Hanne Lippard

Between home, body + psyche: Alpina Huus exhibition, performance festival + scientific symposium, Dec 16 -Jan 14

15 December 2017

The Alpina Huus project at Geneva’s Le Commun and Lausanne’s Arsenic begins December 16 and is running to January 14, 2018.

The “thinking performance and domestic space” will host two festivals; an opening one at Le Commun running December 16 and 17, and a closing one at Arsenic on January 13, an exhibition at Le Commun running December 16 to January 12, and a scientific symposium at Le Commun on January 12.

Curated by Elise Lammer and Denis Pernet, the project was first initiated in March 2015 at Berlin’s Schinkel Pavillon and explores the “many analogies between the house, and the body and psyche.” This event features over 30 participants including BonaventureGina Folly, Lou Forster, Balz IslerHanne LippardGarrett NelsonRamaya Tegegne and many more.

Visit the FB event page for details.**

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Books are forever: the evolution of the printed word + 10 good reasons we should cherish its publishers

11 July 2017

There’s much to be said for the benefits of a book. A text’s existence in print-form — with pages bound and covered — belies a level of investment unmatched by a lot of what’s written for the internet. More often than not, a contemporary writer with an online audience must be their own editor, sub-editor and proofer, in a rapid-turnover environment taken from a vast, though shallow pool of information that can go unchecked and unverified, ideas with no room to develop and even fewer resources to develop them. Books have the benefit of time.

Sleep Cures Sleepiness, pub. TLTRPreß, May, 2014.

Costly and all-consuming, there’s a level of care that it takes to produce a book and a measure of multi-sensory experience it takes to absorb one. Smell, touch and movement all play a part in how printed matter is read that influences the way it’s received. Margins, typeface and stock effect the way its transmitted. While there so much potential for the rate at which ideas circulate and the diversity of voices that are heard in the contemporary milieu of networked information, there is also a place for the book.

To celebrate the launch of multilingual artist and writer Hanne Lippard’s This Embodiment at Berlin’s Broken Dimanche Press on July 13, we’ve taken a moment to highlight some worthy publishers and the books that we like below:  

Broken Dimanche

Broken Dimanche Press is a Berlin-based publishing house and exhibition space founded by John Holten and Line Madsen Simenstad with a focus on “wider discourses of contemporary art and politics.” The press also run a Para-Poetics Programme, an exhibition programme, a BDP Self Publishing Archive and preceded this upcoming Hanne Lippard publication with her first comprehensive collection of text-based works, Nuances of No, in 2013.

 

#Hanne Lippard’s ‘This Embodiment’, published March, 2017. Thank you #BrokenDimachePress 😊

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Book Works

Formed in 1984, Book Works is a London-based contemporary arts organization that works to publish books by artists, as well as holding exhibitions, lectures, workshops and seminar programs. Perhaps their most well-known and successful output is their Happy Hypocrite series co-ordinated by Maria Fusco, that invites an artist to edit and curate a given issue. Past editions include Sophia Al-Maria’s ‘Fresh Hell‘ and Hannah Sawtell’s ‘#ACCUMULATOR_PLUS.’

TLTRPreß

Sleep Cures Sleepiness, pub. TLTRPreß, May, 2014.

Established in 2011, the Berlin-based press is run by artist Martin Kohout and various international collaborators and has published over “90kg of printed matter including photo albums, doubtful magazines, exhibition texts and indirect fetish catalogues.” Early interesting collections of artist’s writing include Sleep Cures Sleepiness and Linear Manual, as well as AQNB editor Jean Kay (aka Steph Kretowicz)’s Somewhere I’ve Never Been, co-published with fledgling London publisher Pool.

Montez Press

Montez Press is a publishing house based in Hamburg, New York and London and was formed in 2012. The team publish books, magazines and editorial platforms like SALT, as well as single author works by the likes of Gjergji Shkurti and Huw Lemmey. More recently they published Tomoo Arakawa’s Laugh at eXperience, a book by Julie Béna and a printed collection of online commissions from a number of artists called The Interjection Calendar. 

 

#JulieBéna’s ‘It Needed to be Tender and to be Whipped,’ published Apr, 2017. Thank you #MontezPress 😊

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Sternberg Press 

Founded in 1999 by Caroline Schneider, Sternberg Press focuses on “art criticism, theory, fiction, and artists’ books” and is based between Berlin and New-York. With a focus on both the design and the editorial aspect, the press commissions and translates works within the fields of architecture, design, film, politics, literature, philosophy and contemporary art. Our recommendations include Rare Earth (2016) edited by Nadim Samman and Boris Ondreička, co-published with Vienna’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and designed by AQNB’s own website designer David Rudnick as well as Jan Verwoert’s COOKIE! (2014) co-published with Piet Zwart Institute.

Rare Earth (eds Nadim Samman + Boris Ondreička). Co-published by Sternberg Press, Berlin + TBA21, Vienna.

Semiotext(e)

Co-edited by Sylvère Lotringer, Chris Kraus, and Hedi El Kholti, the press is over three decades old and is considered to be known for introducing French theory to American readers via their Foreign Agents series.  The works published range from theory to fiction, activism and confession to economics and sexuality into a “nuanced and polemical vision of the present. Some notable works include Natasha Stagg’s Surveys, Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick and Where Art Belongsthe latter being of the intervention series which also yielded Gerald Raunig’s Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity.

Banner Repeater

Banner Repeater is a London-based artist run space and publishing house, with notable projects including Erica Scourti’s The Outagefirst published in 2014, as well as the un-publish series which focuses on emergent ideas around new technologies and Yuri Pattison’s short story postface: pretty good privacy. Founded by Ami Clarke in 2010, BR also holds events, talks, performances, as well as exhibitions including the current solo show Nam-Gut by Jenna Sutela, running to July 30.

Verso Books

Verso Books is an international publishing house claiming to be “the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world,” with our recommendations including Franco Bifo Berardi On FuturabilityJuliet Jacques’ Trans: A Memoir, Nick Srnicek  + Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, as well as the Jacobin series, featuring “short interrogations of politics, economics, and culture from a socialist perspective.”

Arcadia Missa

William Kherbek, Ultralife (2017), pub. Arcadia Missa Publishing, London.

Arcadia Missa is a London-based exhibition space and publisher, that includes a several different series, including the How to Sleep Faster journals, existing in print and online at howtosleepfaster.net. There are also their Anthology and Artist Books, with some recommendations including Sarah M. Harrison’s All The ThingsWilliam Kherbek’s UltraLife, and Holly Childs’ Danklands. Co-founded by Rózsa Farkas and Tom Clark, the project began “as a self-organised space in austerity Britain.”

Cornerhouse Publications

Cornerhouse Publications Ltd. is a Manchester-based press focused on contemporary visual arts, while is also part of the art center HOME. Some recommendations include The Creative Stance , featuring Grayson Perry, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and Sonia Boyce, among others, Sophia Al Maria’s Virgin with a Memory, and You Are Here: Art After the Internet, edited by Omar Kholeif. More recently, Cornerhouse published the unexpectedly controversial collection of short stories, poetry, experimental writing, and flash fiction Dark Habits.

Penny-Ante Editions

Founded in 2006, Penny-Ante is a Los-Angeles-based book publisher and art-based project that works in series-based projects: Anthology Series (2006-2009), Recess Series (2010-2011), Success and Failure Series (2012-2017). Some notable works include Beau Rice’s TEX, Alex Chaves’ Abigail Adams, and Momus’ UnAmerica.

 

now reading #HannahBlack’s ‘Dark Pool Party’ pub by @arcadiamissa + #DominicaPublishing

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Dominica Publishing

Founded in 2011 by Los Angeles-based artist and writer Martine Syms, the press is “dedicated to exploring blackness as a topic, reference, marker and audience in visual culture.” Recommended books include Hannah Black’s Dark Pool Party (co-published with Arcadia Missa), Diamond Stingily’s Love, Diamond and Lauren Anderson’s Matters. **

Hanne Lippard’s This Embodiment is launching at Berlin’s Broken Dimanche Press on July 13, 2017.

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Hanne Lippard in conversation with Inger Wold Lund: On language + speaking louder across tongues

19 January 2017

Hanne Lippard and Inger Wold Lund both work with words. Lund is a writer who uses both the written format and oral narration in telling her usually short stories written in both English and Norwegian, which includes Leaving Leaving Behind Behind published via  Ugly Duckling Presse and Ingenting skjedde published by Flamme Forlag. Lippard is an artist who explores voice as an artistic medium. She has a background in graphic design, speaks several languages, and works in performance, short film, sound and installations.

