionen an Arbeiten von Verena Pfisterer. Although many of the artist’s actual objects were destroyed, some of these appear as Aktionsobjekte in these films with their stagnant physicality now fully activated through human intervention and hence their envisioned purpose fully realized.

Adjacent to the screening room, select furniture, photographs, drawings, paraphernalia, and specific art objects are installed with the aim to give an insight into how the line between life and art was purposefully blurry for the artist. For Pfisterer, her artistic practice was an integral part to her daily life, with the objects and drawings in constant use and interaction. In a sense, these works can only be seen as fulfilled or finally complete through such personal activation alone, hence diluting the line between artwork as utilitarian object, furniture as painting, drawing as decoration, or altogether as a form of performative practice itself.

Screenings start daily at 1:00, 2:30, 4:00 & 5:30 pm and last about 40 min.

Click here to view images by Alexander Goggin for Spike Magazine

Click here to read review by Karen Archey for Art Agenda

Click here to read review by Alexander Scrimgeour for Spike Magzine

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Konstruktionen der Neunziger

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to invite you to the inaugural exhibition of our new exhibition space in the German city of Erfurt, Thuringia on March 18, 2023 presenting a solo exhibition by German artist Jobst Meyer (1940-2017) entitled Konstruktionen der Neunziger. The exhibition focuses on works created by the artist during the eponymous decade that reflect upon the fundamental socio-political changes predominantly experienced in the East German states of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a result of German unification.

Bouquets of unpredictable implications

Still-life painting as an independent genre first flourished in the Netherlands during the early 1600s. Various fruits, vegetables as well as insects, dead game or precious items were painstakingly arranged on wooden table tops most commonly in front of dark, monochrome backgrounds. Immaculately executed and at first sight just formally decorative, these arranged objects represented more than what meets the eye. Each flower, fruit, vegetable, animal or object could hold an inscribed symbolic value beyond its painterly surface. Reflecting upon the growing autonomy of the bourgeois class, these paintings, themselves luxury objects, were commissioned to represent the social status and moral integrity of mercantile traders in an increasingly connected and urbanized society.

A common thread in the predominantly Dutch or Flemish floral still-life paintings is the assemblage of flowers from different countries or even continents in one vase and at one impossible moment of collective blooming. Still-life paintings became constructions of reality according to a client’s requests that communicated moral codes as well as social status through the painted arrangements of objects. Today, many of these specific meanings or codes are unknown to the majority of viewers, hence what might have appeared obvious to the elusive circles these paintings were originally aimed for is today left to specialized art-historical knowledge.

The 1990s, the decade in which Jobst Meyer painted the seven works exhibited in the exhibition, was characterized by substantial socio-political changes in East and West Germany. Following large scale protests in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the subsequent fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, both east and west German societies entered a complex process of transition. What seems as a historical given today, the German unification under a predominantly West-German capitalist system, was by no means certain in the early 1990s and even past unification further positive as well as negative social transformations impacted both parts of the newly unified Germany.

In his paintings, Meyer references technical as well as formal attributes of traditional still-life painting. On a technical level, Meyer exclusively worked with self-made, non-industrial tempera paints that he carefully layered on top of on another. On a formal level, Meyer’s works follow his predecessor’s three-fold compositional split into table-top, objects arranged upon and staged in front of an often plain, dark background. Meyer exchanges the predominantly natural objects with abstract forms ranging from crosses, hard-edged spikes, and moon-like shapes, to shapes that appear as if in stages of in-between. Physical objects appear in form of musical instrument-like trumpets or horns, wheel or ladder-like structures, or letters of the alphabet. Many of the more or less distinct shapes and objects in Meyer’s paintings seem to be caught in a kind of morphing, transitioning, intertwining or merging state from one form to another creating compositions that seem caught in an almost filmic state of flux just like an interim page of a flip book. These complex structures are placed upon textured plains quite similar to the table tops used in the paintings of his 17th century predecessors. The plain, usually dark and monochrome background’s is replaced in Meyer’s paintings with equally monochrome, yet often fiercely colorful, or in some cases wallpaper-like patterned, backgrounds.

On an interpretational level, Meyer’s painted compositions might also mean much more than what meets the eye at first glance. Especially when seen in context with the date of production, his paintings can appear as a graphic analysis of society in transition. Like the often impossible intersecting floral attributes of the 17th century, Meyer’s paintings invite the viewer to reflect on what these various symbols as well as their in-between stages can mean by themselves as well as within the overall formal composition. Is an electrified, bulb-like doubled flash, or a cross in its morphing distortion reminiscent of popularized right-wing insignia? If so, does Meyer interpret the troubling rise of neo-fascism in both parts of Germany as a consequence of German unification? Does Meyer, who also designed posters for some May 1st demonstrations and other left-wing political agendas, paint a rather dystopian view of the developments in 1990s Germany that critically questions the common narrative of the peacefully unified nation? Does Meyer’s pastel to vibrant color palette lure the viewer into visual consumerism that lays a cotton candy-esque diffusion over the greater societal challenges addressed in the works? Finally, are these works specific to 1990s social change in Germany or do they not have more universal questions embedded?

A particular link between Meyer’s work and the historical reference is the inclusion of loafs of bread in some of the works. While a rather basic food source not meant to elevate a patron’s status, it does find itself in many 17th century kitchen still-life paintings as symbolizing either the body of Christ, the simplicity of everyday life or a certain moral humility. In Meyer’s paintings, bread appears in form of a conventional baguette and is the only clearly defined and undistortedly painted object. Meyer’s reasons for being so particular and specific are unknown and we can only interpret. Yet, the inclusion of bread, as a basic food for human existence and survival might be seen as an intentional hint by the artist towards a socio-political reading of the artworks. Potentially this loaf of bread can even function as the concrete link or access point for an analysis of the work in the tradition of still-life painting past a formal surface?

In difference to the historical predecessor, Jobst Meyer was not painting for a patron or client but acted as an autonomous artist whose overall social, political as well as creative personality is embedded in his works. Meyer’s painted constructions hold no elitist codes readable only by the select few, instead the artist uses shapes and forms that are universally open and accessible to all. Yet Meyer did not have a large audience for his work in later stages of life and so these paintings were, to this moment, not seen by many. With time having passed since their production in the 1990s a new reading of Meyer’s work is possible and the urgency to critically address, question, and reflect upon dangers to civil societies remains fundamentally important today. Meyer’s paintings, when exhibited in the city of Erfurt in 2023, invite the viewer to analyze and abstract from the paintings’ symbolism, to the local placement, to the particular time we live in.

 

Meyer’s works from the 1970s were previously exhibited at EXILE as part of the duo exhibition Monument Error in 2021.

Parallel to this exhibition, EXILE Vienna hosts the second solo exhibition by Jobst Meyer’s partner Sine Hansen (1942-2009). The exhibition is entitled Spannungszangen and features paintings created during the 1970s.

Jobst Meyer (1940-2017) studied at Akademie der bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe (1960-63), and at Hochschule der Künste, Berlin (1963-68). From 1982-2010 Meyer taught at the Hochschule für bildenden Künste, Braunschweig. In 1973, he received the Villa Romana award and residency in Florence, Italy. Meyer exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions, amongst them Galerie Junge Generation, Hamburg (1967); Forum Stadtpark, Graz (1969); Galerie Klang, Cologne (1973, 1974), Galerie Thomas Wagner, Berlin (1975), Galerie Niepel, Düsseldorf (1981, 1991) and Landesmuseum Oldenburg (1998). Selected group exhibitions include Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (1966), Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (1967, 1969), Kunsthalle Nürnberg (1968), Kunstverein Salzburg (1970), Haus der Kunst, Munich (1970), Akademie der Künste, Berlin (1973), Kunsthalle Kiel (1977), Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (1982), Ludwig Forum, Aachen (1992), and Kunstmuseum Mülheim an der Ruhr (2016). Amongst others, his work is in the public collections of Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Berlinische Galerie, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, and Bundeskunstsammlung, Germany.

→Monument Error

→Sine Hansen: Spannungszangen at EXILE Vienna

→EXILE Erfurt, Kartausengarten 6, 99084 Erfurt, Germany

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Dokumentationszentrum Thüringen

Posted on by Regina Regina

The Documentation Center Thuringia (DZT) is dedicated to researching radical political movements in Thuringia that glorify oppression and violence. Founded by artist Erik Niedling and writer Ingo Niermann, the DZT examines both what was and what is, as well as what could be. Unlike documentation centers dedicated to Nazi history, the DZT does not confine itself to surveying particularly catastrophic past events, but understands the pursuit of oppression and violence, as manifested in National Socialism and its underlying racism, sexism, ableism, and totalitarianism, as something always undergoing transformation. In order to resist it successfully, the DZT strives to apprehend not only its existing forms but also its potential future mutations.

In the DZT’s first exhibition – Dokumentationszentrum Thüringen – Erik Niedling explores the question of how Thuringia became a rallying point for right-wing radicals and neo-Nazis after the fall of the Wall, and chronicles how, in order to violently oppose them and the annexation of the socialist Eastern Germany by the capitalist Western Germany, he and his friends founded the “Anarchist Faction” as teenagers. Niedling gathers archival material and historical artifacts and presents his personal story as a fragment in world events.

At the center of the exhibition is the film In the Heart of Germany, in which the artist Amy Patton reads a script recounting the history of divided Germany, the period of reunification, and the activities of the Anarchist Faction over a montage of tranquil images of Thuringia. A present-day encounter between Niedling and an old comrade-in-arms, who today belongs to the QAnon movement, gives a glimpse into an ominous future.

Two display cases contain Anarchist Faction documents, press photographs, and artifacts directly related to the film’s narrative. On the walls are four photographic stills taken during the making of the film. Furthermore, Niedling shows two Flag Paintings, executed in the state colors, red and white, which are omnipresent in Thuringia, on GDR-era canvases found during the artist’s research, and a painting from the Burial of the White Man series which shows a black triangle on a white ground.

Also on view are two artifacts that came into his possession during excavations on historical grounds. The first is Information Board, a decommissioned noticeboard from the radical right-wing Thuringian party Der III. Weg (founded 2013), the second is Target, a fragment of a steel girder riddled with bullet holes that Niedling excavated on a former firing range in Erfurt’s Steigerwald, which was used by neo-Nazis as a training ground after the fall of the Wall.

→View/download brochure (PDF, 100kb)

→Erik Niedling artist link

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NADA HOUSE, New York

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is happy to participate in NADA House with a collaborative exhibition by Vienna-based artist Kerstin von Gabain together with New York-based artist Gwenn Thomas. The exhibition will be held at House 403, along Colonels Row on Governors Island, New York from June 4 – Aug 7.

Governors Island, NY is approximately 6798.57 km or 4224.43 miles removed from EXILE, situated on Elisabethstr 24 in Vienna. The island, originally known as Paggank (Nut island) to the local Lenape Native American tribe, was deceitfully acquired in 1637 by Dutch colonialist Wouter Van Twiller for reportedly “two ax heads, a string of beads, and a handful of nails”. In the 1870s the building that today houses EXILE was built upon the raised medieval city wall of Vienna as part of the Emperor’s Ringstraße Project. The island was eventually renamed Governors Island and six residential houses were built to accommodate officers and their families on what is now known as Colonel’s Row in 1870. Following WWII, EXILE’s current gallery space in Vienna functioned as a travel agency for the US Allied Forces. The island’s defensive importance decreased over time, its original purpose and relevance fading into history. Most likely sometime in the mid 1970s, EXILE’s current space was fully clad in wooden paneling and became the office of a chain-smoking Russian businessman. An engraved metal plaque attached to House 403 reminds of its use by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev for the final preparations to the historic meeting with US President Ronald Reagan in 1988. The deceased Russian’s wooden smoking lounge became EXILE’s gallery space in 2018, eventually being transformed into a white cube during the pandemic. In June 2022, as part of NADA House, EXILE and House 403, Colonels Row, Govenors Island, NY meet inside an upstairs bedroom and adjacent bathroom. Layers of history intertwine and collide for a nanosecond of transitional time.

EXILE invited New York-based artist Gwenn Thomas and Vienna-based artist Kerstin von Gabain to respond to this temporal collision and create an immersive stage for their artworks. The selected works were deliberately not installed into but onto the existing space itself with some of the artworks’ material sources left in a state of flux themselves. Exposed to the elements, von Gabain’s soap pieces, shaped after human bone structures and arranged within the bathroom space, will begin to sweat and disintegrate over time. Thomas’s translucent glass shapes, their repetitive form taken from an abandoned found object and displayed in the bedroom’s cupboard, slowly pass the changing light of day. Both works respond to the spaces’ fluctuant nature and honor the opportunity to become short-lived, but active connectors between historical space and present visitor.

Thomas, who for many years has been researching window shapes as membrane-like metaphors for transformation and time, further places a single resin and copper object central onto the bedroom’s floor. The object consists of two intersecting shapes that seemingly depend on one another. The outer resin-made, opaque shape forms an enclosure for the negatively placed inner copper shape. Oppositional in material, both shapes together enclose a spatial volume that gives the artwork its final dimension and particular identity. Both materials together, one opaque, the other solid but changing its hue from bronze to green, again reference time while containing an inaccessible, hollow vacuum at its center. By scale, form and setting, the object appears like the marquette of a previously positioned piece of furniture and becomes an imaginary vessel for the domestic and intimate character of the space it is situated in.

Von Gabain’s two black and white photographs show limbs of human bodies that appear like anatomical wax models known from historical medical archives. Either crudely cut-off from the human body or cropped by the photographic frame and dipped into liquid, they directly refer to the historical use of photography to disect, analyze and compare the human body into defining categories. Initially these two photographs remind of the previous identities that have occupied these specific two room as much as the island itself. Further though, they are reminders of a violent history that is, even if passed for a long time, forever embedded into this island. Set in context with the bone-shaped soap works, an inability to wash-off historical pasts or one’s personal self lingers within the work. Constantly transformational, von Gabain refers to a pressing urgency to revisit and re-evaluate each individual history.

Collectively, the installed works by Thomas and von Gabain humbly express gratitude for their granted time of existence within the fabric of these two rooms. The selected materialities reflect onto the absurdity and lasting consequences of an uneven exchange of material value in 1637 of which they are now part of. History appears in layers. The dust never fully settles, the light never fully fades. The artists acknowledge and honor the particular history of these two rooms – their artworks imagine and reflect upon past, present and future spatial and personal interconnectivities. The displayed artworks are glitches of spatial time mirroring an uneven past onto an increasingly unpredictable future.

The project has been kindly supported by →Austrian Cultural Forum New York.

→Gwenn Thomas artist link

→Kerstin von Gabain artist link

→NADA HOUSE

→Directions to House 403, Governors Island, NY

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Seizure

Posted on by Regina Regina

On the occasion of Seizure, Erik Niedling announces the following:

“I would like to build the largest tomb of all time and be buried there after my death, along with my artwork. Conceived by writer Ingo Niermann as part of our documentation The Future of Art (2010), Pyramid Mountain is a pyramid excavated from a mountain, standing no less than 200 meters high. Once I am buried, the carved-away material will once again be poured over the pyramid, effectively restoring the mountain to its original form.

For the past seven years, I have been trying to create the necessary conditions to stage my own disappearance in a monumental way. I lived for one year as though it were my last, tried my hand as a political adviser and initiator of a new fitness movement to obtain the necessary financial resources, and created a new currency, the Pyramid Dollar.

In 2012, I declared the Kleiner Gleichberg in my home state of Thuringia the future site of Pyramid Mountain, opening what amounted to a broad front of resistance. The multi-year international search for an alternative mountain proved unsuccessful, and I once again turned my attention to Kleiner Gleichberg: a highly visible landmark and natural bulwark used by everyone from the Celts to the East German National People’s Army.

At 12 pm on May 8, 2017, I seized the Kleiner Gleichberg in an act of civil disobedience until final completion of Pyramid Mountain. As a sign of my claim, I will fix a flag on the summit, erect a pile of rocks in the shape of a pyramid and install a permanent exhibition with future grave items there.

In a world where Donald Trump can become President of the United States, anything is possible: I am taking advantage of this propitious, revolutionary moment to set new rules. I have understood that only they who are ready for confrontation achieve their goal.”

EXILE OFF-SITE EXHIBITION
→Kleiner Gleichberg
50° 24′ 44″ N, 10° 35′ 34″ O

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Organs

Posted on by Regina Regina

I
At noon the Heart is most active, while the Liver is maximally active after midnight.
Time in the body.
The Heart moves the hands. The Spleen opens into the mouth and manifests on the lips.
Functions in the body.
Anger with the Liver, happiness with the Heart, thoughtfulness with the Heart and Spleen, sadness with the Heart and Lungs, fear with the Kidneys and the Heart, surprise with the Heart and the Gallbladder, and anxiety with the Heart and the Lungs.
Sentiment in the body.
Cells with limited life span: skin, nails, oocytes, blood cells. 10 or 70 organs you can live without.
Headlines in the body.

Organs: the fuel, the function, the movement, the daily rhythms of activity, their amount.
Things paired. Things dried. Things absolutely needed.

 

II
They deal with time and love, as matter and forces that transform bodies, friendships, ideas, institutions,
interests, objects and subjects. They become a landscape of metabolic activity – of an amount of light that enters a room, of an amount of energy that leaves a room, of a certain amount of intention, the minimum amount of meaningful gesture.

They are physical traces of a desire, or an impulse, glimpses of locations and surroundings.
They provide evidence of personal and material limitations.

They are also records of affect, meditations, manifestos,
emotional contours of life during increasingly precarious times.
They are a set of conscious decisions manifested as a set of compulsions.
They are self-generating, but also self-consuming.
They create certain temperatures that dominate hormones and rational thinking.
They suggest that careful attention to the tiny and the immediate can be a survival strategy.

They are essays on forces, or their lack of, and on rejection.
They function regardless of sickness and quitting.
They are usual things.
They are found.

 

III
The works are installed as ensembles of Kammermusik, one for each room of the gallery.

On the ground floor, two grids of lights – fluorescent bulbs at the end of their useful lives, in square aluminium ceiling fixtures foraged from defunct offices in Athens. They light against each other.
On the upper floor, a set of oscillating fans operates out of season. They reproduce the sound of key sets clinging, as one opens a door.
On the walls, a series of portraits made in commercial photography studios in Athens. They are shown at the maximum size that was available in that moment.
Energy is released in order to be made available for alternate endeavors. Molecules reconstitute elsewhere, otherwise.

The works and other remnants from the space’s various past lives
– nicotine-stained wood, holes on the floor, debris behind the walls – will remain on view from mid-January until March.

Organs is Iris Touliatou’s first solo exhibition at Exile, Vienna.
Recent solo exhibitions include Overnight, Radio Athènes, Athens, Greece (2019), Woman spinning, Palermo, Stuttgart, Germany (2019), and Some Seine, HYLE, Athens, Greece (2017). Selected group exhibitions include The Same River Twice: Contemporary Art in Athens, curated by Margot Norton and Natalie Bell, New Museum & Deste Foundation at the Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece (2019); Bright File (June), curated by Maya Tounta, Haus N Athen, Athens, Greece (2018); May the bridges I burn light the way, 5x5x5: Selected Projects, Manifesta 12, Palermo, Italy, with EXILE (2018); and We are not the number we think we are, BetonSalon-Villa Vassilieff, Paris (2018).
She lives and works in Athens, Greece.

 

IV
CLUB MOSS

Worse, right side, from right to left, from above downward,  from 4 to 8pm; from heat or warm room, hot air, bed.
Better, by motion, after midnight, from warm food and drink, on getting cold, from being uncovered.

Pains come and go suddenly. Little things annoy, afraid to be alone.

Hurried when eating.
Cannot bear to see anything new. Cannot read what she writes.
Sadness in morning on awaking. Shakes head without apparent cause.
Twists face and mouth. Worse from 4 to 8pm.
Sees only one-half of an object. Eyes half open during sleep.
Dyspepsia due to farinaceous and fermentable food, cabbage, beans, etc. Aversion to bread, etc.

Food tastes sour. Desire for sweet things.
Eating ever so little creates fullness.
Cannot eat oysters. Cannot lie on left side.
Limbs go to sleep. Twitching and jerking.
Starting in sleep. Dreams of accidents.

This drug is inert until the spores are crushed.

 

V
THE WHITE OF THE EYES

The PhD researcher from Spain, is in Singapore to study the eyes of orangutans in Borneo.

I took a photograph of the photograph of the two pairs of eyes, hung above his desk in the Department of
Biological Science at the National University of Singapore, 14 Science Drive 4.

The white of our eyes is several times larger than those of other primates, which makes it much easier to see where the eyes, as opposed to the head, are pointed. Trying to explain this trait leads us into one of the deepest and most controversial topics in the modern study of human evolution: the evolution of cooperation.

It was a close-up of a close-up of the eyes of females, pinned to the wall on the right side of his desk, in Singapore.

→Download text as PDF (80 kb)

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Ausstellung 61

Posted on by Regina Regina

↑At
Aggtelek
↑Night
Christophe De Rohan Chabot
↑Creatures
Erik Niedling
↑Come
Gwenn Thomas
↑Up
Jordan Nassar
↑From
Kazuko Miyamoto
↑The
Martin Kohout
↑Bottom
Nathalie Du Pasquier
↑Of
Patrick Fabian Panetta
↑Our
TM Davy
↑Oceans

→Click here to watch exhibition trailer by Patrick Panetta

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Wo soll das noch hinführen

Posted on by Regina Regina

Wo soll das noch hinführen is an exhibition of new works by Berlin-based artist Ulrich Wulff which explore the psychological and material tensions inscribed in his painterly practice. Having recently reintroduced figuration to his work after a period of delicately rendered abstract painting, Wulff also reengages with a clown-like figure who originally appeared on his canvases during his earlier figurative period.

The works of Wo soll das noch hinführen position this figure against a stylized, magnified shadow of himself which evokes the rich intellectual and emotional dynamics of Wulff’s own engagement with the character. The grounds of the new works contrast sharply with the smooth, monochrome backdrops that characterize much of Wulff’s recent period of abstraction, suggesting a greater formal and psychic tension informs the paintings. Yet to refer to the works of Wo soll das noch hinführen as strictly “biographical” is to subordinate them to a narrative imperative that belies their openness, omnivorous points of reference, as well as the gestures toward universality with which Wulff seeks to infuse his compositions. Wulff’s clown is, at once, old friend, old nemesis, and alter ego, frozen in highly specific moments, yet also imbued with an intense kinetic potential as he fixes his gaze on the indeterminate distance just beyond the frame of the image.

The exhibition’s title thus becomes as much an imprecation as a rhetorical question. Perhaps any attempt at an answer would be insufficient to the presumption of such a bold and reductive question. Or, such answers would be too profound to be comprehensible to the questioner. Wulff’s clown, like those of Rouault and Picasso before him, may also be seeking a kind of resolution. But it is a resolution that will be eternally deferred, trapped, as he is, in the absurdity of the role assigned to him. Despite this fact, or, perhaps, because of it, Wulff’s clown, menaced by his own shadow, may understand an absurdity that is both deeper and more transcendently comic than mere appearances can convey.

William Kherbek

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Polaroids

Posted on by Regina Regina

Several years ago, a man by the astonishing name of Breedlove became the holder of the world land speed record. He did this thing at Bonneville Salt Flats, in Utah, in a rocket-powered car called The Spirit of America. For two runs over a one-mile course, this Breedlove averaged a little over 600 miles per hour … slightly faster than the legally established speed of a passenger jet. Had the ride been uneventful, we may expect that he would have had nothing at all to say about it. But, as it turned out, something did happen.

At the end of his second run, at a speed of about 620 miles per hour, as he was attempting to slow down, a brake mechanism exploded, both chutes failed to operate, and the car went entirely out of control, sheared off a number of handy telephone poles, topped a small rise, turned upside down, flew through the air, and landed in a salt pond. Incredibly, Breedlove was unhurt.

He was interviewed immediately after the wreck. I have heard the tape. It lasts an hour and 35 minutes, during which time Breedlove delivers a connected account of what he thought and did during a period of some 8.7 seconds; his narrative amounts to about 9,500 words. In the course of the interview, Breedlove everywhere gives evidence of condensing, of curtailing; not wishing to bore anyone, he is doing his polite best to make a long story short. His ecstatic utterance represents, according to my calculation, a temporal expansion in the ratio of some 655 to one. Proust, Joyce, Beckett, seem only occasionally to achieve such explicatory plenitude.

But perhaps Breedlove’s most amazing remark came before all that. Rescuers, expecting to find him mangled as by a tiger, discovered him, instead, intact, prone at the pool’s edge, still half in the water. He looked up and said to them, very distinctly: “For my next act, I’ll set myself on fire.”

Excerpt from Hollis Frampton: Circles of Confusion, Visual Studies Workshop Press, New York. 1983

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EXILE. Christophe de Rohan Chabot. August 1 – 31, 2016

Posted on by Regina Regina

https://www.facebook.com/exilegallery
https://www.instagram.com/exilegallery_org
http://www.indexberlin.de/exile
http://www.aqnb.com/2016/08/01/christophe-de-rohan-chabo-exile-aug-1-31

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Conquest

Posted on by Regina Regina

For his second solo exhibition at the gallery, entitled Conquest, Erik Niedling joins together two vernacular practices: Molybdomancy, which is a fortune telling practice dating back to ancient Greece, and the collecting of tin soldiers.

Molybdomancy is still practiced today in German-speaking countries and commonly known as Bleigießen (lead-pouring) respectively Zinngießen (tin-leading). It is a popular pastime, especially during New Year’s Eve celebrations to predict one’s upcoming year. Small lead or tin figurines are melted over a candle and, once liquified, poured into cold water. The transformed and resolidified shape is then interpreted for clues to an uncertain future.

Some of the earliest examples of miniature tin soldiers were used to visualize medieval battlefield strategies. The first mass-produced tin soldiers were made in Germany during the 18th century by the Hilbert brothers in Nuremberg and they have remained a popular collecting hobby ever since.

For his new sculpture series Futures (2017), Niedling replicates the process of Molybdomancy, but enlarges its scale over a thousand-fold. Instead of a single figurine, Niedling liquifies whole armies of tin soldiers, pours them into water and receives a quite dramatic object. The process recalls the artist’s Pyramid Paintings (2014/15), where Niedling used soot from his own torched artworks as a coloring agent for newly generated artworks.

The exhibition’s invite and first work seen upon entering the gallery, Conquest (2017), shows a selenium-toned, silver-gelatin photograph of a knight in shining armor riding a horse. This vintage photograph, singed “Wolfgang Krätzer Nov 1960” on the back, was bought by Niedling at a flea market and presents the access point to the exhibition. The provenance of the photograph is unknown, though it was most likely photographed in a museum in East Germany. The knight depicted in the photograph becomes a kind of metaphorical commander sending the thousands of small tin soldier figurines into battle.

As Niedling liquifies not a single tin figurine but whole armies, the resulting shape is not so much a prediction of an individual future but a collective one. With the individual tin soldier now subsumed under an almost obedient macro-political dynamic, Niedling appeals to the all too relevant fragility of an individual’s freedom and expression. Niedling’s version of Molybdomancy resembles a process of purgatory, as a hellish dilution of the individual, in a greater solidified mass.

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Kazuko Miyamoto & Beatrice Balcou

Posted on by Regina Regina

The current exhibition at EXILE is both an intentional and intuitive dialogue between two artists from different generations, yet with a similar sense of observing the world in its formal and relational complexity.

The work of Kazuko Miyamoto, born 1942 in Japan, living and working in New York since the late 1960s, is represented by a single oversized Kimono levitating in the open space and, in a sense, overseeing the entirety of the exhibition. Its strong, yet partly translucent presence demonstrates the poignant element of Miyamoto’s minimalism-rooted artistic practice. It is in particular this combination of performance-based objects with the unspoken presence of the otherwise physically absent feminine body that continuously reverberates through the artist’s work.

Béatrice Balcou, born 1976 in France, living and working in Brussels, sets a series of small-scale sculptures entitled The K. Miyamoto Boxes in context to Miyamoto’s Giant Kimono. These are the result of a comprehensive, non-invasive research into the work of Kazuko Miyamoto. In her practice, Balcou pursues a poetic analysis of the established rules of production, distribution and consumption of artworks. Balcou states that in the existing art-exhibiting reality, certain artworks get exhibited regularly while many others remain hidden, which, to the artist, leads to a slow unnoticed death of these abandoned objects.

The K. Miyamoto Boxes have a strong formal similarity with Miyamoto’s original works but, presented as plain wooden miniatures, achieve their own referential identity. With many of the original artworks by Miyamoto destroyed, the visitor is invited to focus, if only for a moment, on the display of the objects. The attention is focused on the objects as their material entity with their physical presence being blurred between art-historical fact, memory and disappearance.

The exhibition continues with a set of works by Balcou entitled Placebo Prints. These represent yet another derivation of an art object she examines and, like the echo of the original work, resonate somewhere between the physical matter of the original and the circulation of its reproduction. Set in dialogue to these flat renderings of three-dimensional objects is Miyamoto’s Cardboard Box Painting, which shows various kimono, knife or boat shapes painted onto a regular cardboard box, returning a flat surface back to its three-dimensional state.

This exhibition project was produced and first exhibited in 2016 at →L’ISELP (Institut supérieur pour l’étude du langage plastique) in Brussels.

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Lithosomes

Posted on by Regina Regina

“ [a] vital materiality that runs through all bodies, both human and non-human.”*

The current prehistory demands to test the limits of critical thinking. To assemble conceptual and affective tools for navigation between old and new natures. There is a joyful exuberance and a melancholic resignation in not knowing again.

Neo-naiveté becomes more politically efficient than deconstruction.

In “pre” times we can work on ambiances, accommodate the non-organic, the non-human. We can aimlessly drift across infantile digital territories, multi-natures and pseudo-metaphysics.

