This exhibition started with Pierre Klossowski’s essay “Living Currency” as a point of interest, with the premise that the body and its attendant desires act as units of exchange. It departed into a series of associations between artists and works that includes pieces by Olga Balema, Dora Budor, Georg Herold, Pierre Klossowski, Guy Mees, Josephine Pryde, Rosemarie Trockel, Camilla Wills, and a film by Guillaume Dustan. These works at once bear and disrupt material traces of economic and libidinal systems, without losing sight of the position of the artist, the work, and its spectator in relation to them. They ask us to look at what governs relations of production and reproduction, which logics are at play, and what fails to be assimilated into their systems. From here we might see what they categorise as useless, spent, as well as their erotics, their waste, their gaps, their exhaustion, their ubiquity, their omnipotence, their invisibility.

Since the escalation of the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine at the beginning of this year our reality has shifted, but this was preceded by the ideological conflict between the “Eastern dictatorship and Western democracy,” the coronavirus pandemic, migration flows, fake news, and the storming of the US capitol (and with it the emblematic tottering of democracy), as well as other shocks that we have followed in the media. 

 

The collective witnessing through simultaneous media coverage makes our reality more unreal, the drama more absurd, than could have been imagined—because it is all playing out live in front of our “digital” eyes. A physical war in 21st-century Europe seems outmoded, almost grotesque on the screen, the propagandistic information war, one might think, completely outdated—yet that appears to be the means of the time.

 

The various information and misinformation overlap. “As soon as you turn on your cell phone, news comes in and expands your daily reality into hyperreality,” says Volo Bevza, artist and co-curator of the exhibition. “On the ground, you can feel the war, but most importantly, it is ‘experienced’ digitally. This hybridity of our perception brings with it the idea of a flexible, adaptable, multiform, and cross-platform image that merges with software and digital media—just as information about war does.”

 

This overlaying and blending of information and images is the subject of the exhibition 2022 as part of Curated by. Only Ukrainian artists were deliberately selected, for whom the clash between real war and the hybrid-virtual perception of war may feel particularly bizarre and disturbing. This raises the question of how such drastic experiences are reflected upon and how the reporting changes artistic scrutiny. Through and with the impressions of the current situation, the multimedia exhibition serves to make individual voices visible. Anticipatory works from previous years and updated works are shown in equal measure. Analog and digital means blur, especially in painting and photography. This is indirectly a testimony to the experiential shift in perspectives through the hybrid perception of a hyperreality that takes shape in a very painful and analog way.

 

In Victoria Pidust’s works, generated image worlds overlap with analog photography. For this purpose, she uses photogrammetry software and highly magnified snapshots from her iPhone. During the war, in April 2022 in Kiev, she scanned a shattered screen of a shopping mall destroyed by war damage to render “natural” looking landscape images, which she in turn decontextualized with building components from a Berlin construction site. Zoomed-in on and isolated details can be decoded as danger spots and signal alertness. With the associative mixture of hybrid visual material, she demonstrates the readiness of our perception to be manipulated.

 

The works of Yevgenia Belorusets, on the other hand, seem documentary at first glance. Her war diaries from the spring of 2022 have become famous through their daily broadcast in Spiegel online. Already in the work Please don‘t take my picture! Or they‘ll shoot me tomorrow from 2015, the artist addressed media deception by adapting Today’s Paper, a fictional journal, and dealt with the dichotomy of “private-public” and “personal-general.” In her current engagement, she confronts the issue of reception and enlightenment in private life as well as in the public sphere through artistic and also literary means. She subjects everything to a “reality check”, her simultaneous questioning creates new, concurrent realities.

 

Artem Volokitin translates the anxieties of the digital image into traditional oil paintings—an alliance of believable materiality and flawed artificiality of spectacle. In an almost medieval painting technique, destructive moments are transformed into ecstatic states. In imposing tableaux, beauty and approaching nightmare meet in grand gestures.

 

In Happiness 100%, Dariia Kuzmych explores the vulnerability of the human body through a digital avatar in the form of a female model. One experiences how the changes, transformations, and metamorphoses of the body that are impossible in a physical world can be represented virtually in a very believable and painful way—and in doing so, the digital space with its own laws and possibilities expands our basic conceptions. Digital “body extensions” do not completely replace the analog medium in

Kuzmych‘s work; recently created delicate watercolors decipher real injuries.

 

In his painterly-digital approach, Volo Bevza repeatedly deals with destruction: physical destruction overlaps in his work with the translation losses of a digital software, which in turn is transferred alienated into the medium of painting. Here, realities intermingle; superimpositions and the filter of the “soft image” temper dystopian situations, while painterly structures overlay documentary appropriation. His paintings are exaggerated, charged places of a frightening, existing reality.

 

 

 

Deutsche Übersetzung

 

Nicht erst seit der Eskalation des russischen Angriffskriegs auf die Ukraine Anfang dieses Jahres hat sich unsere Realität verschoben. Voran gingen der ideologische Konflikt zwischen den Systemen „Ost-Diktatur / West-Demokratie“, die pandemische Krise, Migrationsströme, Fake News und die Erstürmung des Kapitols (und damit das sinnbildliche Wanken der Demokratie) wie auch weitere Erschütterungen, die wir medial verfolgt haben. 

 

Die kollektive Zeugenschaft durch die zeitgleiche Medienberichterstattung macht unsere Wirklichkeit irrealer, das Drama absurder, als es vorweg hätte vorstellbar werden können – denn es spielt sich alles live vor unserem digitalen Auge ab. Ein physischer Krieg im 21. Jahrhundert in Europa erscheint unzeitgemäß, auf dem Screen beinahe grotesk, der propagandistische Informationskrieg, könnte man meinen, vollkommen überholt – jedoch das Mittel der Zeit. 

 

Die multiplen Informationen und Falschinformationen überlagern sich. „Kaum schaltet man das Handy ein, kommen Nachrichten rein und erweitern die tagtägliche Realität zu einer Hyperrealität“, sagt Volo Bevza, Künstler und Ko-Kurator der Ausstellung. „Vor Ort kann man den Krieg spüren, aber vor allem wird er digital ‚erlebt’. Diese Hybridität unserer Wahrnehmung bringt mit sich die Idee eines flexiblen, adaptierbaren, vielgestaltigen und plattformübergreifenden Bildes, das mit Software und digitalen Medien verschmilzt – genauso wie die Informationen über den Krieg es tun.“

 

Mit dieser Überlagerung und Überblendung von Informationen und Bildern beschäftigt sich die Ausstellung „2022“ im Rahmen des Curated-by-Galerienfestivals. Bewusst wurden nur ukrainische Künstler.innen ausgewählt, für die sich das Aufeinandertreffen von realem Krieg und hybrid-virtueller Kriegswahrnehmung besonders bizarr und verstörend anfühlen mag. Dabei stellt sich die Frage, wie solch einschneidende Erlebnisse reflektiert werden und wie die Berichterstattung eine künstlerische Auseinandersetzung verändern. Durch und mit den Eindrücken der aktuellen Lage dient die multimediale Ausstellung der Sichtbarmachung einzelner Stimmen. Es werden antizipierende Arbeiten aus vorangegangenen Jahren und aktualisierte Werke gleichermaßen gezeigt. Es verschwimmen analoge und digitale Mittel, insbesondere in der Malerei und Fotografie. Dies ist indirekt ein Zeugnis der erlebbaren Verschiebung der Perspektiven durch die hybride Wahrnehmung einer Hyperrealität, die sehr schmerzlich und analog Gestalt annimmt.

 

In den Arbeiten von Victoria Pidust überlagern sich generierte Bildwelten mit analoger Fotografie. Dazu verwendet sie Fotogrammetrie-Software und stark vergrößerte Snapshots aus ihrem iPhone. Während des Krieges, im April 2022 in Kiew, hat sie einen zerschmetterten Bildschirm aus einer durch Kriegsschäden zerstörten Shopping-Mall gescannt, um daraus ‚natürlich‘ wirkende Landschaftsbilder zu rendern und diese wiederum mit Bauteilen einer Berliner Baustelle zu dekontextualisieren. Gezoomte, isolierte Details lassen sich als Gefahrenherd decodieren und signalisieren Alarmbereitschaft. Mit der assoziativen Mischung aus hybridem, visuellem Material führt sie die Manipulationsbereitschaft unserer Wahrnehmung vor.

 

Die Arbeiten von Yevgenia Belorusets hingegen wirken auf den ersten Blick dokumentarisch. Ihre Kriegstagebücher aus dem Frühjahr 2022 sind durch die tagesaktuelle Übertragung in Spiegel Online berühmt geworden. Schon in der Arbeit „Please don‘t take my picture! Or they‘ll shoot me tomorrow“ aus dem Jahre 2015 adressierte die Künstlerin mediale Täuschung durch die Adaption von Today’s Paper, einem fiktiven Journal, und setzte sich mit der Dichotomie von ‚privat-öffentlich‘ und ‚persönlich-generell‘ auseinander. In ihrer aktuellen Beschäftigung stellt sie sich dem Thema der Rezeption und Aufklärung im privaten Leben wie in der Öffentlichkeit mit künstlerischen und auch literarischen Mitteln. Alles unterzieht sie einem „Reality Check“, ihre zeitgleiche Hinterfragung schafft neue, simultane Realitäten.

 

Artem Volokitin übersetzt die Ängste vor dem digitalen Bild in traditionelle Ölmalereien – eine Allianz aus glaubhafter Materialität und fehlerhafter Künstlichkeit des Spektakels. In fast mittelalterlicher Maltechnik werden destruktive Momente in ekstatische Zustände überführt. Auf imposanten Tableaus begegnen sich in großer Geste Schönheit und nahender Alptraum.

 

In „Happiness 100%“ erforscht Dariia Kuzmych die Verletzlichkeit des menschlichen Körpers anhand eines digitalen Avatars in Gestalt eines weiblichen Modells. Man erlebt, wie die in einer physischen Welt unmöglichen Veränderungen, Verwandlungen und Metamorphosen des Körpers virtuell sehr glaubhaft und schmerzhaft dargestellt werden können – und hierbei der digitale Raum mit seinen eigenen Gesetzen und Möglichkeiten unsere Basis-Vorstellungen erweitert. Digitale ‚Körperextensionen‘ ersetzen das analoge Medium bei Kuzmych nicht vollends, jüngst entstandene delikate Aquarelle dechiffrieren reale Verletzungen.

 

Volo Bevza beschäftigt sich in seiner malerisch-digitalen Vorgehensweise immer wieder mit der Zerstörung: Physische Vernichtung überblendet sich bei ihm mit den Übersetzungsverlusten einer digitalen Software, die wiederum verfremdet in das Medium Malerei überführt wird. Hier vermischen sich die Realitäten; Überblendungen und der Filter des ‚Softimage‘ zeichnen dystopische Situationen weich. Malerische Strukturen überlagern die dokumentarische Aneignung. Seine Bilder sind überhöhte, aufgeladene Orte der erschreckenden, real existierenden Wirklichkeit.

Fedir Tetyanych (1942–2007) grew up during World War II in the village of Kniazhychi near Kyiv. There, through his early contact with land and nature, and against the backdrop of the armed conflict (as a child he was injured by a piece of a projectile), his idiosyncratic perception of rural cosmism and human responsibility for the surrounding world took form.

As an artist, Tetyanych worked against the constraints of various ideologies and disciplines. He was an author of monumentalist mosaics and decorative panels in the Soviet era, a chronicler of Ukrainian indigenous cosmologies and Cossacks’ anarchist history, a joyous performer, writer of cosmist and ecological manifestos, egalitarian hoarder of objects and an activist who wished to turn landfill sites and factories into theatres. All these labels apply yet collectively fail to encompass Tetyanych’s nonconformist legacy and prolific output.

In the 1960s, the artist began his first State commissions for monumental decorations in public space, which he often created using found items: discarded industrial waste, scraps of metal, cans, screws and shards of glass. These materials became prime matter for his future costumes and performances on the streets of Kyiv from the 1980s onwards.

Tetyanych considered his whole life to be one single performance, but he was more informed by science-fiction literature, cybernetics and cycles of nature than by any of his contemporaries in the field of avant-garde art. In the 1970s, he developed his own version of ecologically-informed cosmism, stemming from an awareness of infinite unity with the universe and mutual interconnectedness, which he called Frypulia. According to him, humanity, even if eventually turned into radio waves or rays of light, would carry information about itself and reappear at any point of space and time. 

The exhibition pays special attention to Tetyanych’s concept of the biotechnosphere – an autonomous unit for shelter, energy-storage and transportation. The artist made numerous drawings and watercolours imagining their future application, he also installed the actual models in public space; for example, by incorporating them into his State-commissioned monumentalist works. Today, as we witness the rise of fossil-fascism, sowing crisis and military and information warfare, it is uncanny to trace the previous locations of biotechnospheres in Popasna, Peremoga and Kyiv on a map; in many instances, they mirror current sites of brutal military destruction.

As none of these sculptures survived the past political transformation, and while Ukraine continues to resist the ruthless genocidal and ecocidal Russian invasion, what can we learn from Tetyanych? A radical shift of political imagination and visuality is urgently needed. Tetyanych’s strategy of resistance and political experiment offers us a glimpse into what a project of world-making and healing could mean, but what place does his insubordinate practice occupy in the visual canon of the international avant-garde? Or, indeed, outside it? His future-oriented project reminds us that repair and ethics need to be constantly anticipated, rehearsed and practiced outside of art to produce sustainable results. Natalia Sielewicz would like to thank Anna Tetyanych-Bublyk, Bohdan Tetyanych-Bublyk, Lada Tetyanych-Bublyk, Nikita Kadan, Liza German and Anna Potiomkina.

 

The exhibition 'Fedir Tetyanych. The Neverending Eye' is a presentation of one of the most visionary Ukrainian artists working at the intersection of cosmism, performance, cybernetics and ecology-driven practice. The show introduces his multifaceted oeuvre, which embodied a continued search for artistic freedom and euphoric unity with the universe. 

