The Body Holes group exhibition is launching online at New Scenario, opening June 3.
The show is the third and most elaborate project run by the digital platform, founded by Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig, and will take the concept treating the natural orifices of the human body as practical exhibition spaces for art. It is a part of this year’s Berlin Bienniale, which runs June 4 to September 18, and you can find it, once launched, in the BB9 online ‘#Fear of Content’ section.
Meanwhile, this solo show comes accompanied by a piece of poetic prose that references writing by the likes of artists Matt Welch and Jenny Holzerand questions ideas of ownership, equality and identity in the midst of an impossible Return to Eden sentiment: “There is no natural world.”
Free postgraduate art course School of the Damnedis presenting its final show, End of Year, at London’s Lewisham Art House, opening March 4 and running to March 13.
The exhibition opens with a performance by Rainham Sheds and will feature the work of its 17 artists working with the programme over the last four years as an alternative higher education programme run “by, and for its students”.
Mimicking the format of an institutional “degree show”, this event is made possible by Lewisham Art House members who collectively rent space and contribute five hours of their time a week to provide an “outward-looking and inclusive programme” on a non-profit basis.
For End of Year, they also share their resources with the School of the Damned which runs “without money, without a bank account, without financial obligation”, instead employing a “labour exchange” for education, in opposition to the trend towards an increasingly privatised and corporatised education system in the UK and other parts of the world.
Artists involved in the School of the Damned programme –which has included a group show called SCHOOLin Leicester last year –are Matt Welch, Jack Fisher, Victoria Fornieles, Anastasia Shin, Jake Kent and Robert Fung among others.
Group exhibition, No Need to Hunt – We Just Wait for the Roadkill curated by Paul Barsch brought together the work of eight artists at Dresden’s S T O R E from September 26 to October 10, 2015. Inanimate sculptures and objects sit quietly in conversation with one another; their potential power as vehicles of speech feels fragile and self aware. The accompanying text, and this segment in particular, is integral to the reading of the exhibition:
/fresh meat with zero exhaustion/ is not exactly true, at least it shouldn’t be. Immaterial labour is real labour and going beyond just looking and repeating requires precision and focus. Laid back is fine, but remember, I scroll too and I can see if you’ve been lazy; in fact, I want to see you exhausted. But in the back of our minds, always: how fresh is this roadkill anyway?
The show’s installation photos capture Kai Hügel‘s ‘Iced Herbs’ as they begin to thaw. LED lights and various vietnamese herbs emerge from within the frozen casing. A light leak begins to permeate the floor, moistening Dorota Gaweda & Eglé Kulbokaité‘s deteriorating aubergine skins. Dotted at random around the room and dissected in half, the vegetables lay splayed out over a hashtag text piece stuck to the floor that reads “CaptiveCEOsToBeReturnedToTheWild”. Michele Gabriele‘s ‘SHITTY-SLIPPY-SLUTTY (A beautiful and dangerous night)’, sits firmly in relation to the rest of the light and somewhat ephemeral works. The crystallised body sits somewhere between a rock formation you might see in a cave and an oversized piece of quartz used for spiritual healing. The pigment mixes with the surrounding moisture, dying the floor blue and purple. Protruding from the side, a PREDATOR knife sticks out from the sculpture’s gut.
Similar in size and shape, Burkhard Beschow‘s ‘Holes’ feels skeletal in relation. Wire, metal parts and cloth are tangled in a violent mess. The letter ‘E’, among other unidentifiable pieces of debris, is suspended in some sort of barbed wire trapping. Jake Kent‘s ‘Dropping the A Bomb’ and ‘Hanging out in someone else’s puddle’ pile political slogans in a heap on the floor. Silk screen patches yelling “DESTROY EVERYTHING” and “KILL YOUR INNER COP” are sewn into the digital prints and silk viscose velvet. The handmade tassels have a tender quality, bringing to mind the lengthy and invested form of obscure labour within activism. Alexander Endrullat‘s ‘Unibody’ places a MacBook on a step and in safe distance from the damp floor. Plugged in and fully charged, it has been permanently welded shut and rendered a completely useless object.
On the other side of the room, a printed text winds around a roll of toilet paper by Camilla Steinum. With some difficulty, bits and pieces can be read: “Dirt comes out via the mouth…again and again unprocessed and embarrassing…trying to find meaning…the words, worlds.” The print feels strongly connected to the accompanying text, stringing the exhibition together by a thread of poetic-manifesto styled musings.**
Leicester’s Two Queens is putting on the group exhibition Too Much which will be running at their gallery space from October 2 to October 25.
Taking up the topic of emotions and expression in the art world and in media at large, Too Much focuses in on the “emotive and affective properties of artistic expression”, featuring contemporary practices that work to respond to emotional stimuli, “replac[ing] cynicism, disillusion and apathy with rage, fear and love”. Based out of the gallery’s re-launch of Leicester’s collection of German Expressionist art, the exhibition aims to explore how the internet – and media or technology at large – has transformed how artists express themselves.
When Arcadia Missa co-founder and THE ANGRY SHOW curator Rózsa Farkasaccidentally emailed me her “secret planning pdf”, I was confused by the artwork descriptions like “perhaps the goetse vid and the text she wrote on the modern phallic subject in htsf, in vinyl on the wall” for Jesse Darling’s ‘Mouf’ (2013) video. Assuming there was a reason for presenting the exhibition information sheet in such an unfinished manner (where a ‘?’ stood in place of an actual closing date), I asked Farkas if I could use the piece below, being drawn to how it called attention to the connotations of a given font: the delicate and graceful Chancery for “feelings”, clumsy and awkward Comic Sans for “the lonely sad girl” and dark Gil San Ultra Bold for “Other”. It turned out to be a very old draft curatorial plan.
Nonetheless, Farkas said I could use it but asked that I clarify how the writing came about, “cos like – they aint proper sentences ahahaa <3 <3”. In the context of THE ANGRY SHOW, though –where the didactics are scrawled in black felt tip over white walls and Jake Kent quotes UK punks Crass in ‘Do they owe us a living? ‘Course they fuckin’ do‘ (2013) –it’s sort of fitting.
Because between Aimee Heinemann’s gleefully low-brow reference to Chris Crocker’s emotional plea in ‘Alter (Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels)’ (2013), with “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE” spray painted on a survival blanket, and Rachel Lord’s tribute to the pink ‘girl’ Angry Bird in ‘Stella with flowers’ (2013), THE ANGRY SHOW already willingly rejects the “refinement, delicacy, or sensitivity” that Kent’s ‘crass’ is defined as being lacking in.
This is an exhibition that refuses the political structures that not only dictate one’s social worth via externally defined acceptable behaviours but determine its very aesthetic. To Melika Ngombe Kolongo & Daniella Russo’s ‘Unintended Circumstances‘ (2013) video, Farkas says, one viewer at the Sydney exhibition commented that the work, drenched in radiance and depicting the curb Florida teen Trayvon Martin was gunned down on, doesn’t look very “angry” at all.
“If we think about crying selfies and lonely girls, we begin to see a hierarchy in the deployment of affect: the Other cannot embody anger as part of their affect/subjectivity”, she explains. THE ANGRY SHOW refuses that hierarchy and “welcomes rage”. **