Import Projects

aqnb x Video in Common x Import Projects screening: A rundown

11 March 2016

Last Friday, on March 4, aqnb editor Jean Kay, and Video in Common (ViC) founder Caroline Heron visited Berlin’s Import Projects to present a screening and short discussion with the title, ‘The Future Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed’ —inspired by the William Gibson interview quote from an article in The Economist.

As harbinger to an ongoing collaboration with Import, we shared some of the inspiration behind our ongoing video editorial partnership, available to view at the ViC YouTube account, with a selection of films that also address the theme.

The event featured two aqnb/Video in Common editorial commissions with Monira Al Qadiri and Steven Warwick, as well as video and performance work screened by kind permission of Ulijona OdišarijaJ.G. Biberkopf (courtesy Sonic Acts 2016), Tabita RezaireMaximilian Schmoetzer and Hannah Black. The aim of the programming was to interrogate the systems and infrastructures embedded in the internet and how these affect distribution, flows of information and power.

Steve Warwick (from the floor) #thefutureishere

A photo posted by @aqnb on

At a time when it is becoming increasingly apparent that the global and democratising potential of the internet has been and continues to be restricted by surveillance, commercialisation and imperial neglect, the aim of the ‘The Future Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed’ screening was to explore its implications on art and artists on a political and economic, social and personal level. Where Rezaire advocates for challenging the visual aesthetics of exploitative structures and narratives of  a western-centric internet via projects like WikiAfrica in her ‘AFRO CYBER RESISTANCE’ video essay, Schmoetzer presents the insipid effects of branding and corporatisation on mediated experience in ‘Preliminary Material for 2022’. And while Al Qadiri questions the construction of narrative fictions throughout history up to the newly established “heritage of oil” in the Gulf and its alliances with a largely English-based web and economic culture, Warwick explores an imaged reality through Google Maps renderings of the Californian landscape that teems with a history that’s couched in “dotcom neoliberalism”.

The conversation to follow touched on some of these themes, as well as the multi-dimensional nature of so-called ‘internet culture’ and the necessity for open discourse and communication across platforms —online, offline, and beyond.

Below are the full videos and excerpts of the films screened in their running order:

Ulijona Odisarija, ‘Browser Windows’ (2014). [36:43 min].

London-based Lithuanian artist Ulijona Odišarija presents a half-hour mix of music across media distribution platforms to produce an unsettling mash-up of mainstream popular culture, tourist videos and self-made social media celebrities to express a fragmented worldview through the ‘eyes’ of the web host.

Monira Al Qadiri: ‘Portraits of the End of the World’ (2015). [7:46min].

Amsterdam-via-Japan-and-Beirut-based Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri explores history as construction in a contemporary milieu of global capital and linguistic imperialism. In an age of networked communication, driven by the internet, the role of the English language and corporate branding becomes central to economic development and rapid cultural change in regions like the Gulf.

Tabita Rezaire, ‘AFRO CYBER RESISTANCE’ (2015). [18:25 min].

Johannesburg-based, French-Guyanese-Danish artist Tabita Rezaire explores the social, cultural and political context of online and networked art hegemony as one replicating ongoing colonial interests and othering of African narratives. Using Wiki Africa as a starting point, she presents an argument for a critical awareness of the world wide web as one controlled by exploitative western concerns and a need for digital resistance.

Steven Warwick: ‘A Postcard from LA‘ (2015). [7:23 min].

In this part anecdote, part observation video piece, Berlin-based British artist Steven Warwick (aka Heatsick) relays his experience of Los Angeles and its surrounds while on residency at German-US exchange programme Villa Aurora in 2015. Here he takes the viewer on a tour of the Californian region via Google Maps and muses on the self-actualisation narratives and neoliberal ideology that dominate its Silicon Valley tech culture.

Maximilian Schmoetzer, ‘Preliminary Material for 2022’ (2015). [9:17min].

Berlin-based German artist Maximilian Schmoetzer presents the dominant narrative of capitalism and corporate culture through a visually striking video where the empty absurdity of branded content, advertising taglines and entertainment tropes threaten to engulf human experience and potentially destroy its very existence.

J.G. Biberkopf performance at Sonic Acts 2016. [2:00 min, excerpt]. Courtesy Sonic Acts, Amsterdam.

Vilnius-based Lithuanian artist J.G. Biberkopf interrogates the images and technologies of the so-called Anthropocene era through live A/V performance. His work defines the mediated human experience through conceptual interpretations of speculative ecologies, hyperformalism and new materialism in a world of online information.

Hannah Black, ‘Fall of Communism’ (2014). 5:23 min. ‘All My Love All My Love’ (2015). 6:34 min.

Berlin-based British artist-writer Hannah Black explores what Rhizome describes as “the conditioning of bodies, or the condition of being bodied”. Her two video works tell of the tension between the interior and exterior self through text and moving image, where theory and autobiography, intimacy and commodity, desire and identity become conflated.

aqnb x Video in Common’s screening ‘The Future Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed’ was on at Berlin’s Import Projects, March 4, 2016.

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Cycle Music + Art Festival @ Import Projects, Dec 5

4 December 2015

Berlin’s Import Projects presents three key performances from this year’s Cycle Music and Art Festival Iceland on December 5.

The first edition of the festival took place this past August in Kópavogur, Iceland, and Import Projects is borrowing the best of its acts this winter. The three performances consist of Danish Berlin-based composer, performer and installation artist Simon Steen-Andersen‘s audio-visual performance ‘Run Time Error’ (2009), in which the artist performs with a stereo soundtrack and double video projection controlled by two joysticks.

The second performance is ‘Ceremony Harmony’ (evolving since 2002) by The Icelandic Love Corporation, an “encounter of two very different and unexpected groups who meet within the public space, bringing together dual elements, which at first seem to have no common ground”. The third and last performance is Kaj Duncan David‘s ‘Relay’ (2015), involving techno-logical music for amplified electromagnetic relay and three light-bulbs. 

See the event page for details. **

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Abjects finissage @ Import Projects, Oct 24

23 October 2015

The Abjects group show, curated by Franziska Sophie Wildförster is closing with an event at Berlin’s Import Projects on October 24.

Running since September 18 and featuring work by Eloise BonneviotEmily JonesPaul KnealeYuri Pattison, and Andrew Norman Wilson, the exhibition explores how the word ‘abjection’ applies to specific circumstances and “poses the emergence of a new kind of abject lurking underneath contemporary experiences mediated by technology”.

The closing event will include a conversation between media theorist Paul Feigelfeld, artist and writer Boaz Levin and curator Wildförster.

See Import Projects website for details.**

Abjects (2015). Exhibition view. Photo by Ben Busch. Courtesy Import Projects, Berlin.
Abjects (2015) exhibition view. Photo by Ben Busch. Courtesy Import Projects, Berlin.
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Abjects @ Import Projects, Sep 18 – Oct 24

17 September 2015

Import Projects brings in a new group show titled Abjects, running at their Berlin space, opening September 18 and running to October 24.

The group exhibition, curated by Franziska Sophie Wildförster, brings together the works of five different artists: Eloïse BonneviotEmily JonesPaul KnealeYuri Pattison and Andrew Norman Wilson.

Inspired by Julia Kristeva’s 1980 essay “Powers of the Horrors: An essay on Abjection”, the show explores her notion of the abject and its “psychic origins and mechanisms of revulsion and disgust” emerging out of a confrontation with death, with violence, with vulnerability of decay. 

See the exhibition page for details. **

Emily Jones, The Hudson River (2014) @ Lima Zulu. Courtesy the artist.
Emily Jones, The Hudson River (2014) @ Lima Zulu. Courtesy the artist.
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Berlin Art Week, Sep 15 – 20

14 September 2015

The fourth Berlin Art Week is taking over the German city this week, running from September 15 to September 20 at various locations throughout Berlin.

Like every year, the city explodes with art, with the abc art berlin contemporary and Positions Berlin art fairs both opening on Thursday, as well as over 20 institutional exhibitions, project spaces and private collections, and a stacked lineup of ceremonies, gallery nights, performances, talks and screenings.

The opening night brings the three different exhibitions with Redemption Jokes at nGbKIch kenne kein Weekend. The Archive and Collection of René Block at n.b.k., and the reception for Paul McCarthy‘s latest exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon. Other highlights include:

— 1 LUNATIC 1 ICE PICK with Clémence de La Tour du Pin and Antoine Renard at L’Atelier-ksr

— The openings of Carla Scott Fullerton’s If these walls had ears and Tyra Tingleff’s I gave the postman your name at Chert

— Tilman Hornig’s Looki Looki at abc art berlin contemporary art fair.

Molly Nilsson‘s live show at Berghain’s Panorama

— Aaron Graham and Bryan Morello with Send Cycle at Neumeister Bar-Am, with an installation by Cécile B. Evans and Yuri Pattison.

— Matt Goerzen with Low Floor, No Ceiling at Future Gallery

— Slavs and Tatars with Dschinn and Dschuice at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler

— Hito Steyerl with her first solo exhibition at KOW

— The Abjects group show at Import Projects

Berlin Community Radio‘s Club of the Month

See the Berlin Art Week website for details. **

csm_Amit-Epstein_03_b16955a82c copy

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An interview with Marguerite Humeau

7 September 2015

There’s nothing that can prepare you for walking into a Marguerite Humeau exhibition alone, with no one else’s sanity to cling to. You might think you’ve lost your mind—you might think you’ve found something better. Walk into one of her exhibitions on a grey, godless Berlin afternoon suspended in the middle of a unrelenting winter and you might think you’ve seen god. For all intensive purposes, Humeau acts a bit of a god—or a bit of the mad scientist. She communicates with aliens, she brings prehistoric creatures back to life, she summons from the middle earth the sounds of hell. What she’s really doing, she says in an interview carried out on video chat, is trying to bridge great distances in time and space; bringing disparate and and farfetched worlds together under one roof. What she’s really doing, I say, is creating an ode to imagination.

