Precious Okoyomon

Work from To See the Earth Beyond the End of the World.

“Precious Okoyomon – poet, artist, and chef – stages sculptural topographies composed of living, growing, decaying, and dying materials, including rock, water, wildflowers, snails, and vines. For Okoyomon, nature is inseparable from the historical marks of colonisation and enslavement. In their work, plants like kudzu – a vine native to Asia that was first introduced by the US government to farms in Mississippi in 1876 as a means to fortify erosion of local soil, which had been degraded by the over-cultivation of cotton, and then turned to be uncontrollably invasive – become metaphors for the entanglement of slavery, racialisation, and diaspora with nature, nonetheless holding the capacity for change and revitalisation. In their new work for The Milk of Dreams, To See the Earth before the End of the World (2022), titled after a poem by Ed Roberson, Okoyomon’s sculptures are set against a field of wild growth; here kudzu appears again in the midst of a network of rivers and sugar cane, the latter of which the artist’s grandmother grew in her backyard when Okoyomon was growing up in Nigeria. Much like kudzu, sugar cane is a plant whose very essence is saturated with the economic and historical circumstances of the transatlantic slave trade. Following the play Monsieur Toussaint by Édouard Glissant, whose native Martinique was once one of the world’s largest producers of sugar, Okoyomon’s installation attempts to invoke a politics of ecological revolt and revolution.” – Madeline Weisburg

Hanne Lippard

Work from her oeuvre.

“Hanne Lippard (*1984, Milton Keynes/UK, lives and works in Berlin) has been using language as the raw material for her work for the last decade, processing it in the form of texts, vocal performances, sound installations, printed objects and sculpture. The artist has developed a practice that lies at the confluence of spoken and written word, wherein she appropriates content from the public sphere, chiefly from online sources or from the field of advertising, to investigate how the rise in digital communication and mediation is reprogramming our relationship to language. Lippard intertwines found text with her own material, which she then manipulates through a variety of devices, such as repetition, the shifting of intonation, or the exploitation of homonyms, in order to formulate musings on contemporary life.

She draws upon themes including questions of bodily and mental wellbeing, self-optimization, and living through the lens of social media. By consciously picking at the seams of her found and fabricated texts, Lippard makes us acutely aware of the fragility of language as a tool for conveying meaning and sense. She exposes its flaws, its oddities, its double entendres, and its potential for misinterpretation through series of calmly obsessive utterances that bear an affinity to the iconoclastic literary experiments of the Dada movement.” – Lambda Lambda Lambda

Daniel Gustav Cramer

Work from 11 Works.

““A thing that we see at a certain point in time, a book that we read not only remains forever tied to whatever was around us, but also remains faithfully bound to the person we were at that time.” Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

In his second exhibition at Sies + Höke, Daniel Gustav Cramer (born 1975 in Neuss) explores the translations of transient experiences of the present and how they are always linked to the images of our memory. For the individual, experienced stories, narratives and interpersonal encounters are what make time palpable as a subjective entity. His works reflect these personal relationships to time that take place in fleeting experiences with people and nature and that can combine as fragments of memory to form a more comprehensive view of the world.

In Eleven Works Daniel Gustav Cramer presents the spatial constellation of his works between various fixed points that link distant geographies, their landscapes and direct contacts with their residents. One of the starting points is a series of four photographs, Eyjafjörður (2018), which show various colorings and transparencies on deep blue. Their location is explained by a brief text that describes how the original film negatives have been taken by a man who lives in Iceland. During his trips onto the fjord, for several years he shot underwater photographs, and archived their resulting negatives and contact sheets. With these images, the man unconsciously mapped the space between the two shores of the fjord, with his childhood home on the one side and his current place of residence on the other. Daniel Gustav Cramer’s display and their contextualization unfolds a structure of memory that goes beyond the visible water formations. As frozen moments, the photographs attest to the crossing of actual distances by the small boat drifting across the fjord as well as the intersection of past and present.

Observing the subjective perception of time and its interweaving with memory is a recurring theme linking the artist’s works presented in this exhibition. As a factual system of order, his works refer beyond their material being to something that can rather be felt than seen. In Landscapes (2017), he shows a series of shelves housing book objects. On the first pages of the books, landscapes, certain locations and environments are described in brief texts. The following pages are left blank. Using minimal means, sentence after sentence, layer after layer, landscape scenes are revealed, while the blank pages lend the evoked images an expanded spatial dimensionality. The series Dust (2017) consists of table objects that contain piles of paper made of marble dust from Carrara. The materiality of marble appears here in its smallest, most fleeting particles and merges with the flexibility of a sheet of paper. The immaterial white and the geometric reduction amplifies the impression of the sculptures being physical forms of a moving conceptual space, between the memory of mountains, the quarries in Carrara and the human desire to record what has been experienced. An underlying tension emerges in the photograph Todtnauberg (2018), for which the artist visited the village in the Black Forest where Martin Heidegger once wrote his main work Being and Time (1927). Hardly identifiable as an actual location in the flurry of snow, the image of his hut attests to the inconsistency and diffuseness of philosophical interpretations.

In another way, the work Rainbow (2016/2018) undertakes a material intervention in the concrete architecture of the gallery. Following the artist’s instructions, the three bearing columns of the space were painted in nine different colors in a certain order, one color after another. The last layer was set as a white RAL, so that the changes are only recognizable in the traces of paint on the edges and corners.

