Paco Knöller: Senkrecht durch den Augenblick

Galerie Thomas Schulte

 

José Montealegre: Narrativas Circulares

Galerie Thomas Schulte

 

Ezgi Erol /

Vienna Art Week

 

In Conversation with Katharina Aigner

 

Notgalerie / Vienna Art Week

 

A closer look at artist fee standards – Studio Berlin at Berghain

 

‘Palimpsest – Reading between the signs’ at after the butcher

in Berlin Art Link

 

Architecture’s Impenetrable Imagery & Rarely Seen Machinery

in Hyperallergic

Julianne Cordray is an art writer, editor and publisher living and working in Berlin, Germany. Her writing has been featured internationally in magazines and journals online and in print, including ArtConnect Magazine, Berliner Zeitung, Berlin Art Link, Hyperallergic, Vienna Art Week, and THE SEEN – art journal of EXPO Chicago, among others. Her essays and translations have also appeared in publications commissioned by artists, institutions and galleries, including Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin and Kunstverein Göttingen. In 2018, she co-founded textur, which was awarded a Visual Arts Project Space Grant by the Berlin Senate in 2021. In 2020, she was Critic in Residence at studio das weisse haus in cooperation with Vienna Art Week.

Entangled

Ilaria Sponda in Conversation with Angelo Iodice

Italian artist and chemist Angelo Iodice unveils heterotopic spaces, unconscious pulsions and physical laws. Here, he speaks about the invisible reality he brings to the foreground through equations and mythological narratives.

Ilaria Sponda: Tell me how your art practice has sprouted and found fertile ground in your scientific studies.

Angelo Iodice: I remember that during my studies in organic chemistry I used to have a strong attraction to the mysterious, invisible nature of matter and its interactions with its visible form. Transition state, ab initio calculations or asymmetric syntheses solicited an attraction to dimensions and spaces that are not tangible but that can be defined in an unconventional, yet not always phenomenological way. My search for what is hidden and what moves things does not always visibly operate undisturbed through the use of physical laws or various formulations.

All of this slowly grafted onto readings of classical myths, and then, without remembering the details of the origin, an irreversible reaction seems to have taken place. It continues to synthesize products of lived experience, through which one catches a glimpse through the lens of mourning, phobias, wonders and traces that are not always clear and traceable to a well-defined origin. 

I do not have a defined academic path, but many encounters have made my path rich through dialogue. Seminars, master’s studies and artist residencies have made and are still making my experience varied through the different stimuli I get from my own ecosystem of relationships.

IS: What does that look like in your practice? 

AI: Throughout my artistic journey, art and science have been two sides of the same coin: intricate and connected. When I decide to start a new work, it is always a pure impulse that comes from a layering of study, connections and research. That’s why I cannot imagine art without scientific calculations or echoes.

My works have lately been informed by and show mathematical demonstrations written in black ink on sheets of paper. I see those pieces of work as imprints without language, made of signs. At first sight somehow cold and detached, they are deeply rooted in abstract, conceptual dimensions formalized through equations but connected to a real, recognizable dimension – thanks to their juxtaposition with a banal image framing reality itself.  There is always a tension between the inhuman dimension of calculation and the syllogisms I visualize and make visible.

IS: Since you said art and science have been mingling in your mind and practice, have you experienced any strong shift from one way of thinking and practicing research to the other?

AI: Dear Ilaria, I honestly struggle to find a comprehensive answer to this question. You know why? Because, with the distance of time, I am unable to individuate a starting point, an end of the skein, or two parallel tracks starting from the same station. Today, what is certain is that they are the same: they are so entangled and they constitute a single body, so it no longer makes sense to talk about science and art. They are elements that together constitute a whole, reacting to each other and creating my work. It’s this synergy that is at the core of my practice. 

IS: You mention mythology and mathematical demonstrations. What, in particular, informs your aesthetics and research?

AI: There have been so many images that stimulated my intuition. I particularly remember that the work that started it all was Parau api (Two Tahitian Women) by Paul Gauguin, which I encountered in an art history book. The unnaturally depicted background of tropical seas seems to me to push toward a primordial, deconstructed place: a non-place. This heterotopic space is a non-tangible dimension which exists. In the same way, to me, all myths and tragedies are heterotopias.

My artistic path has been an untamable succession of dots linking to one another: Vettor Pisani’s interpretation of myth, Giorgio Griffa’s analysis, the “Cosmic Secret” that populated the altars of Michele Zaza… All these dots among others all glued to scientific theorems or processes, to demonstrations or phenomena that I’ve studied and still bring into my research today. Can you not grasp a line of continuity between Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy and a periwinkle and magenta sea of Gauguin? Is it not obvious the conjunction that exists between the psi wave function and the myth of Medusa depicted on an Attic crater or a David Lynch frame?

IS: Entanglement is key in your work. What is it to you?

AI: It has been said that properties of things are relative to other things: this is precisely the phenomenon of Entanglement. Entanglement is the situation in which two systems or two people have somehow remained entangled and connected.

It is said that when two particles have come into connection somewhere the same particles have remained entangled: that is, connected and related. And the magical thing is that each has the characteristic of the other: that is, both are the same thing and are juxtaposed. You have to think that the relationship between two elements is not something that is contained in one or the other, because it is more than that. You need a third object interacting with both systems to give reality to the correlation. It’s indeed a three-way dance.

IS: Photography is the major medium you work with. What fascinates you about it? How is it functional to the formalization of your research?