Having come of a design degree at the Royal College of Art, Horizons at Berlin’s Import Projects was one of Humeau’s first solo shows, a fact you would never know looking at the extraordinary exhibition. I was there and wrote about it before, but words didn’t capture the awe I felt, just as Humeau’s words in her lengthy and extensively researched accompanying story didn’t capture the sophistication of the design, the sonic and visual architecture of the resulting exhibition. After months of chasing our own busy tails, Humeau and I finally connect to talk aliens and ghosts, the self-imprisonment of the “post-digital generation”, and what there is left for us in the lost world.

I was lucky enough to see Horizons alone on a rainy afternoon. It felt like I had entered a door off Kurfürstendamm and into another dimension—a whole different auditory, visual universe. What was the inspiration or point of origin behind the show?

Marguerite Humeau: Actually, when Nadim Samman contacted me for the show at Import Projects, we went through the different projects that I had been doing in the last couple of years. I graduated four years ago from the Royal College of Art and one of the projects that was part of the show at Import Projects was The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures, which started as my graduation project (with ‘Mammoth Imperator’ and ‘Lucy’) and then evolved into a full opera with two more creatures (‘Terminator Pig’ and ‘Walking Whale’). So we talked about this project, and at the time I was also working on The Things?, a project whose quest was to communicate with alien creatures. In 2012, creatures (such as Albino Hairy Crabs, Dumbo Octopus, Pompeii Worms) were found in Antarctica at the bottom of the ocean, in volcanoes near the East Scotia Ridge. It was really incredible for the explorers to find these creatures living there because they were forms of life that didn’t rely either on oxygen nor on sunlight, but their source of energy was actually coming from the volcanoes themselves, from the sulphur that was transformed by bacteria into nutrients that the creatures can then absorb and use as food.

I was reading about this discovery, and then I found out that this place in Antarctica is actually the closest equivalent to one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa. So scientists think that finding life in Antarctica, in this exact spot, could potentially mean that life is possible on Europa. So I wanted to try to communicate with these creatures in Antarctica, and by extrapolation to the aliens of Europa, as the creatures of Antarctica could potentially be exactly the same on this extraterrestrial planet.

'Mysterious Crash’, extract from director’s cut (2013). Image courtesy Marguerite Humeau & Le Studio Humain.
‘Mysterious Crash’, extract from director’s cut (2013). Image courtesy Marguerite Humeau & Le Studio Humain.

So that’s what I was working on when I talked to Nadim. What we thought was the core of my research and my work, was the idea of creating worlds that exclude human beings. These worlds exist in themselves, they are parallel worlds in which no human is involved. So The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures was about resuscitating the sound of prehistoric animals that lived millions of years ago, and The Things? was about communicating with alien life, creatures that live very far, in space. So in the show at Import Projects, we tried to bridge great distances in time and space and bring these worlds back together, all colliding in one exhibition.

You worked extensively with a variety of scientists and doctors, from palaeon-tologists and zoologists, to surgeons and ear and throat specialists for Horizons. What was the research process like? Did you have a concrete idea of what you wanted to accomplish or do you start blindly researching and wait for the concept to develop?

MH: Yes, so I’m really thinking about these questions at the moment, because I’m working on a new project. Every time, it’s good reinventing the process of building a project. In my case, it’s really important because the process is always really part of the work—the process becomes an epic quest, an odyssey. So I’m also trying to reinvent it every time, but most of the time, I start with a few topics I’m interested in; I read in magazines, and then I start with my research, trying to find an interesting angle. It always starts with a lost or unknown world—a specific world or time or space or creature—that I want to revive, to reactivate, to reenact, or simply investigate.

Basically, though, when I start contacting people to help me, I know exactly what I want to do. This is something I’m really interested in: working with a team of people with different types of expertise and really getting them to speculate with me into the world I am investigating.

The Things? – A Trip to Europa – A Trip to Europa, proposal for serenading outer space creatures with stunts, vibrations, chemistry, light, and live magic (2014). HEAD – Genève (Dylan Perrenoud).
The Things? – A Trip to Europa, proposal for serenading outer space creatures with stunts, vibrations, chemistry, light, and live magic (2014). HEAD – Genève (Dylan Perrenoud).

In one of your most recent exhibitions at DUVE, *Echoes*, you created a neon yellow, black mamba venom-painted space titled Black Mamba. You’ve said before that it was the contradictions of the venom—of things in general—that attracted you: its function as both a poison and an antidote. Tell me about this fascination and how playing with these contractions has informed your work.

MH: I felt that until this show I was always choosing one point of focus for my projects—prehistoric creatures, or alien life, or sounds from the centre of the earth. I was setting up and solving an enigma, and would then show the results in the exhibition.

But, with the show at DUVE, I was trying to take the next step. I started with one question again —the show was about eternal life and transitions from one life to another —and instead of proposing one solution, I tried to create various answers, in the form of sculptures or in the fresco and with the soundtrack, that could all together tackle the same idea but from different angles. To create enigmas instead of solving them. I wanted that, when one would enter the show, one would be confronted with different solutions to the same question, the enigma would then become unsolvable, the mystery filled with contradictions and paradoxes.

The show was about life and elixirs of life—there were creatures that were creating life and elixirs of life, there was a cobra that was creating its own antidote, and then there was Black Mamba venom covering the entire exhibition space. What I thought was interesting with the venom was the yellow color which made it fascinating and exhilarating, something that you’re drawn to but at the same time, it’s a deadly, terrifying substance. I also realised that every time one approaches life, one also approaches death—it’s never only one or the other. This is something I’d like to develop in my next shows.

'Wadjet (King Cobra)' from *Echoes* (2015). Image courtesy Marguerite Humeau & DUVE Berlin.
‘Wadjet (King Cobra)’ from *Echoes* (2015). Image courtesy Marguerite Humeau & DUVE Berlin.

I have became convinced that you’re a person that either has really intense dreams or watches really great weird movies—or both. I get the feeling like sci-fi and dystopian settings might be an inspiration for you. Are there any movies or books etc. that you keep returning to?

MH: Yes, I found your question really funny! With The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures, for example, every time I talked about it, people were supposing that I’d been watching Jurassic Park. But actually I hadn’t watched it at the time at all. It’s tricky for me to combine work and reading, and watching films at the same time —I watch films, I’m a big fan of Cronenberg, Lynch, and also… Matthew Barney’s films, you know. I think maybe you can see that in the work. But I always feel uncomfortable watching films while working on a project. Reading and watching films— in my case, it only happens when I’m in between projects. Because when I’m working on a project, I don’t want to be influenced by anything else. Because when you watch a film, you have to really dive into a world that someone else has created. When I’m focusing on creating a world myself, I don’t want to be influenced.

But I read mostly theory on communication technologies, “presence”, non-human worlds. It depends on the project but I would say my inspirations in general also involve a lot of documentaries about history or archeological stuff. I really like that. And I read a bit of sci-fi—recently I read Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island.

That’s a good one.

MH: Yes. But what I read most is theory—one of my favourite books is Haunted Media by Jeffrey Sconce, and it’s one I’m always returning to. It’s about the idea presence and disembodiment in relationship to communication technologies. I’m also reading Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, and the Collapse books, and other thinkers related to this group. I found their work really exciting because they are, on a philosophical level, thinking about realities that could exist in themselves, without being thought / mediated by human beings. It’s actually exactly what I’m trying to do with my work. And to answer your initial question … I guess I have really intense dreams!

'Walking Whale' from The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures (2012). Image courtesy: Felipe Ribon.
‘Walking Whale’ from The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures (2012). Image courtesy Felipe Ribon.

One of the things that’s interesting about your work is the strong biological and historical leaning to your work, often rooted in some form of science; this is pretty starkly contrasted with a lot of ‘post-internet’ style art that nevertheless stays within the realm of the internet—social media, disembodiment, etc. Was that a conscious decision in any way, or is it just where your mind goes?

MH: It was not a conscious decision when I started. My background is in design, so I was not really aware of the movements that were starting to emerge in the art world. I was going to art shows but I was not really part of that community. I didn’t really want to make a statement towards that, I was just doing my thing. What I wanted was to create works that would have a universal aura, trying to bridge different times, spaces, history, trying to confront different civilisations. I am trying to get to the essence of things and to see if there are patterns in the history of humanity or of the universe. And I think it’s essential that the work survives my time, that in twenty years it will still be relevant. But the internet is only a tool and a contemporary condition that we have to deal with. I would never consider it as a topic in itself.

thethings5
Opening credits of a film that has not been shot yet, The Things? – A Trip to Europa (2013). Image courtesy Marguerite Humeau & Le Studio Humain.

That’s kind of what I mean. For so much of art, that is the topic. It’s kind of imprisoned in that; it’s of that, it’s created in it, and it’s also its theme.

MH: Yes, it wasn’t a conscious decision but now it’s becoming one to not do that kind of art. But I’m just following my own thing, really. It’s important to live in my era, and I use a lot of technologies that didn’t exist ten or fifteen years ago—even for my ‘High Definition’ sculptures, for example, I’m using CNC machines—but at the same time, I want the concept and the ideas behind the work to be universal.

Tell about your “Screams from Hell” project, which you’ve described as “bringing voices from the middle of the earth”.

MH: It was a commission fothe Rare Earth exhibition that happened in Vienna, at TBA21, last February. The curators had asked me to give a proposal and at the time, I had done my project on prehistoric creatures and alien life. And I thought that it could become a trilogy —and that it would be interesting to do a project about voices from the very deep past, from very deep in space, and now, from very deep in the ground. And then I found this article about this expedition that happened in Siberia in 1989. Scientists went there and wanted to explore the movement of tectonic plates, so they started to drill a huge borehole in the earth to investigate. At some point, they couldn’t drill anymore and removed the bore, and decided to lower down some recording equipment. They could only record seventeen seconds of sounds because the microphones all melted down there. And actually the seventeen seconds of sound all sound like screams… from hell. Like human screaming, and fire balls, and lava and rocks falling deep in the ground. And so I investigated a bit more and realised that the soundtrack was a hoax, although the expedition actually happened. And so I decided to make this story real —could it be possible to actually create sounds that could come from the rocks and the lava and the fire, crystals and stones?

 

The feeling I always get from your work is one of the dissolve between paradise and hell—the quick shift from a silent, almost holy awe to a skin-crawling discomfort. I’m wondering if this is a common reaction—if this is one you feel yourself or are aiming to achieve.

MH: I’m not sure if it’s a common reaction. I think so. When I saw the faces of people coming out of my show at DUVE… [laughs]… yes, I think that is what it’s achieving. When I start a project, there are things I want to achieve, and in general I always try to create an exhilarating experience—something fascinating and that would be at the same time terrifying. Something that you would be drawn to —creating a place where you actually want to stay. And at the same time, there’s always a twist. Behind my work, there’s always a dream that all humans have —to hear prehistoric sounds, to actually see a mammoth, to be able to travel through space. There’s always this dream and at the same time, when this dream is realized, one has to face the fact that there are always downsides to this realisation. **

Marguerite Humeau is a French artist currently based in London. Her latest exhibition at DUVE in Berlin was titled *Echoes* and ran from April 30 to June 6, 2015.

Header image: ‘Alien Signal (Black Powder)’, extract from director’s cut (2013). Image courtesy Marguerite Humeau & Le Studio Humain.

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Grégoire Blunt + Emmy Skensved @ Import Projects, Feb 14 – Mar 7

12 February 2015

Import Projects is bringing a new collaborative show by Grégoire Blunt and Emmy Skensved titled eStamina, running at the Berlin space from February 14 to March 7.

The duo “delves into the perceived possibilities of ‘human enhancement’ through technological means” with a 60-minute ambient audio track functioning as the show’s centerpiece. The track is accompanied by CG visuals in “a drugged fog”, as well as scripted contributions from 26 other artists, musicians, curators and neuroscientists.

Some of the other contributing artists in the Anja Henckel and Nadim Samman-curated show include Antoine RenardEmma Siemens Adolphe, Susan PloetzEgle Kulbokaite, Viktor Timofeev, and Alex Turgeon, all coming together in a “projection of anxieties and desires driven by the hyper-emotionalized and aestheticized ideals of the commercial sphere”.

 See the Import Projects exhibition page for details. **

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Events + exhibitions, Feb 9 – 15

9 February 2015

Shifting focus away from some standout festivals and fairs starting the year, the week beginning February 9 is a big one for one-off events and exhibitions. Kimmo Modig and Shana Moulton will be performing in Athens and Nottingham respectively, while Hannah Sawtell, Jenny Moore and PC Music‘s Finn Diesel are performing in London.

Also in the UK capital, are new exhibition openings at Jupiter Woods, Project Native Informant, Grove House and Vilma Gold, while Eloïse Bonneviot is contributing to art label Caustic Coastal‘s first digital commission and the Pale Journal Issue 1 is launching at Space with performances and readings from artists including Sophie Jung and Anna Zett.

In Berlin, Leslie Kulesh is presenting as part of a Hotel Palenque commission at Center, while Emmy Skensved and Grégoire Blunt are showing eStamina at Import Projects, along with texts from Clémence de La Tour du Pin, Beny Wagner, Susan Ploetz among others. There’s an app launch happening at American Medium in New York and a poetry series launching at San Serriffe in Amsterdam, while London-based artist Hannah Perry is opening an exhibition in LA.