Hanne Lippard. Photo by Alexander Coggin. Courtesy the artist.

The following conversation, written by Lund was originally published in Norwegian in Billedkunst in March of 2016. Published in English in advance of Lippard’s next show, Flesh, at Berlin’s KW Institut, opening January 20.

Hanne Lippard and I met at Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof train station an early morning in February of 2016. At that time we had been friends for a year or two, but everyone assumed we had known each other longer, both being Norwegian artists in Berlin. This morning I was travelling with her to Leipzig, a little more than an hour southeast of Berlin, to do an interview for a Norwegian journal. She was going there to install an exhibition at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (GfZK). Earlier that same year she had won Ars Viva, a prestigious prize awarded by the German cultural industry, and the show in Leipzig was the second stop of a tour with three exhibitions by the winning artists.

I had waited some minutes by the tracks when Hanne came towards me. Behind her she was pulling a well-used suitcase. She told me that she had arrived from Zürich the previous night. The plane had been delayed, and she ended up going straight from the airport to a meeting. I asked her if it hadn’t been Sunday, and she confirmed.

Hanne Lippard: Now it is Monday morning.

We both bought coffees before boarding the train.

Hanne Lippard’s studio. Photo by Alexander Coggin. Courtesy the artist.

During the next two weeks Hanne would go on to have solo exhibitions at Galerie Tobias Naehring in Leipzig and at Kurator / alte Fabrik on the outskirts of Zürich. Later in the month she was to perform at Royal College of Art in London. In addition to this she was participating in the already mentioned exhibition at GfZK, where she showed new work in both of the two large rooms she had at her disposal.

HL: There are rules for what it is easy to say. I am interested in an extremely exaggerated positivity — something I see as a result of a negative tendency. There is an immigrant crisis in Europe. The glaciers will be gone within the next 10 years. Nestlé exploits the world’s water resources. At the same time, the critical voices are thwarted by a mantra-esque: ‘It’s okay, if the only thing you did today was to breathe.’ My work is about finding a balance between language and some sort of tone, or underlying rhythm, and the fact that language actually does convey information or meaning. When you are surrounded by sayings like ‘from here on it can only get better,’ or bags of Yogi Tea saying ‘empty yourself and be filled by the universe,’ someone has to stop and ask what it all means.

Arriving in Leipzig, Hanne gave me a tour of the exhibition. In addition to her work, there were sculptures by Flaka Haliti and an installation by Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, a duo perhaps best known for their collaborative performance project New Theater. Hanne’s work took up less physical space than that of the other artists, but her voice could be heard in all rooms.

HL: It is difficult for me to take up space, but I am working on it. It is somewhat strange that after six years of experience, I still have the feeling that it’s not sufficient that what I show is mainly sound.

Hanne Lippard’s studio. Photo by Alexander Coggin. Courtesy the artist.

From two large, black speakers Hanne’s clear voice repeated her words. The stanzas in the work ‘Bag’ appeared like disturbing variations over the previously mentioned positivity.

“I do not enjoy sports, although I know it is good for me. I do not enjoy any juice of any colour, although I know it is good for me.
I do not enjoy fresh air, although I know it is good for me.
I tell myself everyday that life is precious in order to believe in it.
I am a private person.
I am a public mind.
I read labels excessively, even if it is only a package of salt.”

Playing over her voice was the ‘Xylophone’ ringtone, from the then newest iPhone model. Every now and again, one could hear her swallow. Or stumble a bit while speaking.

HL:  I haven’t cut it yet.

Hanne explained.

HL: There are still two days until the opening. But I am wondering if I should keep some of the hesitation.

In the second room at Hanne’s disposal, a big screen was hung from the ceiling. On it the video ‘Attention Spam’ was projected. The video lasts five to six minutes, a length Hanne said she enjoys working with. On it, a young man, dressed in a suit and a tie rushes around with a smartphone in his hands that he cannot take his eyes off. I had seen the actor before in a performance Hanne did at KW Institut in Berlin. That time, he acted as her assistant. During the opening at GfZK he would again perform with her. This time, also, with a continuously ringing phone in his hands.

