Nora Schultz & Pernille Kapper Williams

Eröffnung / Opening
Freitag, den 26. Juni um 19 Uhr / Friday, June 26 at 7 pm

Ausstellungsdauer / Duration of the exhibition
26. Juni bis 05. September 2009 / June 26 until September 5, 2009

(for english version please scroll down)

Die Ausstellung zeigt neue Arbeiten der Künstlerinnen Nora Schultz (*1975, lebt in Berlin)
und Pernille Kapper Williams (*1973, lebt in Brüssel).

Pernille Kapper Williams

Poesie ist bei Kapper Williams ein Spiel mit der Rhetorik von Publikation und Vermittlung. Durch ihre Arbeit stellt sich die Frage, wie die Bedeutung von Dingen mit deren jeweiligen Gestaltungs- und Präsentationsformaten verknüpft ist. Die Träger, Sockel und Rahmungen, mittels denen Ideen, Inhalte, Kunstobjekte aber auch Konsumprodukte kommuniziert und verteilt werden, sind das Ausgangsmaterial ihrer Objekte und Bilder. Die Konfrontation damit, wie gestaltete Oberflächen, die unseren Alltag ausstatten, konstruiert sind und was sie dabei über sich und über uns vermitteln, stellt die Künstlerin durch ästhetische Eingriffe, hintergründige Reduktionen oder ungewöhnliche Kontextualisierungen her. Sprache erscheint bei Kapper Williams meist als Textmarke oder als durch Rahmung neu editierter Text, als Design für ein fiktives Buch oder auch einfach als Stapel unbedrucktes Papier.

Arbeiten

Pernille Kapper Williams, Du Bon Ton, 2009
Pernille Kapper Williams, Untitled (Tableau DCCVII & Tableau DCLXXIII), 2009
Pernille Kapper Williams, Untitled (Knob #1), 2009
Pernille Kapper Williams, Untitled (Duster), 2009
Pernille Kapper Williams, The Way We Move, 2009

Nora Schultz

Die Arbeiten von Nora Schultz entstehen im Umgang mit gesammelten Materialien, gefundenen Gegenständen, Texten oder Zeichen. Es sind Auseinandersetzungen mit der Visualität dieser Dinge und den damit verknüpften räumlich-sozialen Zusammenhängen. Formale Eigenschaften, Gewicht, Funktionen oder Bedeutungen werden im ästhetischen Spiel der Bearbeitung, Umgestaltung, Verschiebung, des Nachbaus oder der Umnutzung als Träger und Repräsentanten von kultureller Realität verformt und umcodiert. Bildhauerische Ansätze vermischt Nora Schultz mit den Möglichkeiten der Performance, der Druckgrafik, der Textproduktion und der Fotografie sowie mit verschiedenen diesen Medien angeschlossenen Präsentations- und Reproduktionsformaten. Ihre mit Blick auf ein bestimmtes visuelles Resultat häufig offen angelegten Produkte sind wie Experimente aufgebaut, die den Aspekt der Produktion betonen und nicht selten wie Abschnitte eines fortlaufenden Arbeitsprozesses erscheinen.

Das zeigt sich anschaulich bei der „Countdown Performance” von 2007. Hier biegt Schultz eine Fläche aus dünnem, rostfreien Stahl immer wieder in neue Konstellationen und Formen, die als Ziffernfolge eines Countdowns (10 bis 0) erkenn- und lesbar werden. Die Aktion wird als Reihe von elf Fotos dokumentiert. Das benutzte Blech wird von Schultz anschließend zu einer Schablone geformt, einer aufgebogenen 0 ähnlich, die sie als „Zero Ruler” bezeichnet. Der Zero Ruler wird, wie der Name schon andeutet, später als Lineal für eine Reihe von großformatigen Zeichnungen verwendet. Ein Lineal, das durch die Countdown Performance und das Biegen zahlreiche verschieden geformte Wellen und Knicke bekommen hat. Eine der damit angefertigten Zeichnungen ist das „Corner Panorama”, 2007, das mit fast drei Metern Höhe und mehr als einem Meter Breite in einer Raumecke aufgehängt den Charakter einer Installation erhält, einer Bühne, in deren Raum der Zero Ruler - wieder zu einer Null gebogen - als Objekt erscheint.

Eine andere Reihe von Schultz’ Skulpturen entsteht dadurch, dass sie in Performances selbstgeschriebene oder gefundene Texte auf dünne Edelstahlbahnen überträgt. Dabei wurden die Texte während einer Eröffnungsperformance in der Galerie Meerettich, Berlin, Seite für Seite vorgelesen und anschließend mittels Lösungsmittel und Papier auf die empfindliche Stahloberfläche übertragen (geätzt) oder collagiert. Der Stahl wird nach jeder Seite geknickt. Es entsteht eine Spannung zwischen der feinen detaillierten Arbeit der Textübertragung und dem physischen Akