Paul Kindersley

Brave new artists in a brave new world for New Material: living in a new material world at A.P.T. Gallery, Mar 9 – Apr 2

6 March 2017

The New Material: living in a new material world group exhibition is on at London’s A.P.T. Gallery, opening March 9 and running to April 2.

Curated by Tyler Mallison, the show “seeks to address the shift in the ‘material world’ from the Gen-X perspective of the mid 1980s; a time of pensive self-awareness and anxiety, to our current new material world; one of 21st century post-truth Trumpist politics and Brexit Britain”.

The show will span installation, performance, sculpture and video, and feature work by international artists, including Mallison, Robert Cervera, Russell Chater, Marieke GelissenPaul KindersleyEdith KollathNika Neelova and Michaela Zimmer who will explore and navigate their experience “against the backdrop of an increasingly challenging climate for expression and artistic production.”

The exhibition is also part of the SLAM (South London Art Map) late-night programme on March 31.

See the A.P.T. Gallery website for details.**

Paul Kindersley, ‘Goodwill Ambassador’, (2016). Video still. Courtesy the artist + APT Gallery, London.
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Liberate yourself from my vice like grip. @ Islington Mill,

11 November 2016

The Liberate yourself from my vice like grip. art and music event is on at Manchester’s Islington Mill on November 12.

Presented by Broken Grey Wires, the event comes in support of the arts organisation that responds to and explores mental health. The press release comes with an extensive list of artists and performers taking part in the one night event, as well as a quote by New Left thinker and author of The Divided Self, psychiatrist RD Laing: “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.”

Artists involved include Lizz Brady, Amy Mizrahi, Jared Pappas-Kelley, and Paul Kindersley, among others, with performances by Mother, ILL, The Yossarians, Shield Patterns, and Andy or Jenny.

See Islington Mill website for details.**

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Living in the Future launch @ Banner Repeater, Feb 28

24 February 2014

A new science fiction zine, Living the future, is launching at London’s Banner Repeater, February 28.

Edited by James Hedges and Rebecca Bligh, Issue 1 is called ‘The Next Phase in Human Evolution‘ and features contributions by Ben Osborn, Viniita Neet Moran, Pete Inkpen, Marta Poznanski, Ed Fornieles, Paul Kindersley, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Ad Minoliti, Llew Watkins, Joey Holder and Jack Brennan.

Caught in a self-perpetuating loop of influence, modern life is as much based on science fiction as science fiction is based on modern life and the journal explores this through “future-writing, to include fiction, essays, poetry and visual art”.

There’s also a call for submissions for Issue 2 at the Living in the future website, which you can also check for event details.

Read an interview with Jaakko Pallasvuo. **

Header image courtesy Ad Minoliti.
Frozen spectacle. Florian Auer @ Kraup

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10 artists Heatsick rates

22 November 2013

A board of blinding lights, the metronomic click of a beat-up CASIO taps against an elastic keyboard loop that stretches and contracts, expands and compresses, across the ebbing tide of space and time. A tiny bottle of Chanel No. 5 materialises, Steven Warwick gingerly squirting its contents on a convulsing audience at the Berghain in Berlin. This is one of several times I’ve seen, felt and absorbed a Heatsick performance but the perfume’s a first.

At the time, I thought it was just another addition to the multi-sensory experience that Warwick strives towards; a bodily transcendence founded on a powerful conceptual bearing. By now I’ve figured otherwise. Said ‘feminine fine fragrance’ reappears, again and again, as a bootlegged ‘climate change’ sweatshirt and the “clear chanel” of his RE-ENGINEERING artist statement, a manifesto of sorts accompanying what he calls the “11 blobs” of his upcoming vinyl release, out through PAN on November 26. “It’s the smell of modernity”.

Warwick is as much a musician as he is an artist and intellectual, the distinction as imperceptible as his life view is malleable. A Berlin-based performer steeped in a visual culture orbiting but not limited to the city, his first full-length as Heatsick is littered with references to the contemporary art discourse and theory that he disrupts, dissects and often parodies, in the same cyclical way that RE-ENGINEERING ends as it begins, if not in a distant, degraded form.

Fellow artist Hanne Lippard’s colourless, disembodied voice preens, over measured exhalations and a crisp melody evoking a dial tone, as she robotically engages in a disintegrating loop of references; speaking, quoting, sloganeering, “black power”, “gay Google”, “what we do is secret”, “labour in the bodily mode”, “second annual trend report”, over a rhythm that is less a groove than a forward lurch. Warwick’s manifesto’s “relentless interconnectivity” carries on, across ideas and ideologies, philosophers and philosophies, even past recordings and present tracks, surfacing and disappearing across its track listing.

“I’ve just really thought about these things, they’re such concerns,” says Warwick through Skype and on tour in Australia, about the ideas and aesthetics that he often explicitly explores, sometimes abuses, on RE-ENGINEERING, “That’s the thing with a lot of network theory and circulation. I’m really trying to link a lot of ideas, or map my own ontology, or even some kind of mode, and I’m trying to think about why I think that. Sometimes, if I see people referencing certain philosophers or schools of thought, and it’s just a bit of a quick joke, you feel a bit short-changed, and not in a particularly subversive way.”