Not a full regression, but rather an ontological flatness. Un-adjustable regimes of existence artificially intersecting for a moment. What moment? In the case of concretions that particular moment doesn’t even qualify as time.

A concretion (“trovant” in Romanian) is a compact mass of matter formed by the precipitation of mineral cement within the spaces between particles. Concretions are often ovoid or spherical in shape, although irregular shapes also occur.

The concretions are hyper-jumping from one “pre” to another, bypassing the homo-sapiens age in a blink of a stone pore.

The stone exists in another order of magnitude, a gigantic arch over humanity and life itself.

Lingering at the periphery of discourse. Works triggered not by questions but by an alienating disposition. Non-becoming rapports, non-hierarchical ways of interaction.

Nothing to interrogate. Who cares what it is peculiar to the human? Not even what is peculiar to the concretion.

A prolonged proximity. Trying to resonate with matter coming from an irrecoverable distance. An impossible intimacy.

* Bennett, Jane: Vibrant Matter. Duke University Press , 2010

Text by Ion Dumitrescu

 

EXILE is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Bucharest-based artist Nona Inescu entitled Lithosomes. Inescu has previously shown at the gallery as part of the group exhibition →Grotto Capitale. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with →Sabot Gallery, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Nona Inescu, born 1991, lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. After studying at the Chelsea College of Art & Design in London (2009-2010) and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (2010-2011), Inescu completed her studies in 2016 at the National University of Arts in Bucharest. Inescu’s interdisciplinary artistic practice encompasses photography, objects, installations, and video. Her most recent work focuses on the human interaction with natural and primitive materials.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Conversation with a stone, SpazioA, Pistoia (2016), Her latent image, Kube, Bucharest (2016) and Hands don’t make magic, Sabot, Cluj-Napoca (2015). Selected group exhibitions: Life a User’s Manual, Art Encounters, Timisoara (2017), Becoming an Apricot… , Survival Kit 9, Riga (2017), Gestures of Tomorrow, Kunstverein Nuernberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft, Nuremberg (2016).

Features
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Like A Sick Eagle

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present a two-person exhibition by artists Anna Orłowska & Mateusz Choróbski entitled Like A Sick Eagle. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Wschód Gallery, Warsaw.

Like A Sick Eagle dictates a meandering path through anachronistically arranged objects and photographs. Its narration diverges, switches or breaks up abruptly but, at the end, converges into optical illusions, disguised elements and distorted shifts in scale and content. The works collective presence in the space, amplifies the artists’ interests in architecture, proportions, materials and, most accurately, index another opportunity for experimentation.

Mateusz Choróbski develops narration in relation to the specificity of architecture by either emphasizing or transforming particular existing elements. His objects focus on erasures, interruptions and diversity. Choróbski’s current works rhyme with the setting of generic corporate office design – it derives its shape from the traditional raster lamps with intense conversions – and regular stained glass windows, which become rigorously modified.

Anna Orłowska, with moderation and compliance, offers through photography a discontinuous search for architectural figures with strong and substantial ability to organize and arrange. She uses architectural structures to cooly analyse the logic of the given space. Orłowska formulates the narrative around the resonant relations created between the space and its functionality – she restores its dynamism, complexity and distortions inscribed in its history.

Anna Orłowska (born 1986) received an MFA from the Photography Department at the National Film School in Łódz, Poland (2011) and an undergraduate degree from the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava,Czech Republic (2013). She has participated in numerous group shows including reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today presented at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland and the Aperture Foundation in New York. She held several solo exhibitions including Case study: invisibility at Josef Sudek Studio in Prague and at Asymetria Gallery in Warsaw as well as the exhibition Leakage at the Panopticon in Stockholm. In 2013 she was awarded a scholarship for the PhotoGlobal program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and was awarded a prize at the International Festival of Fashion and Photography in Hyeres, France. In 2017 she received the Overseas Photographer Higashikawa Award and participated in PKO Project Room at Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw with her solo presentation Sunday Night Drama.

Mateusz Choróbski (born 1987) received an MFA from the Intermedia Department at Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He participated in numerous group shows: High Blood Pressure at Koganei Art Spot, Tokyo, 2017; Autogestión / When The World Breakes in II at Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 2017 ; Micro Salon#7, Galerie L’inlassable, Paris, 2017; Raw Material, Eva Meyer Gallery, Pairs, 2017. Selected solo exhibitions include: Le premier venu?, Les Bains Douches, Alençon, 2017; A Slow Collapse of a Journey, CSW Kronika, Bytom, 2016; Nesting, alongside Ronit Porat, Asymetria Foundation, Warsaw, 2015; I Was Maddened by Sunlight. I Felt like Laughing, Arsenał Gallery, Białystok, 2015; Blue Bird, Zona Sztuki Aktualnej, Szczecin, 2015 and at Realny Obszar Działań, Warsaw, 2015. His work is part of the film collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

Features
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A Return to Sweetness

Posted on by Regina Regina

Dear Guests, 

welcome to the new EXILE space in Vienna and to our inaugural exhibition A Return to Sweetness by Pakui Hardware.

Now: Slowly breathe in – then out, while wandering around the space and looking at the works installed within. Inhale – exhale – repeat. At times, this most fundamental rhythm of bringing oxygen into your lungs and flushing out carbon dioxide can be enhanced or distorted depending on one’s prefered additive intake, a ritual as old as humankind. The gallery’s wooden walls are the lasting result of such a chemically enhanced ritual breathing enhancement:

“Chain smoking is the practice of smoking several cigarettes in succession, sometimes using the ember of a finished cigarette to light the next. The term chain smoker often also refers to a person who smokes relatively constantly, though not necessarily chaining each cigarette.” (Source: Wikipedia)

Prior to our move-in, the space was the office of an unknown tenant, locally referred to as ‘the Russian’. For three to four decades (accounts vary) he would sit in this wooden cube behind a grand desk and endlessly smoke. Cigarette after cigarette, inhaling, exhaling, decade after decade, while taking care of unknown business. As smoking is quite often not a solitary but a social action, his office became a smoker’s lounge for the neighbourhood, a partial communal space, where many stories were shared, discussions and conversations held, all over the course of a (Viennese) Tschick.

The exhaled smoke of roughly half a million cigarettes took its part to fumigate these walls and give the space its specific patina and lasting ordeur. While the walls patiently soaked-up the nicotine, the lungs of the Russian disintegrated and eventually collapsed.

In a sense these organic wooden panels are a mirror image of the Russian’s internal organs. The space itself is a breathing machine, that temporarily stopped with the previous tenant’s death of lung cancer a few years ago. Ever since, these spatial lungs laid bare and empty, devoid of function.

From today, these rooms start to breathe again. Without the need for nicotine-intake itself, we continue the legacy left to us. Pakui Hardware’s installation is a first reaction to these walls, to their infused histories. A Return to Sweetness relates to the metabolic obsession of capital reproduction as it does to the need for conversation and exchange. The artists’ own inside-out organs adding another chapter of stories, actions and myths to be experienced, this time though -if smoking – only outdoors.

Now when in this space, surrounded by its nicotine-soaked walls, feel warmly welcomed to this new chapter of EXILE’s trajectory and to engage and participate in our upcoming journey.

Christian Siekmeier

 

Undo opacity. What do we have here? It’s not the heart but the belly of the matter. Belly up. Belly out. Turn the problem inside out and expose it’s guts. To see the thing exposed – the belly of the beast… Crystalline gall. Artist duo Pakui Hardware help us edge towards a new choreography of care.

Pakui Hardware are concerned with the vulnerability of the horizon. Their work collapses the difference between human and non-human actors through installations of ‘hybrid ecologies’ that confuse any immediate impulse as to where loyalty or affinity might lie. Their compositions, amorphous, organic-industrial forms, examine the role that technology, economy and materiality have in shaping each other. Inspired by ‘case-studies of tensions’ including High Frequency Trading, automated futures and the idea of ‘Second Nature’ (biological futures, synthetic biology), Pakui Hardware takes cultures – and by extension culture – off the assembly line to check in – how is everybody feeling? The duo’s palliative approach softens the industrial hardware and along with it our own feedback response to their bill of health. Under the roof, things are looking a bit fragile. New alliances formed through a familiar vulnerability. Must care better.

Pakui Hardware present a new configuration that zones in on the ‘metabolic rift’ (Mckenzie Wark). This is the crisis point of irreversible ecological imbalance, the era of the Anthropocene in which we now live. Working through the metaphor of metabolism, the duo speak from the heart – or rather the belly of all, itself a grossly augmented system, engineered for maximum output, but fatally out of sync. Take it all in. Consumption, extraction. Consumption, extraction. Metabolic process amped to the max. Cables sluice inside wet, fresh extractions on support. A sacrificial victim of the gastric economy. The organism lays exposed. Glass, copper pipes, heat-treated PVC film, latex, saliva and chia seeds. Silicon guts. Interconnected parts lace through the space in an install hung from the rafters, sleek droop system. Eyes slip down rubber tubes and curl around glacier-rounds. Molecular red forms crystallize in thermodynamic moments that look like big boiled sweets. Some parts cinched round the middle like a gastric band… looks a little loose though. Someone should check on that. Stitches coming loose too on the part below, and that bit hanging like the Sword of Damocles above it all. So you breathe in a little as you pass by the formation, suck yourself up and shrink a little. Careful, or shards will be everywhere. Watch your step. Working out how to stay intact together by augmenting your flow. Something a little more symbiotic this time. It’s all in the balance.

Tamar Clarke-Brown. Originally commissioned for Baltic Triennial 13: Give Up the Ghost, May 11 – September 21,  2018.

 

Pakui Hardware are Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda. The artists are based between Vilnius and Berlin. Recent and current exhibitions include The Return of Sweetness, Tenderpixel, London; Solar Bodies, Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Give up the Ghost, 13th Baltic Triennial, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; Peer to Peer, Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz; Somewhere in between, Bozar, Brussels, and L’esprit Souterrain, Domaine Pommery, Reims. Upcoming institutional exhibitions include Orient, Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków; Low Form, MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome; Bielefelder Kunstverein (solo), Bielefeld; Ideal Standard, Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen, and Museum der bildenden Künste (solo), Leipzig.

Pakui Hardware have last exhibited in Vienna in 2016 at mumok, Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna.

→Pakui Hardware: Vanilla Eyes, mumok, 2016

 

Press:
→Spiegler, Almuth: Rückkehr zur Süße, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Sept 21, 2018
→Spiegler, Almuth: Galerien: Berlin zieht nach Wien, Die Presse, Sept 13, 2018
→Watzl, Paula: Neuzugang unter den Wiener Galerien, Kunstmagazin Parnass, Sept 10, 2018

FEATURES
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tropes and limbs

Posted on by Regina Regina

If you like or better: Should the occasion arise and you entertain the wish for a maximal open conversation, open in the sense that not only discussion participants would be invited but also discussion parts, and should it become obvious quite fast that this conversation boils down to a soliloquy (once again), then these parts could also be your arms and legs, your sexual organs, the single lobes of your cerebrum, your book and your computer.

Lee Lozano of whom Lucy Lippard later on will have said (more or less) that everyone understood too late that she, as a matter of fact, didn’t distinguish betwen life and art, fleshed out an extensive series of drawings on paper in the 1960ties – before or after a series of not unsimilar paintings – in which she gave full scope to her dissatisfaction with the design of the human body in morphing cocks, cunts and mouths into new and unique faces. „As if“ writes Helen Molesworthy in 2002, „the cartoon style of Philip Guston had somehow encountered contemporary cyborg fantasies of a complete merger of body and machine.“
Now, after the joystick displaced the classical tool long ago and being an artist is at least on paper a functional life script, other distinctions difficult to make are coming to the fore.

Under the condition of a globally available metatext – to have a conversation about the brandenburgische province or to just have a conversation while the brandenburgische province graciously and at the same time ominously overglared by the sun is passing by our side, might be a more fitting equivalent to the options we now can chose from when we want to consider ourselves sympton and cause simoultaniously, or likewise the media and then its effect. Can (a) media talk about the own biography and stay itself at the same time? Or does it has to have at least the distance to itself a storyteller establishes between herself/himself and her/his sujet?
Using the example of the film, some things might be clarified: to observe yourself from the outside (through a distorting glass of water that blows up your lips while its content wets them) and then looking from inside yourself onto what you just did, adding the film-time and then the studio-space. These are four levels, like four dimensions, of which the last one helps to depict the three valid in our empirical reality.

All works in this exhibition slide along a logic of reproduction, which – if considered noteworthy – starts to raster each format from anew. That provides surprisingly sharp outlines, as if the phenomenas start to dissociate again, the comic is back to referencing a graphic that is telling a story through means of contrast while the silhouette of the own physiognomy marks the place within in the transition from realistic to model.

Inka Meißner
FEATURES
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ARS ELECTRONICA, Linz, AT

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Cruel Summer Camp

Posted on by Regina Regina

We like to thank all artists for the well over 100 applications to our upcoming CRUEL SUMMER CAMP. The selection was incredibly difficult due to the many excellent applications we received and the limited space EXILE can provide. Here now the final list based on a truly challenging selection process by jury members Veronika Čechová, Àngels Miralda, and Peter Sit:

Abdul Sharif Baruwa, Anna Bochkova, Anna Hostek, Bianca Pedrina, Edin Zenun, Filip Dvořák and Martin Kolarov, Flavio Palasciano, Francis Ruyter, Ivana Lazic, Jackie Grassmann and Leonie Huber, Jakub Choma, Jakob Kolb, Kerstin von Gabain, Keresztesi Botond, Lukas Thaler, Marianne Vlaschits, Martina Smutná, Michal Michailov, Nika Kupyrova, Radek Brousil, Sarah Bechter, Sari Ember, Siggi Sekira, Siggi Hofer, Šimon Chovan, Tomáš Bryscejn, Yein Lee

INFORMATION ON OPEN CALL (closed on Jul 21)

Returning from Quarantine we recognize the urgency and need to support the local art scene as a result of the troubling collapse of much of the support structures due to COVID-19. We respond now and launch an Open Call for a Summer Camp.

Following the concept of previous Summer Camp, Irregular Reading and last year’s OSIOS projects, EXILE cordially invites you to submit your artwork for a 2020 Summer Camp. Acknowledging the challenges brought upon the creative scene due to COVID-19 the aim of this year’s Summer Camp is less a static exhibition than a collaborative platform directed at and created for the local and regional (≠ national) art scene. Running from mid July to late August, E X I L E will give the gallery space to artists to engage and collectively present their work. The resulting format should be as much an exhibiton as also an exchange platform.

To submit your work please send us an email including 3-5 images of your work plus a brief bio and statement. All works will be discussed by a jury consisting of Veronika Čechová, Àngels Miralda, and Peter Sit. Images of all exhibited works as well as installation images will be featured on →@exilegram as well as on all other online channels. In case of sale of an artwork, 100% will go to the respective artist. The submission deadline is June 21. We are looking forward to your submissions.

Veronika Čechová is a curator based in Prague. Since 2017, she has been working at the Jindřich Chalupecký Society, a platform supporting Czech contemporary art in the international context. In collaboration with a number of partner institutions throughout the Czech Republic and internationally, the Society organizes exhibitions, public programs, residencies for artists and curators, educational and publication projects. Since 2020, she co-directs the Entrance Gallery in the former orangery of an old monastery in Prague, creating a program dedicated to ecologically conscious content with an emphasis on sustainability and slow curating.

Àngels Miralda is a writer and independent curator based in Terrassa, Barcelona. Her recent exhibitions have focused on themes of decentralisation, heritage, and global industry through personal stories and parallels to artist’s practice. Current exhibitions include: Olev Subbi: Landscapes from the end of times, Tallinn Art Hall; and Andrej Skufca: Black Market, MGLC, Ljubljana. Recent projects include: Island Thinking, Museu de Angra do Heroísmo, Açores; Weight of Abundance, Curated by Festival, Zeller van Almsick, Vienna; Survival Kit 10, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga; and Los Cimientos, Los Pilares, y los Firmamentos, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Chile. Her writing has been published in Artforum, Collecteurs Magazine, Rotunda Magazine, Arts of the Working Class, and Sleek Magazine among others.

Peter Sit is an artist, curator and organizer. In 2012 he co-founded art collective and platform APART. Together with APART he exhibited among others in Kunsthalle Bratislava, Karlín Studios in Prague, Easttopics in Budapest, Plusmínusnula in Žilina, Biennial of Graphic Design in Brno, CCA Chronicle in Bytom. Since 2017, he has been a member of the research team of the Extrasensory-Aesthetics Research Working Group, which is researching Czechoslovak psychotronics, it’s institutional and ideological connections as well as its potential overlaps with contemporary art. This year Sit is a finalist of Jindřich Chalupecký award with Extrasensory-Aesthetics Research Working Group and stipend program of NOVUM foundation.

For further information on previous projects please visit:

→ OSIOS (2019)

→ Irregular Readings II (2016)

→ Irregular Readings (2013)

→ Summercamp III (2011)

→ Summercamp II (2010)

→  Summercamp I (2009)

Features
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The inspiration for this year’s Summer Camp comes from the most amazing →Bananarama whose lyrics achieve a new meaning and relevance:

Hot summer streets
And the pavements are burning
I sit around
Trying to smile but
The air is so heavy and dry
Strange voices are saying
(What did they say?)
Things I can’t understand
It’s too close for comfort
This heat has got
Right out of hand

It’s a cruel, (cruel), cruel summer
(Leaving me) leaving me here on my own
It’s a cruel, (it’s a cruel), cruel summer
Now you’re gone

It’s a cruel, (cruel), cruel summer
(Leaving me) leaving me here on my own
It’s a cruel, (it’s a cruel), cruel summer
Now you’re gone

The city is crowded
My friends are away
And I’m on my own
It’s too hot to handle
So I got to get up and go

It’s a cruel, (cruel), cruel summer
(Leaving me) leaving me here on my own
It’s a…

 

 

Untitled (Molly House)

Posted on by Regina Regina

E X I L E is pleased to participate in this year’s edition of →curated by with a group exhibition curated by Vienna-based artist and curator Julius Pristauz.

With a strong focus on the negotiation of approaches towards how bodies, sex, and forms of gender expression are deconstructed and reconstructed in queer communities and their allies’ artistic practices, Untitled (MOLLY HOUSE) raises questions as to the historical entanglement of gender politics as well as the visibility and space given to discussions necessary in order to learn about their origins.

Looking at the subversive potential of transformation, the exhibition tells stories of individual experiences that evoke curiosity in their community.

Participating 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.

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

→Untitled (MOLLY HOUSE) Publication

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Soul of the desert

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE and CFA are pleased to present a solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Paul Sochacki entitled Soul of the desert. The exhibition will be held at CFAlive, via Rossini 3, Milan.

What is Mythopoiesis?
When the time comes, people will have to choose their totemic name. Symbolic, meaningful, or just a little silly, everyone will have to have it. As an exception, people will be helped by others to decide their totemic name, only if they can’t really choose for themselves. A totemic name will consist of the name of an animal, either real or fictitious, and a quality. Tenacious panda, drunk dragon, sleepy bear, squinty eagle, benevolent hydras, all these will be examples. People will take massive pride in their totemic name.

Simply flat horizon
There is no better example of simplicity than a flat horizon: think of the straight line between a salt lake and the sky; or the edge of a vast sea at rest; or a smooth ice cap. If simplicity is defined as the condition of being easy to understand, a flat horizon must be easy to understand. A uniform mass of land, ice or water against an even backdrop is no trouble for the mind. No sweat, so to speak.

Goodwill
In the days of the cherubs we would praise goodwill. We treated the lack of it as serious business, a grave issue to solve asap. Until goodwill backfired. Just like scatological humour, it turned awkward all of a sudden. That feeling of “ouch.” No longer could we care of its heavenly promises, and even G.A. Cohen declared “fools, that is what we’ve been! Don’t you see this hell now!” And yet, were we fools? Did we miss something here?

Text by Piero Bisello

→Interview between Piero Bisello and Paul Sochacki

→CFAlive

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Martins Kohout

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Born 1984 in Prague, lives and works in Berlin and Prague.

→martinkohout.com

Summer Camp II

Posted on by Regina Regina

This July and August EXILE presents its second annual Summer Camp curated by New York based artist, writer, editor and independent publisher Billy Miller. For this year’s SummerCamp Miller curated two simultaneous exhibitions entitled Head Shop and Lost Horizon:

Head Shop is both a nod to legendary ‘60s bohemian boutiques like Granny Takes A Trip, and an evocation of the idea of the mind as a storehouse of images and potentialities.

Artists: Dan Acton, The Agitators, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Brian Belott, Nina Bovasso, Matt Borruso, Larry Carlson, Ryan Cummings, TM Davy, Michael Economy, Krista Figacz, Janie Geiser, Fritz Haeg, Christian Holstad, Brian Kenny, Paul Kopkau, Steve LaFreniere, Justin Lowe, Noah Lyon, Michael Magnan, Rachel Mason, Glynnis McDaris, Ashleigh Nankivell, Mary Nicholson, Darinka Novitovic, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Jason Peters, Kevin Regan, Alex Rose, Desi Santiago, Barbara Sullivan, Jan Wandrag, David West, Justin Yockel

Lost Horizon takes its title from the book and film of the same name, and suggests aspects of American Western mythology and “lost” possibilities – ecological, cultural, personal and otherwise.

Artists: D-L Alvarez, Rachel Beach, Michael Bilsborough, Colby Bird, Matthew Burcaw, Kathe Burkhart, Luke Butler, Brendan Carroll, Walt Cassidy, Wayne Coe, Reuben Cox, Pia Dehne, Peter Eide, Carl Ferrero, Jonah Freeman, Janine Gordon, Jonah Groeneboer, Marcus Gruendel, Tina Hejtmanek, Scott Hug, Stephen Irwin, Item Idem + Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Pat Keesey, Lisa Kirk, Lewis Klahr, Martin Kohout, Kristian Kozul, Paul Lee, Peter Maloney, Glynnis McDaris, Dean Sameshima, Florent Tillon, Frank Webster, Ken Warneke

 

Additional Events

July 18, 9pm: Screening at Wowsville, Ohlauer Str 33, Berlin

July 20, 9pm: Screening at Basso, Köpenicker Straße 187/188, Berlin

July 31, 7-10pm: STH #67 Launch, Exile

 

Reviews

→ Diane Pernet (PDF, 2MB)

→ Frieze (PDF, 250 kb)

→ art21.org (PDF, 600 kb)

Glare Inland, Quiet Attachment

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is please to present the first solo exhibition by Czech-born, Berlin-based, artist Martin Kohout:

You are dead now. It is not the first time, but it feels like it. It always has. And now… again. You are even bound to think this state becomes ever newer with each repeated case of unsolicited death. You find yourself in a prison of sorts: cold, dry, boring. Colorless time grips your gray matter, though you feel, feel rather than see, some tints coming back from a subdued horizon. They smell and sound. Strangely enough, you find yourself not welcoming them, still clutching to the lifeless reins.

Palo Fabuš

 

ART GWANGJU, Gwangju, South Korea

Posted on by Regina Regina

In response to Art Gwangju’s kind invitation EXILE presents the Artists Aggtelek, Martin Kohout and Monica Paulina Jagoda.The works by the selected artists reflect upon the Art Gwangju’s curatorial concept of Double Democracy.

Monica Paulina Jagoda’s floor-mounted photographs show WWII soldiers on their parachutes approaching unknown territory. Hidden underneath the frame’s matts are text by the artist in reference to the photographs unknown history and loss of context. When viewed from above the viewer re-lives this state of in-between as felt by the soliders between the safety of the aircraft and the landing on hostile soil.
In her video a knitted piece of wool is slowly de-assembled. The thread of connection, of history and context is slowly retracted and with it is historical context annihilated.

Aggtelek, an artist duo from Barcelona, present the film 2o Ensayo Escultorico (2nd Sculptural Essay). In this film the artists’ create their own fictional, often surreal parallel world. The artists’ work is a constant construction of previous mis-en-scenes, always for a more imaginary and absurd world. Reality become their fiction to create what they cant have.

In Martin Kohout’s small photograph 2A. “the constellation of white objects suddenly appeared in the presence of an albino cat” a person clad all in white is holding an equally while cat.  The viewer, when peaking into the small work, at first sees nothing but his/her own reflection. Upon refocussing his/her vision the intricate details of the photograph and its simple, yet kind gestural offer, become visible. The communication with the viewer is based on its subtlety. In his work 4A. It’s Already Now Again the viewer is invited to wear a ring by the artist and therefore entering a quite intimate physical dialogue with the artist himself.

Document Performance

Posted on by Regina Regina

The exhibition Document Performance presents objects by artists Awst & Walther, Claudia Kapp and Benjamin Blanke, FORT, Gwenn Thomas / Joan Jonas, Hermann Nitsch, Johannes Paul Raether, Kazuko Miyamoto, Martin Kohout and Stuart Brisley.

A performance is an action in time. A document of said performance is a physical manifestation of a previous action encapsulated in various material forms.

However, such objects are never merely just documenting their source performance, but are rather autonomous in and of themselves. While they refer back to the source they are neither the past performance itself nor its direct representation. Their temporal source is embedded in the permanent. This doubled relationship to time results in a contextual shift: From questions of What-has-been? and What-has-happened-since? to What-is-now? and, in some cases, to What-will-be?.

Document Performance investigates the autonomous life of the documents as they exist in the here and now. Their fragmented, though transitional relationship with the past, present and future fuels the viewer’s imagination: What does each document mean? How is the source performance embedded in the object? How did the document come into existence? Who is the author? How has the object’s context shifted? How has time transformed the document itself? What does the object mean to the viewer?

The objects featured in the exhibition follow no historical or contextual narrative. Each of them has been produced as a result, a consequence or a mindset of a performative action. Some documents on display are:

– The photograph by Gwenn Thomas of Joan Jonas during her performance Twilight in 1975. This photograph is identified by both artists as a collaborative work and asks about their individual identities, the nature of their collaboration and the photograph’s authorship and existence in relation to the performance.

– The film Being and Doing by Stuart Brisley (with Ken McMullen) features Brisley’s performances in the context of a 50-minute documentation that investigates the origins of performance art, connecting it not to modernism but to ancient folk rituals in England and Europe.

– The object from Johannes Paul Raether’s performance Nationalfahnen zu Schwefelrosen shows a small, burnt German flag. When burning such flags, Raether transformed each into a rose with a thorn. He combines one of the highest visually charged expressions of protest with the creation of a vernacular kitsch object.

– The first vinyl recording of Hermann Nitsch from his 1972 performance Akustisches Abreaktionsspiel is displayed on a record player, although it is so rare and precious that it can no longer be played. The viewer is forced to imagine the performance solely by looking at the vinyl record and employing his/her knowledge of Nitsch’s body of work.

– The printout of a diary of an anonymous participant in Claudia Kapp’s and Benjamin Blanke’s drug-withdrawal project Cold Turkey, presented at Kunstwerke in 2010, undermines almost all expectations of artistic practice, performance and document with one single piece of text.

– The fur umbrella by Kazuko Miyamoto has not been used as part of a performance yet. It has been produced by Miyamoto for an upcoming performance as part of her exhibition at EXILE in the late spring of 2012.

→Read Review: Artinfo

Fake

Posted on by Regina Regina

Fake is of unknown origin. It was first attested in criminal slang in London as an adjective in 1775, as a verb in 1812, as a noun in 1851 and as a person in 1888, though its origins are probably older. A likely source is feague from German fegen in colloquial use. Another source may be from Latin facere.

Fake is probably from feak, feague (“to give a better appearance through artificial means”); akin to Dutch veeg (“a slap”), vegen (“to sweep, wipe”); German fegen (“to sweep, to polish”). Compare Old English fācn, fācen (“deceit, fraud”). Perhaps related to Old Norse fjuka (“fade, vanquish, disappear”), feikn (“strange, scary, unnatural”) and Albanian fik (“put out, vanquish, disappear”).

Fake is a new browser for Mac OS X. Fake allows you to drag discrete browser Actions into a graphical Workflow that can be run again and again without human interaction.

Fake is a song written and recorded by British soft rock group Simply Red. It was released in July 2003 as the second single from the album, Home. It was the next single after their international smash hit “Sunrise.” It reached number-one on the U.S. Billboard Hot Dance Club Play for the week of February 14, 2004.

Fake was a Swedish synthpop band during the 1980s.

Fake is an uncharted territory off the coast of Ko-Realia.

Fake was an exhibition at EXILE in Berlin.

 

Aggtelek
Benjamin Alexander Huseby
Billy Miller
Christophe De Rohan Chabot
Fox Irving and Kenneth Goldsmith
Fresh White
Hanne Lippard
Heji Shin
Jo-ey Tang
Julian Fickler
Jurgen Ostarhild
Kathe Burkhardt
Kazuko Miyamoto
Kinga Kielczynska
Mark Dilks
Martin Kohout
Nadja Abt
Nancy Davenport
Norbert Witzgall
Paul Sochacki
Patrick Fabian Panetta
Pietro Sanguineti
Rachel Mason
Rapture Inc.
Rein Vollenga
TOLE & Tolan
Ulrich Lamsfuss
Ulrich Wulff
Ursus Haussmann
Vytautas Jurevicius

MIART, Milan

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present a group presentation with works by Martin Kohout, Nathalie Du Pasquier and Pauł Sochacki at MIART in Milan.

Concurrently to MIART Nathalie Du Pasquier will open a solo exhibition of new paintings entitled very flat constructions at Assab One in Milan. EXILE and ASSAB ONE cordially invite you to the opening on Apr 5, 6:30pm. The new works by Du Pasquier are displayed within and set in context with the vast post-industrial architecture of this former printing factory.

→Review by Hili Perlson for artnet

→Assab One

ART BRUSSELS

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE and Polansky Gallery, Prague are pleased to invite you to a collaborative presentation of new works by Martin Kohout with Christophe de Rohan Chabot for ART BRUSSELS, section DISCOVERY, Booth D06.