There’s more so see below:

EVENTS

Oculus Book Talk: Architecture/Astrology, Feb 9

Radical Thinkers @ Tate Modern, Feb 9 – 10

Garrett Nelson @ Oslo10, Feb 10

Kimmo Modig @ LIFE SPORT, Feb 10

Paper Circuits @ The White Building, Feb 11

8 the app release party @ American Medium, Feb 11

FR€€ ₮HI₦G$ @ STCFTHOTS, Feb 12

Les Oracles @ XPO Gallery, Feb 12 – Apr 4

Ways of Something @ The Photographers’ Gallery, Feb 12

Eloïse Bonneviot @ Caustic Coastal, Feb 12

Giant Swan, Hannah Sawtell &c @ The Waiting Room, Feb 12

Shana Moulton @ Primary, Feb 12

Non-Threat Event @ T.Chances, Feb 12

Section 6.2 @ The Yard, Feb 13

Rundgang Party 2015, Feb 13

Pale Journal Issue 1 launch @ Space, Feb 13

Carl Palm @ Parallel Oaxaca, Feb 14 – Mar 14

Finn Diesel @ Edition Hotel, Feb 14

Sue Tompkins @ Young Team, Feb 14

NOON ON THE MOON launch @ San Serriffe, Feb 14

Leslie Kulesh @ Center, Feb 14

DEBBIE @ Resistance Gallery, Feb 14

Jenny Moore @ Serpentine Galleries, Feb 14

OPENINGS

Beatrice Loft Schulz @ Grove House, Feb 9 – 15

Ned Vena @ Project Native Informant, Feb 11 – Mar 22

Graeme Thomson + Silvia Maglioni @ The Showroom, Feb 11 – Mar 28

Queer Resistance @ RM Gallery, Feb 12 – 28

Common Grounds @ Villa Stuck, Feb 12 – May 17

Patricia L Boyd @ Occasional Table, Feb 13 – 21

Mariana Ferratto @ The Gallery Apart, Feb 13 – Apr 11

Premiums Interim Projects @ Royal Academy of Arts, Feb 13 – Mar 11

☁ Self ~ Storage ☁ @ EMBASSY, Feb 13 – Mar 1

Grégoire Blunt + Emmy Skensved @ Import Projects, Feb 14 – Mar 7

Marlie Mul + Life Gallery @ Vilma Gold, Feb 14 – Mar 21

COOL – As a State of Mind @ MAMO, Feb 14 – Apr 26

It is My Diamond Now @ Jupiter Woods, Feb 14 – Mar 1

Hannah Perry @ Steve Turner Contemporary, Feb 14 – Mar 14

Isaac Lythgoe @ Almanac Projects, Feb 14 – Apr 4

See here for exhibitions opening last week.

Header image: Shana Moulton, ‘SPF 2012’ (2013).

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Berlin Art Week highlights: Marguerite Humeau + Kate Cooper

24 September 2014

Alone and in silence is the perfect way to see Marguerite Humeau’s latest exhibition at Import Projects and I just got lucky, I guess, shuffling into the gallery as it closed and walking undisturbed through the whole brilliant spectacle. But what can words do to describe Humeau’s Horizons? Language falls flat when passions soar, and awe was the only emotion I could concretely feel walking through the haunting three-room installation. All too often, the story behind an exhibition ends up more fascinating than the work itself, the two appearing to have little in common, as though the true artist was the person responsible for the press release. In Horizons, however, the work and the story weave around each other flawlessly, for once telling the same whimsical story.

In the far right of the gallery hangs a massive black shape, a vibrating fighter jet blown up to life-size in black PVC rubber, suspended from the wall and looming diagonally across the room. Around the spaceship, a sound installation forms: a low, ominous hum that builds steadily and crashes ecstatically in unison with those filtering in from the next room. The fighter jet, the story tells us, is caught mid-flight in its fictional journey to Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter, and we catch up with it in the following room as an installation of an air cannon exploding black dust onto a crisp white wall simulates the jet’s crash into the moon’s surface.

The execution of the pieces is impressive enough, the emptiness of the gallery made stark by the harrowing sounds that bounce off the walls with frenzied insistence, but it is in the story that the installations find their value. Two years ago, in the underwater volcanos found along the ice caps of Antarctica and thought to be the closest earthly equivalent to Europa’s enigmatic climate, scientists discovered an unidentified species capable of surviving without light or oxygen, communicating only by a combination of sound, black powder, and light—the most alien-like creatures found to date. Humeau’s journey in Horizons is not to the moons of Jupiter per se but to the outer edges of our imagination, to the star-eyed notion that we are not alone and never have been.

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Marguerite Humeau, ‘Prop 2’ from The Things? series (2014). Photo by Emi Maria Bohacek. Courtesy Import Projects.