Jesse Garcia purrs, disjointedly in ‘DIAL AGAIN’ emulating the stilted automated voice, deliberately, poorly, over swaggering toms, while Warwick’s voice comes through a far-off megaphone, beneath the noise of a field recording, repeating Lippard’s words (“Modern life is still rubbish, you say. Modern rubbish is still life”) from the beginning, now at the end, as it links into album-closer, ‘ACCELERATIONISTA’ –a circular motion of movement ending up where it began, but different.

“With RE-ENGINEERING, it’s playing around with treating it more like a manual. It’s like, ‘let’s look at these options and maybe you can reprogram yourself to try and get around this dissatisfaction’, or you could just also remould something,” Warwick tells me, following up an email listing ten artists he thinks are doing just that.

***

Ed Lehan is known for his acerbic commentaries on participation and the public event. See his various shows where the opening will consist of a reconstruction of an empty charity box built by the artist, a case of beers, a barrel of mojito and the visitor(s). For the one at a gallery in Tallin [Error 404 at Temnikova & Kasela] he reconstructed an adizone that had been popping up in various parts of London for the Olympics.”

“In Loretta Fahrenholz’s film ‘Ditch Plains’, a street performance group contort in the early hours of a desolate area of East New York, various upscale hotel spaces and an apartment in Manhattan, post-Hurricane Sandy. It’s a strange post-apocalypse zombie HD afrofuturist hypercapitalistic ecological crisis; a networked virus of disconnect.”


Georgie Nettell’s last show [2013 at Reena Spaulings] dealt with notions of recycling, circulation and eco branding. Local dirty dishes were picked up in restaurant bus trays and re-presented in the gallery, images found on the internet were downloaded, distressed and formatted onto raw linen canvases. Her musical group, Plug (with Sian Dorrer), also used a stock image as its cover, confusing the listener as to the public image of the group. “

Plug, Body Story (2011). Album cover.
Plug, Body Story (2011) album cover.

Katja Novitskova uses images found on the internet such as wildlife and prints them out, mounting them in physical space and opening up the notions of documentation, preservation, ecology and materiality. The digital image is itself fuelled by carbon materials and minerals extracted from the earth. Species on the verge of extinction are fed back into image circulation and, in turn, play with the neuro-chemical recognition mechanisms in the viewer’s brain.”

Katja Novitskova, 'Approximation III' (2013). Image courtesy of the artist.
Katja Novitskova, ‘Approximation III’ (2013). Image courtesy of the artist.

Paul Kindersley’s thebritisharecumming YouTube channel  is best viewed left running during a morning after with genuinely bizarre makeup tutorials, presumably also made the morning after (perhaps a satire of the MT genre themselves) at once absurd, daft, unnerving, hilarious and engaging. Current fave: Babes (correct usage).”


Gili Tal presented REAL PAIN FOR REAL PEOPLE [at LimaZulu] as a wall text superimposed by four gestural paintings, evoking haptic gestures and waiting room paintings. The text consisted of the “goriest parts of Marx’s Capital” (itself full of references to Dracula and Frankenstein), written in languages from post-Communist countries and presented with the deceptively friendly aesthetic of an Innocent smoothie, one visitor was heard to have described the show as “Muji Expressionism”.”

Gili Tal, REAL PAIN FOR REAL PEOPLE. Installation view (2013). Photo by Tom Carter.
Gili Tal, REAL PAIN FOR REAL PEOPLE. Installation view (2013). Photo by Tom Carter.

Sabine Reitmaier is a photographer and artist whose work blurs commercial and fine art contexts. Her show [Not comme les autres at Galerie Friedlaender] last year consisted of portraits of models staged in a similar method to how she would present them for the Psychologie Heute covers she also shoots for. In the exhibition, the large format photos confront us, provoking how we make neurological recognitions and associations, down to posing, body language or the coloured backgrounds that Reitmaier herself painted as per a photo shoot.”

Sabine Reitmaier, 'PETIT POIS "CAVIAR VERT"'(2012). Courtesy and @ Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender, Berlin.
Sabine Reitmaier, ‘PETIT POIS “CAVIAR VERT”‘(2012). Courtesy and @ Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender, Berlin.

Hanne Lippard‘s vocal register evokes the automated hold tone of a service centre phonecall and plays with pre-existing imagery found online. Her videos such as ‘Beige’ deploy wordplay and humour to comment upon the hyperreal mundanity of part time work, lifestyles and (non) space.”


Sarah MacKillop‘s Ex Library Book is itself an artist book consisting of fragments of obsolete library books –withdrawn from circulation and sold off at a discounted price onto a discarded heap –presented as a shiny glossy catalogue. Her other artist book, New Stationary Department, consists of various materials found at various stationers, be it neon marker pens or corrective materials such as Tipp-Ex, found in the commercial office, highlighting and reworking notions of editing, work and commercial presentation.”

Ex Library Book by Sara MacKillop. Published by Pork Salad Press (2012).
Ex Library Book by Sara MacKillop. Published by Pork Salad Press (2012). Image courtesy of the artist.

Rachel Reupke deals with HD stock images in videos that, when stripped of its conversations, penetrate an eerie and uncanny atmosphere of social relationships and catalogue-like objects. The warm emotional bond of social relation deployed by advertising is stripped and the viewer is suddenly presented with a cold flat image.In ‘Containing Matters of No Peaceable Colour’ from 2009, the hard gaze confronts the viewer with a series of HD towels while an automated voice proceeds to obsessively list a lifestyle specification quota with the delivery of a Robbe-Grillet novel.” **

Heatsick’s Interiors is out now through Motto Books. RE-ENGINEERING is out on PAN, November 26, 2013.

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