Elisa R. Linn

Grand Opening Reception @ NAK (2015) exhibition photos

9 December 2015

The blue-carpeted group show, Grand Opening Reception ran at Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (NAK) between July 18 to September 13 2015. Each of the works by artists, inlcluding Carey Young, Peter Friedl, Dena Yago, Stewart Uoo, Christian Von Borries, Renaud Jerez, Cooper Jacoby were installed on top of white shiny bar tables made by Kuwaiti artist and architect Aziz Al Qatami. Al Qatami was commissioned by curators Lennart Wolff and Elisa R. Linn to make the exhibition architecture bear close relation to what it looks like at small business events. Berlin-based Wolff and Linn run a project called km temporaer, which pushes at the form and thematics of the group exhibition.

Some of the works in Grand Opening Reception were made for the table tops specifically. They become presentations. George Rippon‘s ‘Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear’ (2015) is a scenario with tiny characters and props inside a white box with a blue floor and skinny shiny white tables. There are three pigs, one on top of another on one of the micro-tables: they appear to be having fun.

Cooper Jacoby, Deposits (leaking valley) (2015) Install view. Photo by Ivo Gretener. Courtesy the gallery Neuer Aachener Kunstverein.
Cooper Jacoby, ‘Deposits (leaking valley)’ (2015). Install view. Photo by Ivo Gretener. Courtesy the gallery Neuer Aachener Kunstverein.

On another table is an incredibly flat piece, ‘Untitled’ (2015) by Julien Ceccaldi. It is an image of a figure half way behind a curtain behind a window, looking out – or up, as the table’s flat surface would have it. Ceccaldi’s table becomes like a stained glass window and the figure is trapped in its visibility. Kaspar Müller also presents figures on top of his table. A group of characters and objects taken from different recognisable children’s fables sit together in close proximity making a strange circle-scene that mostly faces outwards.

The group of works as a collection somewhat refuse (and refuses) to join in with an exact shared aesthetic, or affect, despite and perhaps because of their joint display fashion and its blatant gesture towards a commercialisation of aesthetics (and visa versa). In a previous interview between Peter Friedl and Mousse Magazine, he talks about the disappearance of anything – history, potential -in image, and art as being a phase-out model in the process of standardising an aesthetic.

Where does art go in midst of this process? Where does art go in the discussion of the intentional commercialisation of ‘look’ and aesthetic identity? Does it fall in the gap? Does it fall off? Many of the exhibition photos displayed for and after Grand Opening Reception are of people standing in the blue carpeted room. It is a show wherein the artworks end up as these small unstable self-iterating gems inside something else that’s not really paying attention, whatever they look like, however they appear. **

Exhibition photos, top right.

The Grand Opening Reception group exhibition was on at Aachen’s Neuer Aachener Kunstverein from July 19 to September 13, 2015.

Header image: Grand Opening Reception (2015) Exhibition view. Photo by Ivo Gretener. Courtesy the gallery Neuer Aachener Kunstverein.

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One step ahead moving backwards @ LEAP reviewed

24 November 2014

Time and how it manifests in art is a key theme of a 14-page, print-only written exchange between curatorial project km temporaer‘s Elisa R. Linn and Lenart Wolff and curator Hicham Khalidi. It forms the basis of the One step ahead moving backward group exhibition held at Berlin’s LEAP, running October 31 to November 22 and features solo and collaborative works from 12 contributors, including Andreas Greiner, Armin Keplinger, Wolfgang Laib and Paolo Thorsen-Nagel among others. The outcome is an eclectic exhibition of art and artist ideas made up of disparate, at times conflicting elements that somehow coagulate under the notions of contemporary artwork as gesture, curation as process and communication as value.

Outlines of human figures and drawings of organs cover thin fabric, half stretched and hanging from the ceiling in Mariechen Danz‘s ‘Tower Vessel Tooth, Book B / Book C’ (2013). It explores information transmission through a combination of Mesoamerican art and contemporary technical language in drawing and print, while another sculpture, ‘Modular Glyphic System’ (2013) – made in collaboration with Genghis Khan Fabrication Co. –  resembles a PC computer case of thin metal that can be taken apart and recombined into other forms.

