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Is the color white “neutral”? In many western cultures, whiteness is often considered the ideal, the norm, representing cleanliness, innocence or a fresh start. White conveys class and is used as a metaphor for perfection, piousness, and purity, like the proverbial white vest or the trustworthiness of white lab coats. Describing classical sculptures in his books, the German art historian and archaologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann established the idea of a white antiquity. He conveyed the idea that a beautiful body appears more beautiful the whiter it is, despite being well aware of the colourfulness of ancient statues. And in the art context, the white cube, well described by Brian O’Doherty, has become the epitome of exhibition spaces, providing the optimal setting for representing artworks. Lastly, white skin has been regarded as superior to people of other racial or ethnic backgrounds, resulting in the ideology of white supremacy.  

The exhibition “The Dark Side of White” sheds a critical light on the supposedly “neutral” characteristics of white gallery spaces, clothes, statues, and skin, which have been established through Western-centric and patriarchy-influenced discourse. The show will discuss the negative consequences of white privilege, power, and dominance in various spheres of life and attempt to dismantle the myths, authority and dominance that the color white has asserted over the past centuries.  

Julia Hartmann

The exhibition The Village brings together photographs of the East German village of Berka from seven decades. Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler, the co-founders of the well-known Ostkreuz photographer agency, and Ludwig Schirmer, Ute Mahler’s father, captured the everyday life of the Thuringian community on camera from the 1950s to the 2020s, and for the most part without knowing about each other’s series of works.

By presenting different long-term studies of one and the same place, the curator of the exhibition Ingo Taubhorn tries to approach the theme of “The Neutral,” under which Curated by has as its subject this year.

“The neutral” was considered the ideal and justification for the new medium in the early days of photography, which struggled for its recognition in art, or at least in visual design. Unlike painting, the photograph was intended to capture the world objectively, honestly, and authentically—at least that’s how it was praised by its early protagonists.

This classification proved to be a fallacy. In photography, too, the realization quickly set in that the individual, the independent, the special touch was needed to create power, emotionality, and effect. It quickly became clear that light, focus, and cropping had to be played with, that it was inevitable to trick, exaggerate, and manipulate with finesse if one wanted to inspire viewers, or at least keep them interested—and that the neutral, unbiased photographer’s ideal was a nice aberration and that the lens was just called a lens.

The various long-term studies of the town of Berka by Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, and Ludwig Schirmer are the best proof of this. Although connected by family, although similarly trained in terms of vision, although exclusively committed to black-and-white analog photography, each of them opens us up to their own, to their individual, to their not-at-all neutral view of life in the province—the narrowness, the idyll, the tranquility, the menace, the longing, the melancholy, the anger, the complicated in the simple, the broken in the intact, the beautiful in the supposedly ugly. Each of the Berka series shown reveals something different. Each wants to reveal something different. None remains neutral.

But in combination, in juxtaposition, in being presented side by side for the first time, they give the viewer the opportunity to approach even a neutral gaze. ‘Because,” says Ingo Taubhorn, the curator, “as in natural science and in philosophy, it is also true for art and photography that only in the incorporation, perception, weighing, and validation of different elements, sources, points of view, and representations can something like a neutral position be taken, that this is therefore never possible or allowed to the creator of a work, but always only to the viewer with the comparative inclusion of other works.”

The decisive factor for Ingo Taubhorn is that the project The Village is also a family history that examines aspects of time and change. Berka is the hometown of both Ludwig Schirmer and his daughter Ute Mahler. Due to its location in the East German provinces, it has been and continues to be subject to constant, sometimes radical change, which is reflected in the photos: from the GDR era to reunification to the more or less lived unity.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Ludwig Schirmer (1929–2001) worked as a master miller in the village. Even then, photography was his great passion, and so shortly after the end of World War II he began documenting life, festivities, and everyday life in the small village. Later, after leaving Berka, Schirmer became one of the busiest commercial photographers in the former GDR. His Berka pictures disappeared into boxes and attics. Only after his death in 2001 were they discovered, most of them merely as negatives that had never been enlarged.

Werner Mahler (*1950), the son-in-law of Ludwig Schirmer, decided in 1977—without knowing of Schirmer’s pictures—to photograph Berka for his diploma thesis for the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig. The result was a work of over 150 black-and-white photographs, which he methodically compiled into an artist’s book that impressively traced the community of the place. In 1998, Werner Mahler photographed Berka once again: eight years after reunification, he returned to the place to record the changes in the village community in another long-term study.

The work of Ute Mahler (*1949), daughter of Ludwig Schirmer and wife of Werner Mahler, can be seen as the familial successor to these both projects. It was created in the years 2021 to 2022 and—with knowledge of the other Berka series—takes an independent look at her birthplace. Ute Mahler went in search of the traces of her childhood. She, in contrast to the pictures of Ludwig Schirmer and Werner Mahler, photographed mainly the young generation and youths—she had left Berka, the mill, and the idyll at the same age as the portrayed.

The Village project thus poses questions about home and childhood, about moving away and coming back, about old and new, about the known and the unknown. The photographic long-term view documents life in a village over 70 years from three different positions of a photographer’s family.

In the exhibition The Village, the Berka studies by Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, and Ludwig Schirmer are shown together for the first time. The series by Ludwig Schirmer and Ute Mahler are being shown for the very first time.

Ludwig Schirmer, born in Wenigenehrich, Thuringia, in 1929, completed an agricultural apprenticeship from 1943 and then worked on his parents’ farm. From 1947, he trained as a miller, which he completed in 1953 with a master miller’s examination. From 1953 to 1961 he worked as a master miller in the family’s water mill in Berka, Thuringia. From 1950, he intensified his interest in photography. After moving to Berlin, he worked as a freelance photographer for foreign trade enterprises, industrial companies, and cultural institutions of the GDR. Ludwig Schirmer is one of the most prominent representatives of applied photography in the GDR and was considered the leading “advertising photographer” in East Germany. Ludwig Schirmer died in Berlin in 2001.

Ute Mahler, born in Berka, Thuringia, in 1949, completed her studies in photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig in 1974 and has worked as a freelance photographer ever since. She was a member of the Association of Visual Artists (VBK) of the GDR from 1981 and founded the renowned Ostkreuzagentur für Fotografen (Ostkreuz Agency for Photographers) with six East German photographers in 1990, which later became the Ostkreuzschule. From 2000 to 2015, she held a professorship in photography at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, her work was published in the GDR fashion magazine Sibylle, among others. From 1989, she worked for national and international magazines. She has always pursued her own artistic projects (in addition to commissioned work and later teaching), and from 2008 also together with her husband, photographer Werner Mahler. Ute Mahler’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions around the world, including the Haus der Photographie in Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen, which dedicated a major exhibition of Mahler's work in 2014, and an enlarged show at the Fotomuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands (Beyond the Borders of the GDR) in 2019. Ute Mahler lives with Werner Mahler in Lehnitz, near Oranienburg in Brandenburg.

Werner Mahler was born in 1950 in Boßdorf, Saxony-Anhalt. He began his photographic career in 1971 as an assistant to Ludwig Schirmer. In 1978, he completed his studies in photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig. In his works of the 1970s and 1980s, he vividly documented life in the GDR, such as everyday life in the Thuringian village of Berka, work in a coal mine near Zwickau, and the politically charged matches between the soccer clubs FC Union and BFC Dynamo.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Werner Mahler co-founded the Ostkreuzagentur für Fotografen, of which he was managing director for numerous years. In 2005, together with Thomas Sandberg, he founded the Ostkreuz School of Photography. In his more recent work, historical cameras are often used. With the camera obscura, he created dreamlike sequences of Swiss lakes, Brandenburg landscapes, or Leonardi da Vinci’s work sites in northern Italy. Together with his wife Ute Mahler, he used an old plate camera to photograph girls in transition, between city and country, childhood and maturity. The resulting book and exhibition project "Mona Lisas of the Suburbs" won several photography awards in 2011. Werner Mahler lives with Ute Mahler in Lehnitz, near Oranienburg in Brandenburg.

Summer. Dust, red. The heat comes in waves, the dreams do, the dust does. “Idea of the subject as set of traces (waves) recast according to different wavelengths,” writes Roland Barthes (after the Greeks). These traces floating like radio waves or waves of dust, glittering, pollinating, adding a red shimmer of nuance (intensity) to the air, as when the Sahara is sent across the Mediterranean, tracing Athenian terraces and parked cars with a glittery coat of copper grit, some red gradient. 

          “The word pollen comes from the Greek palyno, meaning dust. Dust brings new life, and dust is what’s left of dead things,” Patricia L. Boyd writes. 

          “Dust is made of mostly skin... dust as migration…the displacement of Koreans to China and Mongolia under the occupation … radio transmits signal to receiver, dust as transmission, collective memory,” observes Na Mira. Mira is writing about her new moving-image installation made under the influence of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s final, unfinished film, White Dust from Mongolia (1982). 

          Of her unfinished work, Cha herself once noted: “There exists a ‘Hole’ in Time, a break in the linearity of Time and Space, and that empty space, the Absence, becomes the fixation, the marking that is the object of retrieval, a constant point of reference, identification, naming.” 

          In 1978, Barthes would announce: “I gather under a name, which here is the Neutral.” As Cha studied film in Paris, Barthes was lecturing every week on Le Neutre at Collège de France, where, from his chair in literary semiology, he offered a “phantasmic teaching.” In her final thesis, Cha would write that she was pursuing, as stated by Roland Barthes, a “plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.” 

          So it might be here: that plurality, that infinity of entrances opening onto a language at once perpetual and ardent and burning. That is, some “perpetual adoration,” per Barthes. That is: Language as material, memory, ancestor, analysis, apparatus, index, collage, montage, mirror, box, language. Without fascism (RB).

          Likewise, Boyd and Mira, whose image- and language-strewn practices—at once sober and spectral in their approach to sign, signification, and montage, in their accession of openings and objects for retrieval—are also sharpened “on the edge of language, on the edge of color,” to echo Barthes again. Their bodies of work made at the edge of life, its materials and mountains and itemizations and apartments and hallucinations. If to work from life or dreams, language or images, the living or the dead, suggests the paradigm in which meaning is made from the false binaries of such terms, it is against this inherited system that their art of the nonlaw is put into process. Its qualities: vital, skeptical, fragile, contingent, perishable, lyrical, laconic, hallucinatory, lucid, other.

          Consider Boyd’s new sculptural series on view, which continues from her last exhibition, Where You Lie. Made from the recontextualization of materials taken from the artist’s domestic autobiography, the works’ primary materiality is a set of cardboard moving boxes gleaned from life and separation, writ with language and its affective operations (FRAGILE FRAGILE FRAGILE reads the red font on wide white tape). The works offer a series of stations strobing the floor. “They emerge,” writes Boyd, “as I reprocess my ‘baggage’ at a pivotal moment in my life. They propose a set of everyday actions as part of a sculptural vocabulary: packing, unpacking, sorting, counting, listing, separating, clearing, detaching, discarding, departing.”

          The moving boxes, now become sculpture, hold and withhold contents, personal possessions—images, objects, lights, sheets, indices, litanies of minimal memory—and so delineate the dispossessions of self and shared life, its shattering and stunning displacements finding new form and new meaning. “But, as always, form comes with dreams, with images of contents,” per Barthes. 

          If The Neutral, divested of the will-to-possess, is imbued instead with the will-to-live, yet it remains strangely aligned with the “ownership of the objects we call ‘personal,’” material that has a mnemonic charge. Indeed, Boyd’s sculptural system here functions, in some sense, like an ideosphere, that is, in how “the pieces are placed and held together by the language … the way the crate held by the worker's hands already resembles a crate.”

          A kind of negative theology, this. A kind of clearing out, per Boyd herself. Note the nuanced pleasure—the desperate vitality, à la Pasolini—of producing a new system, new form, from the detritus and dogmatism of the normative order. If Boyd’s materials are marked by the violence of transport, of movement and memory, they are also defined by the cut—of place, time, material, relation, image, desire—and its montage of frames.

          The frames and cuts of Mira’s new film installation offer another modular reworking and strobing of the space, at once structural, speculative, semiotic. Imagining scenes from Cha’s unfinished White Dust, Mira stages them in some hallucinatory meeting of a fragmentary inheritance: theatrical, diasporic, and sounding. The dreamlike scenes and sounds were summoned by the artist’s meditations and automatic writings: a figure crawling across the seats of a theater; another holding a film slate, marking off her staccato performance of language; footage of the Hallasan volcano haloed by fog in Korea. Evoking ancestral space-time from Cha’s archive, and the artist’s own Korean matrilineal histories, their cosmologies and ecologies, Mira scores the work with the haunting songs and talk news of 1540 AM Radio Korea. Its eerie transmissions cut in and out of the voices of the artist and her actor, their exacting spells.

          The film is projected on a painted red wall, which is then mirrored, dissembling light and images, not quite colorless. Yet: “Red is the neutral color of film,” Mira notes. (The “safelight” of the dark room is red, remember.) By projecting the film directly onto the “disappearing conditions of its development, we can follow to wherever red fades to,” Mira writes, adding: “My mother says my real art is to invent a new color, ‘something like pink.’” 

          The mirror itself articulates itself in fragments across the floor, marking it off and offering various meanings, images. To the Greeks, the mirror is ego: Narcissus’s watery reflection. In the Tao, per Chang-tzu: “The Perfect uses his mind as a mirror … his movement is apathetic as is that of water, his immobility is that of the mirror, his reply is that of the echo.” Mira’s echo of Cha’s oeuvre is liquid, moving. Her reply a fluid admixture of structuralist film and shamanism, apparatus and animism. Korean Shamanism is called Mu, meaning ‘nothing,’ ‘death,’ ‘dance.’ “The Mudang is the intermediary between the living and the dead,” writes Mira. “Shamans use mirrors to see the spirits.”

          To wit, Barthes again: “The Neutral (I will be more brief) is not ‘social’ but lyrical, existential.”

          Images that come in waves—like watery dreams or the driest dust—like language without rhetoric.

          An exhibition of activities at once “burning and ardent.” Form of contents, phantoms. Skins of boxes and books and images; languages of light and darkness and the velvet seating of theaters; the oily taste of film. (In a game of Chinese Portrait, when asked what fabric The Neutral is, Barthes answers himself: Velvet.) Waves of desire because “one must always go all the way to the end of a desire … or of a wound,” instructs Barthes. The wound of color: thin streak of blood at the horizon, the blue darkening like a bruise above. 

          Cha said of her White Dust: “All the elements I have outlined are encompassed in the larger context of MEMORY … It represents a body of time that is eternal and immeasurable, within which our existence is marked like a wound.”

          In Barthes’s famous anecdote, possibly apocryphal, that is, literature, about The Neutral’s origins, he described being dazzled one day by the colors of inks at the store: the blues, greens, reds, blacks. He bought them all. Most intrigued by the one labeled, that is, named, Teinte Neutre. Color of the grammatical androgyne. At home he quickly opened the bottle and the ink spilled: to his disappointment, a flat grayish black. As such, the monochrome gets much play in discussions of The Neutral, and so it is here, in this exhibition, with its monochromatic frames, forms, textiles, texts, montages, reflections. But not quite colorless: shot through with red, almost pink, like dust. We are on the edge of color, like language.

          Dust as a kind of ghost, then, kind of container, for both color and the colorless. Dust as autoexistance. Its specter filling rooms, boxes, projections, montages, this exhibition, with its linguistic transmissions and formal desires. Dusty phantoms that haunt rooms, walls, floors: Barthes, Cha, various shadowy figures, semblances of selves, female forebears, formerly lucid relations. Their languages and litanies and laconic lists scrawled or staccato or hissing across forms and images, their signal discursive and traveling, smearing and fading. Summoning language so as to speak to the other, that phantasmic pleasure, and then the line cutting, dropping, ending. Exit Language (FIN).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Text by Pınar Öğrenci

My studies in photography–“reading” and “writing”–began in France when I was already 25 years old. A late diagnosis of an “illness” that I seem to have developed young. There must be many who suffer from the same disease: being photographers without knowing it, tormented for a lifetime by a sensitive eye left unsatisfied, all because they never chanced to take a camera in their hands and gain consciousness of the power that hides behind their gaze. This kind of thing isn’t strange in Greece, where the language of photography is merely mumbled–we can’t really say that it’s articulated. I had to find myself in Paris to learn to read and write photographically!

– George Toukovasilis, excerpt from his text Self-Presentation, published in Zygos, May-June 1980

Wherever you put a comma in a room, that’s its center. There are commas separating these photographs–like hot neurons or the quick change in feeling when you pass through a slice of shade. Punctuation is more liquid than you think. A walk is one sentence. The photographer places commas as she proceeds, the one she’s capturing pays attention or not at all; the sentence structure of their walk imitates the glowing fog of light it’s in; the commas dilate and become tiny heirs of this pictured friendship, its sleepy conduction through the street. One comma and she is nuanced–nubes, Latin for clouds–one more comma and she is a numen of light that has a tendency for sleep, another comma and arms, legs, and bellies dissolve either from heat or an extremity of glow.

– Penelope Ioannou, excerpt from her text accompanying Our Misfortune, Marietta Mavrokordatou’s exhibition at A Thousand Julys, Nicosia, 15 September–18 November 2022.

Am I completely derailed or did the anonymous one-sentence mention of Rapson’s show in New York magazine just turn into a poem? There is something contagious about these moments when Rapson starts editing references not to inflate their meaning and expose their arbitrariness but to suspend perception of the present, when this tiny two-dimensional world starts spinning to transgress into a soft, semi-hallucination carrying you somewhere else, I am thinking while listening to Drake melting his baritone range with the acoustic guitar, reaching out to us one last time before his overdose from antidepressants: “ You know that I love you/You know that I don’t care/ You know that I see you/You know I’m not there.”

– Pujan Karambeigi, excerpt from Poets and Artfans, his review of Sarah Rapson’s 2019 solo exhibition Sell the House at Essex Street, New York, published in the December 2019 issue of Texte zur Kunst.

His painting, for example, orbits traditional genres (the male nude, the portrait, the still-life) at the same time that it gravitates towards typically homoerotic themes (the man in uniform, the satyr, the erectile phallus). These he approaches with a strong interest in the history of art, especially painting, and with reference to the “greats” of the western canon of his received art education. It is a lesson he has since decentred by conscientiously turning to women artists (to Marlene Dumas and Rosemary Trockell repeatedly), and to examples of artists from the supposed periphery–to the Greek painter Yannis Tsarouchis (especially), to the Cypriot painter Andreas Karayian (obsessively)–in the search for aesthetic articulations of (queer) desire.
[...]
I think of the sensuous washes of his brushwork as emulation of the murkiness of the technologically produced surface on the canvas, although I am aware that the liquid layers of paint are a metaphorical reference to bodily fluids–spit, sweat, sperm, tears–and part of his conscious attempt to debunk the significance of skill in painting and deviate from the demand for a highly finished result.

– Elena Parpa, excerpt from her text Notes on And leaned shoulder against the window, published on the occasion of Polys Peslikas’ solo exhibition at Radio Athènes, May-July 2023

[There are joules, jewels, Julys]

When pronouncing the word ‘above’, the tongue is said to be ‘in neutral’. It doesn’t move, yet it still produces a sound, a shape to the word, an indication: above. There’s an inherent contradiction that comes with associating the ‘neutral’ with something muted, disengaged, or impartial. Even when not involved, something as soft as a tongue can affect the rest. 

According to the practice that studies signs and meaning-making, there is a tendency to judge novel stimuli based on the perception of stimuli from the past. Once we see a sky for the first time, a blueprint is produced that will affect how we see other skies, despite their nuances. There is always a trace, a ‘neutral level’, which carries with it meaning. The question is when and how this trace will reveal itself. 

Behind a wall in the gallery, in a windowless part of the building, lived a Hausmasta: the historic caretaker of Viennese buildings, who carried out maintenance work and looked after tenants. Living on-site but hidden from others, hausmastas were not meant to be seen or heard. At the same time, they were the eyes and ears of the building, the guarding spirits of the place. This gave them a degree of neutrality; a present absence. What stories could they have revealed? 

Reimagining the gallery as a system of traces — ideologies, but also histories and material properties of the building — the project explores various levels at which something or someone ‘neutral’ operates. Bringing together sonic and visual works that embrace minimalist gestures, the exhibition opens a space for re-negotiating identities and othered positions. The artists in the show explore questions of identity and belonging, starting from personal narratives. By switching between various linguistic codes, they shift the perception of what may be considered neutral: unpolluted, unoccupied, silent, invisible, natural - deconstructing and exposing the architectures that shape our bodies and collective imaginaries.

A seemingly silent and impartial object such as a squash–a leitmotif in Anthea Hamilton's oeuvre–opens multiple narratives and possibilities of representation. Partly inspired by the characters of the book series ‘The Garden Gang’, written by 9-year-old author Jayne Fisher, Hamilton recurs to vegetables as a subject - but also as a mode of practice that creates a space for joy and potential, syncretic encounters, and new meanings. The glass sculptures carry traces, among the others, of the artist’s childhood memories and peer-to-peer acts of connection with another girl author; references to Art Nouveau organic forms, the 20s and 30s work of artist Maurice Marinot, and the vegetables themselves. Opaque sculptural forms become subtle protagonists against a Scrambled Sky. While setting an idyllic and virtual scenario, the sculptures and wallpaper destabilise the boundaries of the space, calling into question the ideological constructs of the gallery itself and introducing other hybrid environments.

Moving between architecture and landscapes, Ghita Skali’s two-part video Palm Attacks examines how a common date palm, the Phoenix Dactylifera, takes on unexpected functions. Two fictional characters in the film, a tour guide and an economist, reflect on the evolving role of the palm tree in Morocco. Once a symbol of the ‘exotic’, palm trees are now often turned into cell towers, their foliage laced with receptors, to meet the demands of advancing technologies. Meanwhile, Skali’s series of photographs Montessori is has been captures the facades of private schools in Morocco. Named after predominantly white male figures, such as Steve Jobs and Walt Disney, and using French and English, the schools carry ongoing traces of Western colonial influence. By framing images with white borders that allude to the strategies of canonical black & white landscape photography, Skali exposes the tools that shape urban and social fabrics in Morocco, inviting reflections on the implications of neutralising the ‘Global South’ and its effects on its education systems.

Exploring language from a somatic perspective, P. Staff’s 16 mm film Depollute interrogates what may be considered natural for some, while a toxic presence in the body for others. The silent, two-minute film presents a set of clinical instructions required to perform a self-orchiectomy (the surgical removal of one or both testicles). Capturing the viewer with pulsating words and colours, the fast-paced work explores self-surgery as a form of bodily autonomy and self-actualisation, while also a complex and possibly harmful procedure. In this way, Staff’s film reminds us of the ambivalent relationship between the medical industrial system, harm, and care.

