Kevin Space

Maria Gorodeckaya, ‘Pulling Flesh from the Shell with an Index’ (2016) exhibition photos

31 January 2017

Maria Gorodeckaya‘s solo exhibition Pulling Flesh from the Shell with an Index was on at Vienna’s Kevin Space, opening on September 30 and running to October 30, 2016.

Maria Gorodeckaya, Pulling Flesh from the Shell with an Index (2016). Exhibition view. Photo by Georg Petermichl. Courtesy the artist + Kevin Space, Vienna.

Curated by Franziska Sophie Wildförster, the site-specific performative sculptural installation explored the “dynamics and representations of power structures determining female identity, sex and desire through the affective and affected body.” Here, the skin acts as a point of conflict – a struggle and a border – that’s written upon and lying “open for re-inscription, marking the most intimate and most public threshold – worked, produced and narrated by political, social, ideological forces.”

Left with the traces and remnants of movement, the actions of a body re-enacting and re-inscribing its asserted roles in sex and desire materialise in a circle of Shea Butter stepped over with high heels, metal poles covered in glitter and dragon tattoos, and plastic jewellery flanked by walls of white paint scraped off with steam.

The show comes accompanied by the following poem by the artist:

“warm moisture dripped from my body to yours
the closest i got to another person, my internal organs felt you,
like as if you were ripping my stomach out
the impossibility as well as necessity to have, try get, be under your french skin
to break the seal and have your sweat coming down my forehead
have my hair mix with your hair, have your dirt under my fingernails
have your anxiety, uneasiness and crossed eyes
to be the distorted flesh,
and smell this otherness under the very tip of my nose
every day”**

Maria Gorodeckaya’s Pulling Flesh from the Shell with an Index was on at Vienna’s Kevin Space, running September 30 to October 30, 2016.

  share news item

KOSMO @ Kevin Space, Jul 7 – Aug 7

4 July 2016

The KOSMO group exhibition is on at Vienna’s Kevin Space, opening July 7 running August 7.

Featuring the work of artists, Marguerite Humeau, Antoine Renard, Jeremy Shaw, The Mycological Twist (Anne de BoerEloïse Bonneviot) and Andrew Norman Wilson the exhibition takes one of When Species Meet and Cyborg Manifesto philosopher Donna Haraway’s questions as its core: Who do ‘we’ become when entities meet? Or, as the press release seconds, “what might it take to escape the humanist territory?”

It seems the works installed in the small space, which used to be a garage, will focus exclusively on zones of contact between species, human and non-human, and the interdependence, ­commodification and new imagination that these points of experience bring.

See the Kevin Space website for more information.**

 Marguerite Humeau 'Wadjet (King Cobra)' (2015). Image courtesy the artist and DUVE, Berlin.
Marguerite Humeau, ‘Wadjet (King Cobra)’ (2015). Image courtesy the artist and DUVE, Berlin.
  share news item

Marina Sula @ Kevin Space, May 25 – Jun 19

24 May 2016

Marina Sula is presenting solo exhibition, What is it Like to be Alive in That Room Right Now at Vienna’s Kevin Space, opening May 25 and running June 19.

Gathered from the accompanying exhibition text is a feeling that Sula will embellish the project space and the room somehow, working with surfaces and touch to negotiate the subject that is looking from the perspective of “increasingly complex layered networks of technologically mediated and physical realities.”

Previous shows have included the Albanian-born artist printing images of dimly-lit ceilings on to plexiglass and made in to benches that are also partially filled with sand.

Sula has recently shown in another of Vienna’s up-and-coming project spaces, Malzgasse12a alongside artist Olivia Coeln in a show called Low Frequencies, as well as at Emozionale, a one-day exhibition in a large warehouse in Milan.

