House of Gaga ❧ Nina Könnemann Artists

Installation
views

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.

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

Personas, solas o en pequeños grupos, leyendo mientras el mundo se desmorona. Aún preguntándose si las palabras o el lenguaje pueden salvar el planeta. Absortos cómodamente en su actividad, reclamando tiempo libre, tratando de dar sentido al mundo o simplemente dejándose llevar.

Sex With The City, 2024

Un grueso libro ilustrado de gran formato se convierte en el lugar para un collage relacionado con una relación obsesiva con la ciudad y con la idea de ser perjudicado por su organización del tiempo, dinero y relaciones sociales. El mensaje aquí, sin embargo, es un desvío o reapropiación lúdica para sugerir el posible advenimiento de relaciones alternativas.

Nina Könnemann

What’s New, 2015

Un video, proyectado en una pantalla independiente, filma cómo los hombres desaparecen detrás de vallas publicitarias. Si no fuera por rápidos “reality checks/despertar a la realidad” – cortes abruptos donde somos llevados a los eventos o lugares reales anunciados – ni siquiera nos molestaríamos en considerar su contenido deficiente (comercial, cultural, político. Lo que está sucediendo alrededor y detrás de las vallas publicitarias, la manera en que los cuerpos las ignoran y las pasan por alto, apropiándose de una especie de brecha en el “espacio público” para convertirla en un urinario al aire libre, y la forma en que el dispositivo se duplica aquí, en su exhibición, es mucho más impactante.

Stroom, 2012

Video para sala designada de fumadores
Stroom fue presentado como parte de la muestra individual del artista en 2012 en Gaga, la cual trató, entre otros temas, con los lamentables residuos de espacios públicos – intermedios – en los que los fumadores han quedado para deambular desde que se prohibieron los cigarrillos en las aceras de los centros corporativos de muchas partes del mundo.
Stroom tiene la duración que tarda un cigarrillo en consumirse. Se presentó en una sala diseñada como un área especial para fumar dentro del espacio de la galería y funcionó como una ventana artificial, un lugar que de otro modo estaría ausente sobre el cual posar la mirada.
Tomas de tipo dron de turbinas eólicas y remolinos de humo se alternan. Algo en el ritmo y la edición resulta amenazador de una manera extraña. La animación por computadora del “arroyo” se siente tan resbaladiza e intensa como algunas de las imágenes generadas por IA más recientes. Y los loops de humo del cohete evocan todo tipo de proyectos megalómanos de naves estelares de la actualidad.

Matthew Langan Peck

PV trunk 2024
Fence 3, 2024
Press Pause 1, 2024
Player 2, 2024

Baúles y cajas, a la vez ruidosos y mudos, llenos y huecos, ocupan el espacio. Con su franqueza suave, las visiones y paisajes que los adornan -bañistas, exhortaciones a desaparecer, o más literalmente una cerca transparente sobre un cielo abierto- se asemejan a lo que uno experimenta al circular por el flujo aparentemente interminable de las redes sociales, y los espacios/mundos/fantasías/proyecciones que simultáneamente alimenta y regurgita de manera caleidoscópica. Transferidos y hechizados con pintura, y aunque representan lo contrario, las narrativas comienzan a encarnar e inscribir ideas de contención. Dar la vuelta a las obras para tratar de unir estas capas disonantes solo las hace más inquietantes: los baúles no se abren y los bordes de las cajas parecen separarse mientras que los paneles de madera de los que están compuestos no se encuentran. Combinadas con fantasías no resueltas -o ecuaciones de vida-, estos espacios y aberturas infra delgadas, como fallas, son donde residen las tensiones primarias de las esculturas. En la pieza sonora, grabada en español, aparece un narrador que especula sobre otras rutas de salidas.

Genoveva Filipovic

El Súper Elástico, 2024
6 drawings Untitled, 2024

Primero, hubo un dibujo (bolígrafo y pintura acrílica roja y azul sobre papel de un coche de carreras derritiéndose, transformándose en el paisaje por el que conduce. Luego, el deseo de intentar traducir esta visión fluida y bidimensional en un volumen y ver qué hace esa operación de materialización y transformación adicional en una escultura blanda. Han surgido tres variaciones sólidas y están encontrando su lugar en el espacio tridimensional de la galería.

Chung and Maeda

12 phorographs Untitled, 2014

En su exposición de 2015 en Gaga en México, Chung y Maeda presentaron una serie de fotografías tomadas en su exposición de 2009 Dead Corner [When Buffeted], en Isabella Bortolozzi en Berlín. Para esa muestra, dejaron vacío el espacio del siglo XIX de la galería, excepto por armarios triangulares voluminosos colocados en cada esquina de las salas de forma extraña. Estas piezas de mobiliario tradicionales y acogedoras parecían encajar tan perfectamente en el interior de época de paneles de madera oscura que casi eran absorbidas por el espacio, permitiendo que la galería se exhibiera a sí misma. Fragmento de « Rules, strategies and conventions; role-play, photographs and cupboards », Kirsty Bell, en Frieze, noviembre 2010.
Sin embargo, las fotografías de la serie presentadas no son vistas de la instalación. Y a través del acto de fotografiarlas, los armarios a-históricos, inicialmente desprovistos de cualquier propósito evidente, emergen como algo más que accesorios: los diversos ángulos, primeros planos a veces antropomorfizándolos, a veces evocando las interpretaciones de la vida secreta de los artefactos de Louise Lawler. Relleno vacío.

Antek Walczak

Bright Ideas Lightbox (Advil), 2008
Hurricane Bree, 2013
Hurricane Duane, 2013

Fragmento del comunicado de prensa de la exposición War Pickles, París, 2014:
Comencemos probando las aguas del desequilibrio psíquico entre el mercado y la economía, términos implantados en la mente de manera opuesta, pero que funcionan según las leyes más sutiles de la dialéctica astuta. El mercado es un lugar real, un sitio de trabajo sucio, donde nos remangamos y hacemos negocios humanos, como nuestros viajes rítmicos diarios al baño, pero en público con gracia social. Estamos constantemente en guardia sobre cómo aparecer o admitir nuestra asistencia al mercado porque es el demonio materialista implacable de lo cotidiano. No solo está frente a ti, sino que te contorsiona duraderamente: arrugas, pliegues, ceños fruncidos, las sonrisas rígidas que saludan a los clientes en las farmacias y panaderías. El dinero es el símbolo puro que oculta todo ese trabajo. Ah, pero la economía es etérea, abarcando caprichos a nivel sistémico demasiado intrincados para que los mortales los comprendan. Basta con decir que la economía sonríe o frunce el ceño sobre la tierra con sus escalas de equilibrio cósmico. Como fe, difunde su palabra y promesas, habilitadas por un siervo jorobado llamado mercado, con una ideología lo suficientemente fuerte como para conquistar y gobernar, extendiéndose en todos los dominios. Entre otros, existen economías estéticas, sexuales, economías de movimiento físico e incluso para la locura. Por lo tanto, podríamos decir que la economía es la locura más perversa de la metafísica, un ángel exterminador nacido de las cenizas de un dios muerto resentido.

Works

Ethan Assouline
Lire dans la fin du monde (Reading into the end of the world), 2024
Indian ink on paper, plexiglass box, paint, plastic strips and ribbons, pins
6.69 x 10.04 x 3.54 inches
17 x 25.5 x 9 cm

Ethan Assouline
Lire dans la fin du monde (Reading into the end of the world), 2024
Indian ink on paper, plexiglass box, paint, colored tape, silver strings
6.69 x 9.84 x 3.15 inches
17 x 25 x 8 cm

Ethan Assouline
Sex With The City, 2024
Collage on paper, architecture book, string and plastic beads
6.69 x 10.04 x 3.54 inches
17 x 25.5 x 9 cm