Finally, Daniel Gustav Cramer presents his film work Orrery (2012), which on several levels mirrors the photographs taken in Iceland. The film recounts a personal exchange between the artist and a man he met in the course of his travels. For three conversations, the artist sought out the man in his home near Melbourne where he works as a manufacturer of planet machines, an eighteenth-century craft that has virtually died out today. In the film, the artist reports of his encounters in the house through text, environmental sounds, and shots of interior scenes of the man’s workshop. With ellipses and flashbacks, he thus creates an interweaving narrative that makes clear that individual temporal perception fails to run in a linear and chronological manner. In the process, the film evokes childhood as a site of origin – from pebbles, that were once arranged playfully in a circle in the garden to the completion of an orrery made of ivory spheres that models the elusive trajectories of celestial bodies.

In this exhibition, Daniel Gustav Cramer moves back and forth between various time lapses within the microcosm and the macrocosm, between the ocean and outer space, the singular experience of a transient moment and traditional story telling. They are gaps in his system of order that activate the power of memory and thus create new narratives. Like explorers, we intuitively fill these gaps through what we learned from our own experiences.” – Simone Neuenschwander

Agnieszka Polska

Work from Birds in Space.

“For a bird to fly in outer space, it would have to hold its breath. It would have to fight Earth’s gravity. It would have to endure a temperature of -270°C. It would have to bathe in radiation, unprotected by Earth’s magnetic field. It would have to live without water and food. It would never be able to come back, because it would burn in the atmosphere. It would have to really want to be free.” – Agnieszka Polska

Tabita Rezaire

Work from her oeuvre.

“Tabita Rezaire is infinity incarnated into an agent of healing, who uses art as a mean to unfold the soul.

Her cross-dimensional practices envision network sciences – organic, electronic and spiritual – as healing technologies to serve the shift towards heart consciousness.

Navigating digital, corporeal and ancestral memory as sites of struggles, she digs into scientific imaginaries to tackle the pervasive matrix of coloniality and the protocols of energetic misalignments that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits. Inspired by quantum and cosmic mechanics, Tabita’s work is rooted in time-spaces where technology and spirituality intersect as fertile ground to nourish visions of connection and emancipation.

Through screen interfaces and collective offerings, her digital healing and energy streams remind us to access our own inner data center, to bypass western authority and download directly from source.” – Tabita Rezaire

Agnes Meyer Brandis

Work from One Tree ID – How to Become a Tree for Another Tree.

“The project One Tree ID transforms the VOC * identity of a specific tree into a perfume that can then be applied to the human body.

By applying it, a person can invisibly wear not just characteristics of the tree he/she is standing next to, but also use parts of its communication system and potentially have a conversation that – although invisible and inaudible by nature – might still take place on the biochemical level plants use for information exchange.” – Agnes Meyer Brandis

Marguerite Humeau

Work from “\*sk\*/ey-,” (and related works).

“…Humeau’s laboratory-like methods radically test materiality and temporality in order to explore the mysteries of human existence, ranging from prehistories to speculative notions of the future. Meticulously researched and often developed in collaboration with experts ranging from anthropologists and paleontologists to foragers and clairvoyants, Humeau’s multidisciplinary practice involves both knowledge production and the creation of new mythologies. “I am extracting the essences of real events, and then expanding into ‘what if?’ scenarios,” says Humeau. “I am prototyping worlds that are invisible, extinct, or parallel to ours.” The artist draws inspiration from long-lost ideas and extinct life forms, and uses speculation, research, and methodology to fill in the chasms in each field of knowledge…” – ICA Miami

Louise Giovanelli

Work from her oeuvre.

“Giovanelli’s delicate, luminous works inject vitality into historical subjects from the canon of Western art. Through interconnected series, she weaves together visual clues surrounding a specific moment or event. Her subject matter is primarily chosen for its formal qualities and includes, staged photographs, film stills, classical sculpture, and architectural elements. Within each series, Giovanelli repeats her motifs and certain paintings appear nearly identical, excepting slight alterations of the composition, or tonality. Deftly manipulating light and form, her multivalent imagery reminds us that the classical foundations of painting remain sources of delight and innovation. Keenly attuned to the historical significance of painting as a medium and system of representation, her paintings challenge the eye by dissolving representation into carefully crafted textures and patterns. For Giovanelli, painting allows for a visual slowing-down, and beholding her works is akin to a meditative process.” – Grimm Gallery

Jenna Sutela

Work from her oeuvre.

“Jenna Sutela (*1983 in Turku, FI) uses biological and computational systems to create audio-visual works, sculptures, images and performance art. Working with artificial neuronal networks or bacteria and with the help of her own systems and algorithms, the artist uncovers patterns and meanings that are hidden in disorder. With her collaborative approach she points to decentralised organisation, she questions social hierarchy, broaches the issue of communication between species and the connection of awareness and the material world. Her procedural works are based on latest scientific research and reflect its socio-political impact. Sutela’s work promotes the idea of a symbiotic network and the renunciation of an anthropocentric world. Her oeuvre illustrates that humankind does not exist in a void, but in symbiotic ecosystems with bacteria, mould, computers and many other elements, some of which remain incomprehensible.” – Max Goelitz

Robert Morris

Work from his oeuvre.

“Robert Morris (1931–2018) was one of the most influential figures in postwar American art. His extraordinarily versatile practice encompassed dance performance, minimalist sculpture, earthworks, drawing, painting, film, photography, collage, readymades and theoretical essays. Primarily based in New York City, the artist explored in his oeuvre the perception of objects, and how viewers renegotiate their sense of space when confronted by one of his works. Throughout his long career, he grappled with the conditions of artistic display and production and the dynamics of theoretical and social discourse.” – Sprüth Magers