Dynamic and performative time-based exhibition platform New Scenarioand “post-gender avatar” Agatha Valkyrie Ice are presenting the Episode 4: Bathroom installation at Münchenstein, Switzerland’s Oslo10on November 24.
Episode 4: Bathroom comes with little additional information aside from a text with its focus on the digestive tract, including an excerpt that goes as follows:
“…Ai is closely related to the mouth and hand, which are also organs strongly controlled by the sexopolitical campaign against masturbation and homosexuality in the nineteenth century. The anus has no gender.”
The show’s press release comes in the form of an all-caps rambling description of an unknown narrator’s first trip on Jimson weed seeds that begins at a party and ends in a mental coffin somewhere on his/her friend’s couch the next day.
“Remembering the common source that binds us all…” writes artist Tore Wallert, in a press release text-poem introducing the Jurassic Haze exhibition, running at Berlin’s Center space, from December 19 to March 15. He’s one of seven contributors to the project that’s led by Antoine Renard and literally smeared with the creams and liquids that make up our contemporary experience, as envisioned through a “Dove lotion coating installation” that draws in a world of dirt and synthetics, augmented realities and screens of all sizes.
A suspended watermelon rotates at the centre of a shifting circle on a large LED screen in a corner as a monstrously distorted voice quotes an Apple Store description of a product that configures “an entire computer system on a single chip” in Renard’s ‘iWatch HD’ (2015). Pink and white walls are met with pink and white ceiling lights, while Wallert’s site-specific installation ‘Amanda’ (2015) hides in the bathroom. Fresh mint leaves and their stalks fill the sink and the floor, lying squashed and stepped on over white tiles daubed with blue ink and scattered with soda bottles. Dense and dirty imitation Dove body lotion containers made up of clear resin and sprinkled with “girlfriend dust” are perched next to low black metal benches, their milky body cream contents smudged across wall-length windows that someone’s signed with a finger. A diptych of digital prints by Renard and Sandra Vaka Olsen hang on a wall, the shattered screen picture fragments made up of lines of electricity that collide in shared tones and become form within their frames.
Camouflage-themed VR goggles hang by wires from the ceiling across from a matching jacket –dubbed ‘geek dress’ in its image file –with virtual views to Kate Sansom and Timur Si Qin‘s ‘Nissan Yoghurty’ (2015) rendering of a vast and empty gallery. There’s an eerie montage of violent home footage in Anthony Salvador‘s ‘DONTBRINGAKNIFE2AFISTFIGHT’ (2014) digital video, where you’re not just a viewer but an accomplice, while Grégoire Blunt and Emmy Skensved‘s (who recently completed eStamina) ‘center_H264_2000px_1500kbps_ACC’ (2015) presents a CGI room with a view. You can watch through the plant leaves that look like they’re weed, across to a simulation of water that swells to the icy beats and melodic computer-chimes of a corporatised environment that’s completely lost touch with what’s real. **
Center is bringing a new exhibition by Antoine Renard titled Jurassic Haze to close out the year, running at their Berlin space from December 18 to February 14.
Left to the elements, artworks are vulnerable to weathering, theft or destruction. Scattered across the Grunewald nature reserve on the Western outskirts of Berlin, the first intervention of Stoneroses – an ongoing project by Santiago Taccetti and Mirak Jamal in collaboration with Center for Project Space Festival Berlin -is subject to the same conditions. Though it will be documented and posted online, much of what will take place during the exhibition will not be witnessed. With no scheduled ending, no maps and no physical bounds, one may view Stoneroses by joining one of their tours, or by stumbling upon it.
At the tour meeting point, some visitors wait with blissful expressions, not noticing the time. Others wave their smartphones around in the air and bitch about connectivity until the second tour kicks-off, one and a half hours later than advertised. The show exists in a state of flux, the results of which will be seen, the causes largely imagined, its contingency is virtual.
In a grass clearing between the glittering dune – a remnant of the area’s former incarnation as a sand mine – and a small lake, a common house plant emerges from a swirl of freshly turned earth. Among the muted greens of the native foliage surrounding it, Steffen Bunte‘s decorative perennial looks conspicuous, almost artificial. Its green gives off a toxic glare and the dark sandy earth exposed by its recent installation looks purple against the plastic sheen of its stem. The plant’s leaves are laser engraved with product descriptions from the BMW i electric and hybrid car division. Slick slogans, ‘pure impulse’, ‘life modul’, ‘eco resort’, ‘add-on mobility’ become stand-ins for an urban attitude towards nature. Though made of the same ‘materials’, the urbanite has the feeling of being extraneous or even toxic to the ‘natural environment’. The impression is a posture, an attitude of plastic.
Several hundred metres away and dangling on a wire strung from a branch is Aleksander Hardashnakov‘s ‘Freud Diablo 1’. A few objects twist and turn; the red blade of a circular saw, metal washers, something that looks like a piece of cuttlefish or a mango seed wrapped in gauze. The materiality is rustic, it suits the nature around it, so much so that against the texture and noise of the forest – the leafy undergrowth and optical trickery of shapes in nature – the work sways, limply dissolving into the scene.
We walk on.
A herd of colourful joggers pass by. Our attention turns skywards. Tethered high to the long straight trunks of several pine trees is “World is all of one skin” a work by Ivana Basic. Several cushions are fixed to pole-like tree trunks with wide elastic straps that cinch the cushions through their middles, giving them the posture of a body being slogged in the guts. Basic has marked the satin cushion covers, of an indefinite, visceral colour, with inkjet prints of patterns from her own skin. Their colour, a purplish tone not usually associated with a forest landscape, accords to certain hues of the pine trunks and yet their texture and their fabric pops off the bark. They have the quality of exposure. As if they were objects that have been yanked from the tree’s interior and placed out on display.
The din of trailing conversations is covered by the sound of leaves crushing underfoot. Laid on the forest floor, Jamal’s two part work, ‘Walks in the park – Screenshot 6:20’ is in a process of embedding itself into the scene. As video abstracted into sculpture, the pieces – depicting a negative and a positive of the same distilled image – play with binary as a process of convergence/divergence. The first piece, cast in MDF, is set into the dry leaf floor as if it had been uncovered there. It has a fossil-like quality. The other piece, cast in resin, cracks and crumbles like a non-biodegradable polymer sheet. Both pieces point to an idea about lasting through time.
Almost immediately we come across Taccetti’s ‘Everything that isn’t me’. White plastic rip-ties fixed around tree branches somewhat mimic the trees own spindly brown limbs, jutting out at obtuse angles, mixing in with foliage of other plants to form layered patterns against the sky. The more recent adjunct, unlike the tree’s own, organic, appendages, are straight, white and plastic; reminiscent of prosthetic limbs. Each plastic strip is laser-engraved with the work’s title. Taccetti tells us that this was Einstein’s response to the question, “what is the environment?”, and that this sentence is something of a marker for the entire project. The binary pretends to offer an unambiguous idea of ‘nature’, yet the definition is constantly shifting. From your own perspective you are not ‘environment’, for everybody else, you are.
Walking from piece to piece, nature and art battle for attention. Anything (other than you) could be an artwork; a pock-marked ant-hill, a mossy log, a cluster of yellow mushrooms. At first, the sounds of electric guitar riffs come across as another native element of the forest. We pass by Rubén Grilo‘s jokey riff on the proverb, “If a tree falls in a forest” with his work ‘If Nobody Laughs’ depicting adjacent trees sharing a flat joke about pigs, at an accelerating pace. Perhaps it is the time of day, or perhaps it is to do with our proximity to coeval.gen.in (Clemence de La Tour du Pin and Antoine Renard)’s ‘Seasons in the Abyss’ a continuous six-hour performance of a guitarist practising Slayer songs.
The forest and the tour starts feeling hectic, epic. Nuzzling a papery log, Anthony Salvador‘s ‘http://goo.gl/maps/yeqU3 (I come from a long line of death)’, looks like something somebody has left behind. A time capsule of found objects in a semi-opaque plastic bag. Someone pokes at the objects inside, “a rear-view mirror… sand… is that a dead frog?” We leave the frenzy behind. Sandra Vaka Olsen‘s ‘Transfer Stick Leaf’, two copper sculptures stretch from the ground, bending over ferns like an echo. The sleek metal forms are bedecked with abstract, green toned UV epoxy prints of a leaf with water drops. The piece plays with the aesthetics of what it will become, when the copper oxidises, when it will be covered in morning dew. The piece looks magical, harmonious now, when the sun goes down it will glow.
Returning to ‘base’ the sky is ablaze. A new group is waiting for the next tour. One visitor drains the dregs of red wine from his plastic cup, casts a gaze into the darkening pine forest and says, “Blair Witch project space…” Leaving the reserve, the experience of the exhibition’s final installation, ‘Finding something nice while looking for something else’ by Zuzanna Czebatul, is everything that it promises to be. A heavy concrete bench, standing at the mouth of the forest. **