AI: John Szarkowski said that while painting portrays events of great importance, photography on the contrary reports everything that is marginal and nevertheless gives it an aura of importance. Today, through a strange combination, photography succeeds in transporting simple notations, even trivial details, to another dimension. It seems to be succeeding in achieving a large reach by acquiring or imposing new values and meanings. 

Is photography the tool that can detect through simplicity the most difficult field of reflection and study?

Like a memo or a spreadsheet, it becomes an acme of reasoning and cerebral evaluation that has nothing instantaneous in it. That’s why I like to think of a photograph dialoguing with pages on which I report demonstrations or pencil-made drawings that act as gateways to the imaginative. That’s how photography enters my works; that’s my use of the medium. 

IS: Nowadays, photography risks becoming mediocre and unfashionable. Mainstream circulations of art photography privilege a kind of language that loudly claims this or that hot topic in society and the art world. How do you relate to the wider art photography scene?

AI: I do a type of research that engages in manifesting the invisible and the non-tangible and that is why my photography very often comes across as solitary, diaphanous, never marked or populated. I prefer the absence of matter, because what I am interested in is not a marked trace but rather something that is only hinted at. And that is why it is indecipherable. I actually search for something that perhaps does not really exist, but which I find and present in a new work. And this process of sublimation comes from an image that is somehow layered within me. The personal is somehow hidden in every work I make. 

Lacan said that, “The first trace is the one that cannot be found again because it is erased forever by another trace that repeats itself and the signifier erases the thing but cannot erase the trace of its erasure.” And this concept is key to all my artistic pulsion and research. 

I’ve just finished a master’s degree with a really valuable person who has pushed me to unsettle and make my work more solid, which has brought me to new and previously unexplored fields, such as writing and word omission. This has thus allowed my works to almost float, losing that fixity that was congealing.

I’ve learned to make my past and present works more silent in order to acknowledge the intent behind them more. I continually try to face the world with my work, to propose my poetics and aesthetics, and to enter into dialogue with people on the basis of trust.

Ilaria Sponda is an interdependent curator, writer and visual artist based in Dublin. With an educational background in Arts, Media and Cultural Events (IULM, Milan) and Management of the Arts and Culture (UCP, Lisbon), she also chose photography as a medium to bring about her personal artistic research.
​
Sponda’s curatorial research is inspired by artists that engage with the camera and other media as anthropologists of contemporary society, both on an individual and collective level. Her current research is based in the image culture and how it is affected by global circulations. Within this context, she looks to deconstruct contemporary curating towards a critical mediation of art and its understanding.

Virtual Studio Visit with Jesús Crespo

by Ilaria Sponda

Jesús Crespo is a visual artist from Madrid, currently based in London. His work thrives on the energy put into the artistic gesture and the relationship between the metamorphosis, dissolution and extrapolation of images. Ambiguity is a constant in his paintings: a territory where painting becomes transformative and performative, never fixed , yet always in the process of becoming. 

Jesús finished his studies in London, at Camberwell College of Arts, in 2016 and holds an MA in Investigation, Art and Creation from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His work has been exhibited in different cities such as London, Lisbon, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, and Antwerp.

He is currently part of the Turps Studio Programme in London — a year-long studio and mentorship program for painters. Ilaria Sponda took a virtual visit to his studio there to talk about the program, his current research on liquidity, his ideal work environment, and more.

Ilaria Sponda: Hi Jesús, thank you so much for this virtual studio visit. Could you tell us a bit about Turps and what it is for you?

Jesús Crespo: Turps Studio Programme is an opportunity for painters in South London, where I’m currently developing my practice. They provide painters with a shared studio and a very dynamic programme of crits, talks, mentoring sessions, and not only with the aim to discuss and question painting. For me is a place where painters have their own voice and space to relate to important issues about the practice of painting. I got to know them five years ago when I was finishing my studies as an Erasmus student at the Camberwell College of Arts. I went to an exhibition organised by Turps and I fell in love with them. Coming from Madrid, where there weren’t many opportunities for emerging painters and painting didn’t get any attention, it was really satisfying to discover a place in a different context made by painters for painters. Indeed, I was born in Madrid and grew up there and experienced a lack of places for emerging painters. It was only after the pandemic that a couple of project spaces interested in emerging painters appeared, like El Chico and Arniches26.

Going back to Turps, from the moment I discovered it I knew I wanted to apply and participate in their Studio Program. Even though Brexit doesn’t make it easy for a foreigner to live in London and deal with all the bureaucracy, I applied and accepted the challenge. I’m an artist that lives with and, better said, for challenges. My paintings are kind of challenges themselves. The Studio Programme that I’m part of offers a dynamic network I can connect with. It is a place where I can grow and experiment while developing my career, as well as professionalising it.

IS: Are you currently working on a particular project?

JC: Since my first residency at PADA in Lisbon and the following one at Ladrón de Guevara in Guadalajara (México), I’ve been developing my own research on liquidity, wetness and the fluid appearance of paint. I’m focusing on the meaning of painting and the aesthetic properties of materials to talk about art itself in a metalinguistic way. What is the meaning of painting? What is the meaning of meaning? To work with wetness, and slippery surfaces through an almost sexual approach to the painting and the surface means to play with the very nature of the creative value of my paintings. The forms that come out of this seem comfortable in the “still wet” atmosphere that I make for them.