HL:  Lately, I have considered hiring him as a real assistant, so he can take care of my papers and my phone calls, as well.

Hanne laughed.

Hanne Lippard. Photo by Alexander Coggin. Courtesy the artist.

HL: Of the time I spend on work, maybe only 20 per cent goes to actually making work. The rest is communication. One has meetings, Skypes about things, sends e-mails, does research. On busy days, I keep checking my phone all the time, when I get home, as well. It’s as if I cannot unwind. We live in an ASAP-culture, where through social media one also builds avatars of oneself. I have a Facebook avatar. And then I have the artist Hanne Lippard, with her own homepage.

When Hanne stands before an audience, she appears like she does in her sound pieces — calm. She prefers to call what she does readings, rather than performance and argues that she works less actively with her surroundings than many other performance artists. Even when she is surrounded by electrical fans, office plants, confused assistants — the attention is drawn towards her. I confronted Hanne about her voice having an almost seductive effect on her audience.

HL: The seductive part is quite interesting. It is still an unsolved mystery to me, but I notice that it is some form of a weapon, a power. Weapon and power might be negative, hard and masculine words… But maybe I choose these masculine words because I have been so introverted for so long. As a teenager, I was shy and I used theater to express a different part of myself. But the roles you are given in theater are very specific, and I am not interested in building up a character with a specific age or background. In my work, I have more of an alter ego, that needs neither costume nor change. It is not necessarily so easy for me to say what I want to say in everyday situations. Very often I am told to speak louder.

Hanne Lippard’s studio. Photo by Alexander Coggin. Courtesy the artist.

Inger Wold Lund: I recognize what you say from my own work, and often experience that people pay more attention to me because I am not loud. They come closer, and not just physically.

HL: You and I can not get away from the fact that when we work with our own voices they are female voices. I think that fact makes what we do seem more intimate. One can use this as a tool to achieve what one wants. I am interested in Sue Tompkins’ work. She has a small, frail voice, and in her performances she reads from a music stand. It is always the same set up. She stands there, rocking back-and-forth, while she performs her monologues. She almost sings, but it is not exactly song. It’s more like a rap, but then she is a white woman from Northern England. I recognize myself in taking a step in one direction, but not completing the step.

Despite my work bordering theater, poetry, typography and song, I stick to the arts. And in doing so, I know that it is still different than doing painting or sculpture. There will always be questions asked of work that finds itself in a border space, and in many ways that is also good. That means I cannot just stand at an assembly-line producing.

Hanne has often been grouped together with Karl Holmqvist in exhibitions and festivals. He also works in the borderland where art meets poetry, and he also combines typographic work, objects, video and voice.

HL: In Holmqvist’s work there is a lot of focus on making the language personal. His own personality penetrates his work. He has a very special character, and when one reads something by him on the wall, it’s like one hears his voice. I find that very fascinating, and I think that also happens with my work. People have said of the book Nuances of No, which I published with Broken Dimanche Press in 2013, that they hear the rhythm of my voice in their head when they read. It is exciting to reverse the relation between speech and printed matter in that way — one can turn the effect of moving words to paper back to words being sound again.

IWL: Could you imagine working even closer to the literary field?

Hanne Lippard. Photo by Alexander Coggin. Courtesy the artist.

HL: For me, the voice will always be there. If I move away from using the voice, I will feel some of the tactility also disappearing. When I worked with graphic design, the importance of the paper was significant, and made me a bit crazy. It was like if I had to ask myself all the time, ‘why should I use just this paper and not the other one?’ I got caught up in details, and that is not my way of working. For me the work that I do is more about a feeling, and that is probably why the live element is also important. There is a lot of calculation in the arts, but there has to be room for the sensory and for what can not be explained, as well. My material is both emotional and intuitive.

Hanne and I left the gallery together, and headed to eat lunch at the café in the same building. The room was filled with sound. Coffee grinders grinding. Other guests talking loudly. Babies screaming. I checked whether my sound recorder could separate our voices from the voices around us, and then turned it off as we ate. Hanne soon had to leave to make some final adjustments with the technicians. I had to get ready for my train back to Berlin. After the meal we were both tired.