ART BRUSSELS
Tour & Taxis
Avenue du Port 86c
1000 Brussels, Belgium

http://www.artbrussels.com

 

 

2012

Posted on by Regina Regina

With the exhibition entitled 2012, EXILE wants to actively focus and involve itself in the debate on the current situation of the arts in Berlin. In times of particularly drastic changes within Berlin and an increasingly confrontational debate about the importance and integration of the very artistic foundation of Berlin, EXILE wants to provide a forum in which discussion about these issues is openly encouraged.

Substantial reductions of public and private sales and funding opportunities raise questions of the role of the artist as well as the exhibition space for the identity and branding of the city itself. How is the diverse artistic community, as still existent in Berlin, affected by such developments? What effects do decreasing opportunities and growing commercial pressure have on the diversity of Berlin’s artistic demographics?

The two artists’ positions presented in this exhibition can both, in their own distinct ways, be read in relation to the idea of the exhibition and provide entry points to stimulate a dialogue about the current situation for the arts.

Goran Tomcic’s single work in the exhibition is based on a regular high-end art transport crate, previously used to transport and protect an anonymous painting. Tomcic completely transforms the crate’s wooden surface with multiple layers of silver holographic patterns, resulting in a shiny reflective surface that reflects the viewer back into the space itself. The function of the crate is turned inside out. One of the most mundane objects of the exclusive globalized high-end art is turned into a hollow, though shimmering, jewel. Its form becomes its content and its lack of purpose its purpose itself.

Standing by itself within the gallery space, Tomcic’s work resembles an almost religiously ethereal experience. When being confronted with the crate the associations can range from the Kaaba in Mecca to the monolith in Stanley Kubrik’s 2001. Its mundane character becomes its seduction which again becomes its own alienation; one of the most common signifiers of high-end art becomes a symbol for the deepening ruptures felt within the different parts of the creative community.

In 2009, the artists Ambra Pittoni and Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano, working under the Synonym Ze Coeupel, created the performance entitled S.A.V.E.. Functioning as a self-proclaimed ‘investigation agency’, S.A.V.E. takes residence at EXILE for the duration of the exhibition 2012.

Taking place from 3 to 6 PM during gallery opening hours artists living and working in Berlin are invited to report in S.A.V.E. office inside the gallery to take part in the Census.

Each participant’s questionnaire helps to investigates further into the current state of the artistic community in Berlin. The collected data is turned into an accessible archive as well as into demographic mapping visuals. The results of the census will be constantly updated and visible in the S.A.V.E. office inside the gallery.

With the exhibition’s title, simultaneously apocalyptic yet mundane, EXILE wants to engage itself, as a commercially operating gallery, into the discussion and provide a platform upon which everyone is invited to participate.

The Speaker

Posted on by Regina Regina

this process is really cool
elevator wooden construction
with african tropical decoration
waiting-room-saloon
paintings, the voice
an atmospheric novel
like the never-ending
happy conceptual work
DONT PANIC!!

The Speaker: A Room installation centered around a 72-minute atmospheric novel played on speakers; room consists of one pink wallpapered wall, one brown colored wall, yellow ceiling lights, custom-made pillows using tropical patterns and select oil on canvas paintings of various sizes. Dimensions variable, 2012

TM Davy

Posted on by Regina Regina

Born 1980 in New York, NY.

Lives and works in New York.

tmdavy.com

Like An Intruder

Posted on by Regina Regina

THESE ARE CIRCUMSTANCES STOP MORNING JANUARY TENTH TWO THOUSAND ELEVEN JO-EY TANG SNEAKED INTO CONSTRUCTION SITE OF EXILE ON KOEPENICKER STR BEFORE CEMENT TRUCK ARRIVAL ATTEMPTING TO BRACKET LIFE SPAN OF GALLERY STOP TWO SPANISH SILVER DOLLARS SEVENTEEN SEVENTY-TWO TO EIGHTY-THREE DURING REIGN OF KING CHARLES THIRD RECOVERED FROM CARIBBEAN SHIPWRECK BURIED UNDERNEATH CEMENT FLOOR STOP COINS AND SOUND OF IMPACT AS PERPETUAL SHADOW FOR EXHIBITION STOP EXILE ON KOEPENICKER PERMANENTLY CLOSED REMAINS EMPTY INACCESSIBLE STOP EXILE RELOCATES SKALITZER STR STOP JOURNEY OF CIRCULATION BEGINS AND ENDS WITH THOUGHT OF NON-IDENTICAL VOIDS

Summer Camp III

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is once again excited to present the annual group exhibition Summer Camp. In response to an Open Call on the website and on facebook EXILE received an impressive amount of applications this year.

Characteristic for all selected works is their very strong and independent artistic language. In the resulting exhibition, these works are not held together by a curatorial theme but communicate with each other via their creative language and distinct identity.

Participating Artists: Aggtelek, Artie Vierkant, Benjamin A. Huseby and Lars Laumann, Bonnie Begusch, David Muth, Delusional Downtown Divas, Monika Paulina Jagoda, Murray Dwertman, Sabina Maria van der Linden and Sonja Engelhardt

→ zitty

Ubercunt. Selections from The Liz Taylor Series & Other Works

Posted on by Regina Regina

“Am I dead” was Kathe Burkhart’s first response on facebook to the recent death of Elizabeth Taylor, who for over 30 years has been the central figure of her extensive signature project The Liz Taylor Series.

EXILE is very excited to host the first solo presentation of Kathe Burkhart in Berlin. The exhibition, entitled Ubercunt, is the first posthumous show following Taylor’s recent death and features selections from her seminal series paired with videos and other works that give an insight into the dense web of Burkhart’s artistic dialogue.

Her artistic practice is best described in a text by Lia Gangitano on Burkhart’s solo exhibition at P.S.1/MoMA in New York: “Working since the early 1980s, Burkhart has consistently and frankly engaged gender roles, sexuality, celebrity, performativity, and language in an interdisciplinary practice. Her Liz Taylor Series uses Pop Art imagery and assemblage to critique representation and the sexual politics of identity. Images of Liz Taylor overlaid with profanities provide a platform in which Burkhart addresses feminist resistance, female dominance and sexual power.”

Kathe Burkhart is an artist and writer whose work has been widely exhibited including the 1993 Venice Biennale; Stedelijk Museum, The Netherlands; SMAK Museum, Ghent Belgium; Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada; The FlashArt Museum, Trevi, Italy amongst many others. She has show her works in over 30 solo exhibitions among them Participant Inc, Schroeder Romero and Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York and Lumen Travo, Amsterdam. She is the author of three books of fiction and teaches art at New York University. She lives and works in New York and Amsterdam.

Land

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to announce the exhibition project LAND by Andrew Kerton. The exhibition consists of three consecutive parts:

Sept 11 – Oct 02, 2010
Room 01: Video Installation: Who’s Afraid of Red, Green and Blue
Room 02: HQ for the realisation of off-site performance LAND
Location: EXILE

Sat, Sept 18, 2010: 1 pm
LAND Performance (in collaboration with Jessica Wiesner and Fiona James)
Participating Performers: Jeremiah Day, Anna Dwight, Nadia Hebson, Fiona James, Marcus Knupp, Dafna Maimon, Jessica Wiesner
Location: Tempelhof Airfield

Sat, Sept 25, 2010: 7-10 pm
Presentation: Noch einmal mit Gefühlen
Artist’s presentation of new video work, including videos by William S.Burroughs, Jim Henson and Charles Atlas
Location: EXILE

Andrew Kerton, born 1981, graduated with a BA in Sculpture from Brighton University in 2003 and attended de Ateliers in Amsterdam in 2004/5. He is a founding member of Keren Cytter’s touring dance company D.I.E Now (Dance International Europe Now) who have appeared at Tate Modern, London; The Kitchen, NY and Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin.

Kerton’s work is based in video and live performance and he is currently based in Berlin.

33 115 68

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present this year’s first group exhibition entitled 33 115 68. The show’s title, a secret code for a different title, and the selection of artworks are based on the question of how much we really have to know in order to approach and decipher a piece of art.

In the context of Art even a hidden or disappearing quality can be the source of an artwork’s power and presence. As such, the incomplete is an essential category which encourages the viewer to search for and define what is in his/her interpretation the complete experience. Any seemingly clear and easily understood approach becomes questionable, as only a fragment of the whole meaning can be inferred.

Even if the aesthetic object is a persistent thing, we are dealing in aesthetic intuition instead of a static condition. Of greatest importance is how an artwork appears and speaks to us.

Participating Artists: Carola Deye, Haris Epaminonda, Nschotschi Haslinger, Adrian Hermanides, Katharina Marszewski, Stefanie Popp.

Berlin Off/On Wall & Former East/Former West

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In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall EXILE presents two projects focusing on the ramifications of the physical and emotional divisions between East and West created by the Berlin Wall.

Speck’s installation project Berlin Off/On Wall consists of a video, photographs and documents spanning more than 30 years. The video, filmed in 1978, shows a protest/performance by Berlin Painter Per Lüke in collaboration with video artist Wieland Speck. In the video we see a man climbing onto the Wall and play the harp while being watched by security forces and spectators from both sides of the concrete divide. Decades later, Speck discovered photographs of said performance taken by Eastern border security forces in the archives of the former East German Staatssicherheit (Stasi). An extensive Stasi file, poetically entitled The Harp Player, was created in the aftermath of the protest/performance.

The exhibition now presents the video, photos and documents together for the very first time. In this seemingly distant past everyone seemed obsessed with watching one another. Today, Berlin Off/On Wall acts as an absurd testament to a scary, alienated past. The physicality of the Wall as an epitome of Cold War politics makes the conflict overt; both sides have no other choice than to watch one another through their circumscribed lens.

Consisting of hundreds of street interviews done in Berlin two years after the Reunification, Former East/Former West is a vital, surprisingly open, and at times disturbing documentary about what it meant to be German at that particular moment in history. For forty-five years, residents of the divided city lived radically different lives, both in terms of ideology and everyday experience. Silver questions the very notion of a shared language, focusing on changing definitions of words for political and economic systems – democracy, freedom, capitalism, socialism – as well as words used to describe nations and identity – nationality, Germany, history, foreigners, home.

In Silver’s 1994 project, Former East/Former West, the Berlin Wall has become an internalized psychological divide between the residents of the former East and West based on fundamental misconceptions, stereotypes, hopes and fears.
The juxtaposition of both projects commemorates the fundamental complexity of the transformation of a concrete external reality to an internalized mindset that is still relevant today.

→Artforum Review by Travis Jeppesen

→Flash Art Review by Laura Schleussner

 

 

 

Jack Smith in Cologne, 1974 & 2018

Posted on by Regina Regina

At ≈5 in Cologne, EXILE is proud to present works by New York-based artist Gwenn Thomas. The exhibition, entitled Jack Smith in Cologne, 1974 & 2018, is located inside two publicly accessible vitrines within the underground station of Ebertplatz.

The exhibition combines two distinctly different times and modes of artistic production for the artist. Two recent sculptural objects refer to the artist’s ongoing interest in modernist shapes and legacies was well as material membranes and optical transparencies. These works do not directly refer, but associate to the photographic process of light passing through a particular defined space and object to create impact.

With photography being a core medium and interest for the artist, Thomas became a regular contributor in the 1970s to the legendary NY-based art publication Avalanche. The two exhibited photos show the artist Jack Smith during his performance in Cologne Zoo in 1974. The extended series of over 50 photographs was photographed by Thomas for a feature in issue 10, Dec 1974 of Avalanche where they appeared collaged into a story-board entitled A Thousand and One Irrational Jingoleanisms of Lucky Landlord Paradise. Cologne Museum Festival of Fear, 1974.

It is the first time that these photographs are shown in Cologne. The complete set of photographs is now also in the collection of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

→Gwenn Thomas artist link

→≈5

→Avalanche Index

Wall Drawing 815: Thirty points connected to one another

Posted on by Regina Regina

As part of the solo exhibition String and Thread by Kazuko Miyamoto, EXILE is very honored to present Wall Drawing 815 by artist Sol LeWitt. This particular Wall Drawing was originally created by LeWitt in 1997 and has not been executed since its original drawing:

Sol LeWitt: Wall Drawing 815: Thirty points connected to one another
Common 2” nails, cotton masonline
First drawn by: Anders Hagman, Barbara O’brien and Rose Olson
Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA, USA, March, 1997

For a long time, Kazuko Miyamoto and Sol LeWitt had their studio in the same building at 117 Hester Street, New York where they originally met in 1968. Since then they have shared a great personal friendship and artistic affinity.

In honor of LeWitt’s recent passing, Miyamoto will reconstruct Wall Drawing 815 as part of her first solo exhibition at EXILE. As she has collaborated with and worked for LeWitt for many past decades Miyamoto holds an exceptionally deep and complex knowledge of the LeWitt’s work and method.

Wall Drawing 815 was originally shown at Miyamoto’s own artist-run space called Gallery OneTwentyEight, though with white string on black wall. Miyamoto has chosen Wall Drawing 815 as it is the only Wall Drawing by LeWitt that only consists of string and nails; materials that are particularly relevant to her artistic process.

Now, the second rendering of Wall Drawing 815 is on view at Exile as part of Miyamoto’s exhibition until May 23, 2009:

Sol LeWitt: Wall Drawing 815: Thirty points connected to one another
Nails, cotton Masonline, 540 x 300 x 4cm
Second drawn by Kazuko and Eizan Miyamoto, EXILE, April 2009

→Conceptual Tendencies 1960s to Today II (Body, Space, Volume), Daimler Contemporary Berlin, Apr 19 – Sep 22, 2013 (cat.)

String and Thread

Posted on by Regina Regina

Kazuko Miyamoto (born 1942) left Japan for New York in 1964. In 1969, she met the artist Sol LeWitt, with whom she engaged in a life-long creative and conceptual dialogue. The exhibition String and Thread begins with a particular period in the 1970’s when Miyamoto created a series of ephemeral constructions using only nails and string. Based on existing conceptual drawings and vintage photographs Miyamoto will re-create and re-interpret two of these String pieces specifically for this exhibition.

Central to her work has always been the notion of the line as a link between two points. In Miyamoto’s artistic career this line has evolved from being part of a geometric grid towards a more organically shaped object. In recent years Miyamoto explored elements of dance and performance based on ideas of improvisational music. String And Thread will show Miyamoto’s creative process through the decades and, with the inclusion of Wall Drawing 815, pay tribute and homage to Sol LeWitt.

In 1972 Miyamoto became a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, founded in 1972 as the first artist-run, not-for-profit gallery for women artists in the world. Here, she worked and exhibited together with artists such as Nancy Spero and Ana Mendieta. In close work relationship with Sol LeWitt Miyamoto fabricated many of his sculptures in the past 39 years. In 1986 she established gallery onetwentyeight, the Lower East Side’s longest continuously running alternative art space.

Miyamoto has participated in countless national and international exhibitions in the past 40 years. To name a few: 55 Mercer Gallery, New York; Marilena Bonomo Gallery, Italy; Lodz Biennale, Poland; Neue Galerie Linz, Austria and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. In 2007 Miyamoto was selected for the Artist in Residence Program at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria. Her work is included in a wide selection of important public and private collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York and The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

Starting on March 30th Miyamoto will use EXILE to create an installation of re-created and new works that will open to the public on April 18th. Many works in the exhibition have not been shown in public since their original construction.

Straight To Hell

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Straight To Hell (a.k.a. The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts) is a living legend. Conceived and founded by cult writer Boyd McDonald in the early 1970s, it quickly gained a large following and underground notoriety due to a combination of graphic sexual content, radical politics and stinging wit. The unique concept of Straight To Hell remains unchanged until today: via a New York City P.O. Box, readers are invited to send their accounts of true sexual experiences to the editor.

Over the decades Straight To Hell has become an infamously comprehensive and uncensored library of homosexual practice and identity. The resulting series is a uniquely democratic and powerful collection of bizarre, funny, scary, and raunchy stories documenting the real and often embarrassing sex lives of a wide range of men – detailing a continuous chronology spanning nearly a century.

Exile is honored to inaugurate its new space with an exhibition curated by current editor Billy Miller. The exhibition Straight To Hell presents an eclectic, and in some cases never before seen, selection of vintage and contemporary materials from the archives of Straight To Hell and the personal collection of Billy Miller.

This particular exhibit is specifically not intended to be a historical overview over the complete story of the magazine, but rather a sample of the range of material featured on its pages. Along with an exhibit of photography from Straight to Hell contributors, the show includes rare editions and ephemera – plus samples from edited anthologies, which will be made available for research during opening hours. Exile will also present a very special limited-edition artwork in honor of the occasion.

Participating Artists: Adam Kozik, Al Baltrop, Bob Mizer (A.M.G.), Brian Brennan (Latino Fan Club), Bruce La Bruce, Dan Acton, Darren Ankenbauer (Handbook Magazine), David Hurles (Old Reliable), Gary Indiana, Jan Wandrag, Janine Gordon, Joe Ovelman, Michael Alago, Michael Economy, Nico Urquiza, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Rick Castro (Antebellum), Scott Hug, Slava Mogutin, Stash Buttinski, Steve LaFreniere, Walt Cessna, Will Munro, Xavier Stentz and others.

 

Additional Events
Sunday, October 19, 2008: 6:00 PM
Twilight of the Lemurs
Short Films from the collection of Billy Miller. including films by Michael Economy, Steve LaFreniere, Kristian Kozul, Tony Feyer and others.

Pier Photographs 1975-1986

Posted on by Regina Regina

Exile is extremely honored to present the very first solo exhibition of Alvin Baltrop’s work in Europe. Alvin Baltrop: Pier Photographs 1975-1986 will present a rare selection of vintage and modern prints.

Alvin Baltrop was born in the Bronx in 1948 and passed away in 2004. From 1975 to 1986 he photographed the crumbling piers and their inhabitants on the west side of Manhattan. He photographed obsessively and created an incredible archive of thousands of photographs that show a captivating mélange of intimacy, decay, violence, creativity and anarchy.

Without ever being nostalgic Baltrop’s photographs portray the end of a legendary era; the architectural destruction of the piers and, even more, the emotional and physical destruction brought by the impact of the AIDS crisis. However, his photographs are so much more than historical documents. His passion and personality are visible in the prints. Each of his photographs offers a well-constructed, intimate, and moving glimpse into this fascinating time and place.

During his lifetime, there was little artistic appreciation of his photography and only in recent years has his work slowly emerged to greater awareness. In February 2008 Artforum Magazine devoted its cover and a comprehensive visual essay to his work accompanied by a text by respected art-critic Douglas Crimp. His work has also recently been shown at the Fotomuseum Winterthur as part of the exhibition Darkside, together with artists such as Bill Jacobson, Nan Goldin, Man Ray among others.

Ad Memoriam

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With great joy EXILE presents its second exhibition project organized by composer, singer and artist Joel Gibb. Specifically timed for the month preoccupied with the birth of Christ Ad memoriam looks ahead and acknowledge our inevitable death and decay.

The project brings together the works of the Canadian artists Joel Gibb and GB Jones, as well as the French-born artists and Berlin residents Christophe Chemin and Gwenaël Rattke. All of their works, some of them made specifically for this project, reference what is likely our greatest obsession and fear: the passage from alive individual to decaying corpse.

Working with distinctly different media, ranging from Jones’s lush graphite pencil drawings and Rattke’s magazine collages to Chemin’s bubble-gum crucifixion scenes and Gibb’s black felt wall tableaus, the artists dissect and contribute to the cult of death.

Ad memoriam transform Exile’s project space into a pop-depressive chapel devoted to the rituals, processions and glorifications of all our inevitable departure.

KAISERIN Magazine: Hors Les Murs

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EXILE presents Hors Les Murs (Outside the walls), organized and curated by Arnaud-Pierre Fourtané and Didier Fitan, editors of KAISERIN Magazine. KAISERIN is an independent bi-annual magazine founded in 2006 that presents the work of renowned and emerging artists, authors, photographers, graphic designers, typographers, illustrators and poets. Hors Les Murs is part of a series of exhibitions by the editors. Previous exhibitions were held at OFR, Paris and Envoy Gallery, New York.

Each KAISERIN issue centers around one specific theme or title. Hors Les Murs celebrates the launch of the fifth issue of KAISERIN: L’Outside. The magazine and the exhibition complement one another with the aim of replacing the walls of a space with the pages of a magazine and vice versa.

Fourtané and Fitan bring together a wide selection of artistic practices that set architectural environments and individual identities in direct contrast. The idea of being outside of your comfort zone, outside of your defined space forms the conceptual basis for their project.

With a special feature L’Outside will pay homage to the work of Al Baltrop and, for the very first time, include two color photographs taken on the Piers. A performance by Santiago Reyes will be a special part of the opening. A limited edition by artist Aleksandar Todorovic is available during the exhibition.

Participating artists in Magazine and exhibition are: Aleksandar Todorovic, Al Baltrop, Ariel Kenig, Arnaud-Pierre Fourtané, Bertrand Le Pluard, Brandon Herman, Cyril Sancereau, Didier Fitan, Éric Stephany, Gio Black Peter, Grant Willing, Guillaume Greff, James J. Williams III, Jared Buckhiester, Joseph Earlwyn Covington, Liesbeth de Fossé, Nicklas Hultman, Santiago Reyes, Slava Mogutin, Vier5

Psychometry

Posted on by Regina Regina

Psy·chom·e·try: (sī-ˈkä-mə-trē), Function: noun, Date: circa 1842
The divination of facts concerning an object or its owner through contact with or proximity to the object. (http://www.merriam-webster.com)

As part of the 59th Berlinale International Film Festival, Forum Expanded, EXILE is very proud to present Psychometry organized and curated by Berlin-based Artist D-L Alvarez.

In 1972 an Eastern Airlines L-1011 aircraft crashed into the alligator infested Florida Everglades, and of the 176 people on board there were only seventy-three lucky survivors. In 1975 the movie The Ghost of flight 401 revisited the tragic event and turned it into a low-budget made-for-television spectacle.

In 2007 D-L Alvarez found the movie on Youtube: “It was broken into ten parts, in low resolution and degenerated. Time wasn’t kind to it, but neither was its original budget. Its central premise is that the dead pilot, played stoically by Ernest Borgnine, is a guilt-ridden ghost. After the scattered pieces of the plane were gathered its salvageable parts were re-used in other airplanes, and Ernest re-appears on those flights warning of potential dangers.”

The central premise of the exhibition Psychometry is that the remains of this film have been distributed amongst a group of artists. Alvarez asked a talented cast of creative individuals to salvage the wreckage as the basis for their artworks. The actual Ghost of flight 401 is now embedded in the artists’ sculptures, videos, Super 8mm films, photographs, installations, writings, performances, sound works and computer graphics.When presenting these re-used parts in one program the original film becomes re-assembled, a sort of Frankenstein remake, and the Ghost of flight 401, though slightly tattered, arises from the wreckage.

Participating Artists: Adrian Hermanides, Alexandre Estrela, Animal Charm, Anne McGuire, Aykan Safoğlu, Benjamin Alexander Huseby, Brenna Murphy, Craig Goodman, Jack Falanga, Jennifer Locke, Kim Brauer, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Mike Kitchell, Nao Bustamante, Patty Chang, Philip Marshall, Stanley Lieber, Stephen Beachy and Wayne Smith

 

Additional Events

Sunday, March 01, 2009: 6:00 PM
Introduction to Disaster: A short lecture with long examples
A cinemtaic walk by Psychometry Curator and Mastermind, D-L Alvarez, through the Highs and Lows of the Disaster Film Genre.

Sunday, March 08, 2009: 6:00 PM
Anne McGuire: Poseidon. The Unsinking of my Ship. 117 min, 2006.
Anne McGuire’s film restructures another Seventies’ ‘disaster flick’ with Ernest Borgnine, The Poseidon Adventure. Her story starts with the ending and ends at the beginning, sending our heroes deeper and deeper away from the rescue they so desperately fight for, bringing the dead back to life, and eventually reversing the tidal wave that threw them into each other’s unlikely company. The action moves forward, but the film is edited in a backtracking sequence that creates a new narrative without otherwise altering the footage.

Butterfly

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is proud to present his first Berlin-made large-scale outdoor sculpture entitled Butterfly. The poetic title, color and shape of the sculpture are juxtaposed with the extreme weight of the material resulting in an almost weightless abstraction.

The work of Howard McCalebb, born in 1947, is deeply embedded in studies of geometric form and order that he then transfers into drawings as well as small wooden and large–scale metal sculptures. His works are the result of an extensive visual research into one of mankind’s most fundamental aesthetic principles: the Golden Ratio (Goldener Schnitt).

Howard McCalebb graduated from Cornell University in 1972. He recently located from New York to Berlin where he runs the gallery and artist residency Dada Post in an old factory in Berlin/Wedding. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Solo exhibitions include Kulturfabrikken in Copenhagen, Denmark and Momenta Art, NY. His large-scale outdoor sculptures have been exhibited in countries such as Norway, Bulgaria and China.

Noisy Bottom

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present a solo exhibition by American artist Tom Holmes entitled Noisy Bottom.

Tom Holmes, born in 1975, works with a large variety of mediums ranging from music to photographs, sculptures and installations. His approach rejects clear definition, questions aesthetic principles and the politics of the overall possibility of artistic meaning. Taking the compositional problems of abstraction as a beginning his works harbor a strong uncertainty and disbelief in notions of aesthetics and representation.

Tom Holmes graduated from UCLA in 2002. He lives and works in New York. His works have been widely exhibited in private galleries and public institutions such as Apex Art, NY; the Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden; the Whitney Museum at Altria, NY and the Corcoran Museum, Washington DC.

 

Summer Camp

Posted on by Regina Regina

During the months of July and August EXILE presents its first annual Summer Camp. Artists were invited through an open call to submit their ideas. Each of the two-week long Summer Camps will show a wide variety of artists from 4 continents whose work will be presented during a mid-term Opening Event that will also include performances, installations, music and BBQs. SummerCamp is a raw and spontaneous field of artistic interaction, experimentation, intervention and production. Its core aim is to foster a communicative practice between the selected international group of artists and producers coming to Berlin from four continents.

Each Summer Camp is divided into two sections. The first week is for the artists to use Exile’s floor space to create new works, collaborate, exchange, make contacts and explore Berlin. This one-week work-in-progress period concludes in a mid-term Opening Event that features the presentation of the artists’ works as well as special performances, music and gourmet BBQs from New York chefs.

Following the Opening Event each presentation will be up for only one week before the participants of the following Summer Camp will take over the space and start from scratch to build their own vision of Summer Camp. Many of the works in each Summer Camp will be created on site in response to the artists’ time spent in Berlin.

The participants have been selected via an Open Call on Facebook and the EXILE website. Each Summer Camp is structured around a group of artists whose work and process have a certain commonality. Summer Camp aims to have a strong focus on creative development, spontaneity and innovation. It is a creative experiment in which the artists work together with a curator to create a unique vision of what SummerCamp 2009 in Berlin will stand for. EXILE will be open during its regular opening hours but visitors are encouraged to stop by at any time to meet the artists and view the work in progress.

Artists: Artboydancing, Cesar Van Pinsett, David Gilbert, Eric Ginsburg,  Georgia Kuhn, Guillaume Greff, Jesse Reed, Jonathan Garnham, Jonathan Solo, Laurent Champoussin, Liesbeth De Fosse, Ole Kloss, Augustus Nazzaro, Charlotte McGowan-Griffin, Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo, Christophe Chemin, Hermes Payrhuber, John Monteith, Jonathan VanDyke, Patrick Giglio, Robert Schatz, Steven Bindernagel, Zachari Logan, Andrea Frey, Anka Dabrowska, Celeste Najt, Christopher Robin Duncan, Diana Gabriela Gavrilas, Jan Wandrag, Jan-Holger Mauss, Jeni Snell, Joseph Akel, Janine Gordon, Fabio De Benedettis, Xander Ferreira & Xavier Stentz

American Trip 1974-1978 & A Series of Human Decisions

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE will open its fall program by presenting two bodies of work, American Trip 1974-1978 and A series of Human Decisions, by American artist Bill Jacobson.The exhibition brings together these two distinctly different photographic perspectives, separated by 30 years of artistic production and life experience, and explores their common grounds.

The first body of work, American Trip 1974-1978, includes some of Jacobson’s very first photographs, taken shortly after turning 17 during cross-country trips, and while attending college in San Francisco and Providence, Rhode Island: “I always had a car and a camera…”

While being clearly influenced by some of the photographic role models of the time, the unique strength of these photographs stems from their curious immediacy. They are not only an exploration into seemingly strange and unfamiliar cultural and social landscapes, but also a young artist’s discovery of his personal and artistic identity. The photographs have a striking intensity and intimacy between observer and subject matter: in that particular moment, both seem on the road to self-discovery, divided only by the lens of the camera. Thirty years later, while giving a glimpse into an almost mythologized era of American photography, these photographs still speak of the worries, anxieties, and excitements of the small but meaningful moments of life.

Later, between 1990 and 2002, Jacobson became well known for a body of work that negates the clarity of photographic vision in favor of an immateriality of light and form. His photographs became increasingly ethereal, haunting, and momentary. In 2002, Jacobson returned to the sharp-focus image with A Series of Human Decisions. He began to photograph a variety of interior and exterior scenes ranging from art students’ studios to details of therapists’ practices.

Characteristic for these photographs is Jacobson’s analytical, at times funny, but always poignant approach. Remarkably, in all of these quite formal photographs the human figure, while ever present, is itself absent. A Series of Human Decisions results in a poetic observation of life as a collection of small, intricate and distinct situations.

When viewed together, both bodies of work, American Trip 1974-1978 and A Series of Human Decisions, while distinctly different, have the same seemingly simple question and curiosity at their core. In both, Jacobson searches for ‘the little things’: life’s often overlooked minute details and moments. Spanning over 30 years of artistic work, the two bodies of work show Jacobson’s passionate investigation into nothing less than who, what and where we are.