Having travelled to future dimensions in the far corners of the solar system, the last of Humeau’s installations takes the viewer to primitive times with ‘The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures’. Two large white sound-producing sculptures are fastened side by side, abstracted from concrete shape but evocative of the long-extinct entelodont or “hell pig” and the ancient mammoth. With the help of palaeontologists, zoologists, surgeons and, among others, engineers, their imagined cries are re-constructed from old fossils, using everything from windpipes and synthetic larynges to AI systems and resonance cavities to give voice to these “frankenstinian sonic agents”. Combined with the grating trinkle of Humeau’s ‘Angelic Organ’, reconstructed from an 18th-century instrument banned due to its rumoured ability to drive listeners insane and marking the entrance to the gallery, the impression of Horizons is captivating, maddening. It is both senseless and completely coherent, a not-too-gentle push into the shadows of imagination and towards a knowledge generated only “through the impossibility of reaching the object of investigation”.

organ
Marguerite Humeau, ‘Angelic Organ’ (2014). Photo by Emi Maria Bohacek. Courtesy Import Projects.

Perhaps it says something about me that I could have stayed for hours in Humeau’s dark, imagined universe but when confronted with Kate Cooper’s CGI-assisted show, RIGGED, at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, I wanted only to flee. Nothing is more discomfiting in our modern age than high-definition reality.

Like Humeau, who won the Berlin Art Week Jury Choice award for Horizons, Cooper’s two-storey exhibition won her this year’s acclaimed Schering Stiftung Art Award. Standing in front of a large screen on to which RIGGED’s only video work is projected, I can understand why, even if I don’t much enjoy what I’m looking at. A woman’s body, slipping in and out of HD realism, is seen from various angles, performing various tasks. She runs. She lies. She stares at the camera with dead eyes enhanced to flicker. In photographic works displayed on the higher connecting floor, she is seen exposing her teeth, around which silver braces and a grey plastic mouthguard are fastened. Despite the visible discomfort, her mouth rests in a soft smile.

Kate Cooper, Rigged (2014). Installation view. Photo by Theo Cook. Courtesy the artist.
Kate Cooper, RIGGED (2014). Installation view. Photo by Theo Cook. Courtesy the artist.

The aesthetic of the show is repulsive to anyone who, like me, was raised in the age of high resolution. Why else would we filter every photo we take to show wear that was never really there? Looking at the fictional CGI-perfected woman, bought as a stock image by Cooper online and derived from no living human body, the commodification of the self as a reality of the modern world is unavoidable, especially if that self is a woman’s self. Her body, pore-less and hairless and smoothed of all error, is not ours, does not resemble ours, but is nevertheless meant to represent our own flawed bodies, implicitly widening the gap between the reality of our experience and its latent expectation.

The labour of this visual creation is the Auto Italia co-founder’s locus – the human labour inherent in the making of an animated character, but also the labour it relieves humans of as “expensive yet unpaid figures [begin] performing on our behalf” and purely fictional characters start to take on the roles of living ones. But walking through the dark exhibition room aglow with the impossible skin of an imagined body, all I can read in all this is the labour of being a woman. It is a woman, after all, whose body is used to sell everything from automobiles to lettuce and a woman who became the unattainable and idealized star of Spike Jonze’s latest film Her, which tells you a lot if you really think about it. It’s her body around which laws created by corpulent white men are based, this prescribed prison that artist Hannah Black rebels against in her video, ‘My Bodies‘. Though we can pretend that in this near-future, the idealized, commodified self could easily have been a man, Cooper’s show, almost despite itself, seems implicitly to answer: it only ever could have been a woman. **

Kate Cooper, Rigged (2014). Installation view. Photo by Theo Cook. Courtesy the artist.
Kate Cooper, RIGGED (2014). Installation view. Photo by Theo Cook. Courtesy the artist.

Exhibition photos for Marguerite Humeau’s Horizons (2014), top-right.

Berlin Art Week 2104 ran at various art spaces and galleries in the German capital from September 16 to September 21.

Header image: Kate Cooper, RIGGED (2014). Courtesy the artist.

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Marguerite Humeau @ Import Projects, Sep 2 – Oct 11

1 September 2014

The latest exhibition from Marguerite Humeau, titled Horizons, runs at Berlin’s Import Projects from September 2 to October 11. 

Curated by Anja Henckel and Nadim Samman, Humeau’s solo exhibition loops between the aesthetics of prehistory and occult biology and those of science fiction and the Information Age, producing works across multiple mediums that stage “the crossing of great distances in time and space, transitions between animal and mineral, and encounters between personal desires and natural forces”.

From her sound-producing sculptures modeled after fossils of extinct beasts, to her fictional trip to Jupiter’s icy moon and the ‘angelic organ’ created after a forbidden 18th century instrument, Humeau’s exhibition is an unnerving nod to the creatures of past and present, and is accompanied by a talk with the artist on September 18 titled How Near? How Far?.