A nice metaphor is the creation of plants, fungi or bacteria, or even the gestation of a living being, which happens in wet environments. Likewise, my paintings are created in wetness, are in the process of becoming and alive. I leave my images, my paintings in that liminal state where people can see something in the making and growing. The wetness in the painting is important to give a sense of fluidity. Dryness means to me the last state of something, the end of something, while wetness means that something is still open to be processed.

IS: Ambiguity and undefined forms are a constant in your works. How do you relate yourself to abstract painting and how do you depart from it to build your own approach and language?

JC: People can see different things in my images. Indeed, I use abstract elements to construct images that are not abstract at all. I’m not interested in abstract expressionism and I’m not interested in figurative painting either. I’m only using some tools of both because they help me to focus and live the process of painting. You can see that my paintings are finished because they work as paintings. Every painting is a challenge and discussion between me and the painting itself.

I approach my art in an intense way. I always draw a parallel between my art and sexual acts because the former is very much like the latter: they are ways to create something based on love or attraction, they’re intense and wet and they’re mediums to create something as we are. I’m currently developing works with lubricated surfaces, for example. The surfaces end up being shiny as if they were covered in saliva, vaginal fluids or semen. It is important for my canvases to be lubricated and ready for my art to appear in the moment. I work with oil colours and vinyl resin to fix my paintings and I always make a transparent film between the paint and the fabrics I work on. Colours never penetrate the fabric. They stay on the surface and that stands as a statement of what I’m doing, something tragicomic, and frustrating as well.. like the emptiness that remains after a sublime feeling.

IS: What is your creative process like? 

JC: It is like a trance. This is why I have to finish a painting in a single session. I could spend a week preparing my canvas – as it takes time – but the action of painting has to be condensed into a single moment, which could last for a maximum of three hours. I always paint at night, when I can be in trance and be focused. My paintings show the processuality of their creation. I try to avoid all the images that I know I can paint. I never have in mind how my painting should look. If I do, I don’t paint it. I need to paint something that I don’t know and I’ve never seen. I only know what I don’t want, which is risky.

I try to compose my images with what’s happening at the moment I paint. This is why liquidity is important for me: to find an image. I could start with an idea about the colours I want to use. Everything happens on the surface. In the end, I see colours and juxtaposition that I’ve never thought of. I avoid things that I know I can do or that I’m not interested in. The process is about finding a balance between what the painting wants and what I want. That is why I refer to my paintings as discussions. 

IS: Do you feel like the different environments you work in have an impact on your artworks? How much of them is visible in your paintings?

JC: I’m sure about it, even though I’m not a painter that directly brings it to the canvas, at least not on purpose. It’s a hard question to answer. Maybe it’s more the conditions that I work in that get transposed on my paintings. My work is very physical, it is like body painting. Consequently, the environment always brings my body to be in different moods. No matter where I am, I’m always trying to express the same things. It is true though, that in some places my paintings result in being more colourful and vibrant, or darker and more mysterious. That can happen, but it’s not something conscious. I think, in the end, the place I work in does come across my body.

At this point in my career, I want to experience different places and travel but that is not something that informs my paintings. I like the environment to impact me, but not in a conscious way. I think it’s a good question to ask every artist. If you gave me the chance to be in the perfect place to work I’d maybe pick a place in particular, for example, Sintra (Lisbon). It would be amazing to practice there, especially in one of the Castelo da Pena’s towers. I would love to choose a perfect place to work with respect to how I feel there and what I could aesthetically experience there, but at the moment, I’d rather give priority to places where there are many opportunities.

Ilaria Sponda is an interdependent curator, writer and visual artist based in Dublin. With an educational background in Arts, Media and Cultural Events (IULM, Milan) and Management of the Arts and Culture (UCP, Lisbon), she also chose photography as a medium to bring about her personal artistic research.
​
Sponda’s curatorial research is inspired by artists that engage with the camera and other media as anthropologists of contemporary society, both on an individual and collective level. Her current research is based in the image culture and how it is affected by global circulations. Within this context, she looks to deconstruct contemporary curating towards a critical mediation of art and its understanding.

by Maya Wallis

To display is a poster that was produced exclusively for Indiecon 2022 – find all of our available print issues in our shop and support textur magazine with your order.

Maya is an artist and writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne whose work spans across text, film, book making and radio production. Concerned with poster small things, acts and feelings, she aims to give weight to ribbons, gold buttons and red shoe laces. She has exhibited in Baltic Centre of Contemporary Art, Great North Museum, 36 Limestreet Gallery and internationally at Hungry Eyes Festival in Germany. 

www.mayawallis.com 

Virtual studio visit with Hamza Beg

by Juli Cordray

I visited Hamza Beg’s virtual studio at Vital Capacities residency space – and you can too. 

Over the course of his residency, Hamza, a self-taught multimedia artist and researcher, has been expanding on and conducting research around a previously initiated project, “Mark of My Departure” (MOMD). This central work is a seven-minute video collage that brings together found footage with original compositions and poetic text to consider questions around technology, mobility, colonialism, gender, and place-making, drawing on hip-hop music as a site of cross-cultural exchange in the context of the South Asian diaspora.

Scrolling through the columns of multimedia posts that compose his studio space, you’ll find this work, as well as additional collaged images and short video sketches that expand on its themes. What also caught my eye were the snippets of process-oriented commentary and notes composed by Hamza, which discuss the works themselves as well as his thoughts, experiences and encounters along the way.

