The 15th Istanbul BiennialA Good Neighbour is taking place at venues across the Turkish city, opening September 16 and running to November 12.
Curated by artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset), the curatorial premise poses a series of questions asking if a good neighbor is, “a stranger you don’t fear,” “from a neighboring country,” and “leaving you alone,” to name a few. Levels of intimacy and distance are are explored through the concept of the acquaintance.
There are 55 participating artists, including Mirak Jamal, Georgie Netell & Morag Keil, Kaari Upson and Aude Pariset among others, with a highlight event including dance artist and movement therapist Tuğçe Tuna‘s new choreography ‘Body Drops’ performed by nine dancers under the dome of the hammam.
The Stillness of a Departure and Knife as Outfit group exhibition will open at Prague’s Polansky Gallery on May 24 to July 15.
Both curated by Christina Gigliotti, the show features work by Mirak Jamal, Anna Ročňová and Sung Tieu, and will explore the “material and immaterial traces of arriving and departing, blurred memories, and the silence in between.”
The second is solo exhibition Knife as Outfit featuring work by Nik Timková who will transform the Parter space into a soft smoky space, presenting plush objects and new series of digital prints collaged with embroidered touches.
Mirak Jamal presented solo exhibition cornered at Riga’s 427 which opened March 30 and is running to May 3.
The Berlin-based artist presented an installation using a number of different materials, with an unfinished DIY aesthetic. Handmade drawings and paintings on paper, tissue, and other surfaces are placed behind behind thick plastic sheets that ‘frame’ them upon a larger wooden frame that sits awkwardly in the middle of the room.
Like the majority of Jamal’s exhibitions, little information about the show’s premise is given. The press release only includes a quote from Wassily Kandinsky’s On The Spiritual In Art (1910) where he notes “The entire triangle moves slowly, almost invisible, forward and upward and where the apex was “today,” the second segment is going to be “tomorrow,” that is to say, that which today can be understood only by the apex, and which to the rest of the triangle seems an incom- prehensible gibberish, tomorrow forms the true and sensitive life of the second segment.”
Mirak Jamal’s my dear friends in Berlin running at Berlin’s Ashley from January 30 to February 19 is the first in a series of hybrid exhibitions in which the boundaries between solo and group shows are reconfigured. The series, entitled,Intercalating the Drift, will also include works by George Rippon and Michele Di Menna, but it is Jamal’s work that sets the series in motion.
In my dear friends in Berlin, the artist’s pieces are placed flush with the walls and represent a varied range of imagery and means of creation. On the north one of the gallery, a scratched hazy photographic image of a dog urinating marks its territory near a rectangular piece that evokes and sublimates Malevichian geometries. The black of Jamal’s rectangle has nothing like the assertive clarity of Russian painter’s black square, yet there is a deeper geometric dynamic it evokes: every black square is a black rectangle, but not every black rectangle is a black square.
Mirak Jamal, my dear friends in Berlin (2016). Installation view. Photo by Hans-Georg Gaul. Courtesy Ashley, Berlin.
Along the western wall of the space, the works continue their games of perception and logic. Another one based on a photo, in this case, an image of peaceable yellow balconies, is placed considerably higher than eye level, forcing the viewer to look up. This kind of direction suggests that Jamal is acutely concerned with the dynamics of space both within and beyond the gallery. The viewer performs the ritual of directing their eyes upwards to see the top of a building while inside one. Such conceptual satires address as much our ways of seeing as the content we see.
The content of Jamal’s images are not limited to photographic references. There is a Daisy Age frieze on the eastern wall of the space that shimmers above a metal plate along the wall. Its offhand expressiveness is underwritten by its very materiality. The solidity of the etched flowers and the industrial colour scheme the work integrates again subvert contextual and semiotic expectation. These are not the flowers you find in nature, but they are also not the flowers that are frozen in their transient beauty from art history; they are flowers of pure signification, and, therefore, resist any modalities of domesticity that floral wall patterns may evoke. The material dialogues the works embody feel like, perhaps, their most immediately affecting quality, but, ultimately these works constitute the ‘background’ of the forthcoming Rippon and Di Menna shows, and so they have a kind of proleptic melancholy as well. Jamal’s flowers will not easily fade into the decor as other works appear, but the consideration Jamal has brought to the placement of that and other works will set a formidable challenge for the next two participants in Intercalating the Drift. The territory on which they will work is now forcefully defined, in a sense, by an urban geography of Jamal’s design.**
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.
Steffen Bunte, ‘tbt’ (2014). Courtesy Center, Berlin.
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.
Ivana Basic, ‘World is all of one skin’ (2014). Courtesy Center, Berlin.
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. **
