Karina Skvirsky Aguilera

Work from Folds in the Photograph at DPM Gallery.

“We can understand the work of Karina Skvirsky Aguilera as the mechanism through which she seeks to continuously discover the profiles of her own identity, within the complex plot of ethnicity, gender, customs and family mythology woven around her experiences within the dissimilar cultural stadiums that have marked it. We refer to the two matrices of origin that determine it as an individual, and that appear here and there in their works in permanent tension. On the one hand, the afro roots of its Ecuadorian motherland, whose tales of childhood and childhood memories serve as a substrate to explore the paradoxes and the failure of the modern that surpasses the local microcosm, pairing this up with an investigation into the inadequate but subsisting notion of “race” and its social interpretations. And on the other hand the discordant signals of the advances of the North American society where his thought was born and modeled (within a family of Russian-Jewish migrants), which have tensed to the breaking point the paradigm of political correctness that regulated the speech in North America, and that Donald Trump’s access to power puts in doubt.

In this work we understand that identity politics are not simple but faceted, multidimensional and tailored to each human experience, which is irreducibly unique. If its production is effective as a lens through which to look at the complexity of the social constructs that shape us, it is because in the first instance it speaks of it as an unrepeatable singularity. His work exemplifies that desire of each one to trace his own existential interrogation to find a niche in the world; it is a journey that starts from the open analysis of his intimate experience, which goes from the events of his upbringing to continuous observations about his life in order to achieve a fit with the grand scheme of things…” – excerpted from the exhibition text by Rodolfo Kronfle Chambers.

Nadiya Nacorda

Work from Through Venus.

“Being a mixed womxn of both Filipinx and Black South African decent, but growing up Black in America, my identity has been a complex subject in my life. My outward perceived value and identity shifts depending on the space I am in, both public and private. I spent much of my formative years confused and lost in relation to my identity. I constantly occupy a multilayered space, as I identify as Black, Asian, Blasian, American, and Womxn simultaneously. I am the only child of my divorced parents, and as such, I have navigated my position at the intersection of my many identities, alone. With this ongoing photo project, I address concerns of identity and selfhood through self-portraits and still life imagery. I investigate and negotiate my own place within a complex family heritage. I am asking the questions of how colonization, displacement and trauma are continually performed across generations? What does it mean to manifest an identity of my own? To begin to explore and define myself for myself?” – Nadiya Nacorda for For Freedoms.

KangHee Kim

Work from O0ps.

Inside Out Upside Down

In the sixth edition of The Photographers’ Gallery’s – ‘Open Door‘ series, Wandering Bears will take up residence for an interactive exhibition held over a three day period in the London gallery’s top floor studio space.

Through the exhibition ‘Inside Out Upside Down‘ – Wandering Bears would like to invite the audience to consider the act of the image making process by recreating and responding to the work of fourteen individual artists’ work on display within the gallery space.

Using their mobile phones, visitors will have the opportunity to create and photograph their own unique personal interpretations, printing out the images to complete an individual takeaway sticker album.

An international selection of fourteen practicing photographers include: Beni Bischof, Erin O’Keefe, Fleur van Dodewaard, Hanna Putz, Jason Evans, Joshua Citarella, Lorenzo Vitturi, Luke Norman & Nik Adam, Matilda Hill Jenkins, Matthieu Lavanchy, Maurice van Es, Max Zerrahn, Nicholas Haeni and Romain Mader.

Johan Rosenmunthe

Work from Camping at the Solo River @ Tranen.

“Past, future and a compact ungraspable contemporary now appear to be folded into one complex state in Johan Rosenmunthe’s solo exhibition. Rosenmunthe’s immersive installation takes its starting point at the earliest known pre-historic designs done by Homo erectus on seashells found on the Indonesian island of Java. Solo River is the major river that runs through Java and the exhibition connects the physical location of Java to the digital programming language Java in an installation that takes the form of a combination of Land Art and technology.

With a smartphone in hand, visitors – as modern archaeologists – can uncover the hidden layers that exist in the silkscreen paintings on the walls, by photographing them with the smartphone’s flash turned on.

Camping by the Solo River approaches the nature-culture relationship from a macro perspective. The movement from Homo erectus’ craft of instruments and symbolic characters – to our own time’s ‘back to nature’ lifestyle trends zoom in on human nature as an ancient social phenomenon. “I’m interested in our understanding of objects within social systems.” Johan Rosenmunthe explains in the exhibition guide.