We sat down to talk (also virtually – I in my Berlin apartment and Hamza in Tallinn, where he is currently taking part in The Art of Being Good residency program). We chatted about the work in his studio and his practice more broadly, delving into topics like the importance of humor, what he’s learned during his time with Vital Capacities, and Pedestrianism as platform-building.

^{“Mark of My Departure” (Preview) by Hamza Beg}

“Mark of My Departure” (MOMD) is enlivened by a steady current of images and sound that merge with and overlay one another. This current carries references to transport, labor and production, place and food, community and spirituality. There’s dancing, flowing bodies of water, words weaving with rhythms. It’s tactile in its layering – different moving images simultaneously frame and reframe one another or pop up inside of other images.

Hamza Beg: I always see my work in two streams: one is writing, which is a mix of poetic writing and academic writing, a lot of which tackles themes that I learned about through academic work – colonialism, for example, which is probably the key. And then there is audio and video work. This project was an opportunity for me to try to bring those two things together. 

I turn up to video work as a newcomer to the medium, using the techniques that I learned from producing and making hip-hop music. The programs that are used are also quite similar, so I work with those same methods. That’s why the video work uses layers, chops and samples.

Hamza notes that hip-hop music has been a pervasive cultural influence in his work, as he has been studying and working with it from a young age – though not necessarily in the form of visual work. For him, a key part of this project has been investigating how this influence comes through and what it means in terms of cross-cultural exchange – between African-American and South Asian diasporic communities.

Within the scope of this project, MOMD – its starting point – is also accompanied by some new works Hamza has been producing, including a series of images of chopped tree trunks (seen from above) spliced together with family photos, which either fill the center or extend around the outer rim. These reference the tabla – a pair of South Asian hand drums with a circle of black tuning paste applied on the head – while also resembling vinyl records, embedding music in the image.

Though there is a seriousness to the subject matter and themes, the body of work is not without playfulness. There are also short video sketches among the works that Hamza has created around MOMD. In one, titled “I can flow with the feeling of the water”, multiple clips of flowing water in shifting constellations give way to a tree-trunk tabla filled with two old family photos, continuously rotating, all set to a classic Lollywood tune. In his post, Hamza points out that “it is meant to be funny”.

HB: Humor is really important. It cuts through everything; it cuts through the intellect, through the feeling, through the disappointment or frustration. The thing that I find difficult is that I’m giving people permission to find it funny, while also being serious at the same time. I feel the idea of humor has to be expanded for us to think about things that are untoward, odd or strange, or that make us do a double take.  

For example, there are a few clips of running water out in nature and then it cuts to the high drama of a Lollywood classic. When I watch it, or even while I’m making it, I’m cracking up, because I think it’s absurd. Throughout MOMD especially, there are quite a few moments where I have chosen clips that I think are funny. I would like to leave people with the sense that it’s OK to laugh, it’s OK to find the work funny and for that to be part of their enjoyment. I want it to be serious where it has to be and I think that means creating something for that seriousness to bounce off of.

^{“I can flow with the feeling of the water”, video sketch by Hamza Beg (Read video description)}

Elsewhere, in the introduction to his studio, Hamza writes: “When you step into my studio, you should smell my auntie’s homemade garam masala slowly infusing into fried onions on the stovetop.” Here, the smells and textures of food – the texture of roti is also the background image of the opening liner notes for MOMD – are drawn on to evoke feeling, emotion and memory and to create an immersive, tangible experience of the work in the digital space. I asked him about the role of food in his work, which he described as having multiple layers, like Paratha. 

HB: Food is a key part of my vision of the work going forward. It’s been a really important part of my imagined connection and my reconnection with my culture and heritage. Using it as a motif is a way of reaching out and holding the hands of people from my own community. But it also hints at the larger role that South Asian cultures play in British culture. Part of me feels a little bit disempowered by the role that Indian and Pakistani food have played in the rise of British culinary culture. Because, with the acceptance of the food, a parallel process has not taken place in society. An othering has continued to take place towards people, while food has become lauded as accepted culture. So it feels important – it feels political to talk about it.

How does he see this potentially taking shape within the space of this work?

HB: One large aspect will be performance and performative curry making. My plan is to bring the big pot onto the small stove and to cook in the space while people are there to see the rest of the body of work.  I also have this running perception that a big and beautiful curry can only be made if it has the right ingredients, and the right ingredients also include gossip. So it’s imperative for my participants to come up to me and gossip over the curry in a curry-confessional style. They bring their small pieces of gossip and they put them in the curry – with their words – and it adds to the flavor of the spice. Someone said to me, “oh, you don’t make it with love?” No, you don’t make it with love. If you’ve been to the kitchen and you’re hanging out with the aunties, they’re not making it with love. The gossip is what makes it spicy.

In another way, language and speaking come up as a key ingredient in MOMD too. Words are spoken over the sound of the tabla as the video opens, for example – something Hamza describes as liberating, as he draws a connection between speaking and place-making. How have his thoughts on or experience of place-making, through such acts as speaking, shifted while working on the project?

HB: One of the big influences in my life, in my writing and reading, has been Stuart Hall –  the founder of cultural studies, as well as a writer and theorist. He brings forward this idea that, in the diaspora, there’s this process of imaginative rediscovery that takes place. He talks about how there are stories, histories and myths that were lost and we cannot reclaim or reproduce them. We have to make them anew. Initially, I felt that I was producing something that was a reflection of my growing closeness to my culture. But when I think about it now, I think that it actually ends up reflecting the comfort with which I’m able to use and tessellate images and sounds.