Jack Smith in Cologne, 1974

Posted on by Regina Regina

The exhibition Jack Smith in Cologne, 1974 brings together photographs by Gwenn Thomas and a film by Birgit Hein, both documenting a performance by Jack Smith in the Cologne Zoo as part of Projekt 74 organized by Kunsthalle Köln.

Jack Smith (1932-1989), while often under-recognized, is clearly one of the most influential artists of American postwar Art. He was arguably the inventor of an aesthetics which came to be known as ‘camp’ and ‘trash’, using no-budget means of production to create a visual cosmos heavily influenced by popular film and kitsch culture. Without Smith it is hard to imagine independent cinema, experimental theater and performance art in its current form.

His highly political and critical views disregarded essentially all notions of artistic production while his affinity for popular culture and his ability to transform the every day into art lead the way to what was later labeled Pop Art. Smith’s artistic practice was a major influence on filmmakers and artists such as David Lynch, John Waters, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Anderson and Andy Warhol who describes Smith as “the only person I would ever copy.”

In 1974, Birgit Hein produced a feature on Smith for the influential TV program Kino 74 on German TV Station WDR. Thomas went to Cologne to document Smith’s performance for the New York-based avant-garde magazine Avalanche.

Hein’s and Thomas’ works show a costumed Smith and reveal the artist in a comical yet serious project critical of the implications of national boundaries, landlords and the concept of rent. Thomas’ black and white photographs are organized as a cinematic sequence and give a intricate insight into Jack Smith’s work. Hein’s beautifully shot documentary feature introduced Smith to a larger audience well before he was recognized in the United States. Both their powerful documentations stand for themselves as artistic works as much as they offer a unique insight into the work and persona of Jack Smith.

Birgit Hein is a German film director, producer and screenwriter who has made experimental films since the 1960s. Hein has won many prestigious Awards and her films have been screened at festivals worldwide. She lives and works in Berlin.

Thomas’ artworks have been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in the US and abroad. Her work is included in many public and private collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia as well as numerous private collections. She lives and works in New York.

The exhibition is produced in cooperation with LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World from October 28 – November 1, 2009 at Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art and Hebbel Am Ufer Theater in Berlin.

 

Panel Discussion: Sunday, Nov 1, 2009: 1 – 3 pm
Lucky Landlordism of Taboo. Jack Smith in Germany: A panel discussion with Birgit Hein, Petra Korink, Klaus Mettig and Katharina Sieverding. Moderated by Fesival Curator Marc Siegel

 

This project has since been included in the following exhibitions:

Jack Smith: Cologne, 1974. Photographs
by Gwenn Thomas, Film by Birgit Hein
Space Studios, London
Nov 1 – Dec 22, 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, Stanley Brouwn, Allen Ruppersberg, Jack Smith and others)
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo De Castilla y Leon, Leon, Spain
Jun 25 – Jan 08, 2012

Der Zug aus Leipzig

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is excited to present Der Zug aus Leipzig, the degree film of Astrid Proll from the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, released in 1988.

In the mid 1980s the GDR government eased the travel restrictions, mainly for retired GDR citizens, to visit their relatives in West Germany. In Der Zug aus Leipzig Proll and Richarz accompany and interview passengers travelling on board a train crossing into West Germany from the former border station in Büchen to Hamburg Hauptbahnhof.

This film is in German only.

 

Arises

Posted on by Regina Regina

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English ārīsan, from ā-, perfective prefix + rīsan to rise Date: before 12th century 1 : to get up : rise 2 a : to originate from a source b : to come into being or to attention. (source: Merriam-Webster)

The upcoming debut album by Arises, ‘Rave is Over’, is the source for this project. The musician selected fifteen artists to create new artworks inspired by the music. The participating artists come from various countries, backgrounds and contexts and were given a CD containing a selection of six tracks from the upcoming album. The artists were invited to use the music as inspiration for the creation of new works of art in response to the music.

Arises is a musical project written and produced by Katrin Vellrath, a composer for theater, film and documentary scores. The music of Arises can be described as a finessed exaggeration of pop structures, illustrated by brittle synthesizer landscapes and punctuated by concussive guitar and live snare stabs. In her music, Arises considers the visual arts as an essential element of her practice and the exchange with other artists as a source of her inspiration.

Each of the artists’ responses to the music is unique. Some artists chose particular songs, others were inspired by the meaning of the word “arises”, while other artists created works based on an overall mood or atmosphere the music evokes for them.
The exhibition Arises assembles the results of these individual work processes as a collective visual response to the original music. The exhibition will include photography, sculpture, drawing, installation, video and painting.

Participating artists: Özlem Altin, Urania Fasoulidou, Andrea Frey, Krista Figacz, Pia Greschner, Annice Kessler, Antje Majewski, Maja Körner, Nathalee Paolinelli, Laura Piasta, Rebecca Ray, Annika Rixen, Heji Shin, Juliane Solmsdorf, Diana Weis.

For the exhibition’s finissage on January 23, 2010 Arises will perform a live concert with special performance costumes by Melanie Freier.

Tabledance

Posted on by Regina Regina

pas de production, quel malheur!
travailler bien, auch godard hat schon auf dem bau gearbeitet :
vivre sa vie, mais oui- einmal noch anna k. sein.
tanzen trägt zur aufheiterung bei.
product- placement- prétention- pardon! le mur,
notre projection. wohin mit den ebenen?
wie oft wurde diese szene gedreht?
endlich haben wir es :
weiss auf schwarz und bunt darauf.

 

EXILE is pleased to present a collaborative performance and exhibition project by the Berlin-based artists, Nadja Abt (born 1984 in Wiesbaden) and Katharina Marzsewski (born 1980 in Warsaw).

Tabledance consists of a performance and its aftermath. Questions raised by the temporary quality of performance as a fluctuant action embedded in time are at the core of Abt’s and Marszewski’s project. What remains once the performance comes to a finish and the space becomes vacant? How does a performance resonate in space? How can such an experience be communicated past its specific moment in time?

The resulting exhibition tries to liberate performance out of its temporal limitation and aims to reveal how performance creates works and acts that may, even without a trace left behind, nevertheless activate an endless resonance (poetic, political, corporeal) in our relation to them.*

*André Lepecki, Associate Professor in Performance studies at New York University in SATFT Mag, , P.121, 3/4, 2009

Siedlung

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present an exhibition by artist Erik van der Weijde about his recently published monograph entitled Siedlung.

Between 1933 and 1939 many such Siedlungen (settlements) were built with the goal to provide housing to all working-class NSDAP members. This Siedlungpolitik was a powerful propaganda tool to artificially remove people from unemployment, to enforce a sense of unity and to closely control and subsume the individual to the newly constructed Nazi State. The regionally adapted style aimed to provide a certain sense of ‘Heimat’ while their over-arching utilitarian character aimed to promote notions of collective national identity and National-Socialist superiority.

Erik van der Weijde researched and photographed many of these settlements. His book shows them in their current state, often modified and individualized by past and current owners. Regardless, their initial style and agenda is still inherently visible in these houses.

With his book van der Weijde also asks about typology, one of the central issues of aesthetic and conceptual practice, particularly in what is usually labeled as German photography. Van der Weijde’s approach, however, does not follow any stringent rules; rather, it approaches the subject matter in a much more candid, individual way.

Erik van der Weijde, born 1977, is a photographer who regularly self-publishes his photographs in carefully crafted small edition books and zines. His works often focus around themes of architecture. The book Siedlung was published by Roma Publications in 2008. He lives and works in Natal, Brazil.

Es werden jetzt für die, die noch gut sehen Minusbrillen ausgeteilt

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Heiner von Alberti entitled Es werden jetzt für die, die noch gut sehen Minusbrillen ausgeteilt.

Heiner von Alberti works on and with paper. His approach to his material is a unique mixture of conceptual concentration and sensitive lightness. With detective precision he analyses his source material and creates new, partially fictional, partially true, contexts and scenarios.

A found paper-booklet entitled Rainbow of Colors, produced by the American Paper Company Hunt-Bienfang sometime between 1968 and 1973, is the source material for his investigations in this exhibition. Von Alberti found this colored booklet in almost pristine condition and, by exposing each individual sheet to UV light, simulates a fictional passing of time.

Von Alberti’s works blur the line of real and fake, of scientific truth and fictional play and evoke questions of authorship, social utopias and the meaning of history.

Heiner von Alberti, born in 1984, is a student of Thomas Rentmeister at HBK Braunschweig since 2005. He lives and works in Braunschweig and Berlin.

Open Source

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to announce the exhibition Open Source by Anneli Schütz. The exhibition’s title refers in equal parts to a meaning of “source” as a mystical place as well as to the metaphor of a rhizome. In conjunction, both interpretations describe Schütz’s conceptual and artistic approach. In her work she seems to search for a particular character within an object which can be found outside of our physically perceptible world.

The actual term “open source” comes from computer programming. Open-Source-Software is based on a publicly accessible code. Such code is freely available and may be changed according to a user’s needs and ideas. At first sight, this seems to aim to reduce authority and encourage individual freedom. However, through such a participatory act the user feeds information back into the system and adds this newly acquired knowledge to the original source; individual achievement and authorship become subordinate under an anonymous code.

The exhibition’s title refers to such a correlation of power in a social context. With her installation Anneli Schütz creates mystical models that evoke an inherent spirit in each work and asks whether it is possible for individual expression and emancipation to exist within such an Open Source environment.

Anneli Schütz, born 1981, is a recent graduate from HfbK Hamburg, where she studied in the class of Andreas Slominski. She lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin.

Measurement and Division

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is honored to present the first solo-exhibition of British Artist Stuart Brisley in Germany in almost 20 years. Amongst newer works, the exhibition entitled Measurement and Division will feature documentation of four ground-breaking performances, amongst them Brisley‘s performance during Documenta VI, which has never been shown in Germany.

Brisley, born 1933, developed a radical artistic practice that has played a fundamental part in the development of installation and performance art. He has been at the forefront of experimentation and political debate within the visual arts across a wide range of media with an enduring influence on many of the present generation of artists. At the centre of Brisley’s diverse practice lies his exploration of the essential qualities of what it means to be human. He has challenged the human body in physical, psychological and emotional ways, explicitly pointing to extremes and limitations of human endurance as metaphors for social systems, injustice and control.

The exhibition presents film and photographic documentation of four influential performance projects: 10 Days, 12 Days, Survival in Alien Circumstances and Measurement and Division. Three of these durational performance were performed in Germany.

The performance 10 Days happened during Brisley‘s DAAD Artist exchange to Berlin from December 21 to 31, 1973. During this performance Brisley offered the food he would usually consume to his audience, essentially living without any source of food for the whole 10 day duration of the performance.

Brisley performed Survival in Alien Circumstances during Documenta VI in 1977 which will be on view through never before in Germany exhibited vintage photographs. For two weeks, Brisley was digging a hole outside the Fridericianum in Kassel with the aim to live in it. During the digging he came across various fractured objects, human bones and other detritus.

In the performance Measurement and Division Brisley suspends himself in a wooden grid-like structure on the roof of the Hayward Gallery in 1977. This performance gave the exhibition its name as it poignantly condenses Brisley‘s practice and interests.

Amongst photographs, the exhibition will present a new video incorporating previously unseen Super 8 footage, only recently developed after 33 years.

The exhibition continues with the painting Royal Ordure (1996), and the sculpture Bloody House (1992/2010). Both pieces stand for Brisley continuous artistic practice as it evolves for over five decades and refer to the central questions of his work about social conditions and structures.

Stuart Brisley is represented in the collections of the Tate, British Museum, Arts Council of Great Britain, Henry Moore Institute and Leeds Museums & Galleries,  as well as in numerous other public and private collections worldwide. His work will also be included in the upcoming exhibition Goodbye London – Radical Art and Politics in the Seventies from June 26 – August 15, 2010 at NGBK in Berlin.

 

Read Review: Artslant

Read Review: Monopol

Read Review: Exberliner

Read Review: Welt am Sonntag

 

Additional Events

Stuart Brisley in conversation with Andrew Wilson, Curator Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate Gallery, London. EXILE, Jun 26, 4pm

Measurement and Division is made possible with support from the British Council and Cine Plus.

Jeansmangel

Posted on by Regina Regina

During the Cologne/Düsseldorf Gallery Weekend Desaga Gallery will open their space to welcome the artist Carola Deye, chosen by EXILE Berlin, to present her works.

Deye’s exhibition entitled Jeansmangel subversively references her northern German heritage and personal biography. Having grown up on a farm in the countryside Deye grew up with its stagnant traditions, expectations and gender definitions. In her artworks Deye elaborates on these myths and traditions and crafts her own artistic language out of these.

Idea Fix

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present Katharina Marszewski’s first solo exhibition at the gallery entitled Idea Fix.

Katharina Marszewski’s usually multi-part artworks often consist of works on paper in various mediums that are combined with found or created objects. The artist develops subjective arrangements which function as a kind of storyboard for possible meaning and interpretation.

Select Private Works 1942 – 1992

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present Bob Mizer: Select Private Works 1942-1992, featuring a special selection of private photos by American photographer and visual mastermind Bob Mizer, exhibited now for the very first time. This show launches not only Exile’s new location but also an ongoing collaboration with the newly formed Bob Mizer Foundation. Consisting of 26 modern custom Cibachrome prints carefully produced in strictly limited editions from never before seen vintage Kodachrome film positives, the exhibition gives an initial insight into this artist’s extensive personal work and creative process.

Bob Mizer (1922-1992) founded Athletic Model Guild in 1945 as well as the ground-breaking magazine Physique Pictorial in 1951. Vintage and modern prints from Mizer’s AMG studio are cherished, collected, shared, traded, exhibited and published on endless occasions. But this exhibition introduces a Bob Mizer that has hardly been known and never before exhibited until today.

Over the course of his career he continuously pushed social, political and aesthetic boundaries, and his life and art have had a lasting influence on countless artists and filmmakers as well as on visual culture as a whole. Based in Los Angeles, his photography and filmmaking features a vast social spectrum ranging from Hollywood actors and celebrities to homeless hustlers and porn stars. His models included television and film star Glenn Corbett, actor, Warhol-protégé and Calvin Klein-model Joe Dallessandro, as well as bodybuilder, movie star and recent Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger… among many others.

Although he worked in both black & white and color, we focus here exclusively on selected color examples. The work is presented in three distinct groups that loosely follow a biographical timeline to give an insight into the depth and breadth of the artist’s research and artistic vision.

Bob Mizer: Select Private Works 1942-1992 begins with documentary-based photographs from Venice Beach, CA from the mid 1940s and a selection of outdoor portraits taken during his first trip to Europe in 1951. During these years, Mizer created his photographic identity as well as his entrepreneurial voice for AMG and Physique Pictorial.

The exhibition continues by examining the artist’s particular use of color. Mizer began experimenting with color photography as early as the mid 1940s and continued to experiment throughout his career. This took several forms, ranging from fashion-based imagery to formal portraiture. Many of these photographs show a subtle understanding and manipulation of color and lighting effects – all imbued with a characteristic style and underlying symbolism.

The exhibition culminates in a selection of works that illustrate the ways in which Mizer constantly challenged his own visual language. These works show how he developed and appropriated many of today’s known stereotypes of masculine visual representation – and then further shows his incessant obsession to push further and further into and beyond his own stereotypes. These particular images are multi-layered fables of embedded visual coding: an angry-looking Marine who has lost his pants, a Jesus on a fabric-clad cross in a state of excitement, and a fake Native-American standing proudly against airplane jet trails in the LAX flight path.

EXILE is excited to show a side of this unique artist’s work and of our collective cultural history that has hitherto been underrated and unexplored. His vast estate consists of about one million negatives and transparencies, countless reels of 8 and 16 mm films, thousands of BetaMax videotapes, as well as large amounts of personal paraphernalia. This exhibition has been curated by Christian Siekmeier and Billy Miller, in conjunction with Dennis Bell and Christopher Trout from the Mizer Foundation.

Additional Events

Saturday, February 26, 2011, 6-8 pm
Bob Mizer Film Screening

EXILE cordially invites you to a screening of rare short films by American photographer, publisher and filmmaker Bob Mizer, selected by the concurrent exhibition’s curator Billy Miller.
Encouraged by his friend and mentor Dick Fontaine, Mizer began releasing an ongoing series of “one-reel” films in the 1950s for mail-order customers. Over the years, these initial films evolved from b&w silent films to full-color sync-sound films exhibited in select movie houses and then later, to longer and more explicit videos which were widely distributed.
For this special screening, Miller presents a taste of the full range and history of the artist’s filmic output; featuring Joe D’Allesandro’s screen debut amongst others.

 

→Full list of works

→Review: Monopol

→Review: Spex

→Review: Artforum

→Review: Eyemazing

Privat

Posted on by Regina Regina

Die junge Frau im blauen Blazer betritt den Raum. Hinter der Säule sitzt er und poliert seine Brille. Als sie an den Tisch tritt, schaut er hoch und setzt sich die Brille auf.

Er: Oh, du hast dich zurechtgefunden. Das ist gut.

Sie dreht ihren Kopf zur Seite und verfolgt einen Lichtstrahl, der durch das vorhanglose Fenster fällt und den staubigen Raum durchkreuzt. Mit klarer Stimme sagt sie etwas ganz anderes, als sie sich vorher zurechtgelegt hatte. 

Sie: Ich bin schon eine ganze Weile hier, aber das macht nichts. Ich habe mich selbst beschäftigt.

Sie: Ich habe geträumt, dass du mit einem großen Strauß Sommerblumen vor meiner Wohnungstür stehst – mitten in der Nacht. Als ich mich umdrehe, um die Vase mit den Blumen in die Küche zu bringen, rutscht sie mir – warum weiß ich nicht mehr – vor Schreck aus der Hand. Die Blumen liegen zwischen Scherben und Wasser auf dem Boden.

Er holt tief Luft, rührt sich nicht für einen Moment und fragt sie dann mit unterdrückter Stimme.

Er: Warum hasst du Blumen? 

Ihre Stimme überschlägt sich, als sie ihren wie auswendig gelernten Satz herausbringt.

Sie: Ich habe in China sprechen gelernt und mein erstes Wort war Litschi. Litschis und Blumen, die liegen doch nahe beieinander. 

Er: Ich verstehe kein Wort.

Sie schüttelt den Kopf und versucht sich zu entspannen, die Schultern sinken zu lassen. Ihre Hände sind vor Verkrampfung ganz weiß. 

Sie: Ich fühle mich danach, einen Apfel aus dem Garten zu essen, aber das ist unpassend. Es zerstört die Atmosphäre, die keine ist.

Die junge Frau fragt sich, warum nicht alle lügen in ihren Lebensläufen und ob Malen psychotherapeutischen Nutzen für sie hat. Sie beobachtet die dahinschwindenden Abdrücke, die seine schwitzigen Hände auf der dunklen Tischplatte hinterlassen, wenn sie sich bewegen. Die Momente, in denen die Worte sie verlassen, sind ihr wertvoll. Er unterbricht die Stille.

Er: Ich bin hier, um dir zu helfen.

Sie: Ist das dein Job?

Er: Wenn du es so sehen möchtest.  

Er: Deinen CV brauchen wir auch noch.

Sie: Meine Eltern kommen zur Eröffnung.

Er: Was bedeutet das für uns?

Sie: Für dich nichts. Sie bringen eine Kiste Prosecco mit.

Als die Hand des jungen Mannes ans Ende des Tisches greift und den Verschluss der grünen Wasserflasche aufdreht, entspannt sich ihr Körper und ein Lächeln gleitet ihr über die Lippen.

Er: Hast du auch Durst?

Sie denkt nach, während er in der Pose über den Gläsern verharrt.

Sie: Ja, danke.

Er: Bleibst du mit mir hier heute Nacht?

Sie: In diesem Raum kann man nicht schlafen.

ART BERLIN CONTEMPORARY

Posted on by Regina Regina

For Art Berlin Contemporary 2011 EXILE will present a solo presentation of new works by Katharina Marszewski.

Her deliberately casual approach to this year’s abc thematic frame of About Painting results in objects, photographs and heavily worked silk-screen prints that refer to the gestural language historically associated with common perception of the painter and (usually) his painting.

Marszewski puts her own lighter and at times ironical spin on these stereo-typical and, though outdated, still very prominent modes of artistic production. She references Paris, as a the cliche location of the celebrated drunk male turn of the century painter and pairs this with her own heritage. Polish graphics and silk-screen tools become collaged, re-silk-screened, photocopied and obsessively overworked with lacquer until almost a point of non-recognition is achieved.

Katharina Marszewski turns a mirror on painterly obsession itself. She fractures the cliche and re-assembles her own vision out of the remaining shards.

 

 

 

Epithalamium

Posted on by Regina Regina

Epithalamium /ˌɛpɨθəˈleɪmiəm/ (Latin form of Greekɛπιθαλάμιον epithalamion from ɛπί epi “upon,” and θάλαμος thalamos nuptial chamber) refers to a form of poem that is written specifically for the bride on the way to her marital chamber. (Source: Wikipedia)

EXILE is pleased to present the first German solo-exhibition of New York-based Painter TM Davy.The exhibition features a set of paintings, entitled Epithalamium, that were specifically created for this exhibition over the course of the past year.

Through a selection of very private scenes, this particular set of paintings can be at times disarmingly upfront, at others quiet, at others banal. Regardless, they are always distinctly personal and allow a very deep insight into the artist’s life.

When now viewed in public, the paintings demand each viewer’s own reaction to the displayed privacy. At question is the boundary of one’s own understanding and limitations of the private sphere to the revealing openness of the artist’s exposed self. While the artist offers insight into his own life, it is the viewer’s own state of privacy, exposure and voyeurism that becomes central.

TM Davy’s paintings underline and break with the comfortable distance of a viewer to an artwork and, through this, to the artist’s subject matter and personal identity.

Read Review: taz, Oct 19, 2011

Read Review: Berliner Zeitung, Oct 22/23, 2011

Lou

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE enters 2012 with the long-awaited exhibition by Berlin-based artist collective FORT (Alberta Niemann, Anna Jandt and Jenny Kropp). Following the artists’ much discussed room installation The Eye Balled Walls, presented at last year’s LISTE 16 in Basel, this new project is the artists’ first solo presentation at the gallery.

FORT’s exhibition, entitled Lou, takes its name from various children’s tag games. Here a ‘lou’ defines a specific spot in the game where the player is exempt from getting caught by the others. Generally, if you are ‘in the lou’ you are out of reach to your fellow players; you have reached a safe zone, which you must leave again to continue the game.

The exhibition consists of the artists’ first-ever film, which is set in a specific cinema-esque room installation. While filmic references have always been central elements to FORT’s artistic practice, Lou takes this referential framework many steps further and looks at the medium of film and its origins as well as at the way we consume moving images themselves.

Entering Lou…

The viewer finds himself in a dimly lit carpeted room with one-legged stools to be used in any particular position within the space. The film is set on a loop. While it is not playing, a sign that reads the project’s title solely lights the space and soft music is providing the acoustic ambience. In its mood the environment is similar to the relaxed pre-movie atmosphere found in regular movie theaters although the one-legged stools contrast with the comfort and certainty of a regular cinema experience.

The curtain is drawn, the film begins…

The three scenes of Lou take us a to a public pool where swimming becomes an abruptly synchronized and vanishing experience; to the local zoo where we witness an animal fall asleep; and, as the climatic finale, to the local woods where we are invited to jump from a helicopter into a pause.

Within the film, FORT utilizes many classic dramaturgic principles and takes the viewer back to the very origins of film and back to a certain time of wonder and simple cinematic excitement.  In concept and in practice, Lou seems to pay particular homage to the 1895 film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Train arriving at station) by Auguste and Louis Lumière.

Just like the Lumière film, each of the three scenes in FORT’s film also consist solely of one continuous and unedited real-time shot filmed from a static camera position. However here the classic cinematic trajectory from long-shot via medium-shot to close-up has been broken-up into three separate scenes and then reassembled by the artists according to their conceptual and dramaturgic intentions.

FORT’s film takes the viewer into an increasingly slow and magical scenario but also into a space of simplicity, quietness and collective experience. Lou leaves the viewer with all the big filmic questions but simultaneously provides a chance for contemplation and visual rest.

With their film and room installation Lou, FORT makes use of a kind of doubled filmic language. If a film is already a certain escape, then FORT’s film doubles this concept as it sets the escape and the pause, into the center of their project itself.

Lou creates a small moment in which the viewer is given the luxury of a pause.

The curtain closes, Lou continues…

FORT: Lou. Film projection (HD video, 19:15 min) and room installation with electric vertical jalousie in carpeted room containing twenty handmade one-legged stools, artist-made light sign and musical intermission score.

 

Read Review: Modern Painters Magazine

Read Review: Artforum Magazine

Read Review: Monopol Magazine

Stuart Brisley

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE cordially invites you to the second solo exhibition of influential British artist Stuart Brisley. Following his 2010 inaugural gallery exhibition entitled Measurement and Division, which also was Brisley’s first solo exhibition in Germany in over 20 years, his second exhibition now focuses on a rather unexpected perspective of Brisley’s work and will feature a set of four watercolor works created by the artist in 2011-2012.

Upon first view, this untitled yet visually and thematically consistent body of work appears as intricately crafted watercolor on paper paintings of British landscape scenes. Upon closer inspection these works clearly relate and come out of the oevre of Stuart Brisley as they present the viewer with his personal take on the immediate question of the British landscape painting genre and its political foundation.

Brisley looks through the unaccessible landscapes in these works at the inherent political and national agendas embedded within the genre of landscape and especially in regards to the British definition of land through its long tradition within the visual arts. This new body of work operates as a systemic critique of nationalized landscape, hidden within, and contradicting with, its visual sublime.

The four works are titled Jerusalem, Pit, Sink and Shadow. Beginning with Jerusalem, Brisley draws attention to a poem by William Blake with the same title. This poem is sung in England where “there appears to be an unfortunate lack of suitable songs other than the dull slow moving national anthem. Jerusalem stands as a’hopeful’ expression of a bright future (S.Brisley)”.

Though, on the contrary, he understands these landscapes as ruptures of our contemporary belief systems. He quotes Ian Sinclair:  “Our stunned impotence is in the face of financial meltdown, political chicanery and the creeping surveillance society. One should add the cut glass Monarchy where the ruler plays as head of the Church of England, where whose male members` wardrobes are redolent with the fancy dresses of make believe members of the military elites.“

EXILE is excited to present this new body of work by Brisley for the very first time. Within the oevre of Brisley, these works ask us questions in regards to our future and its uncertainties that is increasingly eroding our accepted belief systems.

EXILE simultaneously presents Stuart Brisley at this year’s Art Brussels (April 18-22, 2012) where one of his oldest paintings, Untitled, 1959 will be on view together with select other works.

Fractures of neglect 1973-1981

Posted on by Regina Regina

Florin Maxa’s stages of creative work, tightly correlated in the 70s, can articulate with the same significance an intransigent “discourse on method”. Between 1969-1974, the subject-matter object (the dichotomies formal-informal; structure-matter) becomes a question of the concept (displaying modular structures by means of illusionism; constructivist kinetics) and, later, an even more complex question of anamorphosis (applied graphics on computer). The computer becomes the accurate, impersonal instrument of a new “alchemy” of the image, performed “cold”.
(excerpt from Livia Drăgoi’ interview with Florin Maxa; Steaua magazine No.6, 1975)

 

5006 years of daylight and silent adaptation

Posted on by Regina Regina

Hibernation
is
the
default
metabolic
state
for
some
animals
that
exist
in
this
state
for
the
greater
part
of
the
year
at
times
of
a
metabolic
energy
crisis.

Conversely, up-regulation of metabolism and alertness is a widespread and common survival strategy in response to the availability of energy.

 

The artist would like to thank Palo Fabuš, Hans-Henning Korb, Hannah Levy, Raphaela Vogel and Wolfgang Winter for helping with the exhibition.

Four poor monologues

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In 1982 approximately 1,200 small-scale wire-frame sculptures were found on the street outside a transient home in Philadelphia, USA. Nothing is known about the artist’s identity or motives. The anonymous artist who created these works is assumed to have had access to tools required to bend some of the heavy-gauge wire visible in the sculptures and it is hypothesized that the sculptures were abandoned after their creator’s death. Based on the demographics of the neighborhood in which these works were found it is assumed that the artist might have been African-American.

Nearly all the works consist of tightly wound wire around objects including plastic, packaging, nuts, bolts, newspaper/magazine cutouts, electrical parts, batteries, coins and other items. Some bundles used rubber bands or tape to bind the objects together. Based on limited possible research, the collection has been dated to around 1970-1975. The collected works were given by the art student who found them to Fleisher-Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia which, since then, operates as the guardian of these works.

Aggtelek, Gema Perales and Xandro Valles, pay homage to these works by creating a setting within the gallery that integrates the works of Philadelphia Wireman as part of a stage-like set consisting of various no-value materials; random fragments, partially recycled from previous exhibitions, and various performative objects.

Though the display itself requires an activation through the four monologues written by the artists. These monologues, enacted during the opening, operate somewhere in-between improvisational theater and enacted audience participation, give a variety of different visions/proposals for the exhibition as it could have been developed but in fact wasn’t.

The exhibition is written as a kind of ‘shopping list of impossibility’ to realize an ultimate exhibition format, leaving homeless a bunch of unrealised ideas. Aggtelek <> Philadelphia Wireman becomes an economic drama based on the history of art and contemporary artistic reality.

Monologue 1: Alex Holdridge (Nov 16, 8pm)
Monologue 2: Christin Larkin (Nov 16, 8.30pm)
Monologue 3: Richard Pettifer (Nov 16, 9pm)
Monologue 4: Blan Ryan (Nov 16, 9.30pm)

Click here to read monolgoues (PDF, 541kb)

With this second exhibition in the series Exile continues to pair two artists, each from different artistic backgrounds and generations. As the defining sign “<>” stands for a freshly ignited dialogue between the two artists and their body of work. Rather than a two-person show, these exhibitions are best described as as attempts at creating a collaborative and immersive experience consisting of two equal parts that communicate individually but can further offer new cumulative readings of otherwise separate works.