Camping by the Solo River focuses on how humans grasp the world through certain technologies. It explores our aesthetisation of our surroundings and the urge to create meaning by putting certain objects in the center of our culture – from the memetic building of sand castles by the shore, to the compulsive need to document our sensations and experiences on photographs.” – text via Tranen

In the Flesh, Part II: Potential Adaptations

Works by Ivana Basic, Hannah Black, Megan Daalder, Cécile B. Evans, and Martha Friedman at Gallery Diet

“Gallery Diet is pleased to present In the Flesh, Part II: Potential Adaptations, a group exhibition curated by Courtney Malick, on view from February 6 to March 12, 2016.

In the Flesh Part ll: Potential Adaptations builds upon the exhibition In the Flesh Part I: Subliminal Substances, which featured work by contemporary artists who explore the potentially harmful inorganic materials found in many things that we ingest—be they mass produced food products, dietary supplements, pharmaceuticals, hygiene and beauty products, or invisible matter from toxic waste and technological devices.

To further these investigations of what goes into the body, In the Flesh, Part ll presents artists whose work envisions the long term effects that the continuous ingestion those “subliminal substances” may have on the way that humans look and function. Their works draw attention to ways that the body, the concept of a body, container and vehicle—or lack of a physical vessel as it may someday be—adapts and shifts over time in the ways that it appears externally and functions internally. While the structure of human DNA itself almost never changes, its epigenome, which aids in gene expression, is easily affected by internal and external, organic and inorganic forces. With this in mind, it is clear that what we ingest, and the ways that we use our bodies in relation to our growing reliance on technological devices, will eventually cause the human epigenome to adapt and morph accordingly.

Undeniably, these transmutations may take place over very long periods of time, and are therefore somewhat imaginary in our current moment. However, experimentation with potential future outcomes continues to gain momentum as a present topic of inquiry. With this in mind, Part ll also responds to subcultural groups and schools of thought gaining traction today that actively seek to reinvent the human body with new, often mechanical or “super-human” abilities. In this way, Part ll incorporates groups such as biohackers, body-modders and transhumanists, into its multifarious and wide-ranging conversation of potentialities.

The artists included in In the Flesh, Part ll, each in unique and unusual ways, reimagine and foreshadow the future of the human body. Through their varied practices that span video, sculpture, installation and new media, they at once call reflect upon the evolutionary changes that have already altered the human body, and point to the plausible causes and effects that will continue to drive this constant shift in collective corporeality.

Through her sculptural work, New York-based Ivana Basic creates forms whose surfaces resemble human skin, connoting raw slabs of meat and twisting into themselves into awkward, alien-like figures. Conversely, her two-dimensional work often begins with images of her own likeness, through which she continues to create complex virtual identities.

Berlin-based Hannah Black investigates ways that the individual body can be used as a foil to reconsider larger cultural issues, such as bodily health, vanity, branding, communism, language, the entropic nature of architecture, and their surprising intersections across various cultural contexts.

Los Angeles-based Megan Daalder works in performance, sculpture and filmmaking to parse a wide range of interests and conceptual focal points through which her projects often reveal ways that technological devices and new forms of communication have changed interpersonal relationships.

There is a palpably futuristic quality to the multi-faceted, often project-based work of Berlin-based Cécile B. Evans, through which she complicates notions of and formats for personal identity as they continue to be more and more mediated by the virtual context in which so many people spend the better portion of their lives.

In both the sculptural and performative work of New York-based Martha Friedman, we see specific parts of the human body magnified and exaggerated – their naturalness questioned through her use of bold, synthetic materials and her severe color palette.”

What a Silencer Sounds Like

Work by Sinae Yoo and Adam Cruces at Kunsthaus Langenthal

“Does a silencer really sound like it does in a thriller? Why do drivers in movies always move the steering wheel? Why were only tinned exotic fruit experienced as authentic by Koreans in the past? Productive misinterpretation of situations and things in pop culture and cultural exchange is the departing point for the artistic work of Sinae Yoo (*1985) and Adam Cruces (*1985). Both, the Korean and the American artist, now living in Switzerland, have produced large new work series with videos, installations and ceramics for the exhibition in Langenthal. Each in their way address the question how incongruent imagination and perception are and how virtual and physical realities can be connected.”

Jeremy Deprez

Work from Common Nouns at Feuer/Mesler

“Common Nouns is a collection of paintings developed through attempts to momentarily experience and analyze articles culled from DePrez’s immediate environment.  DePrez imposes humor, self-described awkwardness, and a variety of painterly strategies to build up a visual and material history within each painting.  These impositions encourage the formation of irregularly shaped paintings that overlap and inform one another in a way that transcends their sources objectivity and propels them into a more allegorical space.”

Liam Gillick

Work from Phantom Structures at Casey Kaplan

“This exhibition consists of two bodies of work in which Gillick demonstrates the disparities and harmonies between the abstract and conceptual investigations at the core of his practice.

