Agatha 1.2.0.1 takes place in two parts. Split across Center, Berlin, and the Berlin Hilton, the project explores the possibilities created by Agatha Valkyrie Ice; a post-gender, digital-only figure, given form in ‘Chapter 1’ through sculptures, digital prints and scents, and in ‘Chapter 2’, the carefully-staged cavorting of a cast of pastel-clad androdgynous nymphs, sharing a room in the Berlin Hilton with themselves and further works.
‘Chapter 1’ was exhibited at Center, from the April 2 to 23; uncompromisingly synthetic materials providing the canvas for similarly un-artisanal modes of production, with PVC as a canvas for digital prints, lasercut cabling casing above careful messes of odour – patchouli and Red Bull, dead flowers and bathwater.
Each chapter carefully references the other; the Hilton logo appearing in wall-based prints, spoiled bath-towels coiled in the patches of disorder that seem to illustrate the prints and sculptures they lie beside. They’re the outcome of a collaboration between Berlin-based artists Clémence de la Tour du Pin, Dorota Gaweda and Egle Kulbokaite. A shared preoccupation with the reshuffling of conventional exhibition spaces sees them co-opting the styled, gauche anonymity of a semi-luxury hotel room in ‘Chapter 2’, for a performance/exhibition that exists only in its online documentation.
Skinny boys and girls in turtle-necks preen and sniff one another – the specially made smells (contributed by International Flavors & Fragrances) that constitute part of the controlled messes in ‘Chapter 1’ clearly at play here – in an environment totally and consciously removed from sensory physical experience. The other artworks blend in with the stainless steel and marble effect well enough that the ubiquitous uncanny of the hotel room is thrown into starker-than normal relief, through the screen. **
The Agatha 1.2.0.1 project was on at Berlin’s Center, running April 2 to 23, 2015.
Header image: Dorota Gaweda, Egle Kulbokaite and Clémence de La Tour du Pin, Agatha 1.2.0.1 @ Hilton (29), 2015.