HL: I feel like the robot HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). When his batteries uncharge, he speaks slower and slower. That being said, it is interesting how one today increasingly sees oneself as a machine. I believe we have also started thinking more like machines. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi wrote in his book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (2012) that the generation growing up now learn more words from the machine than from their mother. I do not have a wide theoretical background, but I am concerned with how Marshall McLuhan also writes about media as “extensions of man.” The voice is an extension. It can also be seen as technology. I have more than once been asked to do voiceovers for movies, but the times I have said yes it has ended with the customer asking for something motoric or generic. Earlier on, I have also worked as the voice of ‘Female One’ in the Norwegian version of the language education program Babbel.

Hanne changed her pitch of speaking and quoted some lines from the program with careful diction.

“I have picked up grandmother today.”
“Really? What did she want?”

When I asked Hanne whether she would be interested in doing more of her own work in her native Norwegian, as well, she changed back to her normal voice.

HL: Of course, it would be interesting to work in Norwegian. Specifically, since the English language has something strangely artificial about it. But I moved away from Norway at 19 [years old], and when one moves at such a young age, one becomes estranged from both the culture and the country. I have done performance work at UKS and at Bergen Kunsthall, but in many ways that is not so different from work I have done in Prague. I am rarely spoken about as a Norwegian artist, but that can also have to do with me writing in English. I also have a not very Norwegian-sounding last name, and an English place of birth.

I quickly asked Hanne a last question, before she again scooted off to work, and I ran to catch my train home.

Hanne Lippard’s studio. Photo by Alexander Coggin. Courtesy the artist.

IWL: Whats next?

HL:  The exhibition I open on the outskirts of Zürich, Autofoffice is about the automatic replies one gets from people who are not at work. When I did my graduation exhibition some years ago, a graphic designer I know received an inquiry from a student wanting to intern at his studio. As so many others in our field, my colleague was broke, slept on his sister’s sofa and had no actual physical studio, even though he was well-known for his work. He did not know how to reply, and I offered to do so for him. I prepared a sound work to be recorded accompanied by a piano. While I was working on the piece, I lost my voice waiting for him at a subway station in Stockholm in minus-20 degrees, and instead of having a pleasant and formal voice when recording, my voice was shrill.

It was the opposite of what I have become known to work with. How should I put it — my voice was very uncomfortable. I sounded like a secretary that was clearly unfit for picking up the phone. The work I am showing in Zürich is a continuation of this project. In the gallery there will also be blinds that automatically drop before the piece is played. Like a visual sign that one is ‘autofoffice.’ The blinds fall with a clumsy movement — too far down — as they hit office plants and other objects. They do in some way perform a mechanical ‘tschüß.’

I stopped the sound recorder after Hanne had said this German word for ‘goodbye.’ She mumbled something about a dream of herself being “autofoffice,” before we walked off in different directions.

Partly machine and partly human. Partly voice and partly silence. Partly artist and partly something else that we both have difficulties putting our fingers on.**

Hanne Lippard’s Flesh is on at Berlin’s KW Institut, opening January 20 and running to April 9, 2017.

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Unveiling (you embrace me, as I am) @ Jupiter Woods, Jun 18 – 19

16 June 2016

The Unveiling (you embrace me, as I am) group event is on at London’s Jupiter Woods, running June 18 to 19.

Featuring texts and on-site interventions by Sarah Boulton, Rebecca JagoeHanne Lippard, Lisa Radon, and Felix Riemann, the event launches the space’s new publishing programme contemplating writing, research and text-led collaborative projects.

Unveiling opens with an arrangement of texts published online on June 16, followed by a weekend of sporadic interventions and intermittent ‘events’, which will unfold as “points of concentration” exploring how artistic space becomes visible or withdrawn within the space of language.

Artists have been selected based on their relationship to the “intersection of writing and objects” and the event not only launches Jupiter Woods’ new publishing practice but a new programme of performance-based residencies, exhibitions and happenings “carefully fluctuating between the public and private, displayed and withdrawn”..

See the Jupiter Woods website for details.**

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Hello @ Ashley Berlin, Apr 27

25 April 2016

Berlin’s Ashley will host Hello, an evening of readings by four artists on April 28.

Starting at 8pm, artists Rosa Aiello, Hanne LippardMegan Rooney, and Jenna Sutela will read in the project space nestled in Berlin’s Kottbusser Tor area.