Fedir Tetyanych (1942–2007) grew up during World War II in the village of Kniazhychi near Kyiv. There, through his early contact with land and nature, and against the backdrop of the armed conflict (as a child he was injured by a piece of a projectile), his idiosyncratic perception of rural cosmism and human responsibility for the surrounding world took form.

As an artist, Tetyanych worked against the constraints of various ideologies and disciplines. He was an author of monumentalist mosaics and decorative panels in the Soviet era, a chronicler of Ukrainian indigenous cosmologies and Cossacks’ anarchist history, a joyous performer, writer of cosmist and ecological manifestos, egalitarian hoarder of objects and an activist who wished to turn landfill sites and factories into theatres. All these labels apply yet collectively fail to encompass Tetyanych’s nonconformist legacy and prolific output.

In the 1960s, the artist began his first State commissions for monumental decorations in public space, which he often created using found items: discarded industrial waste, scraps of metal, cans, screws and shards of glass. These materials became prime matter for his future costumes and performances on the streets of Kyiv from the 1980s onwards.

Tetyanych considered his whole life to be one single performance, but he was more informed by science-fiction literature, cybernetics and cycles of nature than by any of his contemporaries in the field of avant-garde art. In the 1970s, he developed his own version of ecologically-informed cosmism, stemming from an awareness of infinite unity with the universe and mutual interconnectedness, which he called Frypulia. According to him, humanity, even if eventually turned into radio waves or rays of light, would carry information about itself and reappear at any point of space and time. 

The exhibition pays special attention to Tetyanych’s concept of the biotechnosphere – an autonomous unit for shelter, energy-storage and transportation. The artist made numerous drawings and watercolours imagining their future application, he also installed the actual models in public space; for example, by incorporating them into his State-commissioned monumentalist works. Today, as we witness the rise of fossil-fascism, sowing crisis and military and information warfare, it is uncanny to trace the previous locations of biotechnospheres in Popasna, Peremoga and Kyiv on a map; in many instances, they mirror current sites of brutal military destruction.

As none of these sculptures survived the past political transformation, and while Ukraine continues to resist the ruthless genocidal and ecocidal Russian invasion, what can we learn from Tetyanych? A radical shift of political imagination and visuality is urgently needed. Tetyanych’s strategy of resistance and political experiment offers us a glimpse into what a project of world-making and healing could mean, but what place does his insubordinate practice occupy in the visual canon of the international avant-garde? Or, indeed, outside it? His future-oriented project reminds us that repair and ethics need to be constantly anticipated, rehearsed and practiced outside of art to produce sustainable results.

Natalia Sielewicz would like to thank Anna Tetyanych-Bublyk, Bohdan Tetyanych-Bublyk, Lada Tetyanych-Bublyk, Nikita Kadan, Liza German and Anna Potiomkina.

 

 

 

 

 

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. The invited artists make work at the edges of legality, entering directly within international law and its processes, dissect genocide; and expose the absurdities of the state, fixed identities, and borders. The artisanal water pumps in refugee-camp courtyards, the fountain in the window-shattered piazza, the matka at the doorstep are extraneous. They fuse with the possibility of extraterritoriality, exceeding national ideas of jurisdiction, sovereignty and constitutionally given identities, and monumentality. Their extraneousness make them sites of meeting, capable of encounter, capable of reimagining affiliation, the polis, citizenship, refuge. Can territory be exceeded? How to be out of territory? What extraneous space is opened by the extraterritorial or the unidentified? Can a failed forensic identifier open space for abstract, infinite possibilities of identification against identity politics, and constitutional, nationally-sanctioned communities and borders?

It’s your turn to speak and you’re given the cue. On other occasions you go – why am I being asked now? Of course, not all prompts are given out by others, at least not directly. One form of such an auto-prompt is špargalkė (a bastardised Lithuanian version of шпаргалка). A cheat sheet for an exam, its contents as well as its form depend on the imaginative ways in which it will be imminently and covertly used. Any scrap of paper, špargalkė rolls around a pen, folds many times to fit the trousers’ pocket or simply juts out of the sleeve of a (tactically oversized) school uniform. And yet, prompts operate in enclosed systems – the limits of their possible expression are pre-determined. 

"No," says the teacher after thinking for a moment, "I haven't seen Ernesto."
"No one sees him!" says Ernesto's father. "It's as if he didn't exist!"
…
"Ah! Ernesto!" says the teacher. "I don't recognise you."
"Well I recognise you," says Ernesto.
"You see?" sighs his mother. "You see what he's like?"


Five or six years back a Lithuanian friend of mine was studying at a distinguished European university for Political Sciences. For two years, she had been analysing the day-to-day operations and decision-making processes of the European Commission and Parliament. An underlying pattern became apparent: assertions of the ‘Eastern’ European member states in regards to Russia’s involvement in EU politics and energy infrastructure were repeatedly dismissed as paranoid at worst, and unpragmatic at best. In her dissertation, she sought to argue that while all members have an equal weighting in the decision-making process de jure, de facto it was far from the truth. The supervisor kindly recommended to stop pursuing this thesis as her claims were ‘unverifiable’, thus, the thesis unworkable. The supervisor refused to learn. Verification came belatedly, verifying my friend’s thesis as verifiable after all.

Through The Prompt, Ola Vasiljeva’s sprawling installation doubles the one who refuses to learn, alluding to the complacency and naivete of the Western ‘subject of knowledge’, attributes this subject routinely passes onto others. First exhibited in 2015, the work refers to Marguerite Duras’ children’s story Ah! Ernesto! and its film adaptation En Rachâchant by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Its protagonist is schoolboy Ernesto. He, much to the dismay of his teacher and parents, refuses to learn what he does not already know.

On graduation day from the Civil Engineering Faculty in April 1972, documented through a series of photographs, Milda Drazdauskaitė (1951–2019) walks in a suit and chic shades through an empty Vilnius city centre, carrying a folder with the diploma firmly in hand as if it were a top-secret document. The artist’s irreverence befuddled equally her late Soviet-era contemporaries and the narrators of the recent past in post-independence Lithuania. Recently recovered ‘private’ DIY photo books, in which from the 1970s onwards Drazdauskaitė presented significant feminist performances to the camera, help contextualise the body of work the photographer left behind. 

Drazdauskaitė mocks a myriad of untenable, or simply unfulfilling ways of life that the Soviet society granted. She performs as an engineering graduate (a biographical fact), a milkmaid, and a soldier. Her prints in The Prompt underline the blind spots of the late-Soviet era representations, prevalent in the international art circuit, and the rarely attended-to specifics of artistic production under the regime. She uses portraiture as a performative, deconstructive device, as a means to drift away from the confines of Soviet visual culture, including the supposedly non-conforming work of her male peers. Her lens pokes fun at the false choice between ‘utopian’ Soviet modernity and the ‘archaic’ Lithuanian rural culture, another photographic cliché of Drazdauskaitė’s contemporaries.  

Elena Narbutaitė inhabits the show with large-scale foldable paper sculptures titled Dools (2017–), their title a play on the ‘dolls’ and ‘dollars’ homophonic hints. In a seamless interchange between the front and back of a body, Dools trace paper’s internal capacity to soften signification – transform itself through its fold. As two laser rays clash and cut across the room, the light of Fumy Frig Sour (2013–2018) steadies itself into a magenta violet as it lands on the wall opposite. Its physical properties utilised in war, medicine and restoration, render it ephemeral yet not necessarily fragile. Meticulously and theoretically calculated, an intensely organised coalescence of light, it appears neither strictly geometrical nor figurative. Fumy Frig Sour ‘wounds’ without leaving a mark. A set of theoretical calculations, the beam displays itself as its own origin, effect and representation, and shapeshifts into an allegorical laceration flowing through psychological undercurrents.

As a tacit conversation between the distinct artistic sensibilities of Ola Vasiljeva, Elena Narbutaitė and Milda Drazdauskaitė, The Prompt may or may not come across as a transient space offering a redistribution of perception. The Prompt is for Ernesto and for his teacher. 

– Adomas Narkevičius

Our exhibition Reroute—Reorient is curated by Asier Mendizabal and features works by Goshka Macuga, Mangelos, Ciprian Muresan, Roman Ondak and Tania Pérez Córdova.

When lost, perplexed, or shocked, we feel the need to reorient ourselves. That is the term we use to define the adjustment to a new situation that might have come about after a sudden, unforeseeable or unfathomable change. To reorient, to orient again, refers, of course, to a spatial notion. By re-establishing a cardinal reference (east, north…) as a spatial metaphor, we determine a position relative to our surroundings, but also, to an uncertain present. 

This spatial metaphor of adjusting to a compass differs from the way in which contemporary positioning navigation systems deal with being astray. Rerouting, the term popularised by GPS based systems as the corrective action unequivocally determined by data collection, is different from reorienting. It suggests a calculus of all the possible ways, tracks, and paths after a wrong turn, as if they were all simultaneously available and it were only a matter of computational power to identify the right one. Not so much a directional notion that can always be summoned as an aim – as orientation seemed to suggest– but an indiscriminate scanning of all possible bifurcations, of separating lines out of an indistinct mesh. 

If we stretched the analogy of this pair to the subsequent global events that have characterised our present as one of incertitude and bewilderment, we would have to admit that the optimistic, technified mode of positioning ourselves suggested in rerouting entails a naturalised ideological worldview, made of pragmatic choices. Or, conversely, that we have lost trust in any valid anchor point towards which to rearrange our efforts, as an imagined trajectory drawn by a line.

Lines as trajectories or vectors, but also as connectors and as borders feature as a recurrent element in the works that thread this exhibition. These are the three main uses for lines in diagrammatic representations: projecting, connecting, and separating. In all cases, they imply the relation between two entities: a given position, and an aim, in a trajectory, two related elements in a connector, or two planes after a cut – the line is the representation of mediation but is never on either side of the dichotomy. A timeline, two connected units or two divided areas imply a diametrical connection between two things and, therefore, a specular relation and a threshold.

Janus, the Roman god of doors and thresholds, is always represented as a double face, looking simultaneously in two opposite directions. Backwards and forwards, inwards and outwards, into the future and into the past. Its constitution is the exact inversion of a mirror. Whereas the reflection of one’s face in a surface creates an inward illusion of introspection, the faces turned outwards in the representations of Janus create an axis at the point in which each gaze cannot encounter the other. The threshold is always elusive. Irrepresentable. Maybe this is why Janus also presided the dealings between war and peace.

Goshka Macuga’s International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation (2016) features a group of portraits connected by rods which draw a diagrammatic relation between them. It remains unclear whether the lines link or separate these faces, but as in a multifaceted Janus, they cannot look at each other. The title of the series and the subtitle for this particular configuration (End of God: Madame Blavatsky, Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Monster of Frankenstein, Rabindranath Tagore, Charles Darwin) directs the reading towards the historical recurrence of the utopian notion by which cultural exchanges and relations would necessarily foster a peaceful stability. The ambivalence of the function of the connecting rods, simultaneously linking and separating the portraits, suggests an analogue impossibility as the axis/threshold in the Janus head. 

When Ciprian Muresan overlaps several partial casts of busts (Untitled (Portrait), 2021), the multifaceted structure of Macuga’s constellation seems to condense in an equivalent paradox. This method of overlapping is recurrent in Muresan’s work, most notably in his accumulation of lines which, as in a palimpsest, form simultaneous layers of what in its original form would be linearly organised pages in a book (All the Images from the Complete collection catalogue of S.M.A.K., 2019). It is a spatially paradoxical representation of time, both in its overlapping and transparency, and in its spreading throughout the support generating a surface reminiscent of a map. 

The contour of an absent rear-view mirror, identified in the title of Roman Ondak’s work, Erased Wing Mirror (2013), also denies the reflection of our face, suggesting the impossibility not only of facing ourselves as other, but also of looking back, which is, after all, what rear-view mirrors allow us to do. Placed over a relief map, the cut-out mirror evokes the idea of journey and of borders as inevitably linked to the temporal dimension of travel, and the difficulty to orient ourselves in absence of a historical perspective. Ondak returns to the trope of the mirror, albeit less explicitly, in his new piece Parallel Worlds (2022), in which the two contiguous representations of a globe, where the lines that represent latitude and longitude of the geographic coordinate system are engraved, overlapping the concentric growth lines of the section cut of a tree. The ideal nature of the geographical divisions contrasts with the irreducible material condition of the organic tree, not unlike the way in which Tania Pérez Córdova’s Contour #12 (2021) draws a threshold by pouring bronze into a sand mould of lines which, far from their diagrammatical abstraction, spill out of their borders. The lines of ruled notebooks replicated in all Mangelos’s painted manifestos seem similarly imperfect. Hesitant and contingent, they seem almost incapable of fulfilling their function of straightening the calligraphy into a systematic logic. The cadence of the line that constitutes the handwriting in these works (Hamurabi Manifesto, Energia, Manifesto on Thinking No. 1, all dated between 1971 and 1978) is no less decisive than the abstract template that should have normalised it by subjecting it to the order of the parallel lines.

Asier Mendizabal

The Body is Sacrament is an investigation into the East vs West dichotomy as a paradigm that supports imperialism and nationalism. Placing together the works of four American artists–Calli Roche, Catalina Ouyang, Harry Gould Harvey, and Nathaniel Oliver–this show will explore the way in which hierarchical social structures, such as class, race, gender, and ability, systematically divorce certain Americans from their own Western identity. At the same time, however, the East provides no relief for such marginalized people. The Body is Sacrament will dig deeper at this geographical and cultural binary in order to understand the ways in which the East, as well as the West, becomes an oppressive construct that serve to maintain control over citizens of nation states. The East gets rendered as the esoteric opposite of the West, in which the sacred is treated as science. In turn, the West enforces a seemingly empirical ethics of the enlightenment. By exploring these ideas, KJ Freeman is interested in searching for solace beyond the confines and indoctrination of Western ethics. Elements of sadomasochism that prop these systems at large seep into the works of Calli Roche and Catalina Ouyong. These artists’ use of leather, fabric, wax and discarded ephemera signal a cathartic purge that transform raw material into biblical-like relics. Harry Gould Harvey’s constellation of systems of divinity echo these sentiments, while Nathaniel Oliver’s attention to Creole deities and Afro-futurist imagery, paints the architecture of jazz as a sonic practice that is at once mathematical and mythical, deeply rooted in ancient African spiritual practices that predate the problematic division of the globe. KJ’s approach to curation is holistic and driven by an overarching need to frame and highlight the unseen.