See the Kevin Space exhibition page for more details.**

Marina Sula, Untitled (2016), install detail. Courtesy the artist and Malzgasse12a
Marina Sula, ‘Untitled’ (2016), install detail. Courtesy the artist and Malzgasse12a.
  share news item

Caspar Heinemann, nothing is the end of… (2016) exhibition photos

22 March 2016

London-based artist and writer Caspar Heinemann had a solo show at Vienna’s Kevin Space that ran from February 23 to March 20 titled nothing is the end of the world they made. Heinemann was the new curatorial collective’s first artist in residence at the space and they made a show by summoning and foraging the traces of material and semiotic references in the found objects that occupied the garage building at the former butchers, and all the invisible things produced in between.

A dragon is drawn on a plastic tarpaulin, which is held on a wall like a flag outside a child’s den by a piece of blue rope strung between a high corner and a large wooden stick. The stick is maybe what a child would find in a clearing and deem a big stick, similar enough to a tree but light enough to carry and bring back to base for building with. Accompanying the dragon are pretend flames, spray painted on in a way that might go a little like: ‘how do I make this fire in my mind exist on this flat surface’. And so in one wavy action, like a flame that waves in the air, fire is applied.

 Caspar Heinemann, nothing is the end of the world they made (2016) , exhibition view. Courtesy the artist and Kevin Space and the artist. Photo: Georg Petermichl
Caspar Heinemann, n​othing is the end of the world they made (2016). E​xhibition view. Photo by Georg Petermichl. Courtesy the artist + Kevin Space, Vienna.
The drawing is a scene of things, seen from above or across a timeline, rather than as a single encounter or moment. It is as though Heinemann has tried to show something that exists in their head that isn’t and won’t ever be in one physical space, a little bit like a magic trick. In a text written by the artist about the show sent to aqnb by the curators, they declare: “I can’t draw (a dragon a utopia) and the infrastructure that enables them.”

Opposite is a similar work, on more tarpaulin decorated with the same range of materials and mediums, this time showing at its core —or theme, as was the dragon in the dragon piece —a stone house whose stone chimney transforms the drawing tentatively but also clearly and intentionally into a tree house. The ‘tree house’ is the main item and it is bigger than its smaller surrounding illustrations, which act like flickering pieces of attention or memory that have been brought about by Heinemann thinking about a tree house.

The tree house and dragon (and its wave of fire to an extent, too) become objects in the show, but not necessarily in the room. They are indecipherably [but maybe tied down to]: thing, theme, trope, totem, illustration, figure-head and symbol —without the offer of actual meaning with which to read the show as a whole in. As a list, this feels somehow akin to Heinemann’s way of introducing statements in the aforementioned text: “Anyway, elsewhere, just, and because.”

Caspar Heinemann, n​othing is the end of the world they made (2016). E​xhibition view. Photo by Georg Petermichl. Courtesy the artist + Kevin Space, Vienna.
Caspar Heinemann, n​othing is the end of the world they made (2016). E​xhibition view. Photo by Georg Petermichl. Courtesy the artist + Kevin Space, Vienna.

The tree house piece is also held by a friendly wooden stick, and presumably then, in the space, the two paintings and their significant others (rope, sticks) create an inclusive arc space where the sticks act like a pair of arms outstretched, mirroring each other and forming a semi-circle. Heinemann has made it so you can’t feel clearly whether this is a pleasant semi-circle of safely chained memories or whether it is being held together, un-happily.

In the middle of the room is a wooden pallet, on its side. It is held tightly in the eye of its beholder because of an additional layer of thinner scarlet red wood added over its centre part. Equally bashful and vivid Heinemann has given nothing is the end of the world they made a middle, or a fire, or a bright memory in the centre of an exhibition view that gathers all that is foraged into one scene.**

Exhibition photos, top right.

Caspar Heinemann’s nothing is the end of the world they made was on at Vienna’s Kevin Space, running February 23 to March 20, 2016.

Header image: Caspar Heinemann, n​othing is the end of the world they made (2016). E​xhibition view. Photo by Georg Petermichl. Courtesy the artist + Kevin Space, Vienna.

  share news item