Kerstin von Gabain

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Born 1979 in Palo Alto, USA, lives and works in Vienna.

→kerstinvongabain.com

[…]

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“Your search – […] – did not match any documents.

Suggestions:

• Try different keywords.”

 

This is the result when typing Stephan Jung’s exhibition title into Google – a surprise, an impossibility: the fatal syntax error of the search engine. Within a quotation “[…]” are referred to as ellipses of an extended quote for the sake of clarity. This abbreviation, when now chosen as the exhibition title, alludes to such a particular edit, that is nevertheless part of the overall story of an artist’s work and biography.

[…] is Stephan Jung’s first solo exhibition in Berlin in over ten years. Jung established himself through his elaborate techno-cratic paintings of the mid 1990s and early 2000s. Amongst others, he developed a series of paintings consisting of monochromatic gradients overlaid with finely-painted blurred colored spheres, while in other works these contours appeared as explosive three-dimensional shapes that seemed as if one was deeply zooming into a Photoshop or early 3D rendering file.

Whilst possibly even more impressive from today’s point of view, these early works appear reminiscent of a particular context and Zeitgeist. His enlarged color-blur-gradients, for example, appear as if retroactively looking straight into the blinding lights of a Berlin nightclub whilst intoxicated: a distant memorial to a merger of body, light, and beat through the surface of a large canvas. “Jung’s paintings are eccentric expressions and are without coercive statement. Stephan Jung’s paintings simulate without symbolism pseudo-realistic spaces, bodies, transparencies, light sources.” (Giti Nourbakhsch in “Stephan Jung”, Galerie Hammelehle und Ahrens, Stuttgart, 1997.

Now, more then a decade later, this positivistic, almost delirious state has given way to a radical and sobering, yet concise, reduction: whilst the elaborately executed painted gradient backgrounds remain, most of the light spheres have all but disappeared in favor of just a single remaining, brightly penetrating, light source that seems to pierce from a distance onto or through the canvas.

This extreme painterly reduction appears to set the viewer in direct relation to the particular light source in each painting itself creating a spatial relationship not unlike looking at a projection screen. Now, the works in […] appear as a kind of inverted analogy to Plato’s cave; it is the viewer that is blinded and becomes the prisoner, though instead of the illusion of varying shadows, he/she is forced to directly stare into a single monotonous light.

When seen as a continuation of his older works, these singular lights also risk to disappear and leave the viewer to nothing but complete emptiness represented through the totality of a grey gradient that seems to annihilate everything and reflect nothing. Set back in context with the impossibility of a google search, the works in […] are in fact either fatal destructions or energetic beginnings, in any respect they are like blind spot mirrors that are left to be filled by each viewer.

Jung’s new works offer the simplicity of a precise moment of reflection without directing the viewer to a particular reading. Regardless, they inherit a shimmer of possibility and it is up to the viewer to reflect upon it.

Stephan Jung, born 1964, studied at Akademie der bildenden Künste Stuttgart with K.R.H. Sonderborg and Joseph Kosuth. He has exhibited extensively in galleries such as Eigen+Art, Berlin and Galerie Philomene Magers, Munich as well as in public institutions such as Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. His last solo exhibition in Berlin was in 2002 at Galerie Eigen+Art. Jung is represented by Hammelehle und Ahrens, Cologne.

The Chamber

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Erik Niedling would like to be buried in Pyramid Mountain, the largest tomb of all time, conceived by writer Ingo Niermann. Therefore a structure at least 200 meters high is chiseled out of a mountain and re-covered with the excavated material after Niedling’s internment, thus restoring it to its original form.

To make this goal a reality, Niedling lived one year as though it were his last. During this time he designed his own burial chamber. Refraining from his previous artistic work as a photographer and archivist of material built, planted, and photographed by others, he wholly dedicated himself to his own life and its relics.

Particular attention was paid to a night in the late 1990s, in which the physical and psychological excesses he experienced with a group of friends in his hometown of Erfurt culminated in Niedling’s decision to become an artist.

Like Niedling’s previous works, Chamber deals with the notion of vanishing—this time, his own disappearance and that of his work. In doing so, Niedling experiences himself not as a victim of evolution, but rather as an “owner” in the Stirnerian sense of the word, one who playfully rehearses his own demise and retains control over his work even after his death.

For the exhibition at EXILE the Chamber cycle is displayed like in a walk-in-closet to stress the transitory character of the work till it is finally becoming part of Pyramid Mountain.

Text by Ingo Niermann

 

Further reading:
Ingo Niermann with Erik Niedling, The Future of Art: A Manual, Sternberg Press, 2011.
Erik Niedling with Ingo Niermann, The Future of Art: A Diary, Sternberg Press, 2012.

 

List of works to be transferred to Niedling’s burial chamber after his death:

Documents
Various artifacts, documents and photos of the artist’s life. Various mediums, dimensions, 1973-2012.
*Documentation of the artist’s life and work to be displayed in 19 glass display cases chronological from birth through to the artist’s last year. Here, displayed enclosed in its crate (Front space) and as black and white print inventory (Back space).

Tribunal of Reconciliation
Active speaker with built-in MP3 player, 3:46 min, sound loop, punching bag, 103.3 x 50 x 300 cm, 2012.
*A speaker aimed at a punching bag playing the collective brain waves (EEG) converted to sound, recorded during a reunion of all those who were friends on the night of December 24, 1998, and participated in the transpiring events. The speaker and punching bag were located at the place the events took place.

Cycle
C-print in a wooden frame, 167 x 125.5 cm, 2012.
*Reproduction of a print from a photograph of a photograph lifted from a newspaper. The picture shows a Harley Davidson motorcycle that Niedling won as a prize at a carnival in 1986. The print has accompanied him ever since and continues to fade more and more with each passing day.

ST37
Steel, goat’s milk, laser, 197.3 x 2.5 cm, 2012.
*The first impetus towards an escalation of the events on the night of December 24, 1998, came from a laser aimed at Niedling’s eyes. He later tried to defend himself with a similar steel rod.

Day
Inkjet on paper in wooden frame, 230 x 180 cm, 2012.
*Area plan mapping events on the night of December 24, 1998.

Chamber
Inkjet on paper in wooden frame, 230 x 180 cm, 2012.
*Construction plan for the Pyramid Mountain concept, which Niedling acquired from Niermann, along with his proposed burial chamber.

Interview I + II
Laser print on paper, 194 and 780 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm each, 2012, divided by a pink sheet of paper.
*Transcript of interviews Niermann conducted with individuals who participated in the events on the night of December 24, 1998 and Transcript of Niermann’s interview with Niedling about his life.

Particles
Soot on glass in wooden frame, 89 x 69 cm, 2012.
*Seven panes coated with soot from burning assorted parts of Niedling’s artistic archive.

Coffin
Zinc, wood, peat, 190 x 45 x 50 cm, 2012.
*Receptacle for Niedling’s corpse in Pyramid Mountain.

Empire of the Sun (in crate)
C-print in a wooden frame, 162.5 x 125.5 cm, 2012.
*Niedling’s last photograph, taken on a supposedly ancient vegetation-covered pyramid in Visoko, Bosnia.

 

 

My safe reduction to form

Posted on by Regina Regina

Who do we try to satisfy?
Trial // Error

Bob Mizer
Bill Walton
Donna Huanca
FORT
Francisco Berna
Howard McCalebb
Jo-ey Tang
Liat Elbling
Marc Bijl
Matteo Giordano
Piotr Łakomy
Xavier Stentz

 

ARTISSIMA, Turin

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EXILE’s booth for Artissima 19 combines just two works by two gallery Artists: Aggtelek and Gwenn Thomas.

The large sculptural work Poéticas del Objeto by Spanish artist duo Aggtelek consists of 14 individual sculptures, each paired with a piece of text and presented on a large pedastal. Through these 14 pairings the artists approach various problems and crises of today’s social, economic as well as artistic situation.

This work by Aggtelek is juxtaposed by a set of two photographs taken by Gwenn Thomas of the performance Delay Delay by Joan Jonas in 1972. Their subtle shift of horizon and action represents a passage of perfomative time, frozen in these two phototgraphs.

Aggtelek’s quite personal though distinctly humorous approach to their situation as artists in Spain becomes a sobering contrast to Gwenn Thomas photographs that offer an almost utopian outlook into a past where artistic production and its commodification appear not as tightly interdependent.

Whitin the otherwise empty booth both works create a dialogue about issues of artist practice and production in the face of an ongoing global financial crisis.

Leak

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Mateusz Sadowski’s works are deliberately hard to pin down. Instead, and by clear artistic intention, they operate via their ambiguity. He avoids literal statements in favor of subtle messages.

His works appear as crossroads that allow for many points of view and approaches from multiple directions, evoking diverse questions while avoiding direct answers: “I think about my works as carefully thought-out psychological tools with a yet undefined use.”

Roaming around a hyper-complex world his artistic practice is often triggered by a sense of boredom and aimlessness. As a result, he isolates minute and random details as the source for his works.

In his film Onetime a monitor becomes the main set and purpose of the film itself. The monitor, now the lone actor in its own film, becomes a sad though funny metaphor reminiscent of early Harold Lloyd or Chaplin films; seemingly making a laconic statement of our obsessive appetite for technological progress.

In his work it ends an almost pictorial image of a forest becomes the elevated artwork embedded in a frame of cheap grey carpet that does the opposite of its purpose by functioning not as a cozy invitation but as a border between viewer and image.

In his new first animation film that gave the exhibition its title, Sadowski constructs pieces of trash found around in his studio and animates them to living creatures roaming and transforming around on a carpeted stage.

In Sadowski’s works we observe inconspicuous actions and activities isolated from the very margin of existence towards some unclear purpose. The artist follows his personal path of associations and meticulously re-arranges selected fragments to his own newly constructed reality.

From Sadowski’s point of view a conceived banality of life is transformed into a dynamic system that isn’t in itself a destructive message but rather an inspiring and humoristic one.

Mateusz Sadowski, b.1984, graduated in 2010 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan in the class of Miroslaw Balka and Wojciech Lazarczyk. He was award the Samsung Art Master Award, the Polish Edition of Henkel Art Award and the Young Poland Scholarship Award by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

Amongst others, Sadowski has shown at the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art and recently completed a solo exhibition at SVIT Praha. He is represented by Galeria Stereo in Poznan.

Live End Dream No

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EXILE is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by artist Kazuko Miyamoto in the gallery. The exhibition is titled Live End Dream No after a 1975 drawing by Miyamoto and features recent recoveries from the archive of Miyamoto, including four exceptional paintings by the artist that have survived the time since creation in the attic of her small cottage in upstate New York.

This exhibitions further explores the magnitude and depth of Miyamoto’s artistic practice that juxtaposes minimal tactics with a very personal and individual handling of minimalist constraints.

 

Configure

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Artie Vierkant’s first solo show at EXILE is a remediation of the art gallery as a site of art production. With the ever increasing speed of the transfer of knowledge, namely via the internet, Configure is in keeping with Vierkant’s continuing interest in the proliferation of images and demonstrates that the facets of the traditional exhibition format must also catch up.

Vierkant establishes his understanding of the online network in generating a trailer for the exhibition. It serves as an analogy for the title of the exhibition, Configure. Within the video sequence, yellow batteries can be seen individually propelled onto a grey grid. The placement of the batteries is random and only determined by the momentum given from the source of their launch. This concept of forming compositions is extended further in Vierkant’s methodology of his works in Configure. By subjecting readymade objects to speed curating, installations develop and are concluded in photographic documentation by the artist, totaling in eight different configurations for the exhibition.

Vierkant orientates his work so that the material importance of the art works diminish and an emphasis is instead made on the visual representations of materials and of the processes used to achieve this. Primarily using Photoshop as the regular manipulator of his images, Vierkant spurs uneasiness the viewer can have in regards to the automatic trust that is placed in images of documentation. As Configure takes place in both the gallery; the real, physical, space, and online: the space of the Internet, the interface, when confronted with both a sinister “cause-effect” confusion is built up for the viewer.

An important element in balancing his compositions is the awareness Vierkant has to the gallery as a backdrop and as negative space. Vierkant always seeks to simultaneously remind us of this and disregard it. The negative space of the gallery is initially needed for the formation of the works. However, once the first stage of documentation has been completed, Vierkant proves to us that these installations no longer live in our reality but as images in a flexible and limitless digital space.

Text by Tanya Karina Pragnell Lopez

Container

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EXILE is pleased to present Container, the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.

In 1972, upon relocating from her studio in 117 Hester Street (Lower East Side, New York) combined with the urgency for personal freedom, Miyamoto developed a body of work that was small, modular and mobile; a reflection, perhaps, of her own nomadic situation. Utilizing this energy for producing artwork, she inevitably left traces of these events on objects that so closely resemble minimalist sculpture, yet adhere to her own particular visual language.

The center piece of the exhibition is the sculptural installation entitled Hatbox, 1975. Hatbox consists of equal volumes of hexagonal (6) and triangular (36) pieces of gold-painted sheetrock that, in its enclosed state, entirely fill the artist-made and painted box measuring 27 x 50 x 50 cm. In its expanded state, the dimensions of the sculpture depend on the installation by the artist or a person chosen by the artist.

With the same gestural method of “doing and undoing” that can be found in many of her works, such as her string constructions, the process of systematization is both composed and subsequently demolished by the artist’s interaction with the work itself.

Container will demonstrate Miyamoto’s playful reinvention of the rules of the minimalist language. In acknowledging the codes that have underlined minimal and conceptual art, she celebrates the spirited nature of chance and the inevitability of imprecision. The materials used keep their organic qualities while simultaneously adopting the familiar expressions of geometry. In doing so, Miyamoto welcomes an open reading and humanness that is so rarely attributed to works of such nature.

Concurrently the launch of Kazuko Miyamoto’s artist monograph will take place during the exhibition opening on April 19, 2013. As the first extensive catalog dedicated to her works, this limited edition publication features previously unpublished photographs and documentation as well as texts written by Marilena Bonomo, Luca Cerizza, Janet Passehl and Lawrence Alloway.

Kazuko Miyamoto will also participate in the exhibition Conceptual Tendencies II at the Daimler Kunstsammlung Berlin from April 18 to September 22, 2013. She will be exhibiting alongside 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.

A special section of the exhibition is devoted to Miyamoto and Sol LeWitt. This section will give an insight into the artists’ creative interactions. Amongst other works a string construction entitled Archway to Cellar by Miyamoto last shown at PS1 in 1978 will be shown alongside LeWitt’s only wall drawing made entirely out of string and nails (WD #815) as well as wall drawing #529 last executed by Miyamoto in her community art space, Gallery Onetwentyeight, in New York in 1987.

CV CE LA VIE

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“Aus dem Facettenreich komme ich her und dies sind meine Produkte”

If there were ever an expression that reflected the current state of the artist in an age where artistic merit is based on the amount of how many residencies, prizes, shows, contacts, works, etc. one can accumulate, it is CV CE LA VIE.
Used more frequently in English, the borrowed French phrase “C’est la vie,” (That’s life) becomes antagonistic in Katharina Marszewski’s own appropriation. Here, her understanding of what it means to be an artist in a period such as ours becomes an existentialist consideration, and thus the momentum for the production of her artwork.

In Marszewski’s earlier works, carefully assembled installations, often utilising a minimal form of glass and steel, are driven by mediums of mechanical reproduction; Xerox copies, silkscreen prints, colour prints, screenprints, ink jet prints, C-type prints, photographic prints, and finally, written print. By transforming the unique into the reproducible, Marszewski is mindful of keeping some sort of signature of the process, whether it be by hand-writing her own word puns in marker pen onto the works, or by including found objects. Now, CV CE LA VIE is an evolution of Marszewski’s practice; a reaction to all the inks and pigments used, a catharsis of her own process and works, she returns to a more gestural technique and thus emphasises: “where is the body in relation to the printed medium?”

On entering the gallery we are confronted with part of a figurative image; female legs in fishnet tights (sans feet) adorn silver-painted canvases (Cabaret 1, 2 and 3). A singular motif previously appearing in the piece I am here and maybe not just theoretically (Indian ink on paper, 2011) the legs have now multiplied. They are neither sexy nor glamorous since they are only scrawled outlines and, having been reduced to only a few painted lines, Marszewski points out the absurdist undertones of the female as symbol, potentially extended to the symbol of the female artist within the professional world.

Evidence of Marszewski’s own body can also be identified within each of the works. Starting with the traditional silk screen, Marszewski pours lacquer over its surface and writes the work’s title Drinking Ink onto it; a threat perhaps, of a physical reaction against the medium but also a visual indication of Marzewski’s first purge of the substance itself; pigment, lacquer and Indian ink drown the paper. Works such as B.N. (red) and Nude (blue)are produced as block coloured prints where Marszewski has again use pigment and ink in excess.

Other bodily cues can be found in Monumental Stairs and Office Work. Whereas in Monumental Stairs where twenty-four maroon and green lacquered papers form the backdrop to a miniscule Polaroid photograph of marble stairs, in Office Workthe stairs are reduced to a jagged line on a pink printed silk-screen. What could be interpreted as a visual pun on the “ladder of success,” the steps allude to the action of climbing; the absent body, distinctly female, climbing the steps, revealing a leg (recallCabaret 1, 2 and 3). A female who could use her sexuality for the gains of her career, the viewer is left to imagine such a character ascending the stairs.

However, ultimately, each work in CV CE LA VIE should be read as part of a total installation. Aligned so that they face the entrance to the gallery, the viewer can walk around and behind the canvases of the Cabaret series; the prints of Drinking Ink,B.N. (red), Monumental Stairs, and Nude (blue) remain unframed. The artist presents to us the real surface of the printed works and allows us to see clearly her Produkte; her works 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.

Text by Tanya Karina Pragnell Lopez

Irregular Readings

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Irregular Readings is an end of (gallery) season and early evening of short readings and vocal actions by artists and writers Travis Jeppesen, Amy Patton with Erik Niedling, Hanne Lippard, Nisaar Ulama, Marcus Knupp, and Tove El.
The evening is hosted by artist Katharina Marszewski whose already de-installed exhibition CV CE LA VIE will have closed just one hour before the beginning of this event.

Travis Jeppesen is a novelist, poet, and art critic based in Berlin and London, where he teaches at the Royal College of Art. His writings on art, literature, and film regularly appear in Artforum, Bookforum, Upon Paper, and Art in America. He is a contributing editor to 3ammagazine.com. Jeppesen’s new novel, The Suiciders, will be published by Semiotext(e)/MIT Press in October. Since it’s summertime, he will read a poem.

Amy Patton reads from the diary of Erik Niedling. The artist would like to be buried in Pyramid Mountain, the largest tomb of all time, conceived by writer Ingo Niermann. To make this goal a reality, Niedling lived one year as though it were his last. The Future of Art: A Diary recounts the joys and horrors of that year. Niedling will further give latest information about the current state, and future plans of Pyramid Mountain.

Hanne Lippard uses language in all its forms in an effort to create an original aesthetic of the word. Nuances of No, the first comprehensive collection of the artist’s text work was published in June by Broken Dimanche Press BDP.
Her contribution to the event reads as follows: Stretched neck, the mouth remains the end point of the spinal column. Spoken word is our tonal brainpower. Spelling remains trivial. Re-composed through the pointed ears of others. Comma. Coma. Karma.

Nisaar Ulama is a philosopher, interested in how societies form themselves through knowledge and images. He will give a short lecture about our actual political paralysis, which, he thinks, is founded by a broken concept of »reality«, an addiction to knowledge, and a collapsing relation between subjectivity and space-time. If there is still time, Ulama will explain how artists and philosophers can solve these problems.

Marcus Knupp offers a form of communication that passes through the membrane of implied meaning and into the meaning of a new meaninglessness. From his vantage point within the media and marketing industry his gaze is cast upon a wide range of cultural sectors, topics and forms of mainstream incorporation.
He will read from one of his new short stories that either deals with the event-culture obsessed lifestyleartworld we find ourselves trapped in or about his recent experiences in some unnamed dark Berlin basement.

Tove El’s performances take their starting point in the situation and environment in which they are to take place. They raise questions about social codes, status, dreams and the struggle to pursue an artistic career.
At Irregular Readings El will sing the song ‘$$$’, a biography of a diva, originally written and performed with the Stockholm-based pop-punk band Balboa.

Gwenn Thomas <> Hanne Lippard

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With the exhibition Hanne Lippard <> Gwenn Thomas EXILE inaugurates a new series of exhibitions that pair two artists, each from different artistic backgrounds and generations. As the defining sign “<>” stands for a newly ignited dialogue between the two artists and their body of work.

Rather than a two-person show, these exhibitions are best described as an attempt to create a collaborative and immersive experience consisting of two equal parts that communicate individually but can further offer new cumulative readings of otherwise separate works.

The cloud touches us at equal length. We are now back to back to back. Equally wet. Wet equally. Back to back to back now are we. Length equal at us touches cloud the ….*

Back to back, bringing together two artists from two different generations and working within two different disciplines within art, the outcome from the collaborative curatorial process between the works of Gwenn Thomas and Hanne Lippard has created an exhibition with a focus on a phenomenological dialogue. Both Thomas and Lippard created their respective works in spite of and in absence of each other, something that perhaps seems paradoxical in a collaborative project but which has allowed each artist’s work to keep their autonomy and offers new cumulative readings of otherwise separate works.

Thomas’ silver-gelatin prints, objects determined as sculptures as well as photographs since they are neither square nor level, hang around the perimeter of the gallery walls. The traditional distinction between frame and the reproduction is removed; the frame is pigmented to correspond with the photograph it contains (in rose pink, green, black, white and silver hues), creating a filmic quality synonymous with images generated at the time of the mid-to late-1980s. The frames do not follow their own dynamic but are subsumed under the authority and shapes within the photographs themselves.

Not only do the content of the shots – window frames, various unidentifiable dilapidated buildings, exterior and interior empty architectural spaces – initiate portholes to the spaces within the images, but the multiplicity of these irregular photographs in the gallery constructs the illusion of actual windows from within the traditional ‘white cube’ container. Thomas plays with this further by omitting glass from the framing of the photographs (glass, as a long established devise where the viewer literally sees themselves reflected on the surface of a photograph) and its absence releases or “opens” the window of the photograph; the position of the viewer is one of safety and perception first: only that of somebody looking out. Thomas absolves the viewer from looking back at themselves.

In contrast, Lippard’s sound installation is a recording of a text-based piece Locus, which is presented in the gallery in the form of a two-channel audio piece on four speakers. The text, written in the first person, integrates rhetoric through being read out by the artist herself. Locus follows the position of a narrator who encounters ‘the other,’ creating a parallel between the perspective of the author and that of her speculation on the perspective of another. This coerces the listener, as an outsider, to situate themselves within this peculiar dynamic amidst the storyteller and the imagined and silent ‘other’.

Lippard immerses the listener even further by placing the speakers on the perimeter of the gallery, ensuring that the recording is heard at all angles, from all four sides of the gallery walls. Midway through the reading Locus then disorientates; what we understand as a linear form of storytelling is reversed: suddenly Lippard is reading backwards, the text slowly encircling and returning back to it’s beginning. A new perspective is introduced, our own position as a listener is awoken and we realize Lippard’s text can be interpreted as an exercise in perception itself. Where we were first outsiders, our philosophical position has now shifted: by the end of the reading we are perhaps ‘the other’ that Lippard perceived all along. Lippard enforces the viewer to become aware of themselves as listeners and engage with the recording with a heightened sense of attention.

Whereas Thomas has created an architecture of windows in the gallery for the viewer to ‘look outwards,’ Lippard has inverted this and has created a sensory environment for the viewer to ‘look inwards.’ A fresh view is brought to collaboration; two works that disjoint our position as viewers and seem to be the antithesis of each other, actually come to enrich and strengthen one another. This demonstrates that two very different artistic outcomes, produced at very different times, essentially have at their core the same sensibility and considerations for the viewer; to enhance and question our sense of lived experience.

Gwenn Thomas is also known for her performance documentation photographs of Jack Smith and Joan Jonas, amongst others, mainly as one of the main photographers for the NY-based Avalanche Magazine. Now, in her second exhibition at the gallery, Thomas is showing select works from the mid to late 1980s. Gwenn Thomas’ artworks have been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in the US and abroad. Her work is included in many public and private collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia as well as numerous private collections. She lives and works in New York.

Hanne Lippard graduated from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 2010. Her most recent exhibitions have been in MeetFactory, Prague, Minibar Art Space, Stockholm, Spike Island, Bristol and Marres, Maastricht. She has most recently performed at Berliner Festpiele, Badische Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, ARCO Madrid 2012, The Showroom, London, and Poesia en Voz, Mexico City. Hanne Lippard lives and works in Berlin.

*Excerpt from: Hanne Lippard: Locus, 2011

Text by Tanya Karina Pragnell Lopez

ARTISSIMA, Turin

Posted on by Regina Regina

Invited by the curatorial team of Artissima’s Back to the Future section, EXILE is pleased to announce the first solo presentation of the work of Kazuko Miyamoto as part of Artissima’s section Back to the Future.

Moving to New York from her native Japan at the age of 22 in 1964, Miyamoto quickly started working within the burgeoning minimalist scene of that time. Whilst closely interacting and observing the Minimalist movement Miyamoto developed her very own distinct artistic practice, a blend of her Japanese heritage and issues in minimalism, as well as her identity as a woman within this masculine dominated scene. Working across all media from painting to drawing, sculpture to video, performance to dance, Miyamoto has created a complex, though sadly underrated and partially unresearched oevre that deserves deeper appreciation and research.

In 1974, Miyamoto became a member of the women’s art collective A.I.R., building a collaborative platform upon which female artists could present their works to the public. Here, she has had her first solo exhibitions and curated various group exhibitions together with artists such as Ana Mendieta and especially Nancy Spero. Later, in 1982, becoming increasingly engaged in a collaborative and immersive practice, she founded Gallery OneTwentyEight, which, until today, operates out of its original location and is the longest artist-run, community art space in New York.

The works on display at Artissima focus on Miyamoto’s minimalist roots and their adaptation within her own unique practice. Issues of overarching structure and order become undermined by individuality, play and chance. As a starting point, the presentation begins with one of her few surviving early paintings Untitled (1972) in which Miyamoto paints an accurate grid upon which she uses spray-paint, a medium that often unstable and hard to control, resulting in a lose disarray of pattern. This painting has recently been on display as part of the exhibition Conceptual Tendencies at the Collection Daimler Contemporary in Berlin.

Her modular sculpture Hatbox (1975) functions as a transportable sculpture that introduces the  tension between order and play into the gallery space. Packed neatly into an hexagonal painted artist-made box, equal amounts of hexagonal and triangular forms made from gold spray-painted parts of sheet rock form a certain kind of game, solely to be played by the artist herself or other individuals authorized by the artist.

Her enlarged photocopy work wittly entitled Stunt (1982), a result of a private performative action in the artist’s studio, shows the artist herself naked doing a shoulder stand in front of an open cube sculpture by the artist Sol LeWitt, for whom she worked since 1968 and shares a life-long friendship and appreciation. This work brings Miyamoto’s practice rather distinctly to a focal point, critically addressing the problem of subordination of an artist’s individuality under a perceived rigid structure. At Artissima, this unique large photocopy piece is presented for the first time to the public since 1988.

Further works on display include a selection of smaller photocopy works that show Miyamoto’s personal examination of minimalist artistic practice in relationship to her own individuality. One of these, the four-part work Untiled (1988), consists of four repetitive photocopies of wooden cut-off pieces placed directly onto a copy machine that can be arranged freely without any given instructions creating open possibilities for interaction and display.

Miyamoto has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, amongst them: John Webber Gallery, Kunsthalle Krems, Marilena Bonomo and Allessandra Bonomo Gallery, 55 Mercer Gallery, Storefront Gallery for Art and Architecture and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. She has held three solo exhibitions at Exile Gallery and has recently exhibited as part of the exhibition Conceptual Tendencies at Daimler Contemporary Collection. For 2014 EXILE is proud to announce that Miyamoto was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Archive grant.

 

Additional event:

Friday, Nov 8, 6:30 pm, location: Artissima: Book Corner

String and Thread: A book launch of the first monograph dedicated to the artist and a slide introduction to the work of Kazuko Miyamoto by art critic and curator Luca Cerizza and gallerist Christian Siekmeier

The recently published monograph on the work of Miyamoto with texts by Luca Cerizza, Lawrence Alloway, Janet Passehl and Marilena Bonomo will be available at the booth and at the Liberia Luxemburg bookstore at Artissisma.

Midisage: Januar in Berlin

Posted on by Regina Regina

On December 25, 2014 all keys to EXILE were handed over to artist Katharina Marszewski without any further notice. The artist was left behind within this suddenly deconditioned gallery space.

This sudden loss of white cube pressure enables Marszewski to occupy the space according to her own set of rules and continue to deepen her process-oriented workflow. The notion of a finite exhibition, as the preconditioned idea of what a gallery space is supposed to be, had vanished.

Instead, the artist is fully taking charge and deciding to use the space as a kind of open-form laboratory for her cross-disciplinary investigations and actions. The artist will migrate into and merge with the gallery space. Her active presence transforms the space into a kind of a three-dimensional version of her collages.

Marszewski will invite friends, artists and thinkers to engage and research potential future expressions, actions, forms and desires. The space becomes a bracket for her process embracing the unfinished, ever fluctuating nature of her artistic work.

Midisage is open by appointment with the artist only. This page functions as its visual progress report.

Welcome to Midisage.

Arabia

Posted on by Regina Regina

Following on from his recent solo exhibition at The Kitchen in New York, EXILE is honored to present the inaugural exhibition of late Swiss-born artist Klaus Lutz (1940 – 2009) at the gallery. The exhibition takes its title and focus from a single work by the artist, and presents the newly restored 16mm film installation, Arabia; most likely the first screening since its initial showing by Lutz in Switzerland around the time of its production in 1991.