 

 

Georg Kargl Fine Arts is pleased to present the exhibition "I Had a Dog and a Cat", inspired by the life and work of Josef Čapek (1887, Hronov – 1945, Bergen-Belsen), an artist and writer, who challenged the existing thinking and behaviour of his time. Featuring works by eight contemporary artists, the exhibition draws a parallel between the animals from the children's book "All About Doggie and Pussycat" (J. Čapek, 1929), which transform everyday tasks at their home into creative and exceptional situations, and the selected artists, who, each in their own way, share the involvement of combining divergent things and situations that might otherwise not meet. Collisions and contradictions, present in the ordinary and the common, give rise to truly authentic responses. The exhibition design is based on the occurrence of natural light within the existing conditions of the building and the physical experience of the body in the space.

Presented by Christine König Galerie in the framework of the curated by program, the exhibition entitled SEMMI SEM SEMMI features works by Endre Tót, one of the most significant figures of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde generation, as well as an emblematic figure of international conceptual and mail art. The works comprised in the show were realized between the early 1970s and the 2010s, after Tót gave up – abstract expressionist and Informel – painting in 1970, only to return to the painterly gesture in total secrecy in the 1980s and to reveal this fact in the Summer of 2021. During these five decades, the Hungarian artist elaborated and unfolded thematic conceptual series in a variety of (new) media such artist books, telegrams, postcards, typewriting, postal and rubber stamps, video, posters, graffiti, banners or actions. The pieces on view in the exhibition investigate the three fundamental concepts he conceived by 1971, termed Zer0, Joy and Rain, that were elaborated as conceptual survival strategies using derision and humour against the grim Socialist everyday life. In the light of this year’s traumatic geopolitical events, the war in Ukraine raging at our borders, and the still prevailing East-West dichotomy that shapes our existence, Endre Tót’s life – balancing between Hungary and West Germany since 1979 – and works remain sharply relevant, contemporary, therefore offering a visual, conceptual antidote to our anxious times.

The concept and motif of Zer0 first made its appearance in the artist’s mail art activity, a form of artistic communication that conveyed perfectly his idea-based art, while also constituting the only means to initiate correspondence as early as 1971 with the most prominent figures of the international avant-garde from behind the iron curtain. For Tót, the Zer0 sign, which embodied the mathematical concept of nothing, primarily symbolised the absurdity of communication, but also the concepts of absence and presence, while the philosophical and political aspects of the character “0” certainly reflected an ontological approach of the condition of both citizens and artists under state Socialism. The text, as a means of communication – was dangerous grounds considering how the freedom of speech was curbed in the socialist regime. Tót’s works, however, communicated by not communicating, by saying nothing, and by picturing absence, as expressed in the Nothing, Absent Painting and Blackout Painting series – in direct connection with the Zer0 concept.

The second group of artworks from Endre Tót’s early conceptual period are his Rain pieces. The raining pattern, created with an economy of visual means by repeatedly hitting the “/” sign on the typewriter, is always accompanied by text, a fertile ground for the intellectual playfulness characteristic of Endre Tót’s approach, which at times manifested in the form of banal tautology, and at other times as (self-)ironic artistic self-expression or humorous political references. Found pictures – postcards, reproductions of well-known paintings, or images from magazines – comprised the basis of a significant portion of the “Rain” works, in which the artist inserted texts with references to the image or the shape of the rain, in clear connection with visual poetry.

Made in 1971, Endre Tót’s first Joy-piece which was a single sentence in English and Hungarian on a postcard-sized cardboard sheet: “I am glad that I could have this sentence printed.” In the light of the authoritarian control exerted by the socialist regime over any form of publishing, printing and circulating texts, Tót’s sentence is an ironic expression of the optimism demanded by the state from its citizens. Tót himself writes the following: “My ‘Joys’ were the reflections of the totalitarian state of the seventies. I responded with the absurd euphoria of Joys to censorship, isolation, suppression sensed in every field of life, though this suppression worked with the subtlest means, hardly visible.” The artist’s recognition of the fact that he cannot be held accountable by the authorities for expressing his joy gave rise to further Joy-pieces, the development, universalisation of the topic as well as the Tót’s gradually unfolding actionism, especially the Gladness Demonstrations and the series Very Special Gladnesses, associating image and text.

The artist will be present for the opening and will realise a site-specific piece on the walls of the space.
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with acb Gallery, Budapest.

 

 

The exhibition takes its starting point from the understanding of fluid and transformative existence, relations and presences. It brings together artists with diverse mixed media practices whose collaborative and individual works interrogate the contemporary condition through the somatic and explore the relationship between bodies and the organization of space. Informed by queer ecologies, feminism, critical anthropology, re-envisioning collective futures and infrastructures the presentation revolves around notions of radical joy and intimacy, abundance, vulnerability and resilience. Sensory Tales features a line-up of artists from different generations, backgrounds and geographies whose practices share a nuanced and transformative treatment of their chosen media challenging us to reconsider how we read and understand facets of reality and identity. The works enter into conversation on many levels as artists come from different political, sociocultural and economic contexts. They have each developed an expansive visual vocabulary that might involve or be inspired by textual experiments, poetry or fiction. Their concept-based inquiries often connect to critique of dominant ideas around gender fluidity, desire, sensuality as well as implicit and explicit violence or misuse of power. The dominating genre of the exhibition is paper based work but the selection includes crafted objects, sculptures and costumes. Though the pieces and series presented employ various strategies they each embody a commitment to continually challenge our ways to question existing systems of meaning and understanding knowledge.