Because I’m also severed by language, which is a very emotionally charged lack, or absence, I find it difficult in many aspects – with this split heritage – to call myself Pakistani, or to call myself Mauritian. This work has allowed me to make some of those things cohesive and to use images and sounds as material in my hands. And that has been really empowering.  

^{“Since we here no innocence”, video sketch by Hamza Beg (Read video description)}

In terms of the process and production of the work, as Hamza has been developing this project while in residency with Vital Capacities – an online residency focused on digital accessibility for artists and audiences – another shift has occurred.

HB: I have been working really closely these last weeks with Michael and Sarah (Pickthall) on accessibility streams and making the work accessible to partially-sighted and Deaf people. It’s been such an amazing process. I’ve reproduced the video as an audio-only piece with descriptions of the visuals that come in first and then the sound of the music that comes in after. It has offered me such a great opportunity for reflection. I’m also trying to do it in this many-voiced way. I don’t want to do it as a dry description of what the video is; I want to be able to offer something of the personality of the work. 

Then, at the same time, there are also questions like: how can you make accessibility part of your process? For me, that’s longer lasting. It shifts the way that I think about making a work.

As for what he’s been up to in Estonia? Hamza’s organizing a series of experimental workshops on Pedestrianism.

HB: The work is completely different and, at the same time, a very natural continuation for me. “Mark of My Departure” is this hyper-specific, image-focused, kinetic-static work that’s all about place and place-making and the sadness of not having access to place as a natural or organic thing. Pedestrianism comes from questions like: how do we create place as citizens?

I have this loose set of ideas about what a pedestrian future looks like. Those ideas are set out in a document that is at times absurdist and ridiculous, at times political and hard-nose, and at other times soft and spiritual. My plan is to set up four workshops with people from Tallinn and later this year in Lagos. Over the course of those four workshops, we will take what I know about this movement so far and fill it in together using the information that participants give me about the city they live in. Then we will come together at the end for a final presentation – the shape of which is also to be defined by participants.

Though distinct from MOMD, the role of rhythm and language, not just in place-making but also in collectivity, is considered here through the movement of bodies in public space. In one workshop, for example, participants take walks in trios, where a new role is taken up every time a corner is turned. The idea is to allow participants to experience three distinct moments within a clear hierarchy: receiving power, giving power, and observing the transfer of power from one person to another. On the whole, the workshops raise questions about how power is wielded, how ideology and public space are constructed, and how the relationship between individual and whole is negotiated.

HB: My assertion is that if we want people to be more radical, we shouldn’t tell them to be more radical. We should tell them that they’re already doing it. One thing that’s really immobilizing is that people feel that they are behind and not doing enough. The Pedestrianism movement basically tells you that you’re already doing it – you are radical already. Just by walking, you are being radical. So that’s what the work is: it’s platform building.

Hamza imagines eventually bringing the workshop participants together in an international Pedestrianism conference. But how this will be organized, as well as how the documentation from the workshops will be presented, are open questions – likely to be determined along with participants and collaborators, in line with the decentralized nature of the movement.

***

Visit the Vital Capacities website to check out the final presentation of “Mark of My Departure” in the exhibition Appearance.

Video descriptions by Hamza Beg via Vital Capacities:

As the beat drops and the tabla comes into full swing, two circular images are seen rotating on the screen. The two images are in the same style and both created in the same way. On the left is an image of my grandfather, reading a newspaper, looking away from the camera. His image is framed by a circular photograph of a chopped tree trunk. Using the same method, the image on the right has the chopped tree trunk frame with an image of my father and his brothers in it, all sporting the wild 1970s style of facial and head hair. The two images rotate continuously in the style of old vinyl before slowly fading out.

A collection of impressions and experiences from this year’s Vienna Art Week — The House of Losing Control and more.

by Julianne Cordray

The loss of control can be a frightening reality or, alternatively, a welcome release. Taking “Losing Control” as this year’s theme, Vienna Art Week engages this ambiguity in its central exhibition: House of Losing Control. 

Vienna Art Week turns a large part of its focus towards showcasing local and international emerging artists, both in its prominent Open Studio Days program, as well as in the central exhibition — where the work of emerging artists is presented alongside works by Erwin Wurm, Bruce Nauman and Cindy Sherman, among others. House of Losing Control, which sprawls a cluster of abandoned spaces, both industrial and residential, also offers a mixture of curated exhibition in the vast halls of a former car dealership and something close to an open studio format — where artists and collectives have taken over the rooms of a former apartment building and brothel, transforming them into sites of experimentation. The product of this is a certain level of chaos — buzzing with energy and very much aligned with this year’s theme. 

Considering the impact that the pandemic has had on events over the last year or so, the theme might also be understood to address the things that are outside of our control when organizing or participating in a large-scale art festival. It’s an idea that even seems to be built into the House of Losing Control: Navid Nuur’s smoke bomb painting, which introduces a hard-to-control element (smoke+bombs) into the process of the work’s production, in this case led to an unpredicted, somewhat destructive outcome. This was nonetheless embraced by the artist and the curators, drawing another layer of performance into the work and into the space itself, as a monument to the unexpected. 

