Installation
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Ethan Assouline
Lire dans la fin du monde (Reading into the end of the world), 2024
Lire dans la fin du monde (Reading into the end of the world), 2024
People, alone or in a small group, reading while the world collapses. Still wondering if words or language can save the planet. Cozily absorbed in their activity, claiming time off, trying to make sense of the world or just letting go.
Sex With The City, 2024
A thick coffee table book becomes the place for a collage pertaining to an obsessive relationship to the city, and to the idea of being screwed by its organization of time, money, social relationships. The message here though is playful détournement or repurposing to suggest the possible advent of alternative relationships.
Nina Könnemann
What’s New, 2015
A video, projected on a free-standing screen, films men disappear behind advertisement billboards. If it weren’t for quick ‘reality’ checks – abrupt cuts where we are brought to the actual events or places advertised for – one wouldn’t even bother considering their poor (commercial, cultural, political) content. What is happening around and behind the billboards, the way the bodies ignore and bypass them, appropriating a sort of gap in « public space » to make it into an open air urinal – and the way the dispositive is doubled here, in its exhibition – is way more triggering.
Stroom, 2012
Video for designated smoking room
Stroom was presented as part of the artist’s 2012 solo show at Gaga which dealt among other issues with the pitiful residues of public – in between – spaces that smokers have been left to roam in since cigarettes got banned from sidewalks in corporate centers of many parts of the world.
Stroom has the duration it takes for a cigarette to consume. It was presented in a room designed as a special smoking area within the gallery space and functioned as an artificial window, an otherwise missing place upon which to rest one’s gaze.
Drone like shots of wind turbines and racing smoke twirls alternate. Something with the rhythm and the edit are threatening in an uncanny way. The computer animated « stream » feels as slippery and intense as some of the newest AI generated imagery. And the smoke rocket loops themselves call to mind all sorts of present day megalomanic starship endeavors.
Matthew Langan Peck
PV trunk 2024
Fence 3, 2024
Press Pause 1, 2024
Player 2, 2024
Trunks and boxes, at once loud and mute, full and hollow, occupy the grounds. Gently off in their straight forwardness, the visions and landscapes which adorn them – beach goers, injunctions to disappear, or more literally a sheer fence over an open sky – resemble what one gets when circulating the seemingly open-ended flux of social media, and the spaces/ worlds/fantasies/projections it at once feeds upon and regurgitates in a kaleidoscopic way. Transferred and transfixed with paint, and while depicting the opposite, the narratives start to embody and inscribe ideas of containment. Turning around the works to try and piece these dissonant layers together just makes them more uncanny: the trunks won’t open and the boxes’ edges seem to float apart as the wooden panels they’re composed of don’t meet. Paired with unresolved fantasies – or life equations – these infra slim spaces and openings, like faults, are where the sculptures primary tensions reside. In the sound piece, recorded in Spanish, a narrator emerges who speculates on other exit ramps.
Genoveva Filipovic
El Súper Elástico, 2024
6 drawings Untitled, 2024
First, there was a drawing (pen and acrylic red and blue paint on paper) of a race car melting, morphing into the landscape that it drives through. Then the desire to try and translate this fluid, two-dimensional vision into a volume and see what that operation of materialization and further morphing into a soft sculpture does.
Three solid variations have come forth and are finding their feet in the three dimensional space of the gallery.
Chung and Maeda
12 phorographs Untitled, 2014
In their 2015 show at Gaga in Mexico, Chung and Maeda presented a series of photographs shot in their 2009 exhibition Dead Corner [When Buffeted], at Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin. For that show, they had left the gallery’s 19th-century space empty, save for cumbersome triangular cupboards placed in each corner of the oddly shaped rooms. These traditional gemütlich pieces of furniture appeared to fit so seamlessly in the darkly wood-paneled period interior that they were almost absorbed by the space, allowing the gallery to exhibit itself. Excerpt from « Rules, strategies and conventions; role-play, photographs and cupboards », Kirsty Bell, in Frieze, Nov 2010
The series photographs presented here are not installation views, however. And through the act of photographing them, the a-historical cupboards, initially denuded of any obvious purpose, come forth as more than props – the various angles, close-ups sometimes anthropomorphizing them, sometimes calling to mind Louise Lawler takes on the secret life of artifacts. Empty filler stuff.
Antek Walczak
Bright Ideas Lightbox (Advil), 2008
Hurricane Bree, 2013
Hurricane Duane, 2013
Excerpt from the exhibition press release for the show War Pickles, Paris, 2014:
Let us begin by testing the waters of the psychic imbalance between the market and the economy, terms implanted in the mind oppositionally, yet functioning according to the most subtle laws of sneaky dialectics. The market is an actual place, a site of dirty work, where we roll up our sleeves and do human business, like our daily rhythmic trips to the commode, but in public with social graces. We are constantly on guard about how to appear or admit our attendance at the market because it is the unforgiving materialistic demon of the everyday. It’s not only up in your face but contorting it lastingly – wrinkles, creases, frowns, the rigid smiles greeting customers in pharmacies and bakeries. Money is the pure symbol covering up all that toil. Ah but the economy is ethereal, encompassing system-wide whims too intricate for mortals to fathom. It’s enough to say that the economy either smiles or frowns upon the earth with its scales of cosmic balance.
As a faith it spreads its word and promises–enabled by a hunchbacked servant named market–with an ideology strong enough to conquer and govern, extending in every domain. Among others, there are aesthetic economies, sexual ones, economies of physical motion, and even those for madness. Thus, we might say that economy is the most perverse folly of metaphysics, an exterminating angel born from the ashes of a resentful dead god.