"Whether any act of interference is good or bad is a value judgment that could be based logically on the type of interference and the ends for which the interference is conducted." – Richard W. Cottam, American political scientist and contributor to the C.I.A., 1967. "Disordering the meaning – disordering the concepts and all the little tropical rains of demoralisation, disorganisation, destruction, collision..." – Tristan Tzara, Romanian artist, 1920. In a world where 70 countries are using cyber troops to spread propaganda and industrialise disinformation, the exhibition Interference. Traces, Stories and Ghosts, explores interference as an artistic strategy. It is probably no coincidence that it was roughly at the same time in the Cold War era of the 1960s and 1970s that interference first came to full fruition both as a method of psychological warfare and artistic troublemaking. Yet, artistic and state interference differ fundamentally in their methods and goals. The often playful acts of artistic interference are not destructive but productive. Their impetus is imagination, not imperious command. Their goal is social progress, rather than the preservation or expansion of power. As interventions in the ordinary course of things, they bring our automatisms to a halt and can provoke critical thinking or dissent. Instead of virality and click rates, they pursue singularity and deceleration. Artistic interference in public space, like those Jiří Kovanda developed in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, plays an essential role in the history of artistic inference. Many of Kovanda’s performances are conspicuously unconspicuous. Leaning against a barrier, he makes seemingly natural gestures while really following a script, or gather dirt with his hands and scatters it again. In the gallery, he transforms ordinary objects through minimal interventions, cutting the leg of a chair or seemingly misusing two pedestals by placing them on a shirt. In public space, he doesn’t create large marble sculptures for eternity, but builds small assemblages out of sugar cubes that perish with the next rain, or inserts wedges – perhaps the most minimal allegory for holding things open – between floor bricks. Since February 2022, Malenkiy Piket (Russian: Little Demonstrator) has been using a comparable strategy in a similarly repressive climate 50 years later, namely contemporary Russia. When Vladimir Putin banned any demonstration or statement against his Ukrainian war, a young Russian artist launched this project in Saint Petersburg. The participatory initiative has since spread far beyond the country’s borders. The idea is simple: if we are no longer allowed to demonstrate with our own bodies in public space, proxies do it for us, namely small figures made of plasticine or other materials that are discreetly placed there. In this way, not only does dissent remain visible in public, but – at least this is the intention of the initiator – people do not completely lose the ability to protest. In replacement of Kovanda’s black and white photographs, Malenkiy Piket uses Instagram (@malenkiy_piket) as a place of display and community. By September 2022, over 850 images had already been posted. On a paperboard in the exhibition, the conceptual basis of the action can now be seen for the first time. Plasticine and other materials invite visitors in the Positive Interference Lab to design their own protest figures on topics that are important to them to then be placed in the lab or in public space (social media posts may be tagged with #positiveinterferencelab and sent to @malenkiy_piket). In 1953, Jiří Kolář already succumbed to the danger faced by activists in today’s Russia: The author and visual artist was imprisoned for 9 months for his literary texts. A pardon spared him another year in jail. Draping ordinary objects in text excerpts, pictures or diagrams, Kolář crosses boundaries between art and everyday life, poetry and visual art. Instead of simply celebrating the great works of art history by respectfully quoting them, he cuts up art prints and reassembles them, or comments on current events such as the Soviet Union’s invasion of his homeland using images like the Expulsion from Paradise. Like here, artistic disruption often goes hand in hand with the questioning of dominant value systems. In Dominik Lang’s case, this destructive-creative appropriation has a particularly personal dimension. He works on the work of his father Jiří Lang (1927 - 1996), whose sculptures and drawings who conflicted to much with the official art doctrine in the Czechoslovak Republic to gain visibility. So Jiří Lang’s time was over before it had even come. Dominik Lang’s approach to his father’s estate keeps it alive rather than preserving it merely as a document of times past. In 2011, father and son made a joint appearance in Dominik Lang’s solo exhibition “The Sleeping City” at the Venice Biennale. When the son incorporates his father’s works into his own, recombines them or comments on them, he deals both with personal biography and art history and disrupts the usual relationship between father and son. Katarina Burin’s exploration of the modernist architect Petra Andrejova-Molnár, who was born in Bratislava in 1899 and died in the US in 1985, is also centred on an estate. The exhibition will show the curator’s repeated attempts to understand and present the valuable archive that Burin created and sent over from Cambridge, Mass. A seemingly endless and disorganised number of colour tests, prints, architectural designs and photographs, convey a sense of the complex life and work of an important, but suppressed, female position in modernist architecture that one can only wish had really existed. Similar to Burin, but different in form and content, Dita Pepe’s Betynka (2022) develops a trace-based narrative that oscillates between the documentary and the fictional. The combination of text, an interview with the protagonist, photographs and objects slowly reveals a biography where the artist empathises so radically with her subject that her own life story eventually intertwines with Betynka’s and we no longer know where Betynka ends and Dita begins. Mixed biographies are also the subject of self-portraits with women and self-portraits with men, in which Pepe interferes with the others’ families as well as her own. Like Pepe and Burin, Lene Lekše stages a trace-based narrative. From the clues, the story of a vanished mountain emerges, whose loss is mourned by an exchange in a secret language consisting of whistles and a strange folk song. Various memorabilia suggest a mountain cult reminiscent of tourists chasing souvenirs. In a series of drawings, the artist tries to give form to the mountain, failing over and over again: “We will not be prevented from creating what prevents us from creating“, a sentence by Karl Kraus, could become the motto of this work as well as the whole exhibition. The Positive Interference Lab (PIL) invites you to continue the interference processes initiated in the show. With pens, modelling clay, a paperboard and a computer with printer, it is a place where artistic impulses can become art-based thought and action. In the heart of Vienna, people can thus tinker with interference strategies – under the guidance of artists, activists, scientists or on their own initiative – so that aesthetic perception becomes art- based action. Workshops such as “Interfering with the Self“ or “Interfering with Artificial Intelligence” have already been scheduled. Like the exhibition, the Lab will experiment with counter-narratives, historical storytelling, national geographies, art history, our (auto)biographies and cheerfully conjure up ghosts.

