Émilie Pitoiset / MANIAC * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag
In the MANIAC exhibition, at the gallery Klemm's in Berlin, from 10 September to 24 October 2020, the French artist Émilie Pitoiset investigated the way in which the control over our body movements, and particularly dancing, are the manifestation of the acceleration linked to mechanisms and relations built by the expansion of a capitalist system.
Visualizzazione post con etichetta installation. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta installation. Mostra tutti i post
giovedì 26 novembre 2020
Émilie Pitoiset / MANIAC - Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine
giovedì 20 dicembre 2018
PHILIP KOJO METZ | THE BLACK KWADRAT @ KWADRAT, BERLIN | 11.11.2018 - 07.12.18
Philip Kojo Metz, The Black Kwadrat, Installation view, © KWADRAT-Gallery und Fotos by: Markus Georg
PHILIP KOJO METZ
THE BLACK KWADRAT
KWADRAT, BERLIN
11.11.2018 - 07.12.18
A monolithic Black Box is filling up the space of Kwadrat gallery. It is almost impossible to walk in but for a narrow corridor that let the visitor surround the mysterious object.
Philip Kojo Metz ’s third exhibition at KWADRAT crisscrosses several forms of art. It also builds a multilayered structure which reminds a bit of the Chinese box system. It starts from Malevich to finish with the poet Alexander Pushkin, via the use of Social Media. Philip Kojo Metz, a German-Ghanaian artist resident in Berlin, focuses on overdrafts between forms of arts and topics with a strong performative attitude.
Near to The Black Kwadrat sculpture, there is a black hollow room. In fact, the two installations, the full box, and the empty space are complementary.
Visitors take place in the middle of the black room to get a photo portrait. This image is then posted on Instagram.
The Black Box installation is an homage to Kazimir Malevich, the Russian painter who lived at the beginning of 1900 and revolutionized the idea of Painting ( and Art ) with the Black Square, literally a black square painted on a white canvas.
Malevich’s paintings were a statement: painting as a representation of nature was over. The media of painting was free by the necessity of representing something.
It was the time to move in a new direction: abstract painting. That’s where it starts Modern Art.
Now, the Black Kwadrat is ironically provoking a possibility of change too. The social experiment, with the Instagram, it shows the possibility to free the Art from certain ‘social’ constrictions. Differently, from other art projects which used Instagram as an experimental channel, for example, Richard Price or Amalia Ulman, Kojo Metz’s project works like a magic tool that swallows the visitors to project their virtual self into the web.
Near the black walls, it is hanging a painting: a piece of wall with a gunshot hole in it.
The gallerist Martin Kwade told me that the idea was to shot a wall inside the gallery, but of course, this was not possible. The shooting is a direct quotation to a Pushkin short novel, The Shot, which is connected to the tragic duel that caused the writer’s death.
The last deathly shot eternalized him while the shooting in the gallery is harmless but delivers the visitors image into the perpetual flow of social networks.
In front of the Black Box, the visitor is almost a primitive hominid in front of the Monolith in Kubrick’s movie “2001: A Space Odyssey", from the novel of Arthur C. Clarke.
In the original story, the strange object came from nowhere, from the depth of the space. No one knows what it is and no one knows what is it for. But it does something: it triggers the primitives men to use the weapon.
lunedì 19 novembre 2018
STEVE BISHOP | DELIQUESCING | KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART | BERLIN | 3 NOV 18 – 6 JAN 19
 |
Steve Bishop, installation view of the exhibition
Deliquescing, installation in five parts, KW Institute for
Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2018, photo: Frank Sperling
Courtesy the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London
|
DELIQUESCING
CURATOR ANNA GRITZ
ASSISTANT CURATOR MAURIN DIETRICH
KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART BERLIN
3 NOV 18 – 6 JAN 19
“I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.” Fred Madison, Lost Highways.
Memory betrays, deceives. We all know this. Reality is constantly manipulated, rewritten, even invented. The truth is stretched from one side to the other. It's even ourselves to deceive ourselves. In some cases the memory slips away like water in a tap drain. But what are we without our memories?In the exhibition Deliquescing the British artist Steve Bishop speaks of memory through its alteration par excellence: Alzheimer's disease.
The exhibition, curated by Anna Gritz and co-curated by Maurin Dietrich, consists of a large site-specific installation. The entire KW's floor is transformed into a simulated waiting room for a paradoxical laboratory. The entrance to the rooms is obstructed by plastic curtains. As soon as you enter the space a spectral atmosphere envelops you. A soft and opaque moist is embracing everything.
In the first room there is a wall covered with shelve which exposes a line of big rocks, wrapped in plastic, with small numbers on them, probably a date. On some of the rocks, puffy white mushrooms have flourished. They seems to have healing properties for Alzheimer's disease. As a matter of fact, these mushrooms are created by a particular mold that, thanks to the humidity, exudes a liquid that becomes the white puffy fungus. The exhibition refers precisely to the transforming capability of memory that fluidly takes different forms.
Next to the wall with the mushroom, there is a small monitor where it scrolls a report of a woman in an early phase of Alzheimer's. The woman tells her experience and her feelings about being ill and about her relationship with her mother, who was also ill. She explains that she often pretends to recognise people when she talks to them. And when she was a child she used to lie to her mother, when she "forgot" her father's death, making up a story just to make her happy.
In the next room, a film shows a deserted town in northern Canada, built in 1981 to house the workers of a nearby mine and then abandoned in 1983. Nowadays only a guardian lives there. His job is to prevent nature from taking over, in a constant effort not to fall into oblivion. In the corridors between the two spaces a thin transparent curtain is covering the original KW's walls. Through we could see some photos of the abandoned town. Near the exit, two huge freezers keeps the large moldy rocks.
These rocks are not our memories, but the emotions that anchor us to them. The whole installation of Bishop is a bit of a reproduction of our inner state. Feelings are resting in a corner ready to be defrosted. But once outside, exposed to the mistiness of thought and life they are transformed and liquefied, producing something else.
 | |
|
 | |
|
 | |
|
Iscriviti a:
Post (Atom)