The first is a series of wall texts executed in pale, shimmering vinyl, which act as the framework for the exhibition. Since the 1990s Gillick’s development of reappearing narratives concerning notions of functional and aesthetic exchange has become central to his practice, often forming the engine for a body of work. Varying from early statements of intent and written equations regarding the rationalization of production versus consumption to the suggestion of various mise-en-scènes, with references to late 19th century utopian writing, the works are a process of continuous reinterpretation. Gillick merges histories with an ever-shifting present, revealing a renewed outlook on his own work and the exhibition as form. Providing varying degrees of insight, the phantom texts gently guide the viewer through the parallel structures in the exhibition that exist as manifestations of a single thought or idea.

The text work Afragmentoffuturehistory (2002) comes from Gillick’s rewriting of Gabriel Tarde’s “Underground Man” (1905), which updated Tarde’s provocative vision of a post-apocalyptic underground world focused entirely on philosophy and art. The work was also used as the title for his Turner Prize exhibition in 2002. A piano and black snow… (2010) refers directly to the artist’s contribution to the performance-based exhibition, Il Tempo del Postino, in 2006. A Yamaha digital grand player piano performed the artist’s attempt to play the Portuguese folk song “Grândola, Vila Morena” from memory – the song that played on the radio to signal the beginning of the Portuguese revolution in 1974. Black snow fell silently onto the piano while the sound only activated when there was an unexpected pause in the flow of the event.

The second component of the exhibition is a new series of abstract structures. Powder-coated aluminum and transparent Plexiglas platforms, screens, corrals and barriers are rooted in a questioning of the aesthetic of contemporary control systems. The works highlight a tension between the ideological norms of our built environment and how this quietly guides human behavior. The most iconic structures in the exhibition, a new series of Discussion Platforms, have remained essential to the artist’s practice for 20 years. Beginning in 1996, these works designate zones to face up to the visual language of renovation, strategy, and development. Initially taking form as panels of Plexiglas in aluminum frameworks fixed to the wall or propped up by poles, in documenta X (1997) a large platform was suspended directly from the ceiling and became a transitional structure in one of the main exhibition spaces. In 2010, a large site-specific Discussion Platform was constructed as a link between a workplace, Centene Plaza, and its neighboring parking garage in Clayton, MO. Tinted glass panels swathe passersby with wide bands of color. Most recently in 2014, a large-scale multi-colored platform was installed at The Contemporary Austin’s Laguna Park. Standing on the banks of Lake Austin it exists as a structure isolated from the language of post-industrial service economies.

Phantom Structures explores the ongoing relationships in Gillick’s work between contemplation and theory in tension with the foundational logic established by his physical structures. By developing a language of abstraction rooted in continual renovation, Gillick’s work endeavors to expose both the disparities and ties between modernist ideals of a refined aesthetic and the behavioral realities that result from endless development. Within this, the larger aesthetic structural framework of today, Gillick seeks to revisit the dysfunctional aspects of Modernism and provide a renewed approach to abstraction.

The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto will present Liam Gillick: Campaign, an exhibition that takes the form of an evolving presentation over one year between January 28, 2016 and January 3, 2017. With a solo exhibition at The Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery in April of 2016, the artist will also participate in EVA International in Limerick (April 2016). Group exhibitions include Kunstverein Hamburg (January 2016); Contemporary Art from the Centre Pompidou at Haus der Kunst, Munich (March 2016); and Kunsthalle Wien (June 2016). Gillick has previously participated in notable exhibitions including dOCUMENTA and the Venice, Berlin, Moscow and Istanbul Biennales, representing Germany in 2009 at the Venice Biennale. The artist has presented solo exhibitions at institutions such as Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Tate, London. His work can be found in public collections such as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; and Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto. A prolific writer and critic of contemporary art over the last twenty-five years, Gillick has contributed to publications including Artforum, October, Frieze and e-flux Journal. Public commissions include the British Government Home Office (Interior Ministry) building in London and the Lufthansa Headquarters in Frankfurt. Gillick has extended his practice into experimental venues and collaborative projects with artists including Philippe Parreno, Lawrence Weiner, and Louise Lawler. His book, Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820 will be published by Columbia University Press this March.”

Clemens von Wedemeyer

Works from Cast Behind You The Bones Of Your Mother at KOW

“If works of art carried as little social and political significance as some skeptics claim, would they be as hotly contested as they are, again and again? We can draw a mental timeline of iconoclasm from the statues and temples ISIS is currently smashing to pieces in Syria back to countless military campaigns, revolts, and regime changes in which the conquest of people went hand in hand with the plunder and destruction of their artistic treasures. Two exhibitions by Clemens von Wedemeyer and Dierk Schmidt highlight the political contentiousness of sculpture. The appropriation and exhibition of aesthetic objects is an inherent part of the struggle over dividing up the world. Schmidt examines the history of German colonialism, with a particular view to the politics of restitution and Berlin’s Humboldt Forum. But first, Clemens von Wedemeyer explores the cinema as a social scene and battleground that unfolds upon—but also behind, in front of, and around—the silver screen; a project he has pursued since 2002 in an oeuvre that has increasingly expanded into the genres of documentary environment, architectural installation, and sculpture.

Wedemeyer’s show is the eighth and final chapter in our yearlong program titled ONE YEAR OF FILMMAKERS. In the twentieth century, the moving image has dominated our field of vision and helped reshape how we see others and ourselves. The five-channel film installation THE BEGINNING. LIVING FIGURES DYING(2013) draws on the arsenal of scenes of conjuration and destruction in which the cinema has taken possession of the material images of man (and his gods and demons) by putting them on the screen. In a collage of historic footage, Wedemeyer traces how film staged the aura of bodily presence, animating objects and investing the human likeness with outsize magical power while also shattering it. A brief cultural history of sculpture in the movies in which Greek and Roman antiquity is the foil upon which the creation of a human figure as well as its demonization are projected, the video installation is also a historical catalogue of the implements of suggestion, the props, mockups, and effects, in which the cinema fabricated phantasms of the alien and menacing Other.

Wedemeyer’s exhibition builds on and extends the ensemble he produced for MAXXI in Rome. For the video installation AFTERIMAGE (2013), he created a detailed digital record of the interiors at CineArs, where props for Cinecittà, the hub of Italian filmmaking, have been manufactured since 1932—Cinecittà Holding is currently threatening to close the studio. Two statues that he scanned now resurface in the gallery’s basement showroom as 3D sand prints (2015). Resurrected by algorithms, the two sculptures embody a scene from Greek myth: after Zeus sent a deluge to destroy humankind for its depravity, Deucalion and Pyrrha were the only human beings left on the deserted earth. They consulted the oracle of Themis, who instructed them to cast the bones of their mother behind them. Initially baffled, Deucalion and Pyrrha eventually understood that they were children of the earth—so their mother’s bones must be the rocks at their feet. They threw them over their shoulders, and a young generation sprang up from the stones. A new humanity, born from dead matter.

To make his sculptures, Wedemeyer harnesses techniques archaeologists use to reconstruct ancient temples and works of plastic art—and, in the future, to literally reprint objects destroyed in ravages like the one unleashed by ISIS in Palmyra. Iconoclasm is producing a new type of future artifacts from the past, artifacts that are clearly not what they once were and form a distinctive category of aesthetic objects. Another such object is A RECOVERED BONE (2014). In an act of digital theft, Wedemeyer lifted one of movie history’s most famous props from the screen and set it on a pedestal in the gallery. A key scene from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” tells the story of humankind’s earliest technological moment: a humanoid uses a bone as the first tool—and the first weapon—and then flings it toward the heavens in a gesture of triumph. Wedemeyer excised the object from the famous scene and reconstructed its shape using 3D modeling technology. The heavens are deserted, the bone is tangible, but each is as inauthentic as the other. Or is it?

3D and nanotechnology, AI, and other twenty-first-century developments herald the advent of novel metamorphoses that throw a different light on the animistic worldviews that speak from ancient stories. Images and spaces, information and bodies become mutually convertible; the boundary between animate and inanimate substance looks increasingly implausible, as do the distinctions between real people and their media incarnations, between genuine objects and mere dummies. Linear time is riddled with holes and folded in wrinkles. Artistic methods of reenactment, the theatrical recreation of past events, widen to include processes of material and immaterial transformation whose coordinates in time and space seem ever more mutable and inject historic moments of emancipation and critique into the social struggles of the present. Instants of resistance leap across the time of history.

In the final section of Wedemeyer’s exhibition, the mute bit-players and extras of a distant past rise up in a noisy rebellion against the movie industry, the “most powerful weapon in modern societies” (as Mussolini put it when he founded the fascist studio Cinecittà). Shot in Rome in 2013, PROCESSION: THE CAST, a film about the extras’ riots that rocked the Roman studio in 1958, features members of the Teatro Valle Occupato, a self-organized ensemble that came together in 2011 to prevent the closure of the historic Teatro Valle by taking the venue’s management into its own hands. Today’s cultural activists speak in the voices of yesterday’s insurgents. In 1958, the American film Ben Hur was shot at Cinecittà—also known as the Italian Hollywood—and thousands of unemployed locals sought work on the movie’s now-famous crowd scenes. When they were turned away, they stormed the studios: the political dimension of iconoclasm extends beyond the toppling of works of visual art to the social protest against the conditions under which they are produced.”

Text: Alexander Koch
Translation: Gerrit Jackson
Editing: Kimberly Bradley