Abbas Zahedi’s work 11:11 (1030) offers a remapping of space through sound, sensory elements, and minimal gestures. Barely visible pencil lines demarcate the entryway of where the Hausmasta apartment used to be. Meanwhile, elusive sounds emerge from small apertures in the space–a hole in the wall, a ceiling window–all connected via audio cables. The sounds are composed using flooring tiles previously found in a sorting office in South-West London, where Zahedi presented Ouranophobia, a collaborative exhibition accessible only to people working on the front lines of the pandemic. In this new iteration of the project, Zahedi uncovers the past lives of the gallery building, connecting us with different layers of space (the material and secular, but also atmospheric and psychological). Drawing from common materials and the therapeutic, spiritual, and meditative practices where sound facilitates the release of pain and grief, the work carries the potential for a more emotional attunement while opening multiple entryways into personal narratives. As Zahedi asks, referring to the Ouranophobia as signifying ‘fear of the sky’: ‘How do I develop a sense of place in the cosmos when all I can rely on is the ground beneath my feet?’. Staircases, exit signs, and floor tiles forming an arrow propose multiple exits. And yet, they bring us back to the same space where we began: at a ground level. 

Rather than a way out, the exhibition proposes the possibility to inhabit and view structures from different perspectives, inverting grounds and skies; an invitation to sense a way through the silence, between what is not seen or said. If neutrality, by temporarily suspending terms and categorisation, can open a third space for negotiation, who can speak and be silent? Who is there to hear?

The power of choice. To choose or not, to take a stance or to be neutral, or even taking a position to be neutral. Drawing from the complex and subjective concept of neutrality, this exhibition at Galerie Martin Janda brings into dialogue the practices of Sara Bichão, Alejandro Cesarco, Milena Dragicevic, Alexandre Estrela, Roman Ondak, Sjiben Rosa, Tadáskía, Belén Uriel, Jaime Welsh and Michel Zózimo exploring and looking at this concept in factual, abstract, or rather direct ways.

For Between 58 and 131 infinitely. which is part of the annual curated by festival in Vienna, the presented artworks revolve around the realm of the neutral within literature. At play in this exhibition is the intertwining of ideas that allude to the way in which literary works mirror the notion of the neutral, using several narrative techniques throughout the story. Ones that frequently intersect and include first or third person, and a kind of stream of consciousness; traditional spelling and linguistic rules that are often bent and sometimes outright broken.

The exhibition takes its title from Julio Cortazar’s iconic Hopscotch, where readers are presented with the thrilling choice of ending the story at chapter 57 or roaming infinitely through the promised non-sense between 58 and 131. There were other literary inspirations that should be taken into account; like The Winners, also from Cortazar, where a noisy and heterogeneous group of people win a prize for a luxurious cruise trip and are suddenly quarantined, having to let go their personalities and adapt to survive with the other; Herman Melville’s iconic Bartleby and his passive resistance “in preferring not to”; Nick Carraway, the narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and his neutral standpoint throughout the novel allowing readers to form their own impression of the narrative. This also happens, in a completely different setting, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Also, the loss of individuality translated in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or the emotional detachment in Albert Camus’ The Stranger. The list of how literature references neutrality, in its many ways and forms, is in fact endless.

The quest for the neutral through metaphors, poetry, and dreamlike literature, or better said, a sort of freedom is an infinite endeavor. The concept of the neutral in literature is often subjective and varies depending on each interpretation of the specific context of the work. Some literary works go even further and blur the lines between neutrality and uncertainty, leaving readers to engage in an even deeper reflection or critical analysis. The decision to remain neutral can be complex and challenging, a virtue or a failure. Through this exhibition the hopes are in encouraging critical thought, challenging binary mindsets, and fostering empathy.

Luiza Teixeira de Freitas

Essay

It is impossible to be neutral in politics and yet neutrality, the theme of this years Curated by, could be seen as a welcome space in which to embrace the non-functional nature of art.  It is hoped that such a metaphorically extended space and time dilutes any simplistic idea of understanding, that the narrative of artistic intention does not trump experience to determine how things really are or will be. A show consisting of work by four artists, will inevitably, carry a three-dimensional sense of discovery and surprise about it. No description can encapsulate the complicated, perhaps contradictory, power of experience.  While neutrality can never, in its abstraction, provide real vision or result, the range of physical language used by the four selected artists is able to provide a sweep of desire and aesthetics, a true range of physical endeavour and reference, that will unwittingly absorb the neutral in some other way. Much of work by the selected artists arrives out of a metaphorical sideways shift, out of a use of material that reflects the beginning of possibility and the fact that at some sort of level we, as audience and artist alike, begin in the same place.

Andreas Reiter Raabe makes painting and sculpture that arrives out off a sort of hands-off process. With the machinery of production existing somewhere between the artist and the result, Reiter Raabe allows, somehow apparently with little emotion, the paint to fall on the canvas in smears, blops and plops. The sifting process which has already taken the mark away from the hand uses a touch that in its own terms neither succeeds nor fails, but that is, to a certain extent, determined by a language that surrounds the success and failure of abstract painting. It is also one that can be judged by different criteria.  Is this a ‘good one’, both artist and expectant observer enquire, is it lovely, what does that mean? Reiter Raabe’s process mimics the early days of a printing press; the production of and laying out of written and visual language that is neither basic nor primary, but in this case with a palette that looks if it has already been mixed in another life. The machinery of production in turn mimics a cottage industry of constructed rationale where paint, tired rather than fresh, arrives in a roundabout way and ends up, propped, hung on the wall, a slice of horizontal brought flat. When also making a flat surface stand up on its own, Reiter Raabe’s works both mimics and becomes a sculpture.

Jessica Warboys’ paintings are a result of the harnessing of the independent force of nature, in that they are made mainly by placing canvas in the sea. Direction, hands free, is never just one way, as the visual result and surrounding narrative dissolves a rhythm of autonomous and independent logic. The result, anything but pictorial or determined, manages to convey a sense of diffuse powerlessness. It is a matter of throwing yourself in, metaphorically, as the vison appears, against a sub plot of expectation about what a painting should actually do. A production of non-centralised, all-over activity; the movement of water, like that harnessed for electricity, brings about a mass of image shown roughly across a structure.

Her films follow a similar sense. Warboys’ brings image in and out of focus and associative relief using text, scratch, picture of place and, a broken, but directed, mixture of sharp and blunt, diffuse, and concentrated association and disassociation. The film makes an unusual sweep or swoop between the physical and representational, and back again. The relation between real time and moving image is fascinating. The water moves over the surface of the sea paintings, and the imagery in the moving image also seems to have a nature of its own. Warboys’ edits with precision, yet the logic of the beat and rationale of captured place, symbolic moment, associative significance allows a sweep of interference across the work. The implication is of an artist affected by, rather than affecting, the result. Such collaging is not new, of course, but the relation to time, the fact that there is no narrative, as such, creates a quickening in shift, from general to specific, totality to particularity, to extend territory and a sense of possibility. The fact the artist makes something last over time extends a form of conscious unconsciousness.

Made in a sort of ‘hands free’ manner the somewhat belligerent iconographic paintings by Harminder Judge, are as much a matter of relief as paint. As with the work of Reiter Raabe and Warboys, with imagery, in Judge’s case a splattering, or mass, of pigment suspended within its own physical volume, a swarm of flies caught in aspic, in an apparently indirect manner. The subject and direction is petrified within a build-up of material and the work functions in a back to front manner, with the work reflecting gestural movement. The iconic, shift, rivulet of action, put in from behind or on top, arrives fixed and finite and front of stage, as it were, with hard surface, and diffuse action held still. The gesture is suspended, frozen in time, when turned from upside down and around to face us.  So, like the director of an opera, the artist achieves total revelation only after the curtain has lifted at the dress rehearsal. Made up of many gestures and moments, after copious process and care, the instant breath or cross section of reaction is revealed with colour making up an image delivered all at once. Works by Judge allude to the gesture of expressionism but also to a statement that comes, perhaps, from elsewhere. Loose powdery material leaves a trace, like a script or language of painterly ambition. Like Reiter Raabe, who paints from above, neither artist is in a position to stand back, as it were, and choose what they have made. With trust in the process, something has landed.

The action somehow in Tereza Cerenova’s photographs, is held still. They are about, or of, a decision to allow layers of actuality to be caught across the surface; a sort of dive into space brought up to flatness. So much is going on off the side, of course, elsewhere, and everywhere. Or perhaps nothing is happening anywhere, that can have visual, formal, even aesthetic significance till held, not so much still, but as an example of place, space, and insignificant continuity. While the artists in the show have a roundabout, back to front, approach to a subsequent result, Cerenova’s photographs arrive in differing size and scale as perhaps stripping observation, to be shared, understood and appreciated in part for the continuation of the Modernist dream about the observation of elements, cut out ,collaged into consciousness. The loveliness of the disturbed flat sheet, a wall, the reflection in a window; really anything that brings the smear, tear, crumple, layered levels of visual language together. Cerenova’s photographs take on a role that washes up and away an exact sense of direction and subject, in order to remain in the role they play. The photograph, in this case mimics the whoosh of the chemical that in real life washes across the surface of photographic paper, and so with production mimicking the subject, form and content meet in the middle to become not just a self-defining image but a page holder as it were, in the relationship between art and photograph.

Sacha Craddock, July 2023

The first ideas for the exhibition came from the works of Renée Green, Julia Scher, and Christian Philipp Müller, all of whom had exhibitions in 1993 at the Galerie Metropol, which was run by Georg Kargl and Christian Meyer. The aesthetic forms, through which this history is revisited in the show, are not led by ideas around the archive or the aim of deploying an expertise on the time and frame within which each of the exhibitions was made. Comizi d’Amore presents, however, a very small and delicate selection of artworks, that cites the contexts of these past exhibitions, placing them within and in relation to the present framework of the exhibition and current artistic discourses, allowing for poetic encounters with works by Sharon Hayes, Marina Xenofontos, and Bruno Zhu. 

To me, all of the artists are sharing an interest in surfacing and interrogating the power of institutions that are steering our private and public lives. The inspiration for the title came from the video work Ricerche:one (2019) by Sharon Hayes which belongs to a  five-part series that steps off Pier Paolo Pasolini’s documentary film Comizi d’Amore (1964)  in which he travels Italy and interviews people in public places about sex, marriage, and gender roles. 

When I received the generous invitation from Inés Lombardi to organize an exhibition as part of this year's Curated by Festival with the challenging theme of The Neutral, I immediately knew that I wanted to immerse myself in the gallery's dense and expansive history and collection. This impulse possibly corresponded to my own past as well. Growing up on the same street as the gallery, I decided at some point as a teenager that I wanted to work with art. Today, I think that perhaps without the galleries on Schleifmühlgasse, I would not have made this decision. 

The first ideas for the exhibition came from the works of Renée Green, Julia Scher, and Christian Philipp Müller. While Renée Green and Christian Philipp Müller exhibited in 1993 at the gallery Metropol, which was then run by Georg Kargl and Christian Meyer, Julia Scher's exhibition took place in 2000 under the current name and address of the gallery. The aesthetic forms, through which this history is revisited in the show, are not led by ideas around the archive or the aim of deploying an expertise on the time and frame within which each of the exhibitions was made. Comizi d’Amore presents, however, a very small and delicate selection of artworks, that cites the contexts of these past exhibitions, placing them within and in relation to the present framework of the exhibition and current artistic discourses, allowing for poetic encounters with works by Sharon Hayes, Marina Xenofontos, and Bruno Zhu. 