'One step ahead moving backwards' (2014) installation view. Photo by Ivo Gretener. Courtesy LEAP, Berlin.
One step ahead moving backwards (2014) installation view. Photo by Ivo Gretener. Courtesy LEAP, Berlin.

In the background the grafitti inspired wall painting overlaid with a video projection is Kerstin Brätsh and Debo Eilers‘ collaborative project KAYA + n.o.madski. It’s an installation using a certain ‘street’ vernacular more visible in the public rather than private space, yet dominates a LEAP gallery wall in ‘untitled – rewind’ (2014). Meanwhile, a zoom-out in scale presents Adriana Ramić‘s text-based work ‘The Return Trip is Never the Same (After Trajets de Fourmis et Retours au Nid, M. Victor Cornetz, 1910)’ (2014) across three touch screens. Recently shown as part of the Never cargo terminal… exhibition at LA’s Smart Objects in July and based on French civil engineer Victor Cornetz’s studies of insect movements, the work follows an ant pathway across multilingual translations and crowd-sourced dictionaries using an Android Swype. Navigating through their pages, the audience follows their nonsensical logic via colourful abstract lines that are the sequential index of keyboard gestures.

Language and its interpretations and barriers is again explored via Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater‘s ‘Modest Livelihood’ (2012), as the two artists of British Colombian ethnolinguistic heritage screen a hunting trip with Jungen’s uncle within the bounds of a First Nation territory since restricted to within “moderate livelihood”. Tina Kohlmann‘s own reinterpretations of ethnological artefacts are realised in her brightly coloured textile installation named after the inuit sea mammal specialty ‘Mattak’ (2014), while Fabio Marco Pirovino‘s ‘Drawing (Scribble) VIII’ (2014) presents abstract drawings using its eponymous digital ‘Scribble Pen’ that allows its user to scan colour in the ‘real’ world and transfer it to a tablet or mobile device and thus a virtual one.

'One step ahead moving backwards' (2014) installation view. Photo by Ivo Gretener. Courtesy LEAP, Berlin.
One step ahead moving backwards (2014) installation view. Photo by Ivo Gretener. Courtesy LEAP, Berlin.

Documenting the performance of holding a bubble-level tool straight while jumping out of a plane to the tune of ‘Theremin Queen’ Dorit Chrysler‘s cover of The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ is ‘Untitled (Leveling a spirit level in free fall feat. Dorit Chrysler’s BBGV dub)‘ (2009). It’s a video work by João Onofre examining the relationship between physical performance and cinematography, screened from a TV and propped in a corner, while Luca Pozzi‘s curved ‘Wall String #8’ (2013) crosses the art and science divide most succinctly, where pieces of diamond plate aluminium is curved into organic shapes that are poetically ended by balls that stretch out and almost touch each other. All the while Tiril Hasselknippe’s series of five flat sculptures are spread out in ’29 Palms’. Working with nature, the forms are made of thin synthetic material and earth becoming hybrid islands that dot the suspended non-space of a neutral-grey gallery floor. **

One step ahead moving backwards group exhibition was on at Berlin’s LEAP, running October 31 to November 22, 2014.

Header image: ‘One step ahead moving backwards’ (2014) installation view. Photo by Ivo Gretener. Courtesy LEAP, Berlin.

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Surplus Living @ Alte Münze, Mar 14 – 23

10 March 2014

Berlin-based project space km temporaer is presenting group exhibition, Surplus Living, in collaboration with London-based writer Harry Burke at Alte Münze, opening on March 14 and running to March 23.

Curated by Burke and km temporaer intiators Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff, the event brings together the work of 18 artists exploring the function of commodified experience and the role of art production in a continually expanding market.

Including Jasper Spicero, Adriana Ramić, Tatsuo Miyajima, Amalia Ulman, Jesse Darling, Harm van den Dorpel, Michael E. Smith and Constant Dullaart and more, Surplus Living represents a cross-section of production and consumption discourse examining concepts of value creation and division of labor in the “age of the prosumer”.

See the km temporaer website for details. **

Header image: MALL OF AMERICA, 2009. VIDEO, 12:52 © JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER, COURTESY OF ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY, NEW YORK.

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