Hello comes at a moment in contemporary art where artists’ words are being offered as work not just in and amongst shows and press releases —indeed, there are none with this event —but in their own right, read out, and settling in poetry zines.

Berlin-Helsinki based Sutela seeks to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, while London-based Rooney, who aqnb interviewed back in 2014 and who was a part of Cell Project Space‘s sets of poetry event, works between fiction and memory, or, reflection as she puts it.

See the Ashley Berlin event page for (limited) details.**

 

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Hanne Lippard: Speaking in Public/Public Speaking

3 November 2015

“When listening while speaking one might discover what one is actually saying”, says artist Hanne Lippard in this interview-slash-performative text presentation, ‘Speaking in Public/ Public Speaking’, for this latest aqnb/Video in Common collaboration. The Berlin-based artist is informed by an upbringing in Norway, Sweden, Holland, Germany, speaking and understanding languages from those four regions, plus more, as a person. As an artist, however, Lippard works primarily in English, in an art practice that concentrates on language, taken from text and then performed in what she calls an interest in language that is very ‘dissected’, and ‘split’, and ‘everywhere.

Recently in London to perform a work loosely based on The Ssecret to SsucceSs iSs in the Ss-eSs for the Ariel 2.0 programme at Bold Tendencies, Lippard took time out to talk about her language-as-art performance. That particular live presentation had the artist playing ringtone remixes and reading to two “Nordic walkers” circling and looping her at a laptop in the converted car park. The video above meanwhile, goes further into examining the rhythm, melody and dispersed meaning of words when actually spoken. **

___

Produced in partnership with Video in CommonThis project has been made possible through the generous support of Arts Council England.

 

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Just Frustration (2015) exhibition photos

15 October 2015

Just Frustration, an exhibition presented at Copenhagen’s Sixty Eight between August 7 and August 31 explored frustration both as a feeling and an entanglement. According to the press release, it’s an enmeshment where “futures seem to be permanently seen from the perspective of a past of outwardly and inwardly expressed fear”, where Conservative “common sense” and where the “present is permanent(ly)” made up of the continuation of colonial and imperial historical values. Curated by Tom Clark and Iben Elmstrøm, the group show included work by Ester Fleckner, Rachel Maclean, Imran Perretta, Lousie Haugaard, Amel Ibrahimovic, Hanne Lippard and Chloe Seibert, asks how an artwork can be directed towards this entanglement, this frustration, and find nuances, reliefs, magnifications and common denominators, be it via language, material and/or object.

'Just Frustration' (2015). Exhibition view. Sixty Eight.
Just Frustration (2015). Exhibition view. Sixty Eight.

Ester Fleckner‘s ‘I Navigate in Collisions’ (2015) are two woodcut prints on paper that are nervous images all bearing their forms (or trying to) out of straight lines, like family trees, as Fleckner’s collisions webpage describes. London-based Perretta has created a surface that holds white washed marks up to bare scrutiny and that drapes, quite transparently and brightly, like a thing in the way in the space. It’s just behind Seibert’s video of landscapes, high sky scrapers, mountains, which sits in the window, looking out and titled: ‘I Am At A Loss For Words’ (2013). A small text also by Perretta is powerful and straight forward: “She knows about villages, the Modern and the savage, but I can’t listen anymore, because slowly she is taking my history away from me”.

Danish artist, Louise Haugaard Jørgensen‘s installation, ‘Rendezvous. Ascend to the second floor, melt down to the third floor. Bon appétit’ (2015) includes a white plaster 3D print, which resembles an ancient vessel, perched on a metal structure that could be a drawn symbol of a house. With it she has cut up a lecture by anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss and added it to a tape by Danish Musician, Dario Campeotto. Campeotto’s song is about being in love and never leaving: “you could walk in and out the fire… but you would always be mine” and Levi-Strauss’ lecture is descriptions of methods of how to: cannibalism (boiling, melting etc.) The pairing evokes conversations about consumption but also devotion and enmeshment. “Old Hegemonies”, as the press release discusses, are brought into the foreground and distorted. How can art help itself, us and things around us in the present to remain un-distanced? **

Exhibition photos, top right.

The Just Frustration group exhibition was on at Copenhagen’s Sixty Eight, running from August 7 to 31, 2015.