***

Expectations are subverted elsewhere, too. Spaces keep going when you don’t expect them to, or end when you do, inducing feelings of disorientation and vertigo. In a darkened former club space still inhabited by some of its original furniture and fixtures, two installations — Hannah Neckel’s bulging, pink “Hyper Heart” and a kaleidoscopic video, “Visionium”, by Vidya Gastaldon — float and glow before mirror-paneled walls and columns, their reflections extending infinitely in all directions. The effect is almost funhouse-like — a labyrinthine maze of mirrors, the darkness serving to further complicate our relationship to the space. 

This effect is also echoed throughout one level of the upstairs apartment building, where AKT kollectiv has roughly cut out rectangular patches of wall in a series of adjacent rooms. When standing in front of these interior windows at just the right position, we can see across several layers of the space. Though we are quite literally seeing through walls, the framing and repetition can also seem like a dizzying mise-en-abyme, like looking through endless mirrors within mirrors. This simultaneous suggestion and absence of reflection occurs in another room in the house. In Timotheus Tomicek’s “Double Check”, a light bulb hangs in front of an oval opening in the wall; next to it, on the adjacent wall, hangs a small, dark photo of a person pensively sitting in front of their reflection while looking away from it. These elements are duplicated in mirror-image, hung on either side of the threshold and placed in just the right position to create the illusion of a reflection; however, when we place ourselves in this frame, our own reflections elude us. 

In a pair of rooms across the hall from one another, an easily missable doubling is also present in another curated exhibition within the exhibition, “Loosening Control”  by MUME — a nomadic anti-museum by artist Oscar Cueto. Tucked into unlit corners, the same painting can be found on the wall of two adjacent rooms — possible fixtures from the building’s former life, interacting with the video works now installed there. It’s perhaps incidental, but the uncanniness contributes to a sense of disorientation and uncertainty about where we are and where we’ve already been, collapsing past and present and entangling space.

The MUME exhibition, which is curated by Jose Springer, makes a direct connection to the former club below — namely to the women who worked there. The featured works largely present expressive bodies, contorting bodies, fragmented bodies. Larisa Escobedo’s video work, “A well-known secret”, for example, beckons us through a close-up, larger-than-life pair of lips that morph kaleidoscopically in at times grotesque distortions of flesh and teeth. The scale of the mouth and its closeness to the camera press whispered words up against us — like breath caressing our skin. 

***

Our own mouths were drawn into participation during a performance by Scott Clifford Evans, where he and his collaborators prepared and offered pizza out of a “Pizza Pyramid”: hot sauce and stringy, melty cheese inevitably leading to greasy hands and burnt mouths, in a messy mixture of delight and discomfort. 

In another performance, Vienna Art Week curatorial advisor and chief curator of Albertina Modern Angela Stief was put to sleep by artist Oliver Hangl in his “Sleep Show” — not only removing a powerful figure and a lead organizer from the event, but inviting the audience to watch her in this vulnerable state. It would seem that Stief was not in control, but she held a strange power over visitors who quietly entered the room and tried not to disturb her sleep, tentatively watching her as the artist hovered close by, watching them. Entering the room, we were immediately aware of our proximity to the sleeping body at the center, bathed in red light and draped in leopard print, her shoes placed on the ground to one side of the bed. At one point, Stief had turned over from her back — from a more exposed and vulnerable position — instead curling up on her side, covering her face with the blanket like a protective shield. Hangl commented on this unexpected shift, remarking: “I can’t control it.” Meanwhile, threatening to wake Stief, sound performances just outside the small room bled into each other, intermingling with the intermittent calls of “pizza!” that rang through the expansive halls.

***

In contrast to the quiet and still power of “Sleep Show”, Fanni Futterknecht’s “Kritzeln (Scribbling) is an act of Protest“ offered a space for catharsis. The furious scratching sound of scribbles consuming the surfaces of walls, doors, and objects throughout an upstairs apartment privileged the expressiveness of gesture over words. An inscribed slab standing at the doorway emphasized this: 

Words can be corrected, diluted, deleted, overwritten. 
Words can be made illegible, resisted, erased and taken back.
Words can be fragmented, distorted and broken. 
Words can turn abstract, then we call words ‘Kritzel’….

To step outside of the House of Losing Control into another area of the VAW program, “Kritzeln is an act of Protest“ also felt connected to the paintings of Denise Rudolf Frank, who was featured in the Open Studio Days — likewise curated under the theme of “Losing Control”. Frank paints visceral, bold, loose and expressive images with thick, clotted paint, often applied directly from the tube or with fingers. The paintings are unrestrained; they take space, they announce themselves, loudly, in a language that turns words abstract. A welcome and necessary release. 

Selected highlights from the VAW program and partner organizations:

• CLIMAX – Expanding the Void III at The Dessous
  A group show of virtual and digital art featuring Stefano D’Alessio, Olivier Hölzl, Hannes Köcher, Rebecca Merlic, Lieber Michael, Carolina Rivera Arboleda, Hidéo Snes and Mariya Vasilyeva. The exhibition runs through November 20, 2021.

• Jennifer Gelardo, “Pick-up Artist” at tart.vienna
  The installation and performance runs through December 23, 2021.

• Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic* & Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński at Kunsthalle Wien
  The two parallel solo exhibitions by Vienna-based artists run through February 6, 2022.

Vienna Art Week runs until November 19, 2021.

