The Upside-Down world of Yngve Holen | Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine | 02/2020

The Upside-Down world of Yngve Holen * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

by Elda Oreto When I entered the world of Yngve Holen, I had the impression men were hybrids of flesh and synthetic material. It's as if the artist dreams of clandestine experiments in which the brain is injected with substances that induce hallucinations and excruciating headaches.

Anette Gellein - Studio Visit -

Anette Gellein

https://anette.gellein.com

Dirty Magazines from Anette Gellein on Vimeo.

It all starts with the sound for Anette Gellein and how it goes through the body. Wherever it 

comes from: the human voice, a recording, a simple noise or electronically made, it has its own 

power, its physicality while the human body becomes transparent, a porous surface.

Anett Gellein (1995) lives and works between Lofoten and Oslo, Norway. She graduated this 

year at the Tromsø Art Academy. Anette spent a couple of months in Longyearbyen doing an 

internship at Artica Svalbard, helping the director Audhild  Dahlstrøm to coordinate the events.

Anette's idea at the beginning of her practice is to mix the ethereal aspect of sound with the 

impenetrability of the body to create a heterogeneity that can not be synthesized.

In the triple installation Situation of (All Writing is Pigshit) the Flesh, Maenad Maenad Adman, 

 We, The Born Capitalists, ( 2017 ), the three films are projected on transparent screens in order 

to build a sort of maze that aloud  to  watch the films both individually and through each other, 

in perspective.

Deeply influenced by Antonin Artaud, she herself explains in a text about the three videos on 

her website: - I wanted to create another space, a kind of non-space. A place where there are 

other rules, where there are other possibilities of becoming and being in other ways. Having 

multiple identities. Working with the images as a medium, subtracting colors and inverting the 

images created a possibility for me to build this visual space where the body can look like flesh 

and transform to lines. Where it can be in flux, and multi-faceted-.

The performance S.M.A.B. ( 2016 ) emerges from the desire to give the written word the same 

consistency of sound. The result is a performance that is also a video in which homogeneity 

and the incongruity of the auditory experience is expressed through the presence and voice of 

actors.

The transition from the acoustic dimension to the more spatial one s like that between an image 

and its negative. Ahtnamas ( 2017 ), is the story of a sex robot and of another commodification 

of human desire.

More than the story of a machine that promises to extinguish the desire, the artist insists on the 

possibility of express the inextinguishable desire that goes through all things and all people.

I find very interesting the way in which Anette elaborates the images, transforming them in 

their negatives, taken from reality, as in XXXXRadio ( 2017 ) where the synthetic sound of 

electronic music guides the swaying and multiplying of a leaf.

In DIRTY MAGAZINES ( 2017 ) the images come from newscasts, gossip tv programs and 

internet magazines. They are already originally conceived as a form of manipulation aimed at 

consumption. Anette perverts the use of it, reversing them to the negative, abstracting the 

figures, synthesizing the voices.

The next performance of Anette Gellein will be on December 16. in Oslo at the:

WINTER SOLSTICE 2017

here is the Facebook link:

https://www.facebook.com/events/336732140104848/

S.M.A.B utdrag fra performance from Anette gellein on Vimeo.

Isa Genzken ISSIE ENERGIE @ König Galerie, Berlin

"Street's like a jungle

so call the police

following the herd

down to Greece..."

Blur, Girls and boys

A group of dummies dressed with a sort of waterproof plastic mantles and two children's 

dummies with extra large T-shirts are the first bodies to emerge distinctly from the horde of 

objects that fills up the nave of the former Brutalist-style church now home to the König galerie.

The dummies or Schauspieler are, one could say, a peculiar element of Isa Genzken practice. 

The puppets are standing, as if conversing among themselves. On the wall near them are hanging 

metal panels on which there are clippings of newspapers, photographs of the artist, of her life, of 

works, of other exhibitions etcc. The collages are crowded by images like in one of those 

movies where a detective is hunting a serial killer and pins all the clue on a board.

Adhesive tapes in bright colors coverü other panels. The stripes come and go from one side to 

the other; they are an obstacle to the vision, containment tapes, which obscure the shimmering 

surface of the metal. The tape is the restraint but also its own end. From this grid, however, 

what transpires is not a glint of life but an irrepressible flow of energy.

The panels run around the space of the nave.  All the other works are contained in it: sculptures 

made of blocks of cement piled on one another or cut like scalar pyramids with strange steel 

antennas, fake busts of Nefertiti with sunglasses and the dummies, which seem to compete with

visitors to gain space in the crowded monumental nave of the ex-church, built by Werner Düttmann
 and restored by Arno Brandlhuber. Two dummies are laying on each other, as if  making love.

At the bottom of the nave, in right corner, there is a photograph portrait of the artist 

Isa Genzken. "This foto was made at my first trip in New York 1971" is written on it.

She is the beginning of it. The starting point of the motion of energy. It crosses all things and 

connects them to each other. The flow of desire generated by a young Issie overwhelms 

everithing around her even herself. The  energy does not come from an inner withdrawal of 

the artist in her consciousness, but is the drift of the world around it. It cannot be triangulated.

Every work is a station, a ring, a conjunction, which stands for itself, indipendent, but also 

together with the others.

A flow of desire is not always an idyll. The masked dummies, the actors, are the revealed 

fiction, but also a transformation. Each identity is simulated.

The dummies are placed inside a forest of other images and sculptures like the vertical 

blocks made of cement, this amorphous material at the base of most of the current buildings. 

Cement, too, is a sign of transformation, in a sense it can become anything and be nothing. 

Then there are the nefertiti with sunglasses that are a joke, a declassation.

The artist is often defined as a heir to constructivism but seems to overcome all definitions.

All the works in the exhibition are born in different moments of the artist's life. They are a 

horde without control, pure desire, liberated, seen together like this; Those works placed in a

former church, symbol of the extreme repression exercised on the society by ideology they are  

an explosive element.

This aspect of the exhibition impressed me very much.

The gallery is a place of folding up of the reality, often to propose a synthetic experience, 

intensified of reality.

In this former church, the ideas of ​​elevation, repression and sublimation, which belong to the 

sacred place on one side and on the other the intensified experience of the artwork, slide on 

another level. The emptiness of a form is turned into a "concrete" weight, bouncing ambitions, 

desires and dreams, on a real dimension that brings back the flow of desire.

The church - gallery is not the place of perfection or of unfulfilled aspirations, projected on an 

other-life that never comes. It is the ‘here and now’ of desire under the experience of art: the 

endless stream of energy that always produces new axioms, that absorbs everything, 

incorporates everything and everyone and of which Isa Genzken's horde is the interminable 

external limit.

Isa Genzken ISSIE ENERGIE

11.11.17 - 7.1.2018

König Galerie, Berlin

www.koeniggalerie.com