SALTS

Three exhibitions @ SALTS, Jun 16 – Aug 28

14 June 2016

Three exhibitions will open at SALTS in Birsfelden, opening June 16 and running to August 28.

The first space, organised by SALTS curators Samuel Leuenberger and Elise Lammer will see a duo exhibition by Owen Piper and Lili Reynaud-Dewar called on how to talk dirty and influence people. It promises the offer of a rich show, glittered in the biographical, and hinting at a retrospective conversation between the two artists, who have known each other for decades.

The second, My History of Flows, is by Lena Henke who will use water to change the interior and exterior architecture of the exhibition space. The third, curated by New York-based artist and poet Harry Burke will feature the work of Penny GoringLorraine O’GradyLady PinkArleen Schloss and Martine Syms and is titled Works Off Paper.

The artists, whose work will be installed in SALTS’ ‘Printed Room’, have practices that span what the short text describes as ‘multimodality’ in relation to the word: Fragments of text exist as images in circulation as much as they exist as conjunctions of syntax, metre, person.

See the SALTS website for more information on each show.**

Lene Henke (studio visit) where she showed everything outside her studio (2014). Courtesy the artist and Spike Art Magazine
Lene Henke (studio visit) where she showed everything outside her studio (2014). Courtesy the artist and Spike Art Magazine.

 

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Hagar Schimdhalter + Flaka Haliti @ SALTS, Apr 21 – May 27

20 April 2016

Hagar Schimdhalter and Flaka Haliti are presenting their respective exhibitions at Birsfelden’s SALTS, opening April 21 and running May 27.

Although there is no information to accompany either show, in Basel-based Schmidhalter’s Fuji Colour Garden we may expect to see prints and imagery with cool yet uncertain narratives and a real stillness to them.

In My Gravity Slipped Away Munich-based, Kosovo-born Haliti’s fleeting image comes with the shows’ announcements —large, welded structures that look a bit like waves and music despite their rigidity.

Haliti, who has shown at New York’s Ludlow 38 and for the Kosovo Pavillion at 2015’s Venice Biennale has been described as making work that desires something less ironic and more easy.

See the SALTS exhibition page for (limited) details of both shows.**

Flaka Haliti, I see a face (2014). Courtesy the artist
Flaka Haliti, ‘I see a face’ (2014). Courtesy the artist.
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Peles Empire + Sol Calero @ SALTS, Apr 4 – May 25

3 April 2015

B’s SALTS gallery is bringing two simultaneous solo exhibitions by Peles Empire and Sol Calero to its Birsfelden space where they will run from April 4 until May 25.

Peles Empire, the collaborative moniker of German artists Katharina Stoever and Romanian-born Barbara Wolff, opens with their new show, Mutant. The ‘Empire’ – inspired by the Frankensteinian stylistic evolutions of the Peles Castle, found at the foothills of the Carpathians – takes the castle as its subject, exploring the process of reinvention and reproduction, recreating its rooms from A3 digital prints of photographs.

Also showing at SALTS is a solo exhibition by Venezuelan-born and Berlin-based artist Sol Calero titled El Buen Vecino. Calero runs the project space Kinderhook & Caracas with her husband Christopher Kline, named after their two hometowns.

See the Mutant and the El Buen Vecino exhibition pages for details. **

sol

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CLOSER SCRUB + STRÖME @ SALTS, Jan 31 – Mar 13

30 January 2015

Birsfelden’s SALTS is opening two simultaneous exhibitions tomorrow – Gina Folly‘s and Mandla Reuter‘s STRÖME and Tyra Tingleff‘s CLOSER SCRUB – both running from January 31 to March 13.

The Swiss gallery’s two exhibition spaces will be taken up by the separate shows, each prepared with its own curatorial team. In Space 1, Folly and Reuter exhibit STRÖME, drafted by curator Fabian Schöneich and guided by the surreal installations of their past works to collaborate on a joint exhibition.

In Space 2, Berlin-based artist Tingleff exhibits their new oil-on-raw linen paintings in CLOSER SCRUB, curated by artist and curator Samuel Leuenberger and Elise Lammer, who worked together previously on the Association Now exhibition at SALTS this fall.