Working in close collaboration with the Verein für die Erhaltung des Werks von Klaus Lutz and Rotwand Gallery, it became evident during the preparation for the exhibition that Arabia, which originally consisted of two films entitled Arabia 1 and Arabia 2, intended as a simultaneous double projection combining his iconic circular convex balloon projection with a large-scale wall projection in the background. During the original presentation around 1991 these two films were introduced by Lutz in form of a live performance. As with all of his works, this performance was meticulously planned by Lutz, visible in the detailed flow chart displayed alongside Arabia. Sadly, there is no surviving documentation of the actual performance of Arabia, but it is known that Lutz often used performance as a supporting mode for what can be called ‘live screenings’ of his films.

The work of Klaus Lutz seems to operate introspectively from within his very own distinctly personal universe. Originally trained as a teacher, Lutz begins his career in the early 1970s, creating intricate, small-scale drypoint etchings and copperplate engravings showing meticulous hieroglyphic sign systems invented by the artist or spatial abstractions already reminiscent of filmic sequences. Increasingly passionate about his major influence, the writer Robert Walser, Lutz  continues his work in Switzerland and Italy in the following decade, creating numerous books and accordion folders as well as early filmic treatments.

Beginning with his first short film Graph in 1987, Lutz fully engages with 16mm film, providing him with the means to articulate his unique language in complex, multi-layered and fantastical settings with the artist himself becoming the sole actor in his own films. For these complex yet precise productions, Lutz creates abstract, often rather futuristic and dream-like worlds that in their ambience and magical complexity are reminiscent of early silent films such as Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinett des Dr. Caligari or George Melier’s Le Voyage dans la lune.

The two films, that together form the filmic installation Arabia, are the last films created by Lutz in his native Switzerland before he was awarded a residency in New York in 1993, where he continued to live and work until his death in 2009. Here, in his small East Village apartment on 7th Street, between First Avenue and Avenue A, the artist further explored, invented, created, and produced 16mm films using various technical effects, optical lenses, multiple exposures, hand-made sets, costumes and self-constructed apparatuses. There is a sense that the reclusive, and at times, obsessive, personality of his film production within his small apartment becomes a metaphor for his work.

Klaus Lutz’s films are a condensation of seemingly endless layers of animation, staged performances, and drawings, as well as outdoor scenes, a combination that together presents a continuing and distinct personal expression of creativity whilst giving the viewer insight into the artist’s complex dream-like and magical universe. His films do not only follow their very own individual logic but are a precisely calculated implosion of an obsessively creative, intellectual and technical mind. While being at times hard to comprehend, his dizzying armada of signs, motions, layers, loops and suggestive meanings seems to want to add up to a larger grand scheme, explaining possibly not just his universe but the metaphysical sense of being, per se.

The exhibition functions two-fold: In-between the screenings of Arabia the gallery lights are switched on allowing to view related works as well as to watch Frank Matter’s documentary on Klaus Lutz: The beauty of my island, 33 min, 1999.

Opening: Saturday, Feb 14, 5 – 8 pm
Screenings: 5:30pm, 6:30pm and 7:30pm
Following the final screening an informal talk/Q&A will be held with Frank Matter, Verein für die Erhaltung des Werks von Klaus Lutz, and Sabina Kohler, Rotwand Gallery.

Exhibition: Feb 19 – Mar 14
Screenings: Thu – Sat, 1:30pm, 3pm and 4:30pm, and by appointment.

Kazuko Miyamoto & Florin Maxa

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present the first presentation of works by Romanian-born artist Florin Maxa (born 1943) in New York. His works are set in dialogue with works by Japanese-born, New York-based artist Kazuko Miyamoto (born 1942). While their geographical, cultural and social biographies couldn’t be further apart, their works share an affinity that becomes first introduced through this exhibition.

The works on display, some of them have not been seen publicly since the time of their production, range from 1972 – 1980. Both artists have their roots in minimalist practice but increasingly extended their artistic vision towards a less conceptually-rigid, more free and personal expression.

Music plays a central role for both artists. While Maxa is deeply passionate about classical music, Miyamoto is interested in various kinds of global music ranging from traditional Japanese music to contemporary experimental Jazz. The logics and systems embedded in music, from exactly controlled notations to jam-session spontaneity, have been a source for their explorations and became a central inspiration for their works.

In Florin Maxa’s work, the Hexagon as a central mathematical shape, is the starting point of his exploration. Through his early computer renderings (as early as 1973) to his later distorted canvases, Maxa explores the inherent potential of this quintessential form on paper, on canvas and in objects. The hexagonal source becomes deconstructed and disfigured towards a free anamorphic shape, often in form of double-sided, free-hanging canvases.

Following his recent solo show at EXILE in Berlin, the presentation in New York shows a selection of works that have survived his drastic action in 1981 in which he burnt many of his early works as a sign of personal freedom and protest against communist censorship in Romania following his first, and until today, only solo exhibition in Bucharest in 1980.

Kazuko Miyamoto moved to New York in 1964 and has been deeply involved in the minimalist scene since her initial meeting with Sol Lewitt in 1968. Miyamoto operated mainly within the private realm of her studio, only showing her works to friends and peers, avoiding any artist limelight. As a founding member of A.I.R. women art collective in 1972, Miyamoto developed her practice quietly as an active member, showing in 5 solo exhibitions through A.I.R. up until 1980.

The works in the exhibition are from the 1970s and show her early diversion from stringent minimalist logic towards a more subtle, free, and personal expression. Error, as a positive sign of human individuality and a core aspect of improvisation, have always been central to her work. In one of the few surviving paintings from the period, on view for the first time since 1973, Miyamoto draws her inspiration from the natural pattern of a fern frond. The artist abstracts this pattern onto canvas allowing her hands to follow a minimalist imprecision that would become increasingly important to her work until today.

The exhibition of works of Kazuko Miyamoto’s and Florin Maxa’s want to encourage further investigation into the work of both artists and simultaneously raises questions about the understanding of minimal artistic practice as well as creative exchange across borders during cold-war politics.


→EXILE@ONETWENTYEIGHT
128 Rivington Street, NY 10002
Opening hours: Wed – Sun, 1 – 7 pm
Exhibition opening: Thu, Apr 2, 7 – 9 pm

 

SPARK ART FAIR, Vienna

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is happy to participate in the inaugural edition of Vienna’s Spark Art Fair with Vibrationen und Wurzelzonen, two new bodies of work by Berlin-based artist Nschotschi Haslinger.

Expanding from the magical discourse of previous ceramic series, Vibrationen und Wurzelzonen appear like feverish nightmares in which bones morph into worms, morph into penises, morph into brushes, morph into hoofs, morph into anal beads, morph into shoes, morph into viruses, and back into each other at the very same time – an autonomous, entropic biosphere, that couldn’t care less about common perception or current norm.

These seemingly endless and irregular loops of fleshy anamorphic repetition are collectively floating on the caps of calved icebergs in an evaporated concrete ocean – traveling vessels for an army of new organisms that finally found opportunity to reappear after thousands of years of being suppressed in permafrost. New life forms in pole position to conquer annihilated territories, pioneers of an exciting new era.

There are two distinct species found afloat. Within the evolutionary process Wurzelzonen still rely on the remains of their outdated hosts, turning humanoid flesh into prospering soil. The advanced organisms of Vibratrionen have left any need and reference for the predominant host behind – both are fully autonomous creatures in two distinct development stages.

Not pressed for time, these floating life forms are not at all reminders of an extinction of moral, instead, their infinite patience simply awaits the inevitable. Metaphorically switching channels between a rerun of Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and the latest Netflix documentary about the Anthroposcene, they chillax and watch until extinction of outdated life is eventually complete. Self-reproductive and fiercely independent, – they are a conquering autonomy with plenty of time.

Vibrationen und Wurzelzonen, fever dreams on melting ice caps, introduce a post-human present from the perspective of the happiness of new forms of life that, finally liberated, are ready to take over to create an unimaginable Arcadia.

→www.spark-artfair.com/en

→Nschotschi Haslinger artist link

 

SPARK ART FAIR, Vienna

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is happy to participate in the second edition of Vienna’s Spark Art Fair with a solo presentation of Vienna-based artist Siggi Hofer as part of the section Die vierte Wand, curated by Fiona Liehwehr.

The exhibited ceramic piece Weit und Breit kein Ende (2005) by Vienna-based artist Siggi Hofer depicts a group of almost 50 building structures that, as a city, appear in a state of disintegration. The remaining vertical walls of each building display numerous text fragments that form a surrealist kind of poem that paraphrases on an existentialist as much as absurdist reading of the human condition.

→Spark Art Fair

ART COLOGNE

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to participate for the third time in ART COLOGNE with a presentation of works by Vienna-based artist Kerstin von Gabain (*1979) in dialogue with selected early paintings by German artist Sine Hansen (1942 – 2009).

Working in either painting (Hansen) or object (von Gabain), both artists approach the physical and emotional dimension of the female body through tools, measurements, armour, organs or shelters. The core question of inner and outer self, of exposed shield or inner shelter, or exposed shelter and inner shield, is at once addressed as assertive strength and precious fragility of individual definition.

This dialogue presentation runs concurrently to the introductory solo exhibition of Sine Hansen focusing on paintings and works on paper from 1965-1970 at the gallery in Vienna.

→Sine Hansen artist link

→Kerstin von Gabain artist link

→Kate Brown, artnet, Nov 19, 2021

→Silvie Aigner and Paula Watzl, Parnass, Nov 19, 2021

 

ARTISSIMA, Turin

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to participate for the fourth time in Artissima, Turin presenting, in collaboration with Karsten Schubert Gallery, London, a solo presentation of works from Tess Jaray’s 1988 seminal solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Tess Jaray’s Expressiveness

The paintings and drawings brought together in this presentation mark a retrospect to Tess Jaray’s exhibition “Tess Jaray: Paintings and Drawings from the Eighties” at Serpentine Gallery in late spring of 1988. Within the painter’s six decades long career of sustained artistic achievement, the works from the Serpentine exhibition offer a remarkable insight into the significance of Jaray’s painting, not simply with regard to her personal development, but in relation to the momentous answer the artist put forward to the challenges of modern painting in the 1980s.

In March 1968, twenty years before the Serpentine exhibition, a critic writing for the recently founded Artforum reported to his American audience on the prevalence of “measured formal arrangements of basic lines and shapes in two dimensions” in British contemporary painting. Rather than being read as “achieved,” he provocatively observed, these paintings conveyed the impression of being what he called “determined.”1 By this he meant a somewhat Cavellian opposition, namely that in contrast with their obtrusively expressionist American counterparts, British paintings appeared mechanical, more like the implementation of a deduced and predetermined design, then the result of an expressive process.2

Against this backdrop, it may be less surprising that the charge against British abstract painting was picked up twenty years later by another critic reviewing Tess Jaray’s Serpentine show. “At first [they] seem outmoded, harking back to the hard-edged patterns that were in high fashion twenty years earlier,” he remarked about her works, adding plainly: “The brisk visitor will not see them.”3 This may be Tess Jaray’s plight put straight: All too hastily, she can be sorted with a school of painting that she is undeniably indebted to, but likewise she certainly cannot be reduced to. The critic must have felt that. “At first” is the phrase crucial to his judgment, and if her proximity to a “determined” aesthetic may be regarded as her plight, painting at the limits of preconception may be regarded as Tess Jaray’s historical artistic achievement: To push the notion of “achieved” expression, borne by her process of persistent drawing distillation, to the very inflection point of preconceived geometrical pattern without collapsing the paintings into it. 

At the core of Tess Jaray’s expressiveness lies a remarkable dedication to tare the thin line between pictorial frontality and depth. Kima, Always now (small), Cast, and Still Point, the four paintings in the presentation, distinguish themselves by an intriguing convergence of pictorial aspects that mark a transition from frontality to depth, and vice versa, to an extent that it becomes virtually impossible to ascribe the overall pictorial effect to either. Take, for instance, Cast, where pairs of parallel bars appear quite frontally at the lower right, but rather staggered and foreshortened in the midsection of the painting, as if we were looking upon it from a higher, oblique angle. Or the pattern of Kima, whose tile-like configuration to the left might entice viewers to imagine a horizontal extension into space, whereas the rhombi to the right appear progressively oriented towards the verticality of the canvas edge, hence accentuating a more frontal perception.

Color has a part in this, too. Markedly in Still Point and Always now (small) where the saturation of the hues seems inversely proportional to the spatial indication of the paintings’ compositions. The frontal rectangles have been furnished with less saturated hues, facilitating a “veiled” impression of depth, while the opacity – and with it frontality – increases the further the composition recedes into spatial depth.

Ultimately, since the geometrical compositions don’t form patterns that extend to the edges of the canvases (and potentially beyond), they simultaneously attenuate the possibility of relating them all too readily to the pictures’ margins which would draw attention to the paintings as frontally oriented objects in space. The uniform grounds, however, in which or “on” which Jaray painted the compositions in turn hamper their coordination with a pictorially immanent coherent spatial context. In a brilliant feat of balancing effects of frontality and depth this means, paradoxically, that the “depth floating” compositions nonetheless utilize the paintings’ material edges for creating spatial coherence, hence creating an uneasy, yet intriguing rapport between compositional depth and the frontality of the pictures’ surfaces.  

Through this complex engagement with pictorial form Tess Jaray achieves an expressiveness in painting that even though it doesn’t look immediately subjective in style, ultimately directs us back to the painter in front of the canvas, to her intentions, convictions and preferences.

Back in 1968, Kermit Champa, the critic that had introduced the schematic distinction between “achieved” and “determined” art, also named Tess Jaray, thirty-one at the time, as one of the British artists capable “to break out of the strictures of ‘design.’”4 Clearly, instead of appropriating expressivist tropes of gestural trace, impasto, and the indexical registration of artistic process – poignantly denounced by Hal Foster in his admonitory 1983 essay “The Expressive Fallacy”5 – for Jaray in the eighties this meant to work towards a contemplative expressiveness that breaks out of the strictures of “hard-edged patterns” without succumbing to the self-indulgence of neo-expressionism. If there is something to be learned from her painting it should be that sincere expression needn’t be loud and impetuous, and that good art cannot be measured by the persuasion of a “brisk visitor.”

1 Kermit Champa, “Recent British Painting at the Tate,” in: Artforum, vol. 6, no. 7 (March 1968), pp. 33-37, 34.
2 Cf. Stanley Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in: id., Must we mean what we say? Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1969], 180-212.
3 Brian Sewell, “A talent to confuse,” in: Evening Standard, 19 May 1988.
4 Champa 1968, 35.
5 Cf. Hal Foster, “The Expressive Fallacy,” in: Art in America, vol. 71 (January 1983), 80-83, 137.

Text by David Misteli, 2021

 

Further Information

→Kermit Champa, “Recent British Painting at the Tate,” in: Artforum, vol. 6, no. 7 (March 1968), pp. 33-37

→Brian Sewell, “A talent to confuse,” in: Evening Standard, 19 May 1988. (PDF, 700 kb)

→Serpentine Gallery exhibition

→Tess Jaray artist link

→Silvie Aigner: Starker Auftritt der österreichischen Galerien, Parnass, Nov 9, 2021

DAATA, Miami

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to participate in the Miami edition of Daata Fair with a solo presentation of 20 years of video by Patrick Panetta.

→Patrick Panetta interviewed by Chiara Moioli in Mousse Magazine

→To access Daata Fair please click to register

→Review by Colin Lang for Spike Magazine

Selected works:

CAFE DURBAN, 2020.
Dense layers of sci-fi fantasy graphics, collected by the artist over the years, scramble the screen with the sound of Death-Core band The Overmind. The simple layering of a song and images result in something which feels like an algorithm created by a juvenile eruption based on pre-existing data. An evolving preliminary step analyzing the complex sensory concepts of imagery and music. ‘Language is a Virus’ and ‘Words beget image and image is virus’.
The question is, what happens if the host becomes immune to its illness? What if creativity is just a synonym for “well-employed-strategic-decisions”? It should become clear that the terms of creativity, innovation, ingenuity or originality have been successfully assimilated into commercial and managerial practices, effectively nullifying their role in Art. Panetta’s work addresses artistic practice itself, questioning the act of the creative process, not surrendering to refusal, but to strive for what material could still contain usable potential.

WATCHED AND RECORDED, 2010-2020.
The actual intended idea behind a work of art becomes less and less the subject as the information device places itself in the forefront. Scrolling through the “latest” in the world of art, the websites’ design become almost cinematic, information on artists’ works, gallery, and more – becomes a blown up spectacle. The content of these websites surfaces as a mechanism to focus the viewer’s perception on a hyper-visuality. The experience becomes a flattened dimension suited and limited by the screen, becoming its own artwork. These videos are less produced rather extracted; a denial of the idea of artistic production – even a resignation that there is nothing new that can be produced. What feels like an appropriation of art at the beginning, is nothing more than a homage to the impossibility of a constant reinvention of art itself.

REBLOGGED FROM GOD’S ABACUS, 2007-2012.
In 2001 Patrick Panetta started capturing more or less random and banal material with an amateur digital camera. In the beginning he did so obsessively from mostly analog media sources such as, TV, magazines, photos, videotapes. From 2005 he extended the capturing to the emerging digital platforms. Over the years the practice of collecting hundreds of raw clips without intent, especially without improvement in terms of quality—or even content—became a effective working method for the artist, which can be understood as an adaptive mechanism, constantly filtering its surroundings for every bit of context, image and information, like an programmed Algorithm. From today’s point of view, it was a kind of premonition of what was to come—the over-abundance of recorded banality, the image bank as currency.

FORMAL STRUCTURES, 2004-2015.
Panetta’s retro-constructivist photoshop files are organized in layers and animated by pressing the arrow buttons on the keyboard. A blue triangle moves down, a black square moves towards another black square, a red triangle approaches a black rectangle. Each film’s soundtrack represents what the artist was listening to on the radio while filming. Each film’s outdated programming refers back to a time when Photoshop was at the height of digital manipulation; they seem like ancient digital mantras foreboding current uncertainties such as FaceApp or Deepfakes. The films also raise questions about progress—and lack of progress—within art and technology, while emulating a kind of modern crisis. Formal structures as whole series, somehow reenact the phases of abstract art, from its very beginnings to its never-ending repetition in the digital age.

 

Patrick Fabian Panetta (*1977) lives and works in Berlin. His work focuses on the consumption of imagery and their relation to power structures and socio-cultural hierarchies. Like a future anthropologist, Panetta analyses visual data as coded artefacts and metaphors in and of themselves. With precise analogy and often biting irony Panetta dissects the opulent abundance of imagery prevalent anywhere in contemporary visual culture but specifically within the art industrial complex. He analyses less than he performs a synthesis, rather than questioning it, he uses it as his material.

 

ART GENÈVE

Posted on by Regina Regina

Our presentation for artgenève combines the works of Gwenn Thomas (*1944, lives and works in New York), Kazuko Miyamoto (*1942, lives and works in New York), Nschotschi Haslinger (*1982, lives and works in Berlin) and Paul Sochacki (*1983, lives and works in Berlin). Beginning with the two photographs by Gwenn Thomas, all featured artworks investigate the relevance and importance of inter-individual engagement and co-dependency.

Gwenn Thomas’ photographs were taken in April 1975 at The Kitchen in New York and show experimental dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton and Group performing Contact Improvisation. Beginning in 1972, Paxton developed this practice based on the idea of collectively-experienced physical interconnectivity. Termed Contact Improvisation, this choreographic process pulls elements from martial arts, social dance, sports, and child’s play together to a new form of movement and physical interaction. Upon entering a Contact Improvisation structure, bodies must come together, give weight equally to each other, and create a movement dialog that can last for an undetermined amount of time. Contact Improvisation can be done by any person not just professional dancers because the emergence of a movement vocabulary depends on a specific touch and the initiation of weight exchange with another person. 

A piece of string, as a connector between two points, has been prominent in the work of Kazuko Miyamoto since her earliest string construction pieces in 1972. These iconic strings constructions follow a minimalist logic of drawing, in which each string becomes a spatial line between two points. In her later works this formal approach becomes more freely-adapted and organic, with the artist stating the birth of her son in 1980 as a turning point towards this more fluid and organic practice. Industrial string now turns to rope made from natural materials, often intertwined with other natural materials such as twigs or stones. The shapes no longer follow the logic of a straight line but are free in their individual form, expression and relation to one another. Often these structures take the form of bridges, in which the intertwined, almost woven structure becomes the connector between two points. 

The allegorical paintings of Paul Sochacki poetically describe the status quo as experienced and reflected upon by the artist. Often his works appear as fables or even visual haikus describing in quickly-rendered but at time painfully precise paintings experienced states in our contemporary world: a cat delicately balances in a treetop, seemingly dictating the treetop’s branches; a mythical beast has a heart of fire, yet it’s tail drips water allowing for a small seedling to grow. Entitled Fire department this work could well be an allegory of the urgency for socio-political action, despite the minute results that can be achieved. Finally, today’s sunset finds itself trapped in a cave. Sochacki’s poignant reflections remind quite painfully precise of the situation any individual faces within the alienation of the capital-fuelled anthropocene. 

In Nschtoschi Haslinger’s ceramic installation entitled Unkentreff ten toads gather around a campfire. In various global cultures toads play a specific mythical, medicinal or spiritual role. In biblical times the occurrence of toads raining from the sky was seen as a prophetic prediction, while in medieval times toads were compared to the female womb and often offered as religious sacrifice against infertility. Then again, if rubbed correctly, the cane toad can produce an LSD-like toxin used for psychedelic stimulation. Haslinger references these escapist strategies as analogies for her own production. Beginning with drawings, her ceramics are metaphors for experienced emotional states. The majority of Haslinger’s toads appear laying on their backs, either overdosed or dead pointing to a dystopian time, or a ritual going fatally wrong. 

The ten artworks on the walls surround ten frogs surrounding a campfire. Hung deliberately low, the artworks assume a viewing height of a child, an animal or a participant of a ancient ritual. As in concentric circles around a flaming fire, toads and artworks orbit the ritual’s focal sun present in the camp fire. The booth becomes itself an unanswered prophecy, a processional ritual of interaction. From Contact Improvisation to Contact High – let’s gather together around a campfire and create waves of movement.

 

 

 

ART COLOGNE

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to participate for the first time in Art Cologne with a presentation of works by Katharina Marszewski, born 1980 in Warsaw, Nathalie Du Pasquier, born 1957 in Bordeaux, and Verena Pfisterer, born 1941 in Fulda, died 2013 in Berlin.

The three artists, while from different generations and biographical backgrounds, share a common approach in their artistic practice. Rather then static, each artist’s process can be defined through a state of ongoing flux. Their works are embedded in, and interact with, each artist’s life and often transgress between visual playfulness, everyday life and conceptual practice. The missing stasis becomes the source for open exploration often in-between personal life and artistic processes.

Beginning her career as a founding member of Memphis Design, Du Pasquier turned to painting in 1986 and works in a complex and multi-facetted approach ranging from painting to design to construction and fabric until today. The original drawings on display show various objects, furnitures and patterns designed during the 1980s and are paired with new oil on paper, cut-to-shape drawings entitled Impossible Objects. Du Pasquier will be honored with a comprehensive solo exhibition entitled Big Objects not always silent and curated by Luca Lo Pinto at Kunsthalle Vienna opening in July.

Katharina Marszewski’s work resembles an open-source archive consisting of photographs, silk-screen prints, objects, sculptures and textiles which frequently become re-assembled according to a particular setting or scenario. Following her recent solo exhibition in London, the sculpture and new lacquer screen-prints on display were specifically made for the presentation at Art Cologne. Marszewski is currently part of the group exhibition Contemporary Art from Poland at European Central Bank.

In 1967, after finishing her studies at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Verena Pfisterer moved to Berlin to engage with her works in the political movements of the time. Not unlike other women artists of her generation, Pfisterer expanded her career, studying psychology and working as a therapist. The works displayed at Art Cologne range from select drawings made for objects from the mid 1960s-1970s together with select very rare original objects produced before 1973. Many of these works have not been publically displayed for decades.

Click here to read review in Aesthetica Magazine

Click here to read review in Artspace

Click here to listen to SWR radio review by Simone Reber

New Writing

Posted on by Regina Regina

Travis Jeppesen: New Writing
183 pages, black and white xerox
Hardcover, spiral-bound, 29,7 x 21 cm
Signed, limited edition of 50 copies
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Travis Jeppesen: New Writing, June 2016

50 EUR plus shipping

/**/

 

New Writing

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to invite you to the first solo exhibition of writer and artist Travis Jeppesen in Berlin. Entitled, New Writing, the exhibition oscillates between text as language, as abstraction, as calligraphy, as image, as text. Two-dimensional subtexts reverberate within the gallery space, turning text to image to mirror, offering up a new language for the eye to decode.

Travis Jeppesen is an artist working in the medium of language. His books include novels such as Victims, Wolf at the Door and The Suiciders, poetry amongst them Dicklung & Others, Poems I Wrote While Watching TV, and art criticism such as Disorientations: Art on the Margins of the “Contemporary.”  He is known as the creator of object-oriented writing, a metaphysical form of art writing that attempts to channel the inner lives of objects. His first major object-oriented writing project, 16 Sculptures, was published in book format by Publication Studio, featured in the Whitney Biennial as an audio installation, and was the subject of a solo exhibition at Wilkinson Gallery, London, in 2014. He is a PhD candidate in Critical Writing in Art and Design at the Royal College of Art in London.

Your Long Arm

Posted on by Regina Regina

Exile is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Anna Jandt. Jandt has previously shown at the gallery as a member of the artist collective FORT in the exhibitions The eye-balled walls at LISTE, Basel in 2011 and Lou at EXILE, Berlin in 2012.

 

 

 

 

WHAT’S GONNA HAPPEN
WATER BREAKS
YOUR LONG ARM
PROP
AND ALL THAT CAL
WAS
THE GRAND FINALE

Click here to read review by Gauthier Lesturgie for mouvement.net

Click here to view limited edition artist vinyl record

New Work, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, 1979

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to inaugurate its new location with a special, one night only, screening of previously unseen footage of Kazuko Miyamoto’s 1979 solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery in New York. The two early video reels have only recently been digitized as part of the gallery’s ongoing research into, and archiving of, the work of artist Kazuko Miyamoto.

The exhibition entitled New Work was on view from March 13 – April 4, 1979 at A.I.R. Gallery at 97 Wooster Street in New York’s Soho neighborhood. Miyamoto, who joined the women’s art collective in 1974, showed her works on multiple occasions in solo and group exhibitions at the collectively-operating gallery. The exhibition consisted of four large-scale sculptural interventions named String Constructions by the artist. These works were titled, Black Poppy, Trail Dinosaur, Trail of Illusion, and Mariana, and were accompanied by five String Construction Drawings, which stood in direct relation to the works.

Turning away from painting, Miyamoto began creating her String Constructions in 1972. The earliest, still wall-mounted pieces, were created in her studio at 117 Hester Street (e.g. String along mortar line, 1972 in: Kazuko Miyamoto. Published by Exile, 2013, p. 49). Increasingly, these string constructions evolved to more complex forms (e.g. Untitled, John Weber Gallery, 1975. cat p. 54-55) or adopted elements of weaving (e.g. Egypt, PS1, 1978. cat p. 52). The artist also created few free-standing pieces (e.g. String around cylinder of my height, A.I.R., 1977. cat p. 63) though only one of these works still exists in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan.

From the mid 1970s, Miyamoto’s String Constructions started to extend from the wall into the space itself, resulting in three-dimensional shapes that responded directly to the architectural environment and often allowed for a spatial interaction by the viewer (e.g. Black Poppy, A.I.R., 1979 and Exile, 2009). With their growing complexity and dimension, Miyamoto’s practice became increasingly collaborative, often working with artist, peers, and friends to create these works.

The 1979 exhibition, New Work, marked a turning point for Miyamoto as she again evolved her practice towards new artistic strategies expressed through materials such as cardboard, natural elements (twigs and leaves), and packaging paper. By 1980, following the birth of her son, her work became “more organic and natural” resulting in complex, but still almost always temporal, installations, sculptures and outdoor projects.

All string constructions are based on drawings as their source and begin with nails hammered into a surface; either solely into a wall, or into wall and floor. Two such nails are then connected to each other by industrial cotton string or, less often, by hand-dyed wool. By interlocking with the architectural space none of these works are intended to extend past their exhibition’s life span. They are by definition temporal and stand in direct relation to the artist’s body. In fact, one could argue that body and space are made visible through string and nail.

The two video reels, now shown for the very first time, document the four string constructions on display at the 1979 exhibition, approaching the construction from different angles and fleeting perspectives. The filming was done after hours with a small group of the artist’s friends present within the gallery. Over the course of the filming, this small group of people started to interact spontaneously with the works or is at times specifically directed by Miyamoto. Using mainly a hand-held video camera, the two reels present itself somewhere between documentation and spontaneous participatory happening.

None of the artworks in the exhibition have been seen in public since this 1979 exhibition except the string construction Black Poppy which has been re-installed by Miyamoto at EXILE in 2009. The ink drawing Trail Dinosaur, also visible in the video, was recently shown as part of the exhibition Kazuko Miyamoto <> Florin Maxa: A dialogue at EXILE@ONETWENTYEIGHT in New York.

On two occasions during the exhibition in 1979, the dancer Yoshiko Chuma performed A girl on trail dinosaur, which was also recorded on video.  This reel was also digitized and can be viewed upon request.

Should you have any information on these events please contact the gallery.

