Temnikova & Kasela

Merike Estna @ Temnikova & Kasela, Sep 4 – Oct 31

3 September 2015

London-based artist Merike Estna‘s Corporate Jungle solo exhibition is opening at Temnikova & Kasela gallery for its fifth anniversary party, running September 4 to October 31.

Presenting a new Slip Off painting series and an installation called ‘I’m a bit out of sync but next time I’ll do better, I promise’, Estna takes an online messenger service Sticker Store as inspiration for her ongoing exploration of painting as a medium in parallel to these digital modes.

Pondering what the press release calls “the idea of a surface as a means of communication” the Corporate Jungle and its concept lingers between ideas of “the abstract and the overly representational”.

See Temnikova & Kasela website for details. **

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Sophie Jung, New Waiting (2015) exhibition photos

22 June 2015

Some would say that to be a woman is to long. For what exactly it is difficult to say; the target shifts continually as one approaches. In New Waiting, a recent collaboration between artist Sophie Jung and curator Juste Kostikovaite, the idea of longing is taken as the starting point. More specifically: female longing in the digital age, which is a new, headless kind of beast.

The installation is introduced with a scene with Vladimir and Estragon from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, but the latter name is replaced with Estrogen. Otherwise, the words remain intact. The replacement of Estragon with Estrogen is telling: Estragon is the fall guy, the dunce, the complainer and the forgetter—the shameless one. That the role of the stupider, weaker character is replaced with the hormone integral to “femaleness” is telling and sets the stage for Jung’s “private onesie-purgatory of infinite, weightless waiting”.

VLADIMIR:
It’s for the kidneys. (Silence. Estrogen looks attentively at the tree.) What do we do now?

ESTROGEN:
Wait.

VLADIMIR:
Yes, but while waiting.

ESTROGEN:
What about hanging ourselves?

VLADIMIR:
Hmm. It’d give us an erection.

ESTROGEN:
(highly excited). An erection!

VLADIMIR:
With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That’s why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?

ESTROGEN:
Let’s hang ourselves immediately!

VLADIMIR:
From a bough? (They go towards the tree.) I wouldn’t trust it.

ESTROGEN:
We can always try.

Sophie Jung from Laura Oks on Vimeo.

The Luxembourg-born and London-based artist’s practice routinely addresses representation and its pitfalls, both personal and cultural, as seen in DOUBLE, her joint exhibition with Shana Moulton, and her performances from Learning About Heraldry at Ceri Hand Gallery. With New Waiting, Jung turns her sharp eye to the tropes of historicised feminine obsession, examining what it means to be a woman and to long in the modern world in a new “virtually emoticised” state of waiting. Smart but water-damaged devices wait in heaps of uncooked rice at the gallery floor while its walls are filled with the echoes of a yodel, understood as “an ancient alternative to the high-frequency 24/7 just-aboutness of fb/twitter/insta/gmail messaging hysteria”.

Exhibition photos, top right.

New Waiting by Sophie Jung ran at Tallinn’s Temnikova & Kasela from March 3 to May 3, 2015.

Header image: Sophie Jung, press photo portrait. Image courtesy artist.

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Frieze New York 2015, May 14 – 17

13 May 2015

Frieze Art Fair New York is back for another round in the US city, running from May 14 to 17.

As always, the fair brings a dizzying slew of exhibitors and events. And for all its union labour woes (now resolved), it always brings some great emerging artists looking to break into the art world.

This year, exhibitors include: Berlin’s Croy Nielsen (with Olga Balema, Marlie Mul and Sebastian Black, among others); Real Fine Arts (with Yuji Agematsu); C L E A R I N G (with Harold Ancart and Calvin Marcus, as well as Korakrit Arunanondchai); The Breeder (with Andreas Angelidakis); The Third Line (with Sophia Al-Maria); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler (with Katja Novitskova, Slavs and Tatars, and Guan Xiao); and Temnikova & Kasela (with Kris Lemsalu).

Happening alongside the exhibitions are a series of talks (including Next Top Models: New Forms of Artists’ Collectives on May 14 with Abdullah Al-Mutairi (of GCC) and Dena Yago (of K-HOLE), hosted by Alex Provan).

Also taking simultaneously taking place is the annual NADA, bringing in exhibitors like Smart Objects (with Michael Manning), Evelyn Yard (with Héctor Arce-Espasas and Paul Kneale), and The Sunday Painter with Leo Fitzmaurice.

See the Frieze website and the NADA website for details. **

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NADA New York, May 9–11

8 May 2014

Happening in parallel to Frieze week, the third edition of NADA New York is running in the city, May 9 to 11.

Showcasing emerging international art and artists across various locations annually, including Cologne, Miami and Hudson, the NYC program features a presentation of interactive art projects from San Juan’s Beta-Local and Detroit’s MOCAD, as well as a site-specific installation in a Ford Galaxie 500 by Shoot the Lobster, including work by Lena Henke and Marie Karlberg of M/L Artspace and Bradley Kronz.

There’ll be gallerist tours of the exhibition and a “marathon reading” of contemporary poetry on May 10, including Sophia Le Fraga, Ben Fama and Deanna Havas.

Galleries exhibiting include Temnikova & Kasela, Interstate Exports, Tomorrow Gallery, Regina Rex, M+B, ltd los angeles, Invisible-Exports, Et al. and London’s The Sunday Painter showing work by Hannah Perry.

See the NADA New York website for details. **

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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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