See the SALTS exhibition page for details. **

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Events + exhibitions, Jan 26 – Feb 1

26 January 2015

CTM and Transmediale 2015 kick off in Berlin this week, while Art Genève is also running in Geneva, and will include Arcadia Missa and Preteen Gallery as exhibitors with work by Amalia Ulman and Babak Ghazi; Phoebe Collings-James, Deanna Havas and Leslie Kulesh,  respectively.

Events in Berlin around CTM include performances by Evian Christ, Young Lean and 18+ (who are also doing a few dates across Europe), as well as a collaborative concert with Transmediale on the weekend. Sandy Brown is hosting its ☁︎ cave kino screening in the city outside of that, while in London Paul Kneale and Natalie Dray have solo openings, and Candice JacobsEXHALE  (to her earlier INHALE at Project/Number) is opening in Liverpool.

Elsewhere there’s another double-opening at Birsfelden’s SALTS, an exhibition in Reykjavík including work by Sæmundur Þór Helgason and another group show at Johannesburg’s The Goodman Gallery featuring work by Candice Brietz and Mikhael Subotzky among others.

There’s more so see below:

EVENTS

Transmediale 2015, Jan 28 – Feb 1

☁︎ cave kino @ Sandy Brown, Jan 28

18+ @ WesterLiefde/WesterUnie, Jan 29

Evian Christ, Suicideyear @ Berghain, Jan 29

Art Genève, Jan 29 – Feb 1

CTM & transmediale Collaborative Concert I @ HKW, Jan 30

(3rd) CONTACT @ Xperience, Jan 30

Open House @ Crown Building Studios, Jan 30

Rachel Rose @ V4ULT, Jan 30

Yung Lean & Sad Boys, 18+ @ YAAM Berlin, Jan 31

Paramount Ranch 2, Jan 31 – Feb 1

18+ @ V ARE, Feb 1

OPENINGS

Anne de Boer @ Desktop Residency, Jan 26 – Feb 14

Paul Kneale @ Evelyn Yard, Jan 27 – Feb 17

Yulan Grant @ Paradise Garage, Jan 28

Other People’s Memories @ The Goodman Gallery, Jan 28

Simon Davenport @ Trampoline, Jan 29

Laura Aldridge @ Tramway, Jan 29 – Mar 22

Julien Bismuth @ Galerie Emanuel Layr, Jan 29 – Mar 14

Natalie Dray @ Cell Project Space, Jan 29 – Mar 8

Lithium @ MilMa, Jan 30 – Feb 22

Candice Jacobs @ Cactus, Jan 30 – Feb 22

CLOSER SCRUB + STRÖME @ SALTS, Jan 31 – Mar 13

Yung Lean & Sad Boys, 18+ @ YAAM Berlin, Jan 31

#KOMASVO @ Listasafn ASÍ, Jan 31 – Mar 1

**

See here for exhibitions opening last week.

Header image: (3rd) CONTACT @ Xperience.

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Associations New @ SALTS (2014) exhibition photos

18 November 2014

An 18th-century bourgeois salon-hang for the 21st-century privilege of art production. The material parallels between the seemingly long-outdated practice of showing off a painting collection to friends and business associates in the semi-private surounds of a French living room and the nature of art display via a desktop are uncannily similar. That’s something curators Samuel Leuenberger and Elise Lammer picked up on with “cluster hung painting show” Associations New at Birsfelden’s SALTS, running from October 4 to December 8.

Associations New (2014) a cluster hung painting show @ SALTS. Installation view. Photos by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the gallery.
Associations New (2014) a cluster hung painting show @ SALTS. Installation view. Photos by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the gallery.

Featuring the work of 25 artists from their personal networks, Leuenberger and Lammer sought contributions of one to three paintings – from gouache on paper, egg-tempera, acrylic and oil on canvas – under 50 x 50 cm, to be hung in the kind of clusters that reduce the relevance of an individual work to being only an element of a greater display of an Enlightened household’s cultural (and economic) wealth. Now compare that with the appropriated images of a private blog or Tumblr scroll, where a personal aesthetic is publicly presented via online networks that are restricted to an audience educated in a particular cultural language, with access to and an understanding of the internet.