On view:
Kazuko Miyamoto: Documentation of A.I.R. exhibition, ½-inch EIAJ open reel video tape transfer to DVD, (Part 1: 23:32 min), 1979
Kazuko Miyamoto: Documentation of A.I.R. exhibition, ½-inch EIAJ open reel video tape transfer to DVD, (Part 2: 31:45 min) 1979

Viewable upon request:
Yoshiko Chuma and Kazuko Miyamoto: A girl on Trail Dinosaur, ½-inch EIAJ open reel video tape transfer to DVD, 27:26 min, 1979

Verena Pfisterer

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the work of artist Verena Pfisterer (1941-2013). The exhibition, curated by Silke Nowak, focuses on drawings and objects from the early and late stages of her artistic career. The selected works, most of which have never before been exhibited, are set in dialogue with each other and form a beginning and an end point from which to approach the work and persona of Verena Pfister.

Already at the early age of 17, Pfisterer joined the Junge Kunstkreis (JuKu), a group of young adults interested in art, which is where she also met her later peer and personal friend Franz Erhard Walther. From 1960 to 1963, Pfisterer studied at Städelschule in Frankfurt before entering Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from where she graduated in 1967. In Düsseldorf, Pfisterer became an active part of the art movement, participated in many exhibitions, happenings, and actions alongside artists such as Jörg Immendorff, Chris Reinecke and Reiner Ruthenbeck. She created experiential room-size environments such as Lichtbrunnen (1965), sculptures, which often contained moving or light elements, staged photographs, fashion drawings for women clothing, and participatory happenings.

Following art school, Pfisterer moved from Düsseldorf to Berlin. Motivated by the student protest and peace movements predominant in Berlin, Pfisterer shifted her focus from the perceived narrow margins of the Düsseldorf art scene to the ideas of social and political change. Here in Berlin, Pfisterer continued her artstic practice while simultaneously becoming deeply involved in socio-political activism. Her works were made to be used, touched, and interacted with as she opposed the limited context art was traditionally presented in.

By expanding the idea of the purpose and role of her art, Pfisterer wanted her art understood as participatory and integrative, aimed at a direct visceral interaction between the art work and the audience. Pfisterer understood her art as an active part embedded in the ideas for social change but never limited her interests to the arts alone. In 1975 she began to study psychology, philosophy and sociology at West Berlin’s Freie Universität and was awarded her doctorate in psychology in 1985.

From the mid 1970s, Pfisterer increasingly retreated from an active involvement in the arts, later becoming a professional therapist and occasional illustrator for magazines, but always continued her artistic practice, though now predominantly in private. Instead of creating actual objects she captured the ideas for such objects in very precise drawings and began to photograph her environment as a means of documenting her specific view. Simultaneously, she worked on various novels and texts and later published the comprehensive book Fotografie und Alltag.

From 2001 to 2004, Pfisterer’s work was revisited in exhibitions organized by Kienzle & Gmeiner Gallery in Berlin as well as in the group exhibition Kurze Karrieren at mumok, Museum of Modern Art, Vienna. These exhibitions motivated her to refocus on her early creative works, and produce large-scale drawings that partially reconnect to her early work while moving it forward into its own visual and conceptual language. Latest, in 2014, her hometown Fulda honored Pfisterer with the, to date, most comprehensive exhibition of her work at the Vonderau Museum.

Taking inspiration from her self-titled, though sadly only posthumously finished, catalogue Die Illusion der Freiheit der Kunst the exhibition pays homage to the multi-facetted, complex dimensions of the artist Verena Pfisterer. Through her very personal melange of academic and artistic interests she created an œvre that, while at all times playfully, often attributes to fairy-tales, christian symbolism, comics, craft, fashion and even kitsch; though her execution is in fact always carefully planned, highly specific and conceptually concise.

From today’s point of view, Pfisterer’s work continues to question the role of art in terms of its ability for social integration, the rapidly vanishing potential of art in the face of its own hyper-commodification, and of its potentially even regressive meaning for social development. The artist has left us with a body of work that, from many different approaches, remains incredibly timely and relevant for the situation of contemporary art and society today.

Selected further reading:

Annika Karpowski: Verena Pfisterer. Exhibition Review, Vonderau Museum, Fulda. in: Frieze d/e. Issue 18. March/April 2015 (external link, English)

Boris Wagner, Judith Schmutzer (Ed): Die Illusion der Freiheit der Kunst: Verena Pfisterer. Books on Demand, Norderstedt, 2014

Franz Erhard Walther: Sternenstaub. Ritter Verlag, Klagenfurt, 2009

Dominikus Müller: Verena Pfisterer in conversation. in: artnet, Mai 23, 2009 (external PDF, German)

Gregor K. Stasch (Ed): Verena Pfisterer – Lebensspuren einer Künstlerin. Michael Imhof Verlag, Fulda, 2014

Sabeth Buchmann und Susanne Leeb: Zufall mit System. Interview with Verena Pfisterer. in: Texte zur Kunst. Issue 44. Dec 2001 (external link, German)

Click here to read review by Astrid Mania for Texte zur Kunst (PDF)

Additional Event:

Saturday, Nov 28, 4 pm: Artist talk with Silke Nowak (exhibition curator, who met the artist in the years prior to her death in 2013), Dominikus Müller (editor frieze d/e, who was the last to interview the artist in 2009 for artnet) and Boris Wagner (Estate of Verena Pfisterer and son of the artist).

 

 

House of Cards

Posted on by Regina Regina

An artist says to a critic says to the gallerist says to Contemporary Art Daily says to the art fair selection commitee which replies to the artist via the gallerist per email: I’ve done what I have to do. Now you do what you have to do. Seduce them, give them your heart. Cut it out and put it in their fucking hands!

 

 

 

ART COLOGNE

Posted on by Regina Regina

For our second participation at ART COLOGNE EXILE is pleased to present artists Erik Niedling, Katharina Marszewski & Pauł Sochacki with further contributions by Anna Jandt, Katja Aufleger, Milch & Steven Warwick.

 

Art Cologne
Hall 11.3 Booth B-017
Messeplatz 1
50679 Köln

artcologne.de

Irregular Readings II

Posted on by Regina Regina

Irregular Readings II is an end of (gallery) season and early evening of short readings and vocal actions by artists and writers Alex Turgeon, Anna Jandt, Elijah Burgher, Hanne Lippard, Kinga Kielczynska, Martin Kohout, Patrick Fabian Panetta, Sabina Maria van der Linden, Steven Warwick, Susanne M. Winterling, and Trevor Lee Larson.
The evening is hosted by artist Nancy Davenport whose exhibition Polaroids will have closed just one hour prior to the first reading.

Alex Turgeon is an artist who’s work operates at the intersection between poetry and sculpture. Through his work nouns evolve into objects while objects become the stuff of nouns. Currently his work explores nihilism as creation theory, gay fascism, masculine drag, greek tragedy, and interstellar space. For his contribution to the evening, he will read from his ongoing work: (love poem) for Ceres.

Anna Jandt I think someone’s in the Egypt room whom I wanted to see bare, if I could take my eyes off that dressed up broom, I should start walking there. The waiting fair across from what looks like a landslide down there. I don’t think I have been.

Elijah Burgher is an artist and occasional writer, recently relocated to Berlin from Chicago. His work examines sexuality, subcultural formation, and the occult. He will present an excerpt from Sperm Cult, a collaborative publication with Richard Hawkins to be published by Bad Dimension Press later this year.

Hanne Lippard A clear, high-pitched sound made by forcing ones breath through a small hole between partly closed lips, or between one’s teeth is used to express indignation, derision, or incredulity, but might also be the result of obstruction in the air passages by which it should not be met with aggression, but rather assistance in removing the obstructive item so that the individual can breathe at its normal pace.

Kinga Kielczynska due to the inevitable time continuum and limited capabilities of writing by hand she was not able to fully follow-transcribe the mind in its original form. she decided not to use capital letters in the text (except for in proper nouns), as lots of sentences in the text are not actual sentences, but phrase note like. hope you will still enjoy some sketched ideas in a form of inspirational, briefly noted thought like signs. the reading will be done in silence.

Martin Kohout will once again meet with Mr. Step and Mr. Weller.

Patrick Fabian Panetta uses structures and mechanisms of the given conditions and action patterns of the exhibition world, the art market, and art production directly as working material. On the occasion of EXILE’S move to New York in late 2014, the artist thieved the closing event’s guest list, compiled during the event by a hired doorkeeper. The list offers, occasionally, a detailed insight into who is invited or present and who is not. A few days later the 10 sheets of paper went back to the gallerist and are now in a glass framed version.

Sabina Maria van der Linden Showing a video and two dresses, reminiscent of Liz Taylor in Boom! (Joseph Losey 1968), made by Birgit Neppl, and remnants of Warm Assessment, 2013, a performance that was initiated by Marie Caroline Hominal, choreographer/performer, as a collaboration with Sabina Maria van der Linden – moving and moaning to the scattered biographical soundtracks Touch and Down, produced in critical times and conducted in the windows of Histoire d’Amour, a bridal wear store in Normandy, France.

Steven Warwick is an artist, writer, and musician based in Berlin. His recent work has mused on Californian desert ideology, the fear economy of the X Files, and unexplained seemingly natural desert phenomena. Here he will present a new short piece of fiction Amber in Racetrack Playa, a conspiratorial Science Fiction text set in the outdoor culture of Southern California and Death Valley, where he spent last year making work during his residency at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, which informs forthcoming installments of work.

Susanne M. Winterling‘s reading will feature pandoras box as a polyphony and threads systemic violence and structures of hope. Re imagining what social justice could be along the path to ecocide, which might be the immersive dream in a multispecies salon?

Trevor Lee Larson shows you where to relax. A prime example of the non pressured and unfettered way in which this city’s young individualists live. Adventure and Romance. “There’s so much time you can get monumentally depressed.” “We’re starved for something new.” “The only legitimate purchase I’ve made this year.” Larson prefers a simple vodka and soda. “You can hear the wind from the forest when you’re out in the pool.”

→Irregular Readings I (2013)

NEW YORK ART BOOK FAIR

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is happy to participate in this year’s New York Art Book Fair organized by Printed Matter at New York’s MoMA PS1 featuring a curated selection of artist publications and works on paper by artists Nathalie Du Pasquier, Christophe Rohan de Chabot, Katharina Marszewski, Paul Sockacki, Gwenn Thomas, Martin Kohout, Travis Jeppesen, Marcus Knupp and Kazuko Miyamoto.

PUBLICATIONS
→Nathalie Du Pasquier: Constructions (2016)
→Christophe De Rohan Chabot: EXILE. Christophe de Rohan Chabot. August 1 – 31, 2016 (2016)
→Katharina Marszewski: Decisions jus-d-orange (2016)
→Pauł Sochacki: Epistemic Heartbreak (2016)
→Travis Jeppesen: New Writing (2016)
→Nathalie Du Pasquier: The Big Game (2015)
→Martin Kohout: Sleep Cures Sleepiness (2014)
→Kazuko Miyamoto: Kazuko Miyamoto (2014)
→Gwenn Thomas: Artist Monograph (2013)
→Martin Kohout: Linear Manual (2013)
→Kazuko Miyamoto: Artist’s Portfolio (2012)

WORKS ON PAPER
→Nathalie Du Pasquier
→Kazuko Miyamoto
→Katharina Marszewski
→Christophe De Rohan Chabot
→Gwenn Thomas
→Travis Jeppesen

 

http://nyartbookfair.com/

 

FRIEZE, London

Posted on by Regina Regina

For Frieze London EXILE is pleased to present a specifically created room environment by artist Nathalie Du Pasquier. This room, entitled White model for a big still life, consisting of various sculptural and architectural elements, blurs the lines between environment, architecture, painting and installation by creating a monochrome space that functions, in a sense, like the artist’s own creative mindscape.

White model for a big still life subsumes two-, to three-dimensionality (or vice versa) with the walls of the room extending into the space while sculptural constructions within the room extend spatially towards the walls. Adjacent, her paintings reflect through their formal, multicolor arrangement back upon the monochrome reduction of White model for a big still life.

Nathalie Du Pasquier began her career as a founding member of the design group Memphis in Milan. Operating from 1980-1988, Du Pasquier was one of the very few women members of the group and formed a legacy that remains onmipresent in today’s visual culture. In 1986, Du Pasquier left the group to focus on her artistic practice. By encompassing a variety of approaches, Du Pasquier has created a unique universe ranging from the smallest designs for a pencil, to elaborately crafted oil paintings and monumental sculptural environments.

Concurrently, Du Pasquier holds a comprehensive survey exhibition at Kunsthalle Vienna entitled Big objects not always silent featuring works from 1980 until today. The artist also holds her second solo exhibition entitled Meteories & Constructions II at the gallery, on view until Oct 8.

 

Frieze Focus. Booth H30.

Click here to view Big objects not always silent at Kunsthalle Vienna

Click here to view Meteorites & Constructions II at EXILE

 

 

 

White model for a big still life
By Nathalie Du Pasquier

In fact i don’t think this is a model, I am not going to represent it, it is too big. But the title comes from the fact that in origin my constructions were built as models for very realistic paintings. These paintings were called still life because the model did not move, because the model was just an object even if the final painting had the look of an abstract work, it was just the model that was abstract, not the painting. In origin….time has gone by and now only occasionally, do I still represent my constructions. In this period the built constructions exist by themselves and the paintings don’t represent any existing constructions anymore.

The constructions, and this one in particular which has taken the shape and size of a room, are made of elements which often arrive from previous installations or constructions. For the one presented at Frieze, some parts of it have been repainted many times, some are quite complex and some are just simple volumes. Many have been parts of other installations. This is the way these pieces of wood exist in my studio. Raw material that is used according to my needs. It could be said that this piece, if not sold, will turn into something else. And unless some one takes it away from the studio it is a non-permanent installation. Like any room in fact.

As in nature, as in life, there is a constant recycling of ‘materia’. In the studio, ideas which have appeared years ago can re-emerge today in a different shape or as part of a more complex work. With the wooden pieces it is the same and what is built with them is not an eternal shape but maybe just a temporary incarnation.

In the exhibition held concurrently at Kunsthalle Vienna, there is a sister of that piece. Both these ‘rooms’ have been conceived around the same time. Both pieces are monochrome ambients, in a dull indefinite color. Both pieces evoke silence, evoke the mystery of useless machines open to any interpretation and ready to generate something else. The one in Vienna will be disassembled in a few weeks, this one might be the only one to survive.

 

 

A Journey Through Vibrant Space

Posted on by Regina Regina

Whenever a searching eye encounters barren land, it seeks for shelters that can provide potential sites for hiding and creation. Arid tree trunks become essential elements of orientation – relics of a life cycle on deserted soil. The Land of Nod is such a place in the Book of Genesis, located on the ‘east of Eden’, where Cain chose to flee after murdering his brother Abel. There, as vagabond, he was condemned to wander the land forever.

The location east of Eden is explicit and so named on biblical maps, such as Ortelius’ and Mercator’s. Historical representations of the Land of Nod usually show vast and vacant landscapes, where several paths lead in all directions, entry points could be anywhere.

The Land of Nod is also an English idiom for the imaginary realm of sleep and dreams, followed, one assumes, by waking up. Only emerging from sleep makes a sleep what it is: a restless subconsciousness surrounded by a state of external quiescence, providing the mind with a protection for regeneration.

Both conceptions suggest that the potentiality of absence denotes the state of being away. Here, existence (being) becomes an implicit expectation, because it comes prior to presence (being there) as the necessary premise for the recognition of absence. A Journey Through Vibrant Space.

Excerpt from Sandra Meireis: East of Eden, 2012

Click here to watch excerpt of A Journey Through Vibrant Space

INDEPENDENT, Brussels

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present a solo presentation of new works by Nathalie Du Pasquier.

Painted pictorial compositions expand beyond the perimeter of the canvas using three-dimensional wooden structures and mural painting. The play between pictorial and volumetric space opens up a dialogue between formal arrangement, historical reference and contemporary practice.

ART-O-RAMA, Marseille

Posted on by Regina Regina

We are excited to announce participation in ART-O-RAMA art fair in Marseille with works by artists Pauł Sochacki, Pakui Hardware and Erik Niedling in reference to Le voyage dans la lune (1902) by George ‪Méliès‬.

Paul Sochacki’s series of paintings is entitled Le monde est un portrait and depict images of a planet. The works appear as almost identical, and yet can be quite different in size, color and through slight thematic variations. As with most of Paul Sochacki‘s paintings, the works appear at first sight deliberately naïve, almost childish. Upon closer inspection this surficial disguise fades and a stark, critical dimension reveals itself in the works. The particular body of work selected for ART-O-RAMA has a multitude of references but is specifically reminiscent of two early films by George Méliès La lune à un mètre (1898) and Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902).
Sochacki references early stop-motion animation and magical filmic fantasy but contrasts it through the title of the works. Sochacki’s body of work “Le monde est un portrait” brings the viewer to question the nature of technology in relation to the state of the planet we live in today: from environmental realities, to gender conflict to increasing political right-wing dangers, in Sochacki’s works Méliès’ early rocket landing on the moon becomes a sexualized dildo-shaped rocket flying into the mouth of planet earth and leaving a cum-like patina on the surface.

These paintings are set in dialogue with a new body of work by Erik Niedling. All blandly entitled Futures, the sculptures follow the tradition of bleigiessen in Germany. This archaic tradition, dating back to Roman times, remains a popular thing to do on New Year’s eve in many German-speaking and nordic countries with the leisurly aim to predict the future. Usually, small lead figurines are heated and liquified, then thrown in water to appear in a new shape that then are interpreted to predict one‘s future. Here, instead of small amounts, the artist pours kilograms of lead (now tin) into water to create the works, sourced from army‘s of tin soldiers the artist acquires for this purpose. These works appear as grand masculine connoted artistic gestures pointing in similar ways to issues of environmental use of resources, gender clichés as well as dooming macropolitical realities.

Pakui Hardware complete the conversation with a new series of neon and glazed ceramics sculptures entitled On Demand where the artists trace Capital traveling through bodies and materials.

→http://art-o-rama.fr

The Vanity Fair & the Commonwealth of Mathilde Blühdorn

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to host an intervention organized by Clark House Initiative from Mumbai, India with works by Amol K Patil, Yogesh Barve, Sajan Mani, Ming Tiampo, and Nalini Ranjan Nirad.

An anonymously painted portrait of Mathilde Blühdorn bought at the Marche aux Puces de Marseille, reveals a little known Austrian royal called Mathilde Blühdorn who died not far away from Marseille at Saint-Raphael. Her portrait had become part of the detritus unwanted to descendants who must have sold her chateau or themselves died interstate.We at Clark House appropriated it for an exhibition after having bought it for five euros. Portraiture and its perspective cannot be claimed by South Asians as their own but was introduced to us by the colonizing British who established Art Schools such as the Sir JJ School of Art in Bombay in 1958, a year after the First Indian War for Independence in 1857.

Amol K Patil places his portrait within letters of his grandfather and the plays scripted by his father. Denied a visa to a performance festival in Nottingham in 2013, Patil enacted a protest performance in the city of Bombay during the ongoing Ganesh Festival using the traditional space allowed to theatre as a stage for a performance that satirically explained the reasons for his visa rejection. Class forces people into districts of the city that do not have favorable reputations with visa officers. Sports too! It is the last constant bastion of racism and sexism. People are compartmentalized into sexes and levels of hormones to determine their levels of competition. Various races have favorable outputs such as Kenyans for long distance running, Chinese for table-tennis though Indians seemingly remain incompetent at most levels of sports.
After much criticism Patil was invited to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow as part of an exhibition that would accompany the events around the games. He also was able to participate at the HighLand Print Studio in a residency where he cut up the sports editions of the newspapers and placing the images in his domestic environment to act as sport-rings and stadiums. A physicality of the body emerges, something intimate and sensual as well as voyeuristic that Patil as a performer keenly observed.

Paris is a city of portraits. Caricaturing is a common habit by buskers near the Seine, Sacré-Cœur or the Eiffel Tower, also caricaturing done by comedians and magazines that have been the centre of debate and a tragic crime over the last years. The success of the magazines do not dwell on sales or distribution but rather the branding and promotional advertisements pay for the budgets that pay the high premiums for fashion photo-shoots. This complex system of economies erred to caricature Europe’s most powerful political leader. Angela Merkel was the face for Vanity Fair in the recent spring issue. Off late along with Christine Lagarde they have been featured as strong women leading a fractured Europe, but the gloss print of those magazines that have politically corrected themselves rather is funded by products that often have no alliances with women issues rather objectifying them with aspirational visuals of supposed beauty.

This aesthetical alliance of beauty and politics was destroyed in the Paris rain, outside the bus terminus at Porte Maillot where dozens of magazines were left to the elements on a low wall that surrounded the terminus. Many young tourists passed by the heaps of Tatlers, GQs & Vanity Fairs. Yogesh Barve chanced upon those that were wet, where the varnish of these magazines had been worn out in the rain, while a few under them had retained their gloss. When touched the ink-jet paint left the paper, creating abstract portraits that resemble Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s portrait’s of faces of nobility made up of vegetables, fruits and roots, a fine example stood not far away at the Louvre alongside the Mona Lisa, whose face is now printed on many of the shopping bags and curios that had been bought by the tourists now returning home on Air Berlin, Ryanair, Transavia and others.

In India and around the world auction catalogues are printed in the same gloss and specifics such as paper quality and dimensions; alongside art you have advertisements by fashion brands and jewelry watches in these catalogues. The contemporary section of auctiona catalogues often contain photographs, along with the title of the photograph, the details of the “multi-inkjet HP printer on 350 gsm Hanhemuhle Archival Colth Rag Paper” is often mentioned – as if a harbinger of quality is set to make photography a more acceptable form of art, at the details of color, money and and archival ability put into place for its printing. But that day as the varnish washed away over Madamme Merkel, Barve created watercolors from toxic inkjet prints. They were dried, each an individual watercolor made from highly circulated prints, and were later fixed and dried to make a series of caricature portraits of the lady herself.

As Europe’s centre parties ignore the consequences of their pandering to conservative paranoia’s against immigration, they see their own political fortune’s deplete as those convinced by their subtle xenophobia often crossover to more outright rightwing parties that promise more radical solutions. We see this happen with the emergence of the right wing across Europe as the most powerful opposition to the centre creeping closely towards power. Barve comes from a political situation where a party had pandered to decisive politics only to be decimated in by the same vote in its most unfortunate form later. The magazines sell fairer skins to Indians back home, hopefully Europe’s mighty shall rally more often to aide those who drown in the Mediterranean with freer access across their borders as they did for the freedom of speech.

Sajan Mani allows his body to be painted into shades of white by the audience in a performance festival in Kolkata – they have no hesitation in crossing the boundaries of privacy and forget the context of their action. Marriage rituals in North India see men and women pasted with herbal and tumeric pastes to lighten their skin. This obsession is now a source of great income for multinational companies in the skincare business. Photos taken by Ming Tiampo of myself in front of apartments, bookstores, and restaurants where Afro-American Exiles lived in Paris, in the district of Montparnasse, in the Paris of the 1930s and later. I place myself appropriating the choreography Amol K Patil uses in his performances, and doing so asserting Black identity that may be contested if you look at my physical appearance, later Nalini Ranjan Nirad uses photo filters to create a tapestry printed on fake silk that is used in Bombay to make sarees with digitally painted designs , a technique invented in China.

Patil often uses detritus of the urbanscape to cover sculptures to rid them of their cultural value, neutralising their beauty, the question of legitimacy and authenticity is similar, for it is used to make art that is devoid of its conscience conceptually and aesthetically. Large watercolors using Moroccan loufa and a Senegalese towel used to clean dead skin as printing equipment are made as editions but look like abstract expressionist renditions. Colors from a One-Euro-Shop watercolor box set made in China, are used on archival paper, the elements do not add any value but measure up to European stander museum archival needs.

Portrait painting alien to tradition is now the most pursued academic training at the Sir JJ School of Art in Bombay, and often finds ridicule among proponents of a more liberal Western Education, in fact what we see is a reversal of history and change in Class aesthetics that are determined by accessibility. We are in EXILE from our realities.

Sumesh Sharma

Clark House Initiative is a curatorial collaborative and a union of artists based in Bombay. It was established in 2010 by Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma.

 

NOT FAIR, Warsaw

Posted on by Regina Regina

For NOT FAIR in Warsaw EXILE will present the second of three chapters of Kinga Kiełczyńska’s project entitled Białowieża.

Kiełczyńska’s project pays homage to, and raises awareness for, the threatened primeval forest by the same name. Białowieża, is one of the last and largest remaining parts of primeval forest in Europe, and historically a place of many violent occupational histories, the most recent being the German occupation during WWII. At a size of 141,885 ha it extends across the border between Poland and Belarus, and today, it is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site. A primeval forest, such as Białowieża, is a forest that has attained great age without significant disturbance by humankind and thereby exhibits unique ecological characteristics. One of the most noticeable characteristics of a primeval forest is the amount of dead and decaying wood, which undisturbed provides, in the case of Białowieża, a habitat for approximately 50% of the estimated 12,000 species found in the forest.

Primeval forests have the potential to be extremely lucrative for many industries, especially the logging industry. The deforestation of these habitats has been a point of intensifying contention between the logging industry, national politics and environmentalists. In 2016, Poland’s State Forestry Board approved a three-fold increase in logging, argued as an unavoidable preventive measure against an invasive infestation by the European spruce bark beetle, a controversial measure that has been contested by many environmentalist as well as the European Union. The trees which are labeled as infested are cut, removed from the forest, processed and eventually sold. Such commercial sale counters claims by the Polish government that the wood infested by the European spruce bark beetle can’t serve any commercial purposes except burning. Upon the artist’s visit to local sawmills near the forest in 2016, it became evident, that the primeval forest wood was in fact actively sold for profit as wooden flooring.

For the first chapter of her project in October 2016, the artist acquired 40 m² of existing Białowieża wood flooring. The processed timber was brought to Berlin to be showcased in the gallery as part of an exhibition dedicated to the conflict surrounding the forest and its protection. Concurrently, an advert was placed on eBay with the aim to resell the wood for the exact same value as purchased. The floor did not succeed in finding a buyer and has been stored in Berlin since.

Now, for its second chapter, the untreated wood will be moved from the German to the Polish capital to be installed inside the Pałac Kultury i Nauki (Palace of Culture and Science). From September 21 to 24, 2017 the wood can be seen installed on top of the marble floor of this highly charged location. Contradicting the logic of an artfair, the flooring will not be available for sale. It becomes a short-lived anti-monument, a memorial to the forest’s commodification. Simultaneously, the wooden floor, which by its appearance within this particular building and specific artfair context, will reference minimalist sculpture. Though the wood is neither artwork nor flooring, it becomes a blank slate in the midst of a highly charged and complex socio-political, commercial as well as aesthetic environment.

After the fair, the wood will be stored in Warsaw before being returned, in the final and third chapter of Kiełczyńska’s project, to Białowieża in the spring of 2018 as a ritualistic gift offered back to the forest. There, back at its origin, the wood will be laid out one last time and left to rot. Eventually, its inherent memories of geo-political contexts experienced through its forceful removal and cyclical journey will disintegrate while simultaneously forming a biotope for the exact species in need of such dead wood to thrive in. Once disappeared, only personal memories of this particular piece of Białowieża will remain but new growth will have been created.

The Białowieża project by Kinga Kiełczyńska utilizes the wood as a metaphor for recent right-wing movements in Polish and global politics. Set in relationship to her own body, the floor is meant to connect private and personal body politics and their attempted erosion in a regressive political climate; a tree’s purpose is to live, die, decay, and finally create new growth. This progression is set in context to the increasing importance to micro-political freedoms of choice and expression.

→Białowieża: Ebay Meditation Room

→NOT FAIR

→Pałac Kultury i Nauki / Palace of Culture and Science

ARTISSIMA, Turin

Posted on by Regina Regina

[…] Immersed in leisure while automated bodies scurry around carrying out our daily routines and work, we devote ourselves to spiritual and cultural augmentation, cultivation of our creativity and fitness. Everyone is familiar with such kind of phantasy of automation. It is, of course, accessible to only part of the future post-working class.

While as today, metallic bodies of the automated companions are stretched over with uniforms. Shielding their surfaces from hazardous environments, these clothing, made of disposable cellophane, soft textiles or expensive hard duty, heat-resistant fabrics, bring them even closer to their human coworkers, blending the organic and automated into a synthetic whole. The covered ‘bodies’ merge machine-human features and gestures, creating an assembly of yet unknown or transitory species. […].* 

EXILE is pleased to participate in →ARTISSIMA art fair in Turin with a solo presentation by artist-duo Pakui Hardware selected for the Present Future section by curator Cloé Perrone. The object-based installation entitled Creatures of Habit was first shown at SIC Space in Helsinki and will travel next to Trafo Gallery in Budapest.

Pakui Hardware is a collaborative artist duo founded in 2014 by Neringa Černiauskaitė, born 1984, and Ugnius Gelguda born 1977. Pakui Hardware has intensively worked on tracing movements of capital through bodies and materials by highlighting friction between the velocity of technological and scientific development and human response thereto. The name Pakui Hardware refers to Pakui, a Hawaiian Goddess, who circles Oahu island six times in a day. Thus Pakui Hardware is also obsessed with speed and investigation of high-speed cultural encounters. The duo’s work span around the complex relationship of materiality, technology, economy, and how technology shapes economy and physical reality, including the human body.

Pakui Hardware held recent solo exhibitions at SIC Space in collaboration with Kiasma, Helsinki; MUMOK, Vienna; kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga; →EXILE, Berlin, and, upcoming, at Tenderpixel, London. The duo has participated in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Trafo Gallery, Budapest; Kunstverein Freiburg; 20th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, São Paulo; National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; Assembly Point, London; and will participate in 2018 at the XIII. Baltic Triennial, curated by Vincent Honoré at the Contemporary Art Center (CAC), Vilnius.

*Excerpt from →Pakui Hardware: Fire, Water and Other People Working. 

For further information on the artists please also visit their website →pakuihardware.org.