Header image: Chloe Seibert, ‘I am at a loss for words’ (2013). Installation view. Sixty Eight, Copenhagen.

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Just Frustration @ Sixty Eight, Aug 7

5 August 2015

Sixty Eight brings in a new group exhibition, titled Just Frustration opening at the Copenhagen art space on August 7.

The show, curated by Sixty Eight founder Iben Bach Elmstrom and curator, writer and Base for Active Knowledge (BAK) editor Tom Clark, takes frustration as the fertile ground for artistic growth, “at the entrenched ideologies, local specificities, and claims for global progress that bind the everyday”.

The participating artists—which include Chloe Seibert, Hanne Lippard, Amel Ibrahimovic, Ester Fleckner, Rachel Maclean, Imran Perretta, and Louise Haugaard Jørgensen —draw attention to the flawed historical paradigms and dogmatic values that have caused, in recurrent waves, social and economic collapses and destruction.

See the exhibition page for details. **

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Hanne Lippard + Caique Tizzi @ L’Atelier-KRS, Jun 17

15 June 2015

Berlin’s L’Atelier-KRS continues its stellar programming run with “Sanctuary”, a performance by Hanne Lippard and Caique Tizzi on June 17.

Lippard and Tizzi join forces for a performative evening titled “Sanctuary”, running at the Berlin gallery as part of the Blue Majik group exhibition. Norwegian-born Lippard, whose practice explores the voice as a medium, brings her background in graphic design to the table, exploring how the visual power of language and the rhythmic and performative aspects of text.

Meanwhile, Sao-Paulo born Tizzi expands his development of social art practice, having founded the Berlin’s popular Agora food collective, and AFFECT, it’s  flagship artistic residency. Tizzi, who works with painting, drawing and performance art, is also a member of the collective Der Kanal.

See the event page for (minimal) details. **

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Blue Majik @ L’Atelier-KSR reviewed

12 June 2015

Blue Majik, running at L’Atelier-KSR until June 27, “intends to sense the confusion and the ongoing dissolution of the synthetic and organic.” The group show is named after an extract of Arthrospira platensis. Marketed as a Nutrient Dense Aqua Botanical™, Blue Majik is described as a “pigment” with superfood qualities and is as much a biological substance as it is the bottle in which it is sold. Through each individual contribution, this invocation of a hyped, factitious nature shimmers. Across an impressive spectrum of mediums and materials, it sticks to each work and holds them thick together, revelling in the aesthetics of rust, destruction, decay, design and juxtaposition.

Blue Majik (2015). Exhibition view. Image courtesy L'Atelier-KRS.
Blue Majik (2015). Exhibition view. Image courtesy L’Atelier-KRS.

It is probably the clean, black rubber tyre jutting perpendicular to the wall that makes me think “car showroom” as I first arrive at the hidden two-floor gallery space. Anthony Salvador’s ZWEI JUNGS IM BENZ (2015) features a wall-length PVC print, a photograph of the front corner of a banged-up car. Its boot, popped and skewed, arches over a headlight like a raised brow, an indistinguishable appendage pokes out where a nostril might fit, a gash where the bumper was seems to fall open like a slack sneer. The tyre pops from the wall like an ear or a barnacle. I wonder if I am wrong to see a face. I also see something oily and slick, like the essence of hype winking at me.

Nearby on the ground Tore Wallert’s Sponsored by Destiny (2015) stretches like the prostrate body of a barely discovered deep-sea creature, the kind that live in darkness and feed on oil. From this scrunchy package of toxic usables—plastic, epoxy, resin, fibreglass, permanent ink, polyester fabrics—ratchet straps snake out like the treacherous stinging tentacles of a Blue Bottle jellyfish, its nose points towards the wall where Clemence de La Tour du Pin’s two prints hang. Worked and layered, these textured prints bare leaf impressions like tattoos on skin, wearing their tread marks like bruises. One of the prints, Tean_Crimson Blood (2015), sheds its rusty crust onto the floor below, toxic like body fluids and powdery like uranium-enriched pollen.

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The Secret Life of Our Protheses (2015) by Santiago Taccetti. Image courtesy L’Atelier-KRS.