In the photos from Associations New, only a handful of them feature the credited work of individual arists, including Charlotte Herzig‘s ‘Landscape, the sun is actually red’ (2014) and Henning Strassburger‘s ‘o.T’ (2014), that yells “LOOK WHAT I PAINT” in black scrawl through the lurid pink and black noise of oil and acrylic. The rest are reduced to an ‘installation view’ of wall-hung paintings by the likes of Max Brand, Claudia Comte, Thomas Jeppe, Jan Kiefer and more, while a link to Pauline Beaudemont‘s concurrent L’Age D’or exhibition next door comes in two square concrete ‘chairs’, designed for the almost empty garage cubicles outside.

Associations New (2014) a cluster hung painting show @ SALTS. Installation view. Photos by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the gallery.
Associations New (2014) a cluster hung painting show @ SALTS. Installation view. Photos by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the gallery.

Each block seat features a quote from a film and a fiction work: one from Jacques Tati epic Play Time (1967) on a future vision of Parisian modernity and the other from objectivist Ayn Rand’s famous novel The Fountainhead. It’s taken from the part of the book where vulgar publisher and passionate private art collector Gail Wynand offers indvidualistic modernist architect a contract while announcing, “You will take your spectacular talent and make it subservient to the taste of the masses.”

As per the press release, the ‘salon’ concept also refers to the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Salon de Paris, initiated by Louis XIV in 1667. This idea of ceiling-to-floor presentations of paintings was developed in response to lack of space and became not only an exhibition of wealth but an instrument of political power. These days that display comes in the manner of privately-funded public institutions, branded art fairs and corporatised content-sharing platforms. **

Associations New group exhibition is on at Birsfelden’s SALTS, running October 4 to December 8, 2015.

Header image: Associations New (2014) a cluster hung painting show @ SALTS. Installation view. Photos by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the gallery.

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read the room/you’ve got to @ SALTS, Jun 19 – Jul 21

11 June 2014

The read the room / you’ve got to group show is taking place at Birsfelden, Switzerland’s SALTS space, running June 19 to July 21.

Drawing inspiration from the artists-architects-poets group the Reversible Destiny Foundation and pulling a quote from founders Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ The Mechanism of Meaning, the exhibition comes as part of curator and poet Quinn Latimer‘s The Printed Room begun in 2013.

As a program based on “changing exhibitions of printed material and a series of literary-minded readings, lectures, concerts, and performances” this instalment will feature the work of a number of prominent artists and writers, including Etel Adnan, John Kelsey of Bernadette Corporation, and Karl Holmqvist, as well as Sophie Jung, Paul Kneale, Harry Burke and Megan Rooney.

See the SALTS Facebook event page for details. **

 

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BRANDS – CONCEPT/AFFECT/MODULARITY @ SALTS, Apr 6 – May 21

28 April 2014

Group exhibition BRANDS – CONCEPT/AFFECT/MODULARITY is running at Birsfelden’s SALTS, April 6 to May 21.

Curated by Lunch Bytes organiser Melanie Bühler and featuring artists Kari Altmann, Florian Auer, David Jablonowski, Pierre LumineauMetahaven, Pamela Rosenkranz and Anne de Vries, the exhibition explores the highly problematic position of corporatised images and commodity branding-as-art aesthetic.

By “intensifying the value of their own visual capital”, adapting the embedded codes and signifiers of the networked image, artists identify and interrogate “the surfaces, visual regimes and aesthetic potentials of branded goods”, ultimately questioning the blurred border between adaptation and reproduction; critique and collusion.

Read a review of David Jablonowski and see the SALTS website for details. **

Kari Altmann, “Ttoshibaa- 10,000 Impressions” (2009 - ongoing). Photo by Gunnar Meier.
Kari Altmann, “Ttoshibaa- 10,000 Impressions” (2009 – ongoing). Photo by Gunnar Meier.
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