Sory

Posted on by Regina Regina

Albrecht Pischel’s exhibition SORY is the final chapter and epilogue to the curatorial and exhibition tour de force of EXILE’s ten-year anniversary season collectively entitled May the bridges I burn light the way. Pischel’s deliberately short exhibition is conceived as a reverberation of the closing gallery space in particular and as a melancholic yet humorous gesture towards art and its props in general.

In SORY, Chinese Joss paper replica of multi-media equipment are mocking the technological-aesthetical codes of contemporary art shows. The appropriated paper effigies, which by tradition are ritually burnt to provide renditions to ancestors and stray ghosts, become fragile placeholders for the art exhibition itself, leaving behind a depleted shell of a show. Following an analogous strategy of dematerialization, Pischel is also presenting a sound installation in which latent images and its projectors are echoing in the exhibition space.

SORY is in many ways a good-bye metaphor for EXILE’s Berlin space, asking invisible forces for their good-will, support and continuous energies for the opening of our new location in Vienna on September 14.

MANIFESTA, Palermo

Posted on by Regina Regina

We are happy to invite you to EXILE X Summer Camp: May the bridges I burn light the way selected by Manifesta as part of this year’s 5x5x5 collateral program for Manifesta in Palermo.

The initial part of May the bridges I burn light the way is a temporary exhibition that creates face-to-face conversations between social activism, art practices and Palermo’s socio-cultural realities. Departing point is the exploitation of the self for marketing purposes or as alibi for personal intentions, as sometimes in the #metoo debate or the current rise of populism.

May the bridges I burn light the way evolves through conversations, screenings and performative interventions at Cre.Zi Plus, a daily changing group exhibition at Ballaró Market, and the distribution of the street newspaper ‘Arts of the Working Class‘, a tool of integration between the citizens of Palermo and art professionals arriving to reflect on arts and society during the opening days of Manifesta 12.

Participants: Albrecht Pischel, Angels Miralda Tena, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Ayami Awazuhara & Christopher Burman, Bob Hausmann, Club Fortuna, Heiner Franzen, Dietrich Meyer, Elmar Mellert, Kazuko Miyamoto, Erik Niedling, Federico del Vecchio, Iris Touliatou, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Kinga Kielczynska, Lauryn Youden, Lorenzo Marsili, Narine Arakelyan, Nschotschi Haslinger, Martin Kohout, Patrick Fabian Panetta, Paul Sochacki, Raffaela Naldi Rossano, Sarah Lehnerer, Sara Løve Daðadóttir, Sebastian Acker, Utopian Union, Zoë Claire Miller.

May the bridges I burn light the way is curated by María Inés Plaza Lazo, in collaboration with Alina Kolar, Dalia Maini and Christian Siekmeier.

EXILE X Summer Camp was organized with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum, Laboratory ABC Moscow, Goethe Institut Palermo, Podere Veneri Vecchio, Studio Botanic and Reflektor M.

 

FURTHER INFORMATION

MANIFESTA 5x5x5
→May the bridges I burn light the way

DETAILED DAILY PROGRAM (June 13-17)
→Daily program (PDF, A3, 2 pages, 3MB, English)
→Programma giornaliero (PDF, A3, 2 pagine, 3MB, Italiano)

LOCATIONS (June 13-17)
→Cre.Zi Plus is a community kitchen and co-working space in the areal of Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa, where the conversations and screenings will take place.
→Ballarò is the oldest food market in Palermo held in Albergheria neighborhood, where EXILE will present a daily changing group exhibition during the opening dates of Manifesta 12.

DETAILED GOOGLE MAPS
→Cre.Zi Plus
→Ballarò

REVIEWS
→Marie Civikov in Jegens & Tevens (NL)
→Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir in art.zine.is (IS)
→Kathrin Schöner & Stephan Becker in Baunetz (PDF download, DE)

 

One Season Inner Outer Space

Posted on by Regina Regina

One Season Inner Outer Space (OSIOS) is a one-day event of video, performance, readings and summery interaction to which we cordially invite you.

It is an evening for us to say thank you for your support over the last year and to celebrate EXILE‘s first set of exhibitions and activities which happened since its relocation to Vienna last September. We would be happy if you join us for a toast and gather as part of our community one final time before we all break for the summer.

OSIOS is dedicated to video, text-based and performative works dealing with the perception of various inner & out-of-body experiences, spiritualism as well as with fantasy and fiction in general. It is rooted in the particular appearance and identity of EXILE’s gallery space which over the course of the last year has shifted with each exhibition.

The works presented in OSIOS explore, or make comments on, mystic places and subjects – may their origin be of biblical, postbiological or simply self-imaginative nature. They further present themselves as possible answers to what role the natural human body, with all its complexities, is assigned in utopian narratives.

When questioning the limits of our own consciousness and rationale, we look for extensions of what can be felt by our sensory organs.

Artists: Lonely Boys, Rustan Söderling, Age of Theia, Ganica Stauz, Valentýna Janů, Anna Zilahi, Eoghan Ryan, Leon Höllhumer, Ada Karlbauer. OSIOS is curated by Julius Pristauz.

VIENNA CONTEMPORARY

Posted on by Regina Regina

In collaboration with Karsten Schubert London, EXILE is pleased to present a two-part solo exhibition of Vienna-born, London-based artist Tess Jaray entitled East of the West. It is the artist’s first introductory solo exhibition in Vienna.

The first part of the exhibition, opening on Sept 12 at EXILE, presents some of the artist’s most recent paintings together with a selection of early drawings. The second part of the exhibition, held at VIENNA CONTEMPORARY artfair from Sept 26 – 29, will focus on early paintings paired with a selection of contemporary works on paper.

As a common strain in Jaray’s practice, all works have architectural abstraction/reduction at their core with many of the exhibited works in both parts of the exhibition relating to Viennese architectural details, specifically the patterned roof of Vienna’s Stephansdom cathedral.

By splitting the exhibition into two physically distant parts within the same city, the viewer will be able to experience the earliest stage of the artist’s career as well as the current. Yet the biography of the artist itself, who fled Vienna in 1938, is absent within the social and artistic landscape of the city.

Tess Jaray studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (1954-57) and University College London (1957-60). Her works are included in numerous private and public collections, amongst others the Tate, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Sainsbury Center, Norwich, the Museum of Modern Art, Szépmüvészeti, Budapest, and the Museum of Modern Art, mumok, Vienna.

Jaray has previously shown at EXILE in Berlin in 2018 with a solo exhibition entitled Aleppo.

→East of the West. Exhibition text (PDF)

→East of the West at EXILE

→VIENNA CONTEMPORARY

→Tess Jaray: Aleppo

 

Coloring Quarantine

Posted on by Regina Regina

Coloring Quarantine was an open call and open access project initiated in response to the closure of EXILE’s physical gallery space on March 13 due to COVID-19. Contributions could be made until Apr 22, the day EXILE was able to reopen with regular opening hours.

Coloring Quarantine has the simple aim to collect and share drawings from a wide range of contributors. All collected 175 contributed drawings remain accessible via an open-access dropbox folder from where they can be downloaded and printed out on any standard printer to color in for anyone experiencing lockdown.

 

Click on link to access dropbox folder→Coloring Quarantine

 

Coloring Quarantine Contributors: Aaron Schraeter, Adam Shecter, Adéla Součková, Adnan Balcinovic, Aggtelek, Ahu Dural, Alan Stefanato, Albrecht Pischel, Albrecht Wilke, Alexander Jackson Wyatt, Ali Fitzgerald, Almut Reichenbach, Alyssa De Luccia, Andrew Read, Andrew Rutherdale, Anna Bochkova, Anna Kautenburger, Anna Schachinger, Anne De Boer, Anne Meerpohl, Anneke Kleimann, Antanas Luciunas, Antonio Della Corte, Arnold Berger, Arthur Golyakov, Aykan Safoğlu, Belen Garcia, Bernd Löschner, Bianca Pedrina, Billy Miller, Bora Akinciturk, Bruno Hoffmann, Carl Lützen, Caro Eibl, Charlotte Heninger, Chiara No, Christophe de Rohan Chabot, Christopher Prendergast, Ciresu Tudor, Clémentine Coupau, Constantin Hartenstein, Cristian Tusinean, D L Alvarez, Dana Engfer, Daniel Ferstl, Darja Shatalova, Dennis Loesch, Edin Zenun, Ellen Schafer, Eloise Bonneviot, Eric Giraudet de Boudemange, Erica Baum, Ethan Assouline, Federico del Vecchio, Felix Oehmann, Fette Sans, Filip Dvořák, Francesco Della Corte, Francis Ruyter, Francisco Berna, Gabriela Tethalova, Gaspar Kunsic, Götz Schramm, Gribaudi Plytas, Guillermo Ros, Hanny Oldendorf, Hugo Gomesand, Isabela Ghislandi, Isabella Fürnkäs, Iumi Kataoka, Jakob Kolb, Janine Muckermann, Jeronim Horvat, João Marques, Johannes Daniel, Jonas Esteban, Jonathan Baldock, Joseph Manyou, Judit Kis, Julia Fischer, Julia Magdalene Romas, Julia Rublow, Julian Fickler, Jura Shust, Jurgen Ostarhild, Karen Dolev, Katharina Hoeglinger, Kea Bolenz, Kinga Kiełczyńska, Kinke Kooi, Laura Franzmann, Liliana Lewicka, Lisa Kuglitsch, Lisa Wölfel, Lorenzo Sandoval, Lucia Leuci, Lukasz Horbow, Lux Cervantes, M Reme Silvestre, Magdalena Kreinecker, Magdalena Mitterhofer, Marcus Knupp, Marianne Vlaschits, Martin Chramosta, Martin Hotter, Maurizio Vicerè, Max Freund, Michael Eppler, Michal Michailov, Michele Bazzoli, Moritz Frei, Nana Wolke, Nataly Gurova, Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Nicolas Pelzer, Nikolay Georgiev, Nora Köhler, Norbert Witzgall, Nschotschi Haslinger, Patrick Alt, Patrick Panetta, Paul Barsch, Paul Otis Wiesner, Paul Riedmueller, Paul Robas, Pauł Sochacki, Paula Linke, Pedro Wirz, Philip Hinge, Rafał Zajko, Real Madrid, Remi Calmont, Ricardo Martins, Robert Culicover, Robin Waart, Sakari Tervo, Sarah & Charles, Sarah Bechter, Sarah Księska, Sarah Lehnerer, Scott Rogers, Sebastian Jung, Siggi Hofer, Siggi Sekira, Sofia Nogueira Negwer, Sophia Domagala, Sophie Aigner, Sophie Esslinger, Sophie Yerly, Spencer Chalk Levy, Stefan Reiterer, Stefanie Leinhos, Stefano Calligaro, Stelios Karamanolis, Sybren Renema, Taiana Defraine, Tess Jaray, Thomas Baldischwyler, Thomas Geiger, Thomas Grogan, Thomas Laubenberger, Tilman Hornig, Timea Mitroi, Tom Holmes, Travis Jeppesen, Ulrike Johannsen, Vanya Venmer, Veronika Neukirch, Viktor Timofeev, Virginia Russolo, Vlad Nancă, Wieland Schönfelder, Witalij Frese, Xenia Lesniewski, Yannik Soland, Yein Lee, Zuzanna Czebatul

 

VIENNA CONTEMPORARY

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to participate in this year’s VIENNA CONTEMPORARY with a solo presentation of Christophe de Rohan Chabot for section Zone 1, curated by Cathrin Mayer, curator at KW Berlin, and accompanied by a text by Cédric Fauq, curator at Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

 

TEMPERATURE

I first wrote that word on top of the page as I was thinking of that term to reflect on what Christophe de Rohan Chabot does but I struggle to get the Sean Paul song of the same title out of my head (“he gal dem Schillaci, Sean da Paul / So me give it to, so me give to, so me give it to, to all girls”).

It then struck me that this is a common de Rohan Chabot move: employing images that somehow stick with you, get into your head, because of the familiarity of their content or what they refer to, as signs or symbols. Whether it is Britney, Courtney, a clown, a fire, a skeleton head or else – the selection of images (result of a two-steps process: that of the selection of words to enter onto the google search bar, followed by the selection of an image itself) is both algorithmic and alchemical.

In many ways, the vocabulary and grammar de Rohan Chabot devises through his practice can be said to interrogate a certain regime of the neoliberal image, its vampirization and circulation (with a certain temporal leap since his image-bank seem to belong to some kind of close-past, stuck between LA and Berlin, in the late 90s and early 2000s). There’s surely some truth in there. However, I’d say that de Rohan Chabot’s practice is also an attempt at liberating images from the .jpg and .png formats, the cells of the google search results, and a pixel-based ontology.
The move from screen to print is one that is often unquestioned, since pushing the printing button became such a banal gesture, but this is one of the liberatory gesture enacted by de Rohan Chabot. Amongst his obsessions, this is a fascinating one – but the print doesn’t even claim the slickness of the screen-image. On the contrary, de Rohan Chabot manifests a fatigue of the image. And glossiness isn’t part of his syntax. If reflection comes up, it’s through the use of glass panels, which actually camouflage the images as much as it reveals them (look at you…).

Here in Vienna, the triad of a/ fire – b/ skull – c/ powder belongs to a (virtual) body of images with no background. The display doesn’t include a mirror. There’s a lot of black, everything is absorbed. Whether e Rohan Chabot is the author of the black (within the images) is an open-ended question. He told me once about these vans in Berlin that are covered in black to avoid surveillance. Although here, the black is rather enhancing (to which point is blackness camouflage?)

Beyond the semiotics of such symbols in the context of an art fair (the death drive is real), what is crucial to me is to pause on how the images are stuck to their support structures (squared, with a thickness that isn’t negligeable). Or rather ask: how does the stickiness of the image on the support structures equates to the stickiness of the images in our minds? To what temperate do images stop being sticky?

Text by Cédric Fauq

 

Christophe de Rohan Chabot: Installation conisisting of an empty space, painted black walls and three artworks following no particular formula or order:
a/ Untitled (burning- ame- re-background-vector-899563.jpg), 2020. Sublimation printing on metal, aluminium frame , 50 x 50 x 7cm
b/ Untitled (J1480x1480-303464.jpg), 2020. Sublimation printing on metal, aluminium frame, 50 x 50 x 7cm
c/ Untitled (shutterstock_466831727.jpg), 2020. Sublimation printing on metal, aluminium frame , 50 x 50 x 7cm

 

For more information please visit:

→VIENNA CONTEMPORARY

→Artist link

→Proposal for an artfair, 2020

HAUS, Vienna

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to participate in the new exhibition platform HAUS with a solo presentation of historic photographs by African-American, Pittsburgh based photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris (1908–1998) curated by New York based artist and curator Billy Miller.

Charles “Teenie” Harris (1908 – 1998) was an African-American photographer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. From 1936 to 1975 Harris chronicled life in the black neighborhoods of the city for the Pittsburgh Courier – one of America’s oldest and most important black newspapers. Nicknamed “One Shot Harris” – as he rarely made his subjects sit for retakes due to the necessary frugality of photographic materials – he took more than 80,000 images during his career. 

In addition to his photo essays of daily life in the city, he captured many celebrities who visited Pittsburgh, including Harry Belafonte, Erroll Garner, Duke Ellington, Eartha Kitt, Louis Armstrong, Joe Louis, Sam Cooke, Sarah Vaughan, Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon, Shirley Chisholm, Hank Aaron, Billy Strayhorn, Ralph Abernathy, Lena Horne, Ray Charles, and many, many others. His vast collection of photographs also includes documentation of nightlife, sports & political figures, crime scenes, and a remarkable selection of images portraying the black queer and drag community in Pittsburgh’s Hill District – once an important African American neighborhood and a thriving cultural center of black life, especially for Jazz and underground clubs. 

In 1986 Harris licensed his entire collection of photographs for $3000 to a local entrepreneur, Dennis Morgan. Harris filed a lawsuit in 1998 for unpaid royalties and the return of his collection as he was proven illiterate and conned out of his work. Unfortunately, he only won the case posthumously. Since 2001 the Harris estate is part of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. 

In the mid 1980s NYC-based curator Billy Miller purchased a suitcase full of prints and ephemera from a sidewalk flea market on St Marks Street in the East Village. Miller recognized familiar faces from the Jazz and black celebrity scene of the 1930s -1970s in the photographs but was not aware of the context or details of the photographer’s career. Only in 2001, with the advent of the Internet and the first New York Times article published on Harris, did Miller recognize who Harris really was and the scope of his legacy. 

For this site-specific exhibit, Miller and EXILE present an initial small selection of photographs set within the domestic and abandoned location of Haus. At first sight, there are no parallels between Harris, Pittsburgh, Haus and Vienna. Yet both urban locations are predominantly working-class communities, all too often on the margins of urban society. The Hill District, as depicted in many Harris photographs, no longer exists, and the building complex where the photographs are here displayed will also be demolished after the end of this project.

 The provenance of these particular photographs prior to being purchased by Miller is not known. As some of the prints are of very high quality and signed, they were possibly made for an exhibition context. It is likely that they are from the so-called ‘Morgan prints’ and derived from the illegitimate contract Harris signed in 1986. These photographs therefore pay tribute to Harris’ creative authorship and authenticity, and remind us of issues of artistic practices, ownership, and alienation often faced by marginal communities.

WORKS exhibited

Charles “Teenie” Harris: Coal miner leaving underground mine in Library, Pennsylvania, c. 1947, printed later. Toned vintage print signed on front, 28 x 35,5 cm. Carnegie Museum of Art, Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive: 2001.35.3078

Charles “Teenie” Harris: Elder Charles Beck and two other men, holding child, possibly girl, in baptismal pool, surrounded by crowd for large baptism at Kennard Field, Hill District, August 1945, printed later. Toned vintage print signed on front, 28 x 35,5 cm. Carnegie Museum of Art, Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive: 2001.35.4266

Charles “Teenie” Harris: Five hunters gathered around car with woman seated on roof and two dead deer lying on hood, c. 1941-1946, printed later. Toned vintage print, 28 x 35,5 cm. Carnegie Museum of Art, Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive: 2001.35.3115

Charles “Teenie” Harris: Eartha Kitt leaping though poster to launch a Citizens Committee on Hill District Renewal program, with police officer Harvey Adams, Vine and Colwell Streets, Hill District, May 1966. Vintage print, 35,5 x 28 cm. Carnegie Museum of Art, Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive: 2001.35.2509

 

Further reading

Cheryl Finley, Laurence A. Glasco & Joe W. Trotter: Teenie Harris, Photographer: Image, Memory, History. 208 Pages, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011

Stanley Crouch: One Shot Harris: The Photographs of Charles “Teenie” Harris. 168 pages, Harry N. Abrams, 2002

Charles H Harris: Spirit of a community: The photographs of Charles “Teenie” Harris. 48 pages, Westmoreland Museum of American Art, 2001

 

Online ressources

→haus.wien

→Teenie Harris Archive

→Teenie Harris Wikipedia

→https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/07/arts/black-life-black-white-court-ruling-frees-legacy-tireless-photographer.html

→https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2011/12/23/144093524/the-big-legacy-of-charles-teenie-harris-photographer?t=1600680819347

→https://www.post-gazette.com/uncategorized/2007/07/25/Out-on-the-town-Teenie-Harris-exhibit-captures-a-rare-glimpse-of-gay-life/stories/200707250280

→https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/harris-charles-h-teenie-1908-1998/

→https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa3UBzuDn6Q

 

 

 

NOT CANCELLED

Posted on by Regina Regina

For NOT CANCELLED, opening online on Monday Nov 30, we are happy to feature a set of photographs by Kerstin von Gabain taken in a seemingly distant past.

While we are currently more then ever forced to hide in physical and emotional isolation merely connected through corporate networks and devices these photographs sentimentally remind of a not too ancient past before all forms of sub/culture became streamed and subsumed within omnipresent algorithms. A final blip of spatial and personal freedom before global corporations and obsessive connectivity fully captured our blood vessels.

Von Gabain’s analogue photographs show backdrops, trucks, printed banners, sound systems, loudspeakers belonging to people attending socalled ‘free parties’ at the end of the 90’s in Central Europe. The free-party movement, perceived itself as a counter concept to the commercial rave-and techno-scene, staged self-organized parties with free entrance at isolated and mostly illegal locations. Most important is the thought of do-it-yourself, another ideology of the original techno movement that has perhaps become obsolete with the commercialisation and normalization of counterculture.

→https://www.n-c.art

Meanwhile

Posted on by Regina Regina

During the closure of EXILE’s physical space until spring 2021, artists were invited to create spatial interventions visible through, or on, the windows from the outside.

Meanwhile 01
Iris Touliatou: Untitled (Still not over you). Disputed energy debt, 2020.

Meanwhile 02
Julius Pristauz: Slowly coming to terms, 2021.

Meanwhile 03
Zuzanna Czebatul: The cell, 2021.

Pokorná

Posted on by Regina Regina

 EXILE is pleased to participate in Vienna meets Prague with an exhibition by Czech artists Martina Smutná and Sáro Gottstein. The exhibition entitled Pokorná, which translates to humble in English, was curated by Anežka Jabůrková.

In the exhibition, paintings by Martina Smutná enter into dialogue with sculptures by Sáro Gottstein. Behind Pokorná is the artistic exploration of the theme of (invisible) care work. The word addresses the unpaid status of housework and childcare as well as care work performed for pay. In English the Czech word ‘pokorná’ translates to ‘humble’. However, this literal translation is too limited. The English adjective is not able to convey the gender-specific feminine ending in Czech, which calls attention to a prominent problematic of the topic: it is still women*, who perform the greater share of this fundamental but mostly invisible activity for our society.

A synergy of the two different points of departure of artists Martina Smutná and Sáro Gottstein materializes in the appropriation of an everyday object that we need and take for granted – the dishcloth. In the exhibition, it becomes a synecdoche for care work – professional and nonprofessional alike. Howbeit both artists tackle different problematics associated to care work.

Sáro Gottstein comments on the relationship between the intimate setting of work at home and the conditions under which workers perform the same activities tasks to earn a living. Whether in the private or professional sphere, the results of the work are taken for granted by society. For her sculpture Nového 1194, Gottstein takes the industrialization process and the commodification of care work as inspiration for her sculpture pointing to the close connection between invisible and underpaid labor.

In contrast, Martina Smutná addresses the implications of historical representations of care work in her series of paintings Laundrywomen. Smutná appropriates depictions of women at work in paintings by Old Masters such as Chardin, Metsu, and Vermeer. In their voyeuristic approach, the female servant is idealized as a paragon of virtue, beauty, and grace, diligently and obediently performing the tasks assigned to her. The humility and modesty of the women* at work is foregrounded by the lowered, vacant, gaze out of the painting’s frame. In Smutná’s reiteration, the beautified/romanticized portrayal reappears, albeit at first glance. After further inspection, subtle deviations emerge. A modern dishcloth appears, linking the historical representation to the predicament of care workers today. In her subversion of the likeable paintings, the viewers’ attention is drawn to the contrast between representation and reality, thereby turning the painting into a critical instrument.

Despite her approach, the absence of women* of color is felt in Smutná’s Laundrywomen. The omission points to the limitations in overcoming the art historical canon. But this critique also risks perpetuating invisibility of women* of color, which becomes additionally problematic in the context of today’s social issues.

In the exhibition, Gottstein and Smutná both scrutinize the way labor can be aestheticized. In their appropriation of everyday objects, both artists wittily toe the line between kitsch and ‘high’ art. For example, in the painting series Loss, Smutná employs current trends in contemporary painting to reproduce woven patterns and motifs on dishcloths; Gottstein, on the other hand creates a large abstract tableau by sewing the dishcloths together.

By elevating everyday objects to ‘high’ art, the viewers’ attention is drawn to something that is normally ignored, thereby granting the objects agency. The hope being that this agency will reappear the next time the object is used. On a more self-reflective note, this tension between the ‘beautiful’ (art object) and the ‘mundane’ (everyday object), is an attempt by the artists to resist the commodification of their aesthetic artworks and undermine their privileged positions as artists. But the final questions the exhibition asks, left for the viewer to answer: is it possible to create a seminal work of art that can address and enrich the socio-political discussion revolving around care work today.

Text by Anežka Jabůrková

NADA, Miami

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to participate in NADA Miami with a presentation of works by Vienna-based artist Nazim Ünal Yilmaz (*1981) together with selected new ceramics by Berlin-based artist Nschotschi Haslinger (*1982).

Yilmaz‘ paintings oscillate between figurative representations of particular memories of the artist’s personal biography and current social surrounding, socio-political realities of migratory identity as well as various structural, capitalist and environmental critiques. The artist’s collective works sharply observe our world and form an atlas of personal, social, political, and environmental challenges.

Through ceramics, performances and drawings Nschotschi Haslinger explores an imaginary world and its boundaries to the real. Her two new ceramic works presented at NADA are part classical flute, part snake, part diverse genitals. Haslinger‘s amorphous creatures are individual autonomies, these flute-like organisms are provocative, sensual, playful, gentle yet fiercely independent.

NADA Miami
Ice Palace Studios
1400 North Miami Avenue
Miami, FL 33136
Booth 6.13

→Nschotschi Haslinger artist link

→NADA Miami

Nschotschi Haslinger

Posted on by Regina Regina

Born 1982 in Eitorf, Germany, lives and works in Berlin.

→nschotschi.de

Patrick Fabian Panetta

Posted on by Regina Regina

Born 1977 in Germany, lives and works in Berlin.

→patrick-fabian-panetta.de

Tess Jaray

Posted on by Regina Regina

Born 1937 in Vienna, lives and works in London.

→tessjaray.com

Sine Hansen

Posted on by Regina Regina

The Estate of Sine Hansen (1942 – 2009)

→Sine Hansen: An introduction (PDF)

°°‾‾°°

Posted on by Regina Regina

Following Tess Jaray’s first institutional solo exhibition in Austria at Vienna’s Secession in 2021, EXILE is honored to present a third solo exhibition at the gallery of the Vienna-born, London-based artist. Entitled °°‾‾°°, the exhibition presents a selection of circular works created in 2020-2021 as well as the complete set of her latest works from 2023, made specifically for this exhibition. Both bodies of work continue Jaray’s exploration into an increasingly reduced formal language as well as into the challenges of painting with the circular plain.

Stemming from the early form of long-distance communication developed in the 1830s known as telegraphy, the exhibition’s title, a combination of dots and dashes, is itself an unintelligible abbreviation of a well known Morse code. By today’s standards an archaic form of technology-based communication, telegraphy allowed for an instant long-distance connection between bodies far removed from one another. In a sense, telegraphy was an initial form of an abstracted immediate conversation that would become the inevitable standard for contemporary technological societies.

All works in the exhibition share two commonalities: They are round and painted on wooden panel. Both refer to a particularity within the challenges of pictorial representation with painting. Jaray elaborates on these art-historically tested parameters of working outside of the common rectangle and inside a circle’s central perspective. Further, painting on wooden paneling instead of canvas allows Jaray an expanded graphic reduction of form and flatness while annotating to the ancient use of wooden surfaces as carriers for visual communication.

The two bodies of work shown in the exhibition express Jaray’s quest for a progressive reduction of scale, visual contend, association and arrangement. The small-scale works from 2020 and 2021 shown on the gallery’s first floor exist in pairs with one panel inevitably linked by color, contend and form to the other. Each diptych’s communication is held within, a dialogue of two equal parts with one conditioning the other’s existence. The result is an internal communication which presents itself to the viewer as an encapsulated code or language. Only together they can articulate themselves, a two-tone line across a two tone-canvases: what is background color in one, becomes the color of transposed form in the other. Not one of the two works functions without the other, it is an interdependency of formal and spatial dialogue.

What seems almost impossible if not to move to a painted monochrome is achieved in Jaray’s most recent works specifically produced in 2023 for this exhibition. The 17 very small-scale painted plains are now liberated from the limitations a diptych’s internal constraints and appear as isolated atoms freely floating, colliding and bouncing off one another. With these smallest and formally most reduced works to date, Jaray retreats even further from a painted as well as conceptual necessity for visual communication. A dash, a dot, a triangle, a square, a line, a circle, a zero and/on a singular one. Jaray reduces her painterly language to an inevitable core with each painting becoming a skeleton of definitive reduction and minimal depiction.

All that remains, an essential if not ultimate result of many decades of formal and spatial investigation by the 1937 born artist, are flat circular planes painted in two-tonal, at times acidic and bright color combinations. Jaray’s mastery of form and color appears joyful and at ease. 17 basic graphic forms are arranged one per circular canvas, each atom speaking for itself as to the others. Any specific or specified order of things, often seen as a fundamental, is reduced as much to its essence as is the contend of each individual painting.

For the first time, the artist does not give any guidance for their presentation. Each works’ plain and proud autonomy exists and expands once activated through the respective installer’s or viewer’s installation wishes. No presentation of this group of works will be equal to the previous. A perceived order of things is abandoned in favor of a response to these works in future exhibitions to come. The works, either titled In the beginning, In the middle, or In the end, point to a narrative liberation though, when read in order, can also refer to a time-, or lifeline.

The artist’s internal and well as external withdrawal from distinct authorship can either be understood as a form of visual and spatial anarchy or, more likely, a form of enablement. It is as if Jaray has given us the greatest gift of them all. The empowerment to view and engage with these works as if to say: make your own decision, craft your own story out of the 17 individual atoms.

With °°‾‾°° Jaray reduces language to its core. Jaray’s gift, after 65 years of painting, is a joyful and a generous one.

Kazuko Miyamoto

Posted on by Regina Regina

Born 1942 in Tokyo, lives and works in New York.

Kinga Kiełczyńska

Posted on by Regina Regina

Born 1972 in Warsaw, lives and works in Warsaw.

→kingakielczynska.com

Gwenn Thomas

Posted on by Regina Regina

Born 1943, lives and works in New York.

Erik Niedling

Posted on by Regina Regina

Born 1973 in Erfurt, Germany, lives and works in Berlin and Erfurt.

→erikniedling.com