By the door, a text  contribution by Dorota Gaweda and Egle Kulbokaite of The Young Girl Reading Group tells of a “hypersea” (“a postmordial sea of countless and interconnected conduits”) and leads to Antoine Renard’s Untitled_1, 2, 3, 4 (Vase of Flower) (2015), which stretches out in foamy shale piles, like a queer rubbery mountain range. It brings me into viewing the next few pieces as landscapes, artificial and reminiscent of cheap market wares. Santiago Taccetti’s sculptural installation The Secret Life of Our Protheses (2015) clings to the ground in mimicry of nature overcoming a drain grid. Built of metal, wood, water and soylent green, it has all the magic of grass growing through a crack in the pavement under a magnifying glass. Three squat humidifiers, dressed like foam rocks, flaunt their cuteness; their skeuomorphism drives the scene into fantasy and they puff off into associations between fairy tale, science fiction, and the mundane. Similar but different, Adrien Missika’s Here is shot through with there (2015) hangs on the wall above, two flat, pink tiles made of red Turkish travertine stone gouged out and filled in with Berlin algae and Spirulina. Evocative and fragile, the works are beautiful but not especially subtle.

Plenty of Berlin galleries find refuge in apartment buildings; many echo a dilapidated pre-war opulence, and this one has a spiral staircase. From the mezzanine above I see Julie Grosche’s Zen out (2015) as a cheesy hipster-relic galaxy, something to dive into. At the bottom of the stairs is Sanctuary I-IV (2013), four digital prints on metallic paper by Hanne Lippard. Aesthetically they land somewhere between a periodic table and an eye chart. A poem of disjointed words and phrases, spaces inserted between the syllables, make me giddy. I feel her poetry as a gentle kind of beautified nausea.

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Sanctuary I-IV (2013) by Hanne Lippard. Image courtesy L’Atelier-KRS.

I nearly missed Neïl Beloufa’s La deomination du monde (2012) a 27-minute video hiding out on a monitor behind a black curtain in the corner. I may have passed up something significant, a comment, some hidden meaning, I rarely have the patience to watch things to their end in a gallery, and here I am standing upright in a makeshift closet, I don’t last the distance.

On June 17, you’ll get a chance to experience Hanne Lippard and Caique Tizzi perform live as one of the event elements tied into this show. A week later, on June 24, there’ll be an artist talk in the same space.

Blue Majik is on view at Berlin’s L’Atelier-KSR from April 26 to June 27, 2015.

Header image: Sponsored by Destiny (2015) by Tore Wallert. Image courtesy L’Aterlier-KRS. 

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Transmediale 2015, Jan 28 – Feb 1

27 January 2015

transmediale 2015 is celebrating its 28th year this week, running at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) from January 28 to February 1.

The festival and year-long project looks at the future of work, play and life through “the black mirror of data”, examining a culture that has become dependent on and synonymous with measurement, automation and optimisation, one where all work is fun and all social relations productive.

transmediale 2015, led by a curatorial team made up of Daphne Dragona, Kristoffer Gansing, Robert Sakrowski, and Marcel Schwierin, presents the artistic responses to this contemporary phenomenon, kicking off with an opening ceremony with Erica Scourti, Hanne Lippard and La Turbo Avedon, among others. The next day brings a discussion called “Glossary of Subsumption: Enclosed Athens Disclosed” with Oliver Lerone Schultz, as well as “The First Global unMonastery Summit” with unMonastery and Ben Vickers.

That Friday brings back Vickers together with Scourti and Sebastian Schmieg for “Expose and Repurpose” as well as for “Enclosures of Toxicity”  with unMonastery, and the day also features: “hybrid publishing toolkit” with Florian Cramer, “Appropriate and Accelerate – Art Under Algorithmic Pressure” with Jonas Lund“Attuning to ‘Data Doubles’” with Stephen Fortune and Matthew Plummer Fernandez among others; and Evgeny Morozov at the “All Watched Over by Algorithms” conference.

Other events of the day include “#temporarycustodians” with curator Helen Kaplinsky and artist Maurice Carlin, and “Datafied Research: Capture People” with Mercedes Bunz.

That Saturday brings another handful of great events, including ones with Benjamin Bratton, Shu Lea Cheang, Lorna Mills, Aram Bartholl, and McKenzie Wark.

See the transmediale website for details. **

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