Nina Könnemann
What’s New, 2015
3’40”, HD, color, no sound

Nina Könnemann
Stroom, 2012
loop, HD (video for designated smoking room)
00:03:00
Edition 3/3, 1 AP

Matthew Langan-Peck
PV trunk, 2024
Plywood, flasche paint, plexiglass
31.89 x 39.76 x 31.89 inches
81 x 101 x 81 cm

Matthew Langan-Peck
Fence 3, 2024
Plywood box, flasche paint
31.89 x 39.76 x 31.89 inches
81 x 101 x 81 cm

Matthew Langan-Peck
Press Pause 1, 2024
Plywood box, watercolor on paper
31.89 x 39.76 x 31.89 inches
81 x 101 x 81 cm

Matthew Langan-Peck
Player 2, 2024
Plywood, enamel paint, plexiglass, audio hardware
31.89 x 39.76 x 31.89 inches
81 x 101 x 81 cm

Play

Matthew Langan-Peck
Exit Ramp 1, 2024
Two channel audio track
8:21 minutes

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda
Untitled, 2024
Silver gelatin print mounted on board and white frame
35.04 x 25.59 x 1.18 inches
89 x 65 x 3 cm
Edition 1/3, 2AP

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda
Untitled, 2024

Silver gelatin print mounted on board and white frame
35.04 x 25.59 x 1.18 inches
89 x 65 x 3 cm
Edition 1/3, 2A

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda
Untitled, 2024
Silver gelatin print mounted on board and white frame
35.04 x 25.59 x 1.18 inches
89 x 65 x 3 cm
Edition 1/3, 2AP

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda
Untitled, 2024
Silver gelatin print mounted on board and white frame white frame
18.7 x 25.2 x 1.18 inches
47.5 x 64 x 3 cm
Edition 1/3, 2AP

Genoveva Filipovic
El Súper Elástico, 2024
Polyurethane foam and manta
43.31 x 11.81 x 25.2 inches
110 x 30 x 64 cm

Genoveva Filipovic
El Súper Elástico, 2024
Polyurethane foam, nylon
43.31 x 25.2 x 11.02 inches
110 x 64 x 28 cm

Genoveva Filipovic
El Súper Elástico, 2024
Polyurethane foam, couduroy
43.31 x 11.81 x 25.2 inches
110 x 30 x 64 cm

Genoveva Filipovic
Untitled, 2024
Photocopy on paper, framed
12.4 x 10.04 x 1.38 inches
31.5 x 25.5 x 3.5 cm

Genoveva Filipovic
Untitled, 2024
Ink on paper, framed
7.28 x 9.45 x 1.38 inches
18.5 x 24 x 3.5 cm

Genoveva Filipovic
Untitled, 2024
Ink on paper, framed
12.4 x 9.84 x 1.38 inches
31.5 x 25 x 3.5 cm

Genoveva Filipovic
Untitled, 2024
Ink on paper, framed

Genoveva Filipovic
Untitled, 2024
Ink and marker, framed

Antek Walczak
Bright Ideas Lightbox (Advil), 2008
C-print on wooden lightbox
22 x 18 x 3 inches
55.9 x 45.7 x 7.6 cm
Edition 1/3, 1

Antek Walczak
Hurricane Bree, 2013
Pencil, silkscreen and kumamoto oysters on paper and bamboo
39.76 x 33.86 inches
101 x 86 cm

Antek Walczak
Hurricane Duane, 2013
Pencil, silkscreen and kumamoto oysters on paper and bamboo
39.76 x 33.86 inches
101 x 86 cm

Liquidity has served as a metaphor for digital activity now for several decades, not least because of the “randomness, chaos, and even danger” individual users risk when dropping lazily into so-called information streams—fraught with outrageous reactionary currents and devastating emotional riptides. If certain acquired skill (youth, self-loathing) is needed to avoid a total wipeout, the breaking deluge can also be conceptually rethought.