25. A mother of three who works the red-light district in six-inch heels: her thoughts on a Friday night. A woman from the valleys of Coco-yam country is here. Deities visiting bodies. Grass skirts waving. Mother of two melanated girls and a boy. My daughters and other black girls rock. We speak spells and own bodies that slips through their fingers. Make them pay.
Man, woman, it makes no difference.
I own a degree from Humboldt and student loans.
Pay-up! Pay-up! Pay-up!
An empty purse and a fur jacket.
Pay-up! Pay-up! Pay-up!
An expired passport and mouths to feed in another country.
Pay-up! Pay-up! Pay-up!
All money is good money if it puts a roof over your head.
My kids be eating good. They be smiling real hard.
What you don’t know is: my body remains a temple even after I let their greedy limbs feed.
Men take. They take. And take. So, I compartmentalise.
Every night, I empty myself into a Calabash. And then into a creek.
I become born-again in salt.
Netflix was great last night. 3:45am sips of Ciroc.
A warm body in a bed that’s not mine, yelling, come here, shut up and peel me out of my skin. My old man in a shack. Paid like Beyonce. Diva getting money. Fierce nymph with a wig from Akarawe. I wonder: where am I going to die, when, how. In pain? In a ditch somewhere? Who will take care of my seeds? How deep. How far into the ground does a mother’s love go? What if the Mona Lisa was a Black woman – would we travel far to see her? Bride needs new shoes and some books. Women & markets. Women are markets and products men make money with. Don’t judge me, I’m getting mine. 

hn. lyonga is a Berlin-based Poet, Creative-writer and Activist. Currently, he is a Master’s student of American Studies at Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin. He graduated with a Bachelor’s in American Culture and Sociology from the University of Kassel. He is a founding member of the Black Student Union at Humboldt and a member of the Kuratorium of BARAZANI.berlin – Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand.

A session on dead things and little pleasures
by hn. lyonga

I dedicate this to my sister and the women who walk white streets everyday hiding themselves in fear.

On the day Nelson Mandela died
I dragged a malnourished body through muddy streets
then paid to hurl my guts about everything wrong with my life. And. Little pleasures that hold
them together.
My therapist is a black woman.
So, when I say; skin, she says I understand, I have one too. And hypervisibility and invisibility are sides of the same coin.
I gesture. She nods.
I tell her about drifting through Alexander Platz in afro-puffs and skin-tight jeans
and
about the girl who said; good god! this is Germany not Ghana. what the fuck is that thing you are trawling your body in, go back to Africa – you bimbo slut
and
I love it when married men choose me over their wives and I replenish their preeminence and
they fill my mouth with vitality. And. Their white dreams become mine.
and
I’m twenty-one with no aspiration
because I was raised to be ok with what I was given
to never question the MAN, to respect emblems
and not end up another body in a bag. And gunshot injuries
raised to survive – so I can live long enough to believe euphoria is a thing to be experienced
and
when I beam at my reflection, my demons laugh. They reply. They gloat.
and
I gain weight around my thighs and they caress and contuse in the summer
and
I’m two months post-relaxer. & I’m loving this new growth.
and
I downloaded Facebook last night & I’m cat-fishing my ex with pictures of the type of girl he likes
and
what is beauty anyway, I always want to tell myself I am beautiful enough – but I really don’t know if I can fully believe it
and
where are the movies about black inventors and entrepreneurs, what happened in Auschwitz, where did all the Afro-German folks disappear to. What heaven. What hell?
90—days fiancé is a new show I want to binge-watch
and
deep down I know I will never get married
and
my brother’s wife is without a clue of how much he loves to dress-up and succour alpha-males when she’s away on a visit and I bury mysteries in my gut
and
I decided my math teacher can fill me up next week
and

and

and

and

I Said. Last night, I slow-danced
with a needle and a blade
because someday, it will happen and I want to be prepared.
It was 3:45am. when they finally departed
when Kai’s bang reached through to the other side of the wall separating our rooms
indicating it was time.
Time I stopped feeding strays,

time I stopped giving away what was holy and mine,

time I stopped searching…

stripped and beguiled by three men I picked up on a rail travel to a city of hope.
Tastebuds of absolute madmen.
Their stench will stay with me until the right one finally rears its head
when they thrust their hips in mine, I say; amen – I want it all.
I lay my back to the ground.
I do not heed, not while I ride the high.
I do not see their faces.
I hear them moaning and worshipping from afar.
I am present. But. I am not seen.
and
one of the men tells me he is 55% attracted to me
what’s the other 45% – I ask
DISGUST?
and
sometimes, I’m at sea
sometimes, I wanna be alone
sometimes, I wanna stay enveloped – head to toe
and
I might try medicating.
What drug. What dream. What dead thing will I force down my throat today?

hn. lyonga is a Berlin-based Poet, Creative-writer and Activist. Currently, he is a Master’s student of American Studies at Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin. He graduated with a Bachelor’s in American Culture and Sociology from the University of Kassel. He is a founding member of the Black Student Union at Humboldt and a member of the Kuratorium of BARAZANI.berlin – Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand.

by Juli Cordray

We had the chance to catch up with artist Seo Hye Lee during her time at Vital Capacities — a UK-based accessible online residency program — to learn about what she’s been up to over the last month(s) and her practice more broadly.

For Seo Hye, the residency presented an opportunity to build on previous works that consider modes of communication, particularly in the visual form of gestures and subtitles:

“I was interested in further exploring dynamic forms of communication through subtitles and the residency provided the perfect opportunity to expand on this. My research during Vital Capacities has incorporated more about the history of subtitles, the difference between closed caption and subtitles, and also the history of intertitles during the silent film eras and the role of the Subtitler in translation in film/media.”