Different threads are woven together to create a “whole cloth,” which is greater than the sum of its parts: a fabric. For its physicality and tangibility, fabric is also commonly employed as a metaphor for what is complex and abstract: a system or an order—the fabric of society, a nation, or even the cosmos. In information technology, fabric is used synonymously with a framework or platform. Hence, weaving—or rather, “ordering”—connects and assigns roles and positions to each of the interrelated strands, based on rules, boundaries, binaries, and containment that implicate inclusion and exclusion.
The modern computer emerged from weaving, the quintessential “women’s work,” according to Sadie Plant; early looms used binary code based on algebra. Ada Lovelace, the “first programmer,” made the loom the vanguard of proto-software development. With Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engine, they laid the foundation for algorithms and computer technology that came to transform not only production and consumption but also warfare. In the 1950s, when IBM started mass-producing its 701 computer, the escalating competition between East and West, NATO, and the Warsaw Pact mobilized computing machines and thinking such as cybernetics—the study of circular causality and feedback—as they were perceived as opportunities to catapult one’s bloc to the forefront of modernity. 
In the Soviet Union, formerly banned and persecuted scientific fields such as cybernetics returned with the death of Stalin, the “Father of Nations,” as the propagandists named him, and inspired artists and designers to experiment with mathematical formulae. Anna Andreeva, a prominent and much-lauded designer, occupied an ambiguous position as a non-party member and partner of scientist Boris Andreev, Gulag prisoner and later developer of the first Soviet computer. Heading the Krasnaia Roza [Red Rose] silk factory in Moscow, named in honor of Rosa Luxemburg, Andreeva “programmed” patterns for machine-produced fabrics. Worn by prominent figures such as Raisa Gorbacheva and the masses alike, they were the fabrics of society. These hand-drawn geometric and mathematically constructed patterns could only exist in the realm of applied arts, a medium in which avant-garde ideas “survived.” Only thus could they evade being purged as “pure propaganda of abstraction.” Complicating a binary between Socialist Realism and Abstraction, these patterns employed aesthetics officially decried as “Western” and “bourgeois” to communicate socialist visions. Hence, to defend her Electrification Series (ca. 1960s–1974) in front of the committee, Andreeva appropriated Lenin’s developmental slogan: “Communism is synonymous with industrialization and electrification of the whole country.” While cosmism as a utopia and philosophical movement only continued to exist on the margins of collective imagination, it was the technological successes of space travel that led the state in the 1960s to request patterns on the subject from Andreeva. In turn, she had to frequently argue that her designs were not about cosmologies such as moons, stars, and meteoroids—heterodox subjects associated with superstition, irrationalism, and mysticism. Here fabrics for children, seemingly trivial and hence less regulated by ideological restrictions, allowed Andreeva to further develop cybernetic thinking and algorithmic design into analog compositional systems. Basic geometric shapes—little cubes [kubiki]—inspired by El Lissitzky’s Story of Two Squares (1922) amounted to a “program” that could “process” different motifs, signs, and letters. 
In non-aligned Sweden in the late 1970s, Charlotte Johannesson, a trained weaver and self-taught artist, traded her textile artwork I’m No Angel for an Apple II Plus computer. Johannesson, active in the punk and countercultural scenes, was deeply influenced by the work of Swedish-Norwegian artist Hannah Ryggen, who enhanced weaving with wool, linen, and holes as an unruly medium for social satire, private myths, and folk art. In the 1980s, alongside her involvement in the independent art and research platform Digital Theater (Digitalteatern), which she co-founded with her partner Sture, she produced an array of printed images. These “woven digital graphics,” as she calls them, were coded to the exact same pixel dimensions of her analog loom and depicted artists and politicians like Boy George or Ronald Reagan, world maps, and abstracted and satirized political imagery in what might be read as speculation on a fully networked, cybernetic future. One in which binaries such as gender identities, the domestic and public, private and political, and analog and digital are razed. 
In 1991, after the fall of the Berlin wall, the Cyberfeminist Manifesto, written by a group of artists named VNS Matrix, demanded a new art for the twenty-first century. As the “terminators of the moral codes, saboteurs of big daddy mainframe,” they claimed the clitoris as a direct line to the matrix. To corrupt the discourse of the new status quo world (dis)order, they imagined tools for conviviality in cyberspace: chatrooms, message boards, billboards, or an interactive computer game for a dynamic space conceived by holes in the so-called social fabric. 
Against modernist fallacies and their colonial dimensions, artist and musician Melika Ngombe Kolongo uses Geomancy (“magic of earth”) as a prehistoric re-patterning of living matter, as a speculative practice, paranormal storytelling device—a system of divination. In a geomantic network, it is believed that ley lines, as topographic constructs and hidden patterns embedded in a landscape, carry high-vibrational energetic information around the planet, a sort of quantum technology of crossroads “between worlds.” In ancient Congolese cosmologies, geomantic technologies are akin to the secret principles of minerals. Today, a global extractivist machinery commands unidirectional material flows from South to North.. Here, ​​“‘Modern’ technology extracts and captures these electro gravitational waves; they open portals through their intense electromagnetic fields and magnetic behavior as high-frequency, high-power electronic connectors.”
Lorenza Longhi appropriates and subverts via re-making and re-printing consumer objects such as furniture and fabrics from the design detritus of late modernism. A Camelia flower handmade by the artist using fabric mimics the perfect symmetry, the “classic and consistent ordering of the petals” that has become a timeless and continually reinvented form for the fashion house Chanel. With its ​​pistil replaced by a micro camera and communicating with a screen, here ​​conspicuous consumption takes place under “surveillance capitalism,” triggering a psychosocial type of surveillance based on the need for self-reflection and portrayal.
A novella by Jordan Martin/Hell consists of vignettes and speculative dialogues from polycentric and non-essentialist perspectives on power, hierarchies, hate, and love. The subconsciouses of fictional personas mutate and alter into their actual opponents, sometimes until their effacement. The threads of stories are visually reflected in sculptures and wall works that propose parapsychological landscapes that challenge any differentiation between the concrete and the abstract. Here, varied pieces of fabric, bows made from ribbon, strings of pearls and pigtail braids support or spell out names, hallucinatory figures, or quotes such as Reaganism’s “nine most terrifying words”: “I’m from the government & I’m here to help.” 
In the future looms, the non-division of hand and head, the ongoing mutation of organic and artificial, past and future, technological and cyborgian, form “the thinking- feeling-doing-matter of the cosmos.”

The Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie mixes fine art painting practice with multiple collaborations in design, historic research and commerical fashion. The greatest manifestation of this is in her long term collaboration with the designer Beca Lipscombe in the company Atelier E.B. The present exhibition follows in the steps of a 2016 fashion presentation prepared by Atelier E.B, for Boltenstern.Raum Galerie Meyer Kainer. That antecedent clothing collection, called ‘The Inventors of Tradition II’, focused on the issue of expressing cultural identity by means of sportswear. Here, the present interest of McKenzie – both within Atelier E.B and independently are the relationships between the pre-war haute couture and post-war Soviet fashion. This shift manifests itself not only in the historical and geographical difference of the sources of inspiration for the past and present projects but also in apparent details, such as the mannequins. Whereas six years ago, Atelier E.B presented its sportswear collection on schematic mannequins, McKenzie’s present artworks – which are copies of 1920s clothing desings of the French designer Madeleine Vionnet – are installed upon mannequins with heads of a real person, the very young guerilla fighter Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, murdered in 1941 by the invading Wehrmacht and posthumously awarded the order of Hero of the Soviet Union. Her martyr’s death was commemorated by numerous public monuments, depicting Kosmodemyanskaya either as a combat-ready androgynous figure with a boyish haircut and in a skirt, or on the contrary as a harrowed female figure, scantly clad in torn petticoats and with her hands bound behind her back.

By presenting haute couture clothing on a mannequin with the face of a socialist war hero, Lucy McKenzie establishes a relationship between mutually opposite yet equally ideologically conditioned aesthetic regimes. Whereas in 1920s France, the bias cut introduced by Madeleine Vionnet represented a fashion revolution by freeing the female body as it did, in the 1940s Soviet Union it was taken for a sign of Western decadence. However, when the sculptors producing the historically later monuments of Kosmodemyanskaya wanted to emphasize her innocent victimhood they represented her in a flowing dress and barefooted, as did Vionnet with her models in her fashion shows. On the other hand, while Kosmodemyanskaya’s androgynous figure epitomized in the 1940s the ‘New Soviet Woman’, today similarly shaped figures, showing young people of vague gender and ethnicity, serve to sell the hypercapitalist ‘fast fashion’. McKenzie further underscored this ambivalence by choosing polychrome: the sitting figure is painted in a terracotta hue, commonly seen on classical Greek vases, whereas the standing figure is treated in aubergine, as known from Roman marmor sculptures. The ambivalence was then heightened yet further by the artist’s choice of models to be reproduced, as their geometrical pattern can refer to ancient Greek architecture as well as to Soviet constructivist art.

These contradictions, stemming from the ideological presuppositions of aesthetic ‘regimes’, are summarized by McKenzie in her 2021 work ‘Ethnic Composition (Moldova, Russian Ethnographic Museum)’. This is a replica of a map to be found in the Russian Ethnographic Museum in Saint Petersburg which defines the ethnic types of the population of Moldova on the basis of their traditional garb. However, the photographic illustrations from the original museum exposition were replaced by photos of other figurines, such as a mannequin exhibiting the traditional Jewish costume, a mannequin dressed as La Calavera Catrina on the occasion of the Mexican Day of the Dead, or a male figure illustrating the history of the Moscow department store GUM.
Whereas the terracotta-hued mannequin is looking out of the entrance of the gallery, the aubergine one, installed behind a separating panel, is turned inwards, as if imitating not only human proportions but also a person’s movement in space. It is wearily resting its back against the wall and looking over a paravent towards a vitrine with clothing. Since all three plastic installations have been produced in realistic dimensions and utilizing trompe l’oeil painterly techniques for imitating textiles, marmor, wood and other materials commonly used in the interiors of modern fashion stores, the result is destabilizing both for our sense-perception, which is incapable of distinguishing what’s real and what’s painted, and for the character of the place we are in. At the same time, the installations refer to the complex history of mutual relationships between art and fashion and to the methods of their presentation.