As merely one wave, after another: a rhythmic electrical pulse disbursed in amplifying peaks and troughs; occasionally troubled by directional winds and other microtrends. Más o menos, it ebbs and flows—contingent on atmospheric pressures, “real time.”

The mechanical manipulation of water was key to the flourishing of ancient civilization, but the domestic luxuries of indoor plumbing are a more recent (19th c.) revolution—when private concerns of personal cleanliness found ideological expression in public life, and progressive reformists keen to cleanse the engulfing urban masses. “It is not given to every man,” wrote Baudelaire, “to take a bath of multitude.”

Awash in anxiety, today the vile aspect of social hygiene returns—filtered into the mainstream from private-interest channels; buoyed by resentment.

Two new bodies of work by Nina Könnemann examine obscure contemporary activities of subsistence and leisure, as practiced through one’s toilet. Each technically relies on, or is explicitly derived from, a series of plumbing fixtures and commercially available streaming media. Along a narrow shelf in a soothing “comfort room,” Lithic Reductions (2015–18) demonstrate the artist’s “how-to”-tutelage in the craft-hobby of knapping. Sample survivalist fantasy tools are flaked from a salvaged washbasin column and postwar American toilet porcelain.

The single-channel video Que Onda (2018) blends footage pre-recorded at the outdoor public sanitation facility on Venice Beach Ocean Front Walk with a live-stream filmed by the artist on location during the exhibition vernissage; broadcast over the Los Angeles Department of Recreation & Parks Office WiFi hotspot. Cleaning rituals performed by day-trippers, musclemen, hustlers, and rough sleepers—cautiously exploiting still-extant public resources—are eclipsed by views of the raw-concrete-and-aluminum shelter, bathed in winter twilight. The video’s texture analogizes the structural masking that enables disregard for clear (“live”) conditions within our midst, while documenting the humble freedoms of dropping out.

With the general erosion of personal dignity and common good, the “perfect bonhomie” of regulated online sociality converts subscribers into standing data reserves—a Pactolus dense with human sediment, draining, like gray water, out to sea.

Kari Rittenbach

Nina Könnemann (b. Bonn, Germany 1971) is an artist living and working in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions and screenings include Centre Pompidou, Paris/KW ICA, Berlin; Museum Brandhorst, Vienna; and group exhibitions at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; W139, Amsterdam and Yale Union, Portland. Thank you to Dr. Sul.

Footnotes

⁽¹⁾ Jean Armor Polly, www.netmom.com, 22 March 2008.

Review Flashart Review Spike

Works

Nina Könnemann

Lithic Reductions, 2015-2018
Sanitary ceramic and metal shelf
11.8 x 13.4 x 126 in

Nina Könnemann
Que Onda, 2018
02:15:00, HD video

(video stills)

In her first solo exhibition in the gallery Nina Könnemann presents a video about smokers, a video for smokers and a spittoon.

Bann (7min30, HD, 2012) was filmed in London´s financial district where the spaces in which smoking is possible is increasingly restricted. The video presents a catalogue of inlets and corners where this activity is still practiced. Stains and residues, a hand or the tip of a shoe behind a wall indicate those niches.

The poster accompanying the video transports the image of smoking into a bluish fantasy world. From November 6th to November 19th the posters can be seen on commercial billboards around the gallery.

Stroom (3 min loop, HD, 2012) is a video to be shown in a designated smoking room. It was installed a month ago for the first time at Sals Café in Antwerp, Belgium. In front of the smoking room´s six standing places, the video functioned as an artificial window, an otherwise missing place upon which to rest one’s gaze. At Gaga, the video will be installed in a booth whose dimensions resemble those of the smoking chamber.

The spittoons standing next to the entrance to the gallery and the restroom door are a collaboration between the artist and Jay Chung.

Special thanks to Rodrigo Peñafiel