Émilie Pitoiset / MANIAC - Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine

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.

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.

Philip Kojo Metz, The Black Kwadrat, Installation view, © KWADRAT-Gallery und Fotos by: Markus Georg

Julia de Cooker | Svalbard - An Arcticficial Life | KEHRER VERLAG

Julia de Cooker - Svalbard – An Arcticficial Life from Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg on Vimeo.

Julia de Cooker | Svalbard - an Arcticficial life | KEHRER VERLAG

There is a place where no one is authorized to be born or to die.

Julia de Cooker, Svalbard - An Arctictficial Life

The first impression you have when you arrive on the Svalbard islands is to land on the moon. 

The photographs of Julia de Cooker tell just about this strange combination of estrangement and 

loneliness.

As she writes in the text enclosed at the end of the book Svalbard - an Arcticficial life:
 - At this latitude, the Svalbard society, with a quarter of its population changing every year, is almost 

science fiction. Strangeness appears through different sorts of details. The combination of 

elements that have nothing to do with each other, or with the natural environment, is gripping. -

The book, published by Kehrer Verlag in 2017, is a collection of photos which report a state of 

mind more than the history of a place or of the people who live there.

The pale blue light on the snow, the sea of ​​ice, the waves of wind, the cold, the endless Arctic 

night are just some of the atmospheres that Julia de Cooker captures with intensity and clarity. 

This incredible clarity combined with the strange circumstances and Svalbard's habits make 

these images almost 'surreal'.

The artist created this project from 2013 to 2016 and exhibited part of it in an exhibition, in 

March 2017, at the Galleri Svalbard in Longyearbyen.

The collection presents many images that belong to different groups. First of all there are the 

landscapes covered with snow with the  northern lights that glimpse over the mountains, which 

seem to come out of a fairytale.

In some cases, different photographs are collected together in group of two or three and placed 

side by side to form a single landscape. However, these groups do not reproduce a particular 

real place, but are combinations of different views that in some way resemble each other and 

which the artist has artificially re-created.

There are views of Longyearbyen, the Norwegian town and of Barentsburg, the Russian town.

There are also portraits: a blonde girl, covered with a heavy seal fur, is sitting on a snowmobile, 

turned three-quarters. She is taking up her rifle: the weapon is obligatory for everyone who 

want to go outside the city, in defense from polar bears attack.

Another beautiful portrait is that of a girl who works at the Karlsberger Pub; she poses giving 

her back to a wall where are collected bottles of whiskey of all kinds.

There is a group of photos that prove in a detail how much the human presence in these places 

can be absurd. In a photo there is a canoe drifting in a sea of ​​snow. In another there is a white 

limousine lost in the mountains. The formal beauty of the images contrasts ironically with the 

content of them. The idea was to unmask the islands and to see it for what it is far from any 

sort of exoticism. But through Julia de Cooker’s photos, it is difficult to resist at the 

extraordinary beauty and mysterious charm of these places and then let yourself go to a strange 

mixed feeling of irony and nostalgia.