In fashion environment, the function of the paravent is to protect the body from the gaze of passers-by. In our exhibition, it further serves – from the front – as the support for Lipscombe’s silkscreen depicting the cuts of the Jasperwear collection and – from the back – for McKenzie’s painting of a false terazzo depicting East Dunbartonshire landscape. The ‘Street Vitrine’, which holds the Atelier E.B products, installed by the trimmers Howard Tong and Barbara Kell, is a polemics with the surrealist objectification of the female body, as the artist avoids employing a mannequin and has the clothing installed dramatically by means of nylon threads. Yet at the same time McKenzie subverts the exclusivity of contemporary art, since the installation includes her own and Lipscombe’s off-the-rack models. Finally, the ‘GUM’ display, built for Atelier E.B by the artist and designer Steff Norwood, is a reconstruction – based upon McKenzie’s archival research – of the 1950s offer of fabric in the Moscow department store GUM, and with regard to the history of painting it further thematizes the classical relationships between the frame and the image, since the entire image here is merely the frame filled with random samples of fabrics.

In contrast to the public manner the Atelier E.B production is installed in the main space, McKenzie’s presentation upstairs focuses upon the Villa de Ooievaar, a historically significant and officially protected building which the artist acquired in 2014 and whose reconstruction she pursues from that time. The modernist dwelling, called ‘The Stork Villa’ after the stork’s association with childbirth, was designed by the Flemish architect Jozef De Bruycker in 1935, in the era of growing authoritarianism in Europe. The villa, commissioned by a Catholic medical doctor for his 15-member family and his own medical practice, remained the family’s possession until the mid-1990s. Yet notwithstanding its private purpose, the villa’s interior is also marked by ideology, as it depicts stereotypes following from the definition of family as a basic societal unit, and its design adapts avant-garde notions to conservative and nationalist interests. Flemish nationalism is then referenced by McKenzie’s trompe l’oeil paintings, known as quodlibets, laid out under the glass tops of two round coffee tables and depicting objects relating to the villa , such as a memorial of Flemish nationalism, a postcard with a painting by the Belgian abstract artist Marthe Donas or a souvenir powder-box from the 1939 Glasgow Empire Exhibition. Even though the coffee tables and the replica of a chair were originally produced for standard use, they are presented in the exhibition not in immediate contact but rather upon a low pedestal, as used for exhibiting furniture in applied arts museums. These are complemented by two hanged paintings which include the motif of marmor, the 2016 ‘V&A Paonazzo’ and ‘Bridge Club Breche II’ based on marble from the Vienna bridge club by Adolf Loos, which may give the appearance of a reconstruction of paintings contemporary with the building at the borderline of abstraction and decoration; yet in fact, these are the artist’s original works in which she resigned upon illusory depiction, and instead, captured the stone’s texture by means of pure, unmixed colors. The installation closes with an older metal mannequin and a display screen from Atelier E.B production; these stand here as autonomous plastic works, and in comparison with the mannequins’ realism appear almost like pictograms from a visual statistics. The exposition in its entirety establishes a phantasmagoric space which both destabilizes binary oppositions – such as fine and applied arts, individual creativity and collective design, or focused aesthetic contemplation and the browsing glance at shopwindows with fashion products – and discloses the ideological presuppositions of seemingly contradictory aesthetic (and other) regimes.

Biomorphic shapes, flattened like rolled-out dough, alluding to sex, a soft, spongy material embraced by an intensely pink canvas with letters in curving, “feminine” script, forming rapturous sighs: “oh” and “ah.” The title only confirms what our senses have already managed to intuit...

 

Łąka Twojego ciała [The Meadow of Your Body] is one of many works by Maria Pinińska-Bereś merging two of the artist’s fascinations, the erotic and nature, two kinds of love: love that manifests itself in liberated and liberating sexuality and love that blooms from joining the world of nature—a realm of joyful, unbound sensuality. “I ran blindly through those marvelous meadows and copses until I found myself in a gorge. I had a moment of clarity, I felt at one with the moss, lichen, with all those miracles surrounding me. I immersed myself in the moss, I rolled about, moaning with delight. I lay there a long time in utter bliss.” This is how the artist recalled a trip outside the city as a girl. This could just as well be a poetic description of love-making—and this ambivalence is not purely rhetorical.

 

The fleshy, sensual shapes stamped to a greater or lesser degree by allusions to male, female, or androgynous sexuality appeared in Maria Pinińska-Bereś’s art in the early 1960s. Educated in the studio of one of Poland’s foremost Modernist sculptors — Xawery Dunikowski —, she initially grappled with this medium, using solid sculpting materials (cement) and forms (rotundas, stele). These aspirations to timeless value, their emotional distance and monumental gravity, were disavowed by the artist, or perhaps queered, by adding “inappropriate” accessories: quilt bases made from apron cloth, with holes cut for the woman’s breasts etc. Over time, the cement and sculpted forms gave way to media that had formerly been accessories. The artist used them to build scenes where she could openly, “shamelessly” display her feminine desires.

 

The soft materials and forms conjure erotic emotions; they are joined by pink, which became the artist’s signature. Pink evokes sexual corporeality, and yet, as the color of girls’ toys and clothes, it is a means of differentiating, preparing women for their social roles. Pinińska-Bereś confronts this cultural connotation. Yet the “meadow of the body” that spreads before us is unlike the “battlefield” from Barbara Kruger’s memorable work. True, the artist does not remain indifferent to the oppression of the patriarchal culture, to its models objectifying the female body—Czy kobieta jest człowiekiem? [Is a Woman a Person?], a work made of a bathing suit and a label for writing the date of production and expiry date, is not the sole evidence of this. Yet the celebration of emancipated female sexuality seems more crucial to her art. This emancipatory moment is incontrovertibly joined to articulating a sense of a sensual community that transcends the individual, a kind of pan-eroticism, an adoration of vital energy that saturates everything, collapsing the hierarchical differences between male and female, human and non-human. These relations based on dominance and exploitation—of the female body by the male gaze, of nature by instrumental reason—are replaced by relations founded on sensitivity and care. As in Przenośny pomnik: Miejsce [Portable Monument: A Place], a fragile, ephemeral construction made of flimsy materials, built by the artist on hills and in meadows, not to subjugate the surrounding nature, but to pay tribute to it. Unlike a traditional monument, Przenośny pomnik: Miejsce is not a sign of rule, but of shared feeling and existence. Like the pink flag that proudly flies over the artist’s performances. A sign of a vulnerable weakness, which might be the last chance to save a world destroyed by force.