Words and symbols describing sound — interpreting, transcribing or supplementing spoken dialogue, atmospheric undertones, music — subtitles and closed captions are also processes of displaying text on a moving image, against a backdrop of changing scenes, moving bodies, and emotional shifts. In her research and work, Seo Hye is exploring and experimenting with the language used in such descriptions, what they convey or leave out, and the role played by this tool for accessibility.

Seo Hye, who has a cochlear implant, often draws on her experience of hearing loss in her work, while emphasizing the distinction between “hearing” and “listening” — the latter, she explains, is possible regardless of a person’s hearing ability. Her current research expands on a project from 2020, titled Partial Gestures. Created to accompany a zine that she also produced — titled BSL (British Sign Language) — the video work includes auto-generated subtitles from Youtube, with all their inaccuracies, transposed over images of close-cropped hand gestures, including sign language, and other partially visible body parts in motion, without revealing the full context. 

During her residency, Seo Hye has focused her research on the language of subtitles specifically within archival films depicting pottery-making processes and other crafts — likewise incorporating movements of the body. As Seo Hye describes, her new video work “explores the relationship between the language of subtitles and the visual language of hand-crafted ceramic pieces, forming language and communication from movement, gesture, and feeling.” 

Overlaying silent footage of hands as they touch and shape wet clay, molding it into round objects on a potter’s wheel, Seo Hye’s subtitles offer simultaneous sound cues to the viewer.  The same gestures and images are repeated in a row, like a filmstrip, accompanied by a different type of subtitle in each frame: one action-based, one abstract, and one music-based.

“I was interested as to how the identical videos took on varied meanings and the context of subtitles altered the experience for the viewers. By juxtaposing abstract, action-based, and music-based subtitles, I aim to highlight how powerful the use of imagery and words can be and how much this can alter our perception of events.”

Seo Hye’s action-based subtitles consist of a single verb in present continuous form: turning, shaping, etc. The abstract subtitles, on the other hand, feature short poetic descriptions without a concrete point of reference: “sound of listening inward”; “sound of remembering fondly”. While the music subtitles, too, are descriptive but not definitive: e.g., “mysterious string music”. Taken together, they prompt us to imagine what certain feelings and impalpable moments might sound like; and by extension, what subtitles themselves might sound like. Seo Hye elaborates:

“I found it fascinating how the ‘action-based’ subtitle can tell us the specific sound, enabling an immediate connection with visuals, while the more abstract and music subtitles are left open to our own interpretations.“

This specific connection between pottery, sound and language had already been materialized in her previous works — first in Artefacts of Sound and then in Many Shapes of Volumes (both from 2019) — in which she created ceramic sonic vessels. It’s a direction and medium she started to explore while living in Berlin and getting to know a new community. According to Seo Hye:

“I took ceramic classes in a local studio. Coming from an illustration background, naturally I started to explore ways of drawing sound into shapes and making those shapes into ceramics. I started to question — how could I create a shape that would contain sounds I want to hear? I gradually started to experiment with the idea of the shape of sound and began creating objects to reflect this.”

The objects produced for Many Shapes of Volumes — fabricated by ceramicist James Duck — were based on Seo Hye’s drawings and acted as carriers of sound: “this allowed people to listen to and touch the pieces as they moved about the space.” Here, a process of translation manifests through tactile relationships, hand gestures, and physically shaping — giving form. 

“The work Many Shapes of Volume utilised both primitive materials and new technology; the choice of ceramic significant in its timeless nature, along with the integration of modern audio technology within. I find myself drawn to the connection between these two, and I have continued to explore this within the film archives of pottery and the digital art media format.”

In reference to working with these themes within moving-image media, in one of her posts on Vital Capacities, Seo Hye offers this insight: “Craft videos are fascinating as they frequently show pairs of hands making objects from a shapeless form into something beautiful. For me, this formation presents a parallel between the idea of digitally shaping words into the language of subtitles, exploring its poetic nature.”

In her latest work, the subtitles are also digitally shaped by square brackets, which typically signify an insertion of additional information for the purpose of description, of sound effects for instance, or clarification — in this case not transcribing dialogue, but the language of sound itself.

As Seo Hye points out, auto-generated subtitles, like those on Youtube, are notoriously inaccurate. But what potential do inaccuracies — or, perhaps, the absence of a definitive notion of correctness — hold in this context? Can miscommunication instead be used constructively, to offer varied experiences to viewers and allow space for new correspondences to emerge? 

In the various subtitles that appear over the same recurring image in Seo Hye’s current work, we might also recall the prevalence of captioned images on the internet, in the form of memes. Familiar images appear again and again in new contexts created through imagined dialogues or descriptions of ambient sounds. It’s within this digital sphere of communication (and miscommunication) that Seo Hye’s work likewise unfolds and opens up new narratives. Here, Seo Hye seeks out modes of communication based on feeling and perception, rather than clarity and accuracy, highlighting the nuances that already exist and embracing them for their constructive potential. At the same time, such gradations render sound plastic, as a form that is not only tactile, but also malleable — intended to be held, touched, felt, as well as shaped and reshaped, like clay.

Check out Seo Hye Lee’s new work in Vital Capacities’ online exhibition from July 22, 2021.