To me, all of the artists are sharing an interest in surfacing and interrogating the power of institutions that are steering our private and public lives. The inspiration for the title came from the video work Ricerche:one (2019) by Sharon Hayes which belongs to a  five-part series that steps off Pier Paolo Pasolini’s documentary film Comizi d’Amore (1964)  in which he travels Italy and interviews people in public places about sex, marriage, and gender roles. 

During his lectures at the Collège de France Roland Barthes shared with students an anecdote: Once, after buying sixteen various bottles of Sennelier inks, he accidentally spilled one of them. It was a bottle of Neutral ink that broke. The punch line of this story was his disappointment with the Neutral colour when he recognized that »the unclassifiable is classified«. Reading his collected lectures, which served as the impulse for the curated by exhibitions, compels one to adopt a strategy of »nuanced tact« to interpret cultural codes and production. According to such a method, artworks are classified into four pairings—Imprints, Perceptivities, Hyperreality, Reciprocity—to emphasize the relations between the different practices of the participating artists. The exhibition is a distant echo of Barthes’s obsession with (writing) materials, and his sensitivity to colour. »We are afraid to sign our messages with it«, he says, »that is why we write black; we only allow ourselves well-ordered, flatly emblematic exceptions: blue for distinction, red for correction.«

Imprints

Resting Shapes (2016), a series of drawings by Alicja Bielawska, and the sculpture Equating Experience (2022) by Gizela Mickiewicz derive from similar notations of the body. Both artists carefully observed choreographic movements, or in this case, stillness intentionally performed on stage (Bielawska) and unconscious everyday behaviour (Mickiewicz). Modelling Shapes (2016), another of Bielawska’s drawing series, emerged as a byproduct of her collaboration with the Lithuanian dancer Kristina Aglaja Skaldina. During the performance, Skalinda investigated the choreographic potential of soft sculptures by folding, stretching, and crushing a fleshy piece of cloth with her body. The imprint of human presence is also investigated by Gizela Mickiewicz who combines deeply personal experiences with basic »universal« emotions into one shape. She also examines daily habits and routines (e.g. Future of Decreasing Differences, 2020). Both artists look at the body’s relationship to its environment while avoiding its direct representation. 

Perceptivities

A shared feature of the work of Thilo Jenssen and Agnieszka Grodzińska is their use of industrial paints and resins, discovered for the arts in the 1960s. These materials are not only useful for achieving the intended effect, they are also of value to art history. Another similarity is how they build their installations of found materials—Grodzińska repurposes abandoned objects, while Jenssen works with the intangible, such as songs, lyrics and philosophical references. Both choose materials that allow for the construction of an artwork of many layers, physical as well as interpretative. Jenssen partially uncovers the surfaces under coats of industrial paint, and is open to being guided by the material and to make mistakes. Agnieszka Grodzińska pours a resin solution on protective gloves and on a protective glass divider to preserve the narrative potential of found objects by creating monuments of social distancing. Their works also reflect an interest in perception—Jenssen admits to being influenced by the Light and Space movement, while Grodzińska has conducted her own research into the psychology of vision. 

Hyperreality

A sci-fi lover as a teenager, Agata Ingarden populates her sculptural constructions with bestial shapes and likenesses of (un)natural phenomena. She has used found pieces of sequoia wood and mirrored glass to create a solid sculpture of an ephemeral event. The lightning of the title represents a loaded cultural and historical symbol, but for Ingarden the piece connects rather with inner thoughts and feelings. Moreover, the artist has shaped a flash of light as a simplified dragonfly, an insect associated with rebirth or transition. Ingarden often seeks inspiration in architecture, stages her vacation house, or repurposes garden furniture. Her sculptures play with what feels familiar and eerie at the same time. The artworks of an evolving series by Alona Rodeh exist in multiple versions with different endings. CITY DUMMIES, as she calls her body of work created with gaming engines, is reminiscent of vacant movie sets at night, haunted by the animistic presence of service devices. Within the generated cityscape, Rodeh registers barely the noticeable traces of offscreen human activity, such as smoldering cigarette butts (Bollard as Ashtray, 2022/23). The blocks of colour from the rear lights of a Mercedes-Benz van prepared for an undetermined task (Gearing Up, 2022/23) have a strong painterly quality, although the work is primarily cinematic in its set-up.

Reciprocity

Kuba Stępień is focused as much on the process as he is on the effect. He meticulously plans and determines the set of what he calls a »performative reinterpretation of events«. Collaborative performances are the basis for his single- or multi-channel film works. The piece titled All the Stories I Have Ever Told You Were Fiction (2023) is a result of improvised actions undertaken by five participants. Through montage, Stępień draws from historical examples of performing for the camera, especially the practices of artists associated with the Łódź Film School, such as the avant-garde filmmaker Józef Robakowski. Making his film in 2023, he focuses on different qualities of image and body-camera relations—while Robakowski executes his self-therapeutic reenactments alone, Stępień, dressed in tactile costumes, joins playful collective actions. Tangibility is also an important quality of the paintings by Ania Bąk. In her works she combines light transparent tulle with heavy linen canvas, layers of paint, and found materials e.g. press clippings, zircon gemstones or zippers, to give form to emotional states and observed relations. Bąk’s intimate yet multisensory canvases are generated through reconstruction and gestural painting. Her process resembles the modern painterly experiments of Joan Mitchell (with masses of pulsing and dynamic colour) and the sensory collages of the neo-avant-garde artist Teresa Tyszkiewicz (who stitches »canvas« fragments).

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Während seiner Vorlesungen erzählte Roland Barthes seinen Studentinnen und Studenten am Collège de France eine Anekdote: Nachdem er 16 verschiedene Flaschen Sennelier-Tuschen gekauft hatte, verschüttete er zufällig eine davon. Es war eine Flasche mit Tusche eines neutralen Farbtons, die zerbrach. Die Pointe dieser Geschichte bestand in seiner Enttäuschung über die neutrale Farbe, da er erkannte, dass »das Nicht-Klassifizierbare klassifiziert wurde«. Die Lektüre seiner gesammelten Vorträge, die als Anregung für die curated by-Ausstellungen dienten, zwingt einen dazu, eine Strategie des »nuancierten Takts« bei der Interpretation kultureller Codes und kulturellen Schaffens anzuwenden. Nach einer solchen Methode werden Kunstwerke in vier Gruppen unterteilt – Spuren, Wahrnehmungsformen, Hyperrealität, Wechselwirkung –, um die Zusammenhänge zwischen den verschiedenen Praktiken der teilnehmenden Künstlerinnen und Künstler hervorzuheben. Die Ausstellung ist ein entferntes Echo auf Barthes’ Besessenheit von (Schreib-)Materialien und seiner Sensibilität für Farben. »Wir scheuen uns davor, unsere Nachrichten damit zu unterzeichnen«, sagt er, »deshalb schreiben wir in Schwarz; wir erlauben uns nur wohlgeordnete, geradezu symbolische Ausnahmen: Blau zur Unterscheidung, Rot zur Korrektur.«

Spuren

Resting Shapes (2016), eine Reihe von Zeichnungen von Alicja Bielawska, und die Skulptur Equating Experience (2022) von Gizela Mickiewicz leiten sich von ähnlichen Darstellungsarten des Körpers ab. Beide Künstlerinnen beobachteten aufmerksam choreografische Bewegungen, oder in diesem Fall die bewusst auf der Bühne vollzogene Stille (Bielawska) sowie unbewusstes Alltagsverhalten (Mickiewicz). Modeling Shapes (2016), eine andere Zeichnungsfolge von Bielawska, entstand als ein Nebenprodukt ihrer Zusammenarbeit mit der litauischen Tänzerin Kristina Aglaja Skaldina. Während ihrer Performance untersuchte Skaldina das choreografische Potenzial weicher Skulpturen, indem sie ein fleischartiges Stück Stoff mit ihrem Körper faltete, dehnte und zerdrückte. Die Spur menschlicher Präsenz wird auch von Gizela Mickiewicz erforscht, die zutiefst persönliche Erfahrungen mit einfachen »universalen« Gefühlen zu einer Form kombiniert. Sie untersucht auch tägliche Gewohnheiten und Routinen (siehe zum Beispiel Future of Decreasing Differences, 2020). Beide Künstlerinnen betrachten die Beziehung des Körpers zu seiner Umwelt und vermeiden dabei dessen direkte Darstellung.

Wahrnehmungen

Ein gemeinsames Merkmal der Arbeiten von Thilo Jenssen und Agnieszka Grodzińska ist ihre Verwendung von Industriefarben und Harzen, die man in den 1960er Jahren für die Kunst entdeckt hatte. Diese Materialien sind nicht nur hilfreich beim Erzielen der beabsichtigten Wirkung, sondern sind auch kunsthistorisch wertvoll. Eine weitere Gemeinsamkeit besteht darin, dass sie ihre Installationen aus Fundstücken konstruieren – Grodzińska funktioniert nicht mehr genutzte, herrenlose Objekte um, während Jenssen mit Immateriellem wie Liedern, Lyrik und philosophischen Referenzen arbeitet. Beide wählen Materialien, die den Aufbau eines Kunstwerks aus vielen physischen wie auch interpretativen Ebenen ermöglichen. Jenssen legt teilweise die Oberflächen unter Industrielackschichten frei und ist offen dafür, sich vom Material leiten zu lassen und Fehler zu machen. Agnieszka Grodzińska gießt eine Harzlösung über Schutzhandschuhe und eine schützende Glastrennwand, um das narrative Potenzial von Fundstücken zu bewahren, indem sie Denkmäler räumlich-sozialer Distanzierung schafft. Ihre Arbeiten spiegeln auch ein Interesse an Wahrnehmung wider – Jenssen gibt zu, von der Light and Space-Bewegung beeinflusst zu sein, während Grodzińska ihre eigene Forschung zur Psychologie des Sehens durchgeführt hat.

Hyperrealität

Agata Ingarden, die als Teenager eine Science-Fiction-Liebhaberin war, bevölkert ihre skulpturalen Konstruktionen mit brutalen animalischen Formen und Abbildern (un)natürlicher Phänomene. Sie hat Fundstücke aus Mammutbaumholz und verspiegeltem Glas verwendet, um eine massive Skulptur eines ephemeren Ereignisses zu schaffen. Das Blitzen des Titels ist ein kulturell und historisch aufgeladenes Symbol, doch für Ingarden steht das Stück eher mit inneren Gedanken und Gefühlen in Zusammenhang. Außerdem hat die Künstlerin einen Lichtblitz als vereinfachte Libelle geformt, ein Insekt, das mit Wiedergeburt oder Wandel assoziiert wird. Ingarden sucht häufig Inspiration in der Architektur, setzt ihr Ferienhaus in Szene oder funktioniert Gartenmöbel um. Ihre Skulpturen spielen mit dem, was sich vertraut und furchterregend zugleich anfühlt. Die Kunstwerke einer sich kontinuierlich entwickelnden Serie von Alona Rodeh existieren in mehreren Versionen mit unterschiedlichen Enden. CITY DUMMIES, wie sie ihre mit Gaming Engines hergestellte Werkgruppe bezeichnet, erinnert an leere nächtliche Filmsets, die von der animistischen Präsenz von Servicegeräten heimgesucht werden. Innerhalb der generierten Stadtlandschaft registriert Rodeh kaum wahrnehmbare Spuren menschlicher Aktivität außerhalb des Bildschirms wie etwa glimmende Zigarettenstummel (Bollard as Ashtray, 2022/23). Die Farbblöcke der Rücklichter eines Mercedes Benz-Transporters, der sich für eine unbestimmte Aufgabe bereithält (Gearing Up, 2022/23), haben eine starke malerische Qualität, obwohl das Werk in seinem Aufbau vor allem filmischen Charakter hat.

Wechselwirkung

Kuba Stępień konzentriert sich ebenso auf den Prozess wie auch auf die Wirkung. Er plant und legt akribisch die Setzung dessen fest, was er als eine »performative Neuinterpretation von Ereignissen« bezeichnet. Kollaborative Performances sind die Grundlage für seine ein- oder mehrkanaligen Filmarbeiten. Das Stück mit dem Titel All the Stories I Have Ever Told You Were Fiction (2023) ist das Ergebnis improvisierter Aktionen von fünf Teilnehmern. Mittels Montage greift Stępień auf historische Beispiele für Aufführungen vor der Kamera zurück, insbesondere auf Praktiken von Künstlern, die in Verbindung mit der Staatlichen Hochschule für Film, Fernsehen und Theater Łódź stehen, wie etwa der Avantgardefilmemacher Józef Robakowski. Bei der Entstehung seines Film im Jahr 2023 konzentriert er sich auf unterschiedliche Bildqualitäten und Körper-Kamera-Beziehungen – während Robakowski seine selbsttherapeutischen Reenactments allein ausführt, beteiligt sich Stępień, in taktile Kostüme gekleidet, an spielerischen kollektiven Aktionen. Taktilität ist auch bei Ania Bąks Gemälden eine wichtige Eigenschaft. In ihren Bildern kombiniert sie leichten, transparenten Tüll mit schwerer Leinwand, Farbschichten und objets trouvés wie Zeitungsausschnitten, Edelsteinen und Reißverschlüssen, um emotionalen Zuständen und beobachteten Beziehungen eine Form zu verleihen. Bąks intime und dennoch multisensorische Leinwandarbeiten entstehen durch Rekonstruktion und gestische Malerei. Ihr künstlerisches Verfahren ähnelt den modernen malerischen Experimenten von Joan Mitchell (mit Massen pulsierender und dynamischer Farben) und den sensorischen Collagen der Neoavantgardekünstlerin Teresa Tyszkiewicz (die »Leinwand«-Fragmente zusammenfügt).

Übersetzung: Eva Dewes

Krinzinger Schottenfeld decided to develop an exhibition for the annual curated by festival, which underlines a deep research on the artists and their practice in the Middle East. This is justified by the 15-year-long strong presence of the Galerie Krinzinger not only in the yearly Art Dubai Fair, but also by the gallery's continuous visits of the MENA-Region and contact with the local artists, who then successfully joined the gallery program. Gallery Krinzinger invited curator Verena Formanek, as she has knowledge and expertise in these regards and has an extensive experience in working in Abu Dhabi and the rest of the Middle East.

This exhibition presents artists from the Arabian Peninsula whose work focuses on the topic of orientation, camouflage, and identity. The objectives of mounting this exhibition in the Gallery Krinzinger Schottenfeld, Vienna, are two-fold: showcasing the context of what constitutes contemporary art history in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well as for the United Arab Emirates, Reem Fadda mentioned once:” …to establish a framework for understanding the links between the artistic practices of the past generations of contemporary artists in the United Arab Emirates and balance them with the current artistic themes relevant for the Gulf region.”

Secondly, discussing first the exhibition concept regarding the impulse essay “The Neutral” with a curator, born in the Emirates and living between two worlds (as most of her generation in the gulf), France and the United Arab Emirates: Alia Zaal. She connects her work with the tradition in the UAE, represented by her father, an artist, and explains: “My work has been inspired by my father’s weak eyesight as a result of which he was forced to approach art differently, paying a lot of attention to detail”. During her residency in France she responded to Impressionism, studying the natural landscapes of Vétheuil, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, both in their natural and artificial ecosystems, finding connections between her own UAE landscape and the impressionist one.

We decided to showcase the following artists with artworks encompassing the reflection about how to find your way, your directions in a theme of Neutrality. The theme “The Neutral” raises questions regarding passivity vs. activity and how you should find your way in this complexity of questions? Therefore, the artists in this exhibition are searching for their ways.

For continuing and finding his way the artist Mohamed Kazem is represented with his exceptional artwork “Direction (Steps), 2011-2013” and in “Photographs with a Flag, 1997”, which documents his famous performance. In “Collecting Light, 2021” not only the visual appearance is to be seen in his scratching papers but also the sound of the scissors is sculpted on the surface of the paper. While creating the scratches in/on the white paper surface, the artwork can be seen as a two-dimensional work: sculpture, drawing and sound.

Interdisciplinary Emirati artist Layla Juma utilises geometric shapes, in this case circular and elliptical designs, to convey ideas of form and sequence in striking, rhythmic works of art. Her repetitive use of circles and lines evokes abstract contemporary images of (social) codes representing different aspects within a society.

Themes that are raised in Juma’s work are reminiscent of the artist Hassan Sharif’s (+2016) interest in combining drawing, performance, movement and construction in his work, as well as Kazem’s examination of natural processes and social identity. She scrutinises everyday lines and shapes, often dissecting them into pieces and re-assembling them.

The collective work of this generation, which is more or less the age of the UAE itself, gives the place depth and imagination, and more trenchantly, a past and a future, both of which are usually absent from the standard-issue stories on art in the Gulf. Nothing exemplifies this better than the work of Lamya Gargash: her “Presence” series, which was exhibited a year ago in the labyrinthine Bastakiya district, is a catalogue of derelict domestic spaces in Sharjah, Dubai and Ajman, each image capturing a room either abandoned or soon to be so. Lamya Gargash searches for the traces of her history, her parents’ life, and former culture of her country.

Galerie Krobath is pleased to present ZONE, Daniel Boccato’s (b. 1991, Campinas, Brazil; lives and works in New York) solo exhibition at the gallery. Structured around a selection of sculptures from a number of ongoing series as well as new works conceived specifically for the gallery space, the show might be seen as a kind of bridge within the artist’s practice. Imagined and designed to be experienced like “a borderline walk, on the edge of language, on the edge of color,” as Roland Barthes affirmed in his 1978 lecture referring to the idea of the Neutral, the project draws our attention to the concepts of transition and marginality, the soft, the colorless and their opposite, the double as well as the unseen, the void, the spaces in-between, and the nooks and crannies—all aspects that inform Boccato’s practice, among others, from a methodological, processual, and formal approach.

Unfolding on the basis of a rhythmic composition that evokes the ebb and flow of bodies and their contours—sometimes more pronounced, sometimes less so—of signs and their evocative capacity as bearers of a formal alphabet, ZONE traces a path in which shapes, silhouettes and objects chase each other in a vocabulary of visual echoes that is both as postural and affective as it is animated by mundane suggestions and unexpected glimmers. The exhibition revolves around the dialogue between works in which underlying potential structures emerge in a state of suspension, evoking vanishing memories in a constant tension and potential interaction of outlines, icons, colors, and their respective shifts in the space.

A wall painted in glossy black partially obstructs the entrance and at the same time opens up a path, a walk through the gallery. Crossing the threshold, the green LED light of a cross mounted on the opposite side evokes and accentuates the relationship between inside and outside, recalling a sign we usually encounter on the street. Entitled “They have come a long way, those replicators.” (2023), this work bears the traces of a codified, universal and neutral mark—such as that of the pharmacies, but here placed at eye level—that punctuates certain memories through the use of symbols for others to follow. Hanging on the wall in the same room, a seemingly silent, red and wrinkled profile in epoxy resin, fiberglass, and polyurethane from the faceworks series (khafface, 2019) looks like a meme, a stretched, deformed and anthropomorphized potential replica of the nearby cross. Its appearance—at once heavy, like a rock, or light, like a ghost—shyly reveals open arms and legs, and a face with a certain expression of bliss. Forged amid abstraction and figuration, khafface captures provisional states of animism, “quietly conspiring to come alive”[1], as if endowed with a soul. These sculptures are somehow attuned to a human condition found within an ordinary architectural, urban and natural landscape, floating and constantly regrouping in a language of shifting forms. A palpable tension holds together their emotional structure and steers the gaze—as in the details of street life—to another work that interacts and toys with the space. “It was precisely because it was no longer completely true that it could be clearly seen.” (2023) is made up of laser prints on paper, wheat-pasted onto the wall. Like a poster on the façade of a corner building, this watchful and androgynous giant face directly confronts the viewer, acting as a deity or supernatural being digitally treated by the artist in its codified image. After mirroring half and discarding the other half of the figure to create a perfect symmetry, Boccato distorts the tonal values of the original image by rendering the face in grayscale in Photoshop. These manipulations didn’t alter the Vogue logo and the visual identity of the cover: both are still recognizable in their long-established iconicity and standardized idea of beauty typical of glossy magazines.

To be found in the second room of the gallery, “Once you’ve had your life burn down, it takes time to be a phoenix.” (2023) is a wall relief whose shape comes from the flag of the artist’s birth city, a phoenix rising from the fire. It’s a rebirth. Apparently ephemeral, precarious and utterly neutral in its colorless, like a cloud in a foggy sky, this work counterbalances the shiny impermeability of khafface, swirling somewhere along a non-binary line, between neutrality and evanescence. A subtle, yet intentional sense of curiosity and the transitory permeates the other work on display as something that acts as captured instances in a perpetually evolving present. “… sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion.” (2023) blurs the lines of this compositional landscape into a fleeting, faint, almost imperceptible beam of green light shining out of a doorway, along with a cloud of mist and sound, echoing the basement of a techno club at the end of the exhibition space.

Like vulnerable propositions which require a “subject” that is always to be looked at, examined in detail, never really resolved, as it is never really set in the flow, the works on view—as the concept of the Neutral underlines—embody a preliminary stage of incompleteness, a kind of pre-final state where Boccato constantly toys with composition and form, “to animate and be animated by these forms,” as the artist states, in a clear tension between spectral and material existence. The exhibition thus elaborates the Neutral as the desire to somehow remain in that specific instant prior to the crystallization of any concept. As in a constellation of chimes, the show emphasizes this tone through a display that opens up from the individual work, which contains the seed of this floating “neutral,” from a plural and non-unidirectional standpoint, only to embrace the entirety of its breadth, like in the beating of wings.

To various degrees, running through all the works in the exhibition is a sculptural language and a chain of motifs and patterns of decomposition imbued with animism: a notion central to Boccato’s practice and way of dealing with the everyday, an impulse that guides the work in all its qualities—tactile, haptic, and sculptural—floating in the nuances of a ghostly process of repetition and differentiation that stands for action and resistance, as does the Neutral.

Giovanna Manzotti

[1] Zach Fischman, “faceworks” in daniel boccato, faceworks from 2015 to 2018 (Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels: 2018), p. 132.

Our heads hurt. There’s so much news, and too many reactions to it. By now, “information overload” appears less of a revelatory concept than the obvious state of things. We point it out like one points out the weather; we manage its effects with metaphors of diet and addiction. Tuning out is one popular means of self-preservation. If you want to keep your head on straight, it’s best not to look too hard.

This exhibition gathers practices which decline to turn away from the heady task of sensemaking in an overly complex, media-saturated world. Instead, they hold on to the urge to distill from that frothy saturation some grasp of the big picture, the whole. Rejecting the offer to tune out, perhaps against better judgment, they dive deeper in, voracious, until they arrive at some baffling conclusion. I like to call this info-lust: the hoarding and arrangement of signals, no matter how disparate, no matter their bulk. There’s a resemblance to science here, but that’s mostly a pantomime (and why not – wasn’t it reason that landed us here in the first place?). At its core, the tendency instead favors fever and reverie: a controlled chaos, meticulously assembled.

Clearly, we’re in the realm of paranoia, or more precisely, pareidolia: interpretation run off the rails.

Homespun fringe beliefs were once a curious sideshow to the rationalist mainstream consensus of the twentieth century. Those poles have collapsed into more of a tight, brittle knot in the twenty-first. But when the center still held, belief found sympathetic expression in the periphery, among countercultures, dissidents, avant-gardes, and other truth-seekers. But these communities were rarely 100% tuned out, no matter how hermetic. Counterculture needs a culture to counter, and the term ‘fringe’ itself implies a central fabric from which it hangs. From today’s vantage, when alternatives get absorbed before they have even articulated themselves, there’s something quaint, even nostalgic in the clarity of this dialectic. How bounded the mainstream was, even thirty years ago. How nice that the possibility of an outside, an otherwise, was once so evident.

“Homespun” is important. There’s something folksy, egalitarian, and fundamentally uncredentialed about fringe thinking, and that is part of its threat. Fredric Jameson, with some condescension, called the conspiracy theory “a poor person’s cognitive mapping […] it is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system.”[1] For Jameson, conspiracy thinking is the vocation most available to a curious and restless mind deprived of more proper outlets – though he remains vague on what those other outlets might be. One could argue that Jameson’s is a distinction without a difference: poor or rich, credentialed or not, the task of representing the unrepresentable system, of pinning down the absent cause, leads regardless into the same strange space beyond categories, beyond reason, and beyond good taste. The toll of that space will drain you either way. Despite that cost, some still can’t shake the countercultural axiom that “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.” Henry Kissinger put it more bluntly: “even a paranoid can have enemies” – and if anyone could confirm whether paranoids have enemies, it’s him.

Dowsing is the folk practice where a forked stick is used to detect veins of water or rare minerals hidden deep within the earth. It is medieval in tenor, but older than that. Dowsing has been repeatedly debunked, yet the practice still persists, perhaps because it is sometimes still correct: even a broken clock is right twice a day. Similarly, a disreputable paranoiac might still be on to some kernel of truth amidst all the noise. Werner Herzog calls the object of such pursuits “ecstatic truth.” In defining it, he quotes Gide: “I’m modifying facts in such a degree that they resemble truth more than reality.”[2]

It’s messy turf, and no doubt contentious. Increasingly it is potent and, consequently, policed. An inconvenient truth – even if it is more empirical than “ecstatic” – can easily be dismissed for the illegitimacy of its advocates. When Enlightenment scientists tried to eliminate dowsing and other traditional superstitions from the Mining Academies, superstition held on more doggedly than they could have expected. They found that the traditional miners’ pseudoscience was interlaced with generations experiential knowledge among the facts of the land.[3]

One self-authorized expert on modern fringe thinking is included in this exhibition. Donna Kossy is a writer and antiquarian based in Portland, Oregon, who specializes in what she likes to call “Kooks.” From 1988 to 1991 she published a zine by that name, which chronicled case studies from “the outer limits of human belief.” She wrote of cults, UFOlogists, flat-earthers and mad prophets, and along the way she collected their tracts, posters, and various xeroxed testaments. Some of these she re-xeroxed directly into the zine, and some of them are on view here.

Like most people interested in this stuff, Kossy does not believe what her subjects believe. But what’s more remarkable is the way that she approaches belief without irony or scorn. Like a folklorist, she has a fondness for the imagination, the energy of thought, the meticulous craftsmanship of these dense, lonely cosmologies. Beyond amusement, she identifies an epistemic merit to studying the fringe: “By documenting lives and ideas that might otherwise be lost in the onrushing tide of the dominant paradigm, we may be able to examine the process by which an idea comes to marshal its forces. Perhaps we will come to appreciate the subtleties and gradations of human inspiration. In addition, we may be able to overcome an ingrained xenophobia of the mind.”[4] In effect, she is describing the merits of art.

But the QAnon era has given even Kossy pause: in a more recent article, she grapples with the historicity of her own project, and marvels at the new century’s mainstreaming of conspiracy culture.[5] Yesterday’s cranks are today’s pundits. They no longer require a connoisseur to exhume them from their dusty PO Box, no zine to disperse their message. The stakes are a bit different now. Kooks no longer stay in their corners.

– Nick Irvin

[1] Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 1988, p. 356.

[2] Werner Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema,” 1999. First distributed at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 30 April 1999.

[3] Warren Dym, “Scholars and Miners: Dowsing and the Freiberg Mining Academy,” Technology and Culture, Volume 49, Number 4, October 2008.

[4] Donna Kossy, “Introduction,” Kooks, p. 8.

[5] Donna Kossy, “Welcome to the Post-Kook Era.” Broken Pencil, July 28, 2021.

Gallery Meyer Kainer is pleased to announce “PLAY MODE”, an exhibition by Argentinian artist Ad Minoliti, showing a group of pieces selected from different bodies of work. 

Ad Minoliti is well known for an expansive practice that makes use of painting, digital collage, sculpture, murals, installation and participative environments, coming together to articulate a complex critique of our current modes of domination, specifically the binary systems that regulate the human experience. Her work instead seeks to imagine alternative modes of existence concerned with centering empathy and collaboration. 

In its love of bright colors, cheerful abstraction and child-like re-imaginings, Minoliti’s work poses a staunch rejection of everything coded as ideally modern: the primacy of cis-maleness, the hold of compulsive heterosexuality, and the arbitrariness of the rational, the serious and the violent. In opposition, Minoliti’s practice pursues the flexibility and speculation of queerness, softness, humor, cuteness, joy and love.

Their subversion of abstraction with winks of friendly gestures of figuration –doggy and kitty faces, anime eyes and other cutesy critters– wields the intention to disarm its modernist origins and to use it instead as a language, capable of rewiring our strongly-held assumptions towards a certain visuality, what we consider to be part of a feminine realm of care, domesticity, tenderness, cuteness and children. In their detaching of these images from essentialism and infantilization, Minoliti seeks to configure a powerful, potential-filled aesthetics of empathy and collaboration centered primarily on its anti-adultism. 

Faithful to Minoliti’s expansiveness, the exhibition includes a series of murals which serve as complement and backdrop to paintings, drawings and digital compositions. Pieces from the ‘Queer Deco’ series, in which Minoliti digitally intervenes and populates the idealized spaces of modernist living –those images of pseudo-futuristic comfort– with geometrical entities capable of inhabiting the place as well as transform it, taking it beyond its techno-patriarchal so-called efficiency, acting as perfect disorganizers: merely co-existing, floating shapes oblivious to work, productivity or any form of oppression. Another group of pieces comes from the  ‘GSCF’ series, an acronym for geometrical sci-fi cyborg. These pieces are classic Minoliti in their re-imagination of landscape and nature through the use of fluid, frolicky airbrush strokes in somewhat unnatural color combinations, and further rarefied by the appearance of indeterminate yet active beings like bubbles, shapes, pseudo-flowers, shadows and robots, interacting with one-another. The series of drawings titled ‘Geo Sci Fi’ too exists in this realm, and shows many of those eccentric characters in more bio-technical detail. From the same period, the series ‘Cyborg Mom’ makes reference to a series of paintings created by Minoliti in collaboration with their mother, which then led to a quirky series of digital prints which are equal parts voluptuous compositions and unexpected color palettes. The exhibition also includes a couple of Minoliti’s furries, the human-animal mannequins dressed in the artist’s prints that frequently animate the spaces of their art, able to share the moment of contemplation with human spectators, but perhaps not really needing them, their presence as a speculative autopoiesis of art for art with art.

– Gaby Cepeda

The exhibition "Passage to Promise" shows four different artistic positions from southern Africa: Usha Seejarim, Thania Petersens, Joël Andrianomearisoa, and Jared Ginsburg. 

The exhibition borrows its title from a work by Usha Seejarim and creatively references Homi Bhabha's post-colonial concept, The Third Space. In his book “The Location of Culture”, the social theorist argues that cultural identities are neither fixed nor essential, but are always constructed through processes of negotiation and interaction. The Third Space is an “in between” space of cultural hybridity that arises when different cultures come into contact. It is a space of ambiguity, where dominant and marginalized cultures intersect, creating new meanings and identities. A space that challenges and destabilizes established categories, opening up new and transformative possibilities. 

Barthes' The Neutral is also a liberating concept that seeks to challenge prevailing narratives and set meanings. It is about an alternative way of dealing with culture, language and forms of representation. And it propagates openness, ambiguity and different possibilities for interpretation. This game of meanings, of construction and reconstruction is evident in every society, but it can be particularly evident in diasporic communities. The artistic positions in the exhibition play with the variety of meanings and interpretations associated with cultural symbols, traditions and identities within their works and have translated these phenomena into intriguing works of art. 

Artistic expressions from different cultural contexts therefore offer great opportunities to conceive how meanings are constructed and how signs and symbols are subject to different interpretations which touch us in different ways. This exhibition emphasizes the formation of meaning as an ongoing process. However, "Passage to Promise" does not recreate idealized theoretical positions, but offers a platform for the positions and interpretations of the artists involved in this exhibition. 

Usha Seejarim creates installations and works that are both minimalist and sculptural, often dealing with indentured labor and exploitation, functionality and domesticity. With fine conceptual sensitivity, she transforms everyday household objects into particularly aesthetic works of art. With these works, she explores, among other things, the conditions or harsh circumstances of the daily work of the less privileged in her home country South Africa. But it is also about the use and value of tools and the daily rituals of the household. 

Thania Petersen is a multidisciplinary artist. Her discourses are about "identity" in today's South Africa. With photographic "self-portraits", installations and multi-sensory performances, she challenges classifications of apartheid and also their everyday further acceptance of these labels in the post-apartheid era. Among her points of reference are the history of African colonial imperialism, contemporary Western consumer culture, her deeply personal Cap Malay heritage, and the legends and myths of Sufi Islamic ceremonies. 

Joël Andrianomearisoa’s work is always dealing with the idea of duality, between light and darkness, passion and fragility and the space between us, creating Labyrinths of Passion. He explores concepts of time and physicality in a fine, inside-out approach. Activating the latent, emotional power of the material world, he transcends the boundaries of video, fashion, architecture, sculpture, installation and photography. Black plays a prominent role in his textile works, which hover seductively between ephemeral and permanent. These works are partly sculptural, partly left to chance and to the randomness of the material. 

Jared Ginsburg uses art-making to explore alternative modes of knowledge production and transfer. He recognizes art as a tool, a means to test and probe the world, hoping to nurture new strategies for productive engagement. Ginsburg employs a range of media types in his practice, including painting, sculpture, drawing, video and performance. The room is his canvas and plays a significant role as a lab, an instrument and a character in conversation, seeking “indeterminacy or chance operations” in this process. 

"Passage to Promise" is creatively playing with the individual formation of meaning as a sensually-physical process, which is influenced by contexts and shaped by socio-cultural factors. Subtle sensual experiences evoke associations and memories and illustrate how physical our knowledge is - like a "Passage to Promise". 

- Kirstin zu Hohenlohe 

This film cannot be read linear in terms of time nor space.
Pregnancy is an intermediate state,
Intermediate locus.
One person is two persons,
Reclaiming space as a natural notion,
From both humans and nature itself.
No beginning no middle, no end yet to begin again.

Tobias Pils

In addition to the French philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes (1915–1980), who lends the theme of “The Neutral” to this year’s festival Curated by in Vienna, our exhibition strives to remember another great person who is absent: the artist, writer, and most prominent theorist of the “white cube” Brian O’Doherty (1928–2022). We are presenting O’Doherty’s last novel The Crossdresser’s Secret (2014), the title character of which is Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Thimothée d’Éon de Beaumont (1728–1810), a historical transsexual person better known as Chevalier d’Éon. Throughout O’Doherty’s life, he explored the concept of personas in his artistic work and used several alter egos, publishing books and exhibiting under their names. When he made his different personas public in 2011, he stressed that “the adopted names all did something” because they enabled him to “shrug off the cloak of selfhood” and to react to social issues “from another angle of perception.” Bringing together different voices was also decisive for his work as an art critic. For example, in 1967, O’Doherty was the editor of an issue of the Aspen Magazine, which was published in the form of different (printed) media inside a box. The box contained artistic, literary, musical, and scholarly contributions by such figures as George Kubler, Susan Sontag, Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Alain Robbe-Grillet, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Tony Smith, and Marcel Duchamp. O’Doherty also published Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author,” which is about the art of reading, in this issue, one year before it came out in the French original.

In addition to a showcase dedicated to O’Doherty, we are presenting works on canvas by two contemporary women artists: Mia Sanchez and Gritli Faulhaber. Sanchez addresses clothes as an expression of identity in large silkscreens on untreated canvases. She photographs each item of clothing individually, arranging the outfits assembled on the canvases as part of the printing process. Sanchez does not present the clothes of one person; instead, she addresses codes that convey a standardization and a sense of belonging, investigating how these codes are altered by the identical resolution of the images and the monochromatic print. The canvases display neutralized sample collections and cannot be assigned to certain groups, because they are defined by a common style (color, material, cut, use). Sanchez is interested in the figure of the consumer as well as the methods of how individuals can empower themselves in the daily life of existing societal structures. Faulhaber, on the other hand, calls herself an artist who researches painting as a métier and who acts as a painter. She reacts to the primarily male-dominated history of painting with strategies of appropriating pictures by women artists, addressing close relationships, while transforming and reevaluating traditional subjects. We are presenting a new group of Faulhaber’s small portraits based on pictures of women made by women artists. Each of her pictures is clearly contemporary and possibly a self-portrait. She bases her reproductions of the historical works on representations in her digital archive, so as to re-experience, understand, and revive these in a painterly and emotional sense. One quality of her works is that she leaves the picture ground that she sometimes treats with white oil paint visible in parts. These patches remind us of the materiality of painting but can also be an expression of an unfinished, deliberately open form. Although, like Sanchez, Faulhaber addresses questions of belonging, in her case this is in the social and economic context in which she lives and works as an artist.

This exhibition sketches a topography of seeing that promotes a comparative perception of the works and a discussion of artistic suggestions that explore the relationship between aesthetic and quotidian perception, between picture and reality.

          The exhibition The Captive takes as a point of departure and source of inspiration the writings of Forugh Farrokhzad, one of the most important and influential modern Iranian poets. It brings together the works of artists Reza Shafahi and Sadah H Nava, born in Iran almost fifty years apart and developing singular practices of drawing, film, performance and music, and whose works are displayed in the gallery alongside two poems by Farrokhzad, The Captive and Bathing.

          Considered as a pioneering writer and filmmaker, Forugh Farrokhzad was an iconic figure in Iran in the 1960’s as she incarnated the spirit of revolt against patriarchal and cultural norms. She was a modern Iranian voice controversially depicting female desire and provocatively contesting and breaking taboos around sexuality in the male-dominated society she lived in. In this sense, she became the voice of an entire generation undergoing radical social and cultural changes. Tormented by the gap between her ideal self-image as an artist and her culture’s reductive and repressive vision, she deployed the ambivalent image of the mirror, a gendered symbol of vanity as well as a deceptive tool for self-examination. Reinventing classical imagery in modernist forms, her poetry is one of desire, evoking scandalous content at the time such as female pleasure.

          At the age of nineteen, in 1954, she first published a series of incendiary poems as a woman confessing to a sexual awakening in the arms of a man who was not her husband, a deliberate reversal of a thousand years of Persian literature written by men about their lovers, at a time when autobiographical writing by women was nonexistent in Iran. Her first poetry collection, The Captive (1955) spoke openly, and shockingly, of the struggle between artistic freedom and domestic confinement. Later she published The Wall (1956) and Rebellion (1957), exploring themes of universal love, abandonment, exile, and pain. After a trip to Europe in 1958, she started to develop her film and documentary practice. Her last poetry collection, Another Birth (1964) is considered as an ensemble of some of the best structured modern poems in Persian. In 1967, Forugh Farrokhzad was killed in a car accident at the age of thirty-two.

          The exhibition comprises 9 works on paper by Reza Shafahi (b. 1940, lives and works in Tehran), evoking themes of eroticism, fetish, and desire, themes that lay at the core of his practice. In his uncanny and affecting drawings and pastels, Shafahi oscillates between imagery echoing traditional Persian miniature or motifs taken from Persian carpets, and a modern palette of bright colours and dancing shapes evoking Henri Matisse. Some of his drawings express subversive erotic fantasies while others are tinged with surrealism and recall cinematic scenes. As a self-taught artist, Shafahi draws his references from Persian classical poets, such as Omar Khayyam and Hafez, but also Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry of desire; he later illustrated many of her verses. Shafahi and Farrokhzad share a common goal of combining indulgence with the representation of an autobiographical, psychological space and a will to portray humanity truthfully. Abundance and lavishness play a particular role in his aesthetics as his depictions of nature set the backdrop of his narratives through luxurious and enchanted landscape, and illustrate a hidden life of fantasy and transgressive eroticism made of orgies and suggestive scenes. Shafahi’s characters are surrounded by or actually transformed into trees and fruits, symbolizing the incarnation of an inaccessible desire that unfolds in the Garden of Eden.

          While he initially started to draw with pencil and black marker on paper, Reza Shafahi’s palette later developed into a unique mix of pastel and vivid tones, through the use of colour pencils, oil, and acrylic paint, providing each work with a touch of glow and softness that seem to be melting into the surface of his drawings. The themes he explores in his paintings and drawings—womanhood, displacement, and personal identity—continue to resonate profoundly today.

          Sadaf H. Nava is an Iranian-born New York City-based visual artist and composer, whose multidisciplinary interventions encompass sound, film, painting, performance and text. Her conflicting visuals, sonics and performative tactics oscillate between opacity and storytelling, often layered with cinematic and literary iterations. Her original compositions present a mix of intuitive and contradictory materials inspired by contemporary global sound archaeologies, always flirting with noise, and her visual works follow a similar improvisational process, with a focus on self-portraiture, fragmented narratives and reconstructed memory. Working with disparate sources ranging from opera, traditional Iranian painterly techniques, punk and noise, she fuses oppositional sources.

          For the exhibition, Sadaf H Nava has produced a series of eight ink on paper works, which architectural compositions are based on the arches of the infamous Siosehpol Bridge in Isfahan, where the artist was born. Each drawing is named after a poem by Forugh Farrokhzad (Sin, The Wind Up Doll among others) and comprises visual elements from those specific poems, such as windows, curtains, roses or cherries. In her video entitled Nostalgia for Holis, she pays homage to American experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton's seminal 1971 experimental video work, titled "Nostalgia" —a witty, hypnotic account of his experiences as a photographer in New York City in the early 1960s. Nava’s video unravels the action of burning tourist photographs taken by the artist herself as an attempt to overcome false memory, a romantic manifestation of anti-nostalgia. These images seem to echo the profound melancholy that infuses all of Farrokhzad’s poems, while the fire evokes an important part of Persian and Zoroastrian culture. The soundtrack of the film is based on an improvised score bringing together different violon and electronic noise compositions tailored to the video.

The exhibition will be enhanced by a live performance by Sadaf H Nava, based on the poem Another Birth, and taking place in the gallery space on the opening night.

“Strange, though, that we can never catch it in the act,” writes Christa Wolf in Ein Tag im Jahr (One Day a Year), on attempts to capture life. She continues: “It escapes the watching eye and the diligently noting hand, and in the end—at the end of a chapter of one’s life, too—has assembled itself behind our backs according to our unspoken needs: More substantial, more significant, more exciting, more meaningful, heavier with stories.” [1] The exhibition Taking Notes takes up precisely this awareness-desiring, introspective, reconstructive moment; a moment that seeks to materialize what has been lived and felt, to translate it into multiple perspectives and/or media.

    The act of note-taking manifests as an attentive way of perceiving (unknowingly) established routines in everyday actions and thought, a form of listening, zooming in and out. Interwoven with a certain logic of recording, it adopts a diaristic, explorative, and partly self-contemplative mode, one that takes the everyday world, the supposedly banal, as its starting point, grasping it as material and shaping and altering and transferring and processing it further. Pressing questions about the reproduction and representability of everyday lived experience, its actual transferability and translatability, are already inherent within this process, given the fallibility and manipulability of the perceiving and remembering self. How can we get hold of a world that eludes mere observation? 

In a state of simultaneity, occupying the neither-nor, the presented works probe supposedly opposing realms, their fraying visible: Note-taking—be it in the form of photography, sculpture, drawing or actual diary writing—moves between the subjectively experienced and the objectively categorized, the supposedly private somewhere within the sphere of the public. It oscillates between reflective and fictionalizing representation, and thus between reassurance and alienation. It juxtaposes the idea of a coherent ego that promises authenticity and truth, alongside their simultaneous destruction. At the same time, it could be described as a search for individual recollection within collective memory. Demonstrably, the narration of one single, individually-experienced moment may then also serve as a testament, a critical analysis; a document of history. Preserving the sentiment of the times, it can be read as symptomatic of existing societal processes and embedded in already determined cultural and political narratives.

[1] Wolf, C. (2007). One Day a Year: 1960–2000. Translated by Lowell A. Bangerter. New York City: Europa Editions, p. 13.: Moyra Davey, Sofia Defino Leiby, Sarah Lehnerer, Sophie Thun, Marina Xenofonto

When Francis Picabia described the machine as a 'daughter born without a mother' he was hoping to propose an original variation on the modernist theme of the correspondence between humans and machines. However, his instinctive superimposition of the technological device on the female body betrayed the generalised fear towards the rising of technological innovation on one hand, and that of sexual freedom on the other – a cross-attack perpetrated against traditional visions of masculinity in the ‘20s. The ‘motherless daughter’ was a symbol of the widespread alarm for the replacement of men by technology, personified in the figure of the wicked woman, insubordinate and lascivious, who was challenging gender norms and therefore the status quo.

The exhibition Motherless Daughters appropriates this injurious definition to claim new stories for it. Using ‘the neutral’ as a key to open a third way between known categories, the project turns the contradictory nature of the term into a burning space for the negotiation of new meanings. The machine born without a mother will be the cinema, as in the technologies and politics embedded in the filmic device. The status of motherless daughters will be a deliberate choice and not a given: losing the mother while demanding the condition of daughters will allow us to challenge the authority of bloodlines, while plotting together forthcoming genealogies. Turning the gallery space into a para-cinematic installation, Motherless Daughters brings together artists who exercise the political potential of film to forge relationships across vast distances and temporalities. Rising voices from the past, and collecting prayers for the future, the works on view shake our understanding of alliance, friendship, and death, invoking a coven of transhistorical sisterhoods.

The screening programme begins with Undead Voices (2019-21) by Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo, that takes its stances from the amateur militant film Donne Emergete!, shot in 1975 by Isabella Bruno. Being ‘damaged beyond repair’ according to archival standards, the film was lost, together with the memory of the contestation movements it documented. Undead Voices incorporates the original movie by Bruno, reanimating the voices of the feminist communities it portrayed. Past and present feminist practices resonate together in the ghostly sequences we see, hidden in the interstices between what is considered a film and what is not, claiming a space between what is alive and what is dead.

I hope I'm Loud when I'm Dead (2018) was developed by Beatrice Gibson together with poets CAConrad and Eileen Myles. Their warm voices guide us through a narration that intertwines footage of global politics in times of civil unrest with private images from the author’s family life. Poems and reflections constellate the film, where “I hope I’m loud when I’m dead” feels as much a wish as a threat; a firm invocation of strength when grief, destruction, and fear seem impossible to bear. Crossing through chaos with empathy and sharpness, the film reveals itself as a promise for the future and a testimony for a daughter: “I wanted to put all these voices in a frame for you, so that one day, if needed, you could use them to unwrite whatever you are told you are supposed to be”.

Pauline Curnier Jardin’s Qu’un sang impur (2019) re-stages the film Un chant d’amour (1950) by Jean Genet, replacing the original homoerotic love story between two inmates in a prison with an untamed celebration of the erotic power of post-menopausal women. Questioning traditional representations of elderness, the group of women is dangerous and fierce, strong in their resolution to live in a way that was not calculated nor approved by society. Jubilantly uncanny, the gang is composed of killers and outlaws, who escaped the imposition of being objects of desire and can therefore freely feast on their ‘impure blood’.

The three movies are interspaced by Harun Farocki’s short films Bedtime stories. Commissioned in 1976-77 by a German TV channel for kids, the video series features Farocki’s daughters as actresses. The two girls describe to each other huge infrastructures and devices such as railways, ships and bridges as if they were majestic, almost magical machines. Following their dreamlike game, footage of these objects appear on the screen, while they fall asleep together in their twin bed.

Outside the cinema, the exhibition space is transformed into an urban-looking landscape, inhabited by a street lamp, a barricade, and a waste bin. Evoking the streets of Paris, the room acts as an intermezzo between the Wien street outside the gallery and the dark room of the cinema. The sculptures are part of Peaux de dame by Curnier Jardin, a series of artificial leathers shaped as carnal envelopes of crushed women. The bizarre objects are skin-like leftovers of bodies emptied out of their contents, that now fill the street with their ghostly presence. Nearby, a TV monitor screens images from the Montparnasse cemetery, revealing a tombstone covered in wreaths of flowers, ribbons and letters. It is Simone De Beauvoire’s grave, as Delphine Seyrig recounts it in her film Pour Mémoire (1987), which documents the first anniversary of the philosopher’s death. The camera closely follows the garlands of flowers, while voice-overs read the countless messages that were left on the gravestone to remember her legacy.

Pour Mémoire introduces us to the condition of mourning, a hybrid space confusing the boundaries between life and death. As Barthes declared when he first started drafting his lessons on ‘the neutral’ in 1977, “to get myself vividly interested in what is contem­poraneous to me, I might need the detour through death”. He was referring to the so-called “library of dead authors'' he was reading, but also to the grieving of his own mother, who had just passed away. “To mourn is to be alive” he wrote, while dividing his time between the lessons and his Journal de deuil, a mourning diary where he grappled with his loss. Motherless Daughters embraces Barthes’ desire to “make the dead think in oneself”, mourning being a time to evoke those who are not alive anymore, making their voices heard again through our throats.

Before leaving the gallery, the last work of the show consists of a series of holy cards by artist and writer Giulia Crispiani. Bearing prayers, lamentations, or chants, the texts summon past and future generations of motherless daughters. Just as the professional mourners, recruited to cry louder at other people’s funerals, Crispiani’s poems invoke, embody and magnify our voices, disseminating them outside the building, calling out for sisterhoods that have yet to be.

The two artists introduced here for the festival at Galerie Hubert Winter this September—Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili and Carrie Yamaoka—use painting-adjacent processes towards photographic ends … or is it a photographic protocol conjuring painterly results? Borderline indeed (as Maximilian Geymüller states in his “Curated by …” proposal). Carrie Yamaoka’s astute observation of the pairing with Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili was that it is “photography-proximate.” Forging (but not forcing) a dialogue between two artists who explore pictorial phenomenology through photography, painting, sculpture and installation invites a meaningful and complex exchange, much like the active strategies Yamaoka and Alexi-Meskhishvili apply—printing, peeling, playing—with tone (mass and half), drone (reverb and cerebral) and hefty with impulsive, nimble, formal attitude. Mass Tone.

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili draws on the world around her, at the studio, at home, on the road, splitting her time between Berlin and Tbilisi. Images are captured, conveyed and layered using both analogue and digital devices, generating uncropped C-types, pigment prints and transparent cotton voile (“veils” to use the artist’s term) from a 4 x 5 negative. Recycled motifs appear throughout—friends, family, patterns, streetscapes—Alexi-Meskhishvili, who identifies as a photographer, manages a stagecraft that presents as an environmental choreography.  

Carrie Yamaoka, presses her “negative”—a transparent pressure sensitive material—directly onto the wall; at times she pours her “film” (resin with dry pigment) into a mold; often Yamaoka layers unexpected, industrial materials (vinyl, mylar, bubble wrap) to achieve reflective, absorbing, mysterious overlays that transmit a sense of the duration of a process undertaken luring a viewer into prolonged contact. It is not subterfuge, per se, it is temporal photomechanical reproduction in its rawest form. Yamaoka’s surfaces appear to “crawl” (in her words), to illuminate, to chorus, with space and one another.

Samuel Beckett wrote “to restore silence is the role of objects.” What is the matter that can bring peace back? Silence is not the same as quiet, it is not passive. Is it losing oneself in a practice that is systematic and intuitive at the same time? Is it when we drop reception, when an afterimage comes into focus, or sees itself degenerating into a patina; the impression of a breath on emulsion, or thumb print into setting gel? The exhibition at Galerie Hubert Winter offers an opportunity to explore such roles, of objects, materials, silence/noise, of borderline walks, of neutrality, of each other.

Allyson Spellacy, August 2023

For this year’s curated_by festival, WONNERTH DEJACO presents the first European solo exhibition to focus on the work of American feminist artist, satirist and political activist Anita Steckel as well as a series of readings by French writer Constance Debré and British artist, writer and political dominatrix Reba Maybury. Curated by writer and curator Juliette Desorgues, this interdisciplinary programme places three transgenerational figures in dialogue to reflect on questions of power, gender and desire. 

A key figure of the 1950s and 60s New York downtown scene, Anita Steckel developed an oeuvre consisting of photographic, collage- and drawing-based work that blossomed during the context of the Western women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. Constance Debré and Reba Maybury will perform readings of new and recent texts within the context of Steckel’s exhibition for the opening weekend. 

Echoing the feminist literary and artistic historical context of the city of Vienna, from Elfriede Jelinek to Valie EXPORT, each of these three voices confronts the systemic mechanisms of power with humorous, raw and biting force by placing the self as a central trope throughout their work. 


Acknowledgements

With heartfelt thanks to the artists and galleries: Constance Debré, Hannah Hoffmann Gallery Los Angeles, The Estate of Anita Steckel, Reba Maybury, Ortuzar Projects New York; and to the following individuals for their invaluable support: Hugo Bausch Belbachir, Julie Boukobza, Steven Cairns, Alban Diaz, Cécile B. Evans, Paul-Alexandre Islas, Ursula Mayer, Rachel Middleman, Kenta Murakami, Kari Rittenbach and Nicholas Tammens. 
Artist Biographies
Constance Debré is a French writer living in Paris. She is the author of several novels: Playboy, Love Me Tender, Nom and Offenses. Love Me Tender was recently published by Semiotext(e) in English. Her books have also been translated into Italian, German, Danish and Swedish.

Reba Maybury is an artist, writer and political dominatrix sometimes working under the name Mistress Rebecca. She lives and works in Jutland, Denmark and London, UK. Her work explores the tension between her perceived strength as an object of transactional fantasy and how, through the reality of sex work and gender, she attempts to turn this power into something tangible. She is the author of Dining with Humpty Dumpty (Wet Satin Press, 2017) and Faster than an erection (MACRO, 2021).

Anita Steckel (1930-2012) studied at Cooper Union and Alfred University, as well as the Art Students League of New York, where she taught from 1984 until her death. From the early 1970s, she lived at Westbeth Artists’ Housing in the West Village. She was recently the subject of solo exhibitions at the Stanford Art Gallery, Stanford (2022), curated by art historians Rachel Middleman and Richard Meyer, and at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles (2021). Previous exhibitions include Legal Gender: The Irreverent Art of Anita Steckel, Jacki Headley Art Gallery, California State University, Chico and Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento (2018); Anita of New York, The Suzanne Geiss Company, New York (2013); Anita Steckel and Friends, Westbeth Gallery, New York (2012); and Mom Art: 1963–1965, Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York (2008). Her work featured in the recent institutional exhibitions Maskulinitäten, Bonner Kunstverein, Germany (2019); Cock, Paper, Scissors, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles (2016); Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, Dallas Contemporary (2016); and Identity Crisis: Authenticity, Attribution and Appropriation, The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY (2011). She was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2005), a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1983), and a MacDowell Fellowship (1966). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania; Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Kansas; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; and Verbund Collection, Vienna, among others.

Last year I started living in an isolated house somewhere in rural Greece. My idea at the beginning was to escape from a complicated urban activity that was entwined with a hyper-social artist's life. Then one could think I wanted to escape as much as possible the long-lasting effects of economic and environmental systems of late neoliberalism which is also true but deeper, it was more of a reaction to the existing facts of human existence and exploration for its new potentials. In this remote setting I longed to be working without distractions, but also to walk, read, write, or just do nothing and listen to the splendid "sound" of silence. In my new life’s quest for silence and purification, I had indeed fewer thoughts competing for my attention. I know it is impossible to be truly and authentically ‘off the grid’ nowadays. It is impossible to escape the attention economy as it is strongly rooted in capitalism and I am quoting writer Jenny Oddell who says "especially technologies that encourage a capitalist perception of time, place, self, and community". So located in this setting with the only exception of my Starlink connection-Elon Musk’s satellite internet, the closeness to other people is mirrored there in closeness to nature and its frequent mysteries. The strong peace of mind I feel there cannot be dependent on anything and nobody.

Being silent is a romantic idea, it is an addictive quest for something profound that barely exists anymore, the sense of the eternal even if that's temporal, the fixation on a cathartic ritual that enhances the wellbeing from the “noise” of our hyper-connected life. Is silence a healing process against compulsive narcissistic individuation, especially towards technocratic singularities? Does a move towards the “land” a form of ecological resistance? In a broader sense Is this an action to resign this world or to reform it? Do similar gestures suggest another kind of communication more psychic or esoteric?

For Phenomena Evoking Theosis I choose works and artists whose work and lives blend with the idea of a quiet pastoral counterculture expanding with different media and spanning across different eras. These artists’ works explore the connections between physical or immaterial, non-gender specific or queer/ feminist, biographical or contrived, and spiritual or technological. The show becomes a means to reconsider and re-imagine a momentary or a lifelong place of isolation considering different angles and themes like contemporary spirituality, technological decay, and social resilience. There is no anxiety, no analysis, no happiness or sadness. The show becomes a space of pure contemplation. Silence in this way becomes another song of life.