Finissage: #4 Reports from Species of Spaces
Samstag, 18. Juli 2015 - 19:00 Uhr
wellwellwell
27th of May - 18th of July, 2015
Opening: Friday, 26th of June, 2015, 7 pm
Architectural settings in the widest sense are at stake in Reports From Species of Spaces – a fused title lend from the French philosophers and writers Michel de Certeau and Georges Perec. The spaces in question are imagined, visionary, personal, political and spaces of memory.
The body in space and the architectural body specifically, respectively how these bodies are conditioned by and conversely conditioning space is one of the key points of exploration within the works of Reports from Species of Spaces.
Melanie Ender departs from a rather tectonic understanding of bodies in space?constructed entities, figures if you want, actually variations of a modular system assembled to different ?characters?. Although made of material such as MDF and paint in a traditional sense Raumkörper adopt a seemingly virtual fashion as if they were digitized quasi-animated architectural monuments. Like folded, they evolve from modules drawn on a plain sheet of paper, so they could easily morph back into that same plain surface where, for example, the body of the artist in Entern on the other hand measures space performing, inscribing her body literally into space, while marking the margin of her body from a fixed standpoint in drawing a circle. A circle that comes up in another piece: half-full, a bowl, a domestic and to some extent ritual tool being transformed into a form out of concrete, not lacking a portion of monumental posture. The rosé color gracefully and delicately counteracts this monumentality, so does a rope?a similar rope, which fixes the artist?s body in the center of the space mentioned?draped on the floor, inconspicuous and yet so determined in its austerity. We leave out some words from the sentence and get to Phrase, an allegorical micro setting with an eclectic sculpture of classicist allure: a pedestal in form of an upright square, where a fragment of the artist?s and dancer?s foot is posed in take-off position but still in touch with the platform, followed by an enigmatic half-worked granite stone. This Phrase is one of more possible forms to connect the language with the body, another one is presented by the artist in suggestive phrases printed on white linen such as She Urged Him to Bomb or So Soaked in Wet.
A phrase is also at the beginning of a series of Vika Prokopaviciute?s paintings with the modified title of Paul Klee?s saying: ?A line is a dot going for a walk?. Her narration starts as ?Once the Lion and the dot went for a walk?, in short OLAD 1-15. The voyage of the trained architect and painter takes us through a series of paintings with specific titles indicating where we are supposed to be wandering through and therefore see: architectural frames in an urban surrounding. The beholder is supposed to imagine his shifting of 90 degrees going from one painting to the next: admittedly our imagination is put at a hard test following the artist?s fragmented views on ever new aspects of this somewhat surreal urban scape strongly recalling a modernist pictorial set with the consecutive vocabulary. What the artist perceives in real is undergoing a refined transformation?both highly associative/poetic and technical/abstract, similarly in a body of work with the title MDAS.
These to a certain extent uncanny feelings of elegant surfaces are encouraged by Robert Oberzaucher?s seemingly rendered cityscapes: in effect Reflexion is a filmed highrise-building and digitally mirrored in post-production. A series of digital prints, called Soaps #1,2,3 etc. have a digital look, but their basis is completely real and materially produced with brittle models of different shapes immersed into soapy water, immediately lit and photographed before the ?bubble? dissolves. In a process of digital montage some of the prints are mounted together. The appeal is somewhat digital, but at the same time recalls modernist photograms. Contrary to what is expected, reality is mimicking the digital.
Florian Sorgo finally goes to the heart of the institutional space and questions the brittleness and literal soundness of an institutional space, even off-space, via a seemingly minimal though counterproductive intervention. This in times of the seemingly impossibility to ultimately make a political or critical statement since it gets absorbed as a commodity in an all encompassing market. In a contained, maybe helpless yet violent gesture he makes a crack into the wall of the space. Another work echoes the disciplined body of society in a sound piece of noise. Essentially a translation into sound of a phrase from the Civil Code, in which the ranks of penalty are defined, in case other property is infringed. We know similar gestures of critique from Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Michael Asher and others. The melancholic and at the same time struggling tone of this work effectively poses the same question as another series of posters to mark the discrepancy between utopian pretensions and the fatal compromises that capital and corruption dictates: I came to see the results of the revolution and all I got is this lousy poster.
Curated by Sabine Folie
Thanks go to the artists and to the team of wellwellwell for the fantastic collaboration and special thanks go to: Diana Barbosa Gil, Julian Inic, Thomas Hitchcock, Lukas Posch, Noushin Redjaian.