See the Import Projects website for details. **

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Entelodont, “Hell Pig”, -25M years ago from The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures. Image courtesy Felipe Ribon and Import Projects.
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A preview of Project Space Festival Berlin

7 August 2014

Berlin, it is widely known, is a global centre of the “emerging” artist, even if said artist doesn’t emerge from his nightlife long enough to see the sun. And the city, now nearly profligate with pop-up project spaces, has decided to dedicate an entire summer month to nothing but. In what (in retrospect) seems a curiously belated move, Berlin celebrates its inaugural Project Space Festival Berlin, inviting 30 of these sites throughout the city to open their doors with a different surprise event scheduled for each day of August.

To open the festival, the Import Projects curatorial initiative screened Austrian artist Ursula Mayer’s contemporary art film, ‘Gonda’ (2012), written by Belfast-born writer Maria Fusco and partially shot in a real-life smoking volcano. The event, titled Vibration / Frequency / Substance, was followed by a conversation between Mayer and curator Nadim Samman, discussing the artist’s approach to narrative structure and notions of the “queer audience”. Despite the seeming abundance of art events on any given night in Berlin, the screening ran past capacity, dozens of nodding heads spilling out of the small room and straining to see amid mid-20s Berlin.

Video still from Ursula Mayer's “Gonda” (2013). Image courtesy Project Space Festival Berlin.
Video still from Ursula Mayer’s ‘Gonda’ (2013). Image courtesy Project Space Festival Berlin.

As with anything amalgamating 30 distinct artistic ideologies and practices, Project Space has the potential to be diverse at best, disjointed at worst. Following Import Projects’ Friday film screening, the festival’s opening weekend introduced Agora‘s ‘Stravaganza’, a group performance installation involving, among other things, a man in a billowy white dress that stretched across the Neukölln space’s garden, as well as tête‘s culinary art event, Hors d’œuvre: The Secondary Concern.

What follows is a curious line-up of “surprise” events in the festival’s opening week: a performative lecture on the current sound installation by Eva Kietzmann and Petra Kübert for uqbar; an evening of visuals and performances titled Preview Tableau Vivant at Grimmuseum; and the new (edible) works from multi-disciplinary artist and chef, Søren Aagaard, for Kinderhook & Caracas.

“Magic Tricks” by Tobias Dostal and Ariel Schlesinger.Image courtesy Project Space Festival Berlin.
“Magic Tricks” by Tobias Dostal and Ariel Schlesinger. Image courtesy Project Space Festival Berlin.

The festival’s second week brings a whole other slew of miscellaneous events with LEAP‘s
LMSTFU/Let Me Search That For You, an “internet search battle” accompanied by a BBQ and music by Nadav, Kleine Humboldt Galerie‘s exhibition on the historic architecture of the Berlin Agriculture College, titled raumbestandserhebung, as well a reinterpretation of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s last and unfinished work for the viola by artist Daniela Gugg for Lage Egal. The week rounds out with Ozean‘s Ocean Plays, inspired by the 1998 Italian drama, The Legend of 1900 and Archive Kabinett‘s discussion on art and feminism, geopolitics, and speculative futures between Caitlin Berrigan and Beirutopia photographer, Randa Mirza. At insitu, the first artist collaboration between Tobias Dostal and Ariel Schlesinger, Magic Tricks, promises “moments of deception and illusion”, while Center‘s Stoneroses group exhibition –include Sandra Vaka Olsen and Mirak Jamal –comes close to ending the month.

By mostly only revealing events for the first two weeks of the festival, Project Space forges ahead with an air of last-minute mystery. Some of the venues –such as the Selda Asal-founded Apartment Project (one of the first artist initiatives in Turkey) –have yet to announce their events, and all that’s left to go on is the promise of eclecticism laid along the conceptual platform of the project space.

Project Space Festival Berlin runs from August 1 – 30 through various locations throughout Berlin. 

Header image: Ocean Plays at Ozean, image courtesy Project Space Festival Berlin. 

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Beny Wagner @ Import Projects, Nov 4

4 November 2013

The idea of privacy and opacity has been a major theme across the art events we’ve been covering of late, from the panopticon of Kassel’s Speculations on Anonymous Materials and the preoccupations with veiling at Vienna’s Faceless II to online identity representations in Calculating Virtual Ratios at Import Projects. In parallel to that, the latter Berlin venue will also be hosting artist Beny Wagner’s Invisible Measure, running November 4 to December 8.

Adding to the discussion -a topical one in these days of data-spying -Wagner’s is an attempt to make sense of an increasingly confusing reality, through mapping the evolution of our relationship to transparency next to a gradual shift away from the material into the immaterial labour processes over the last century.

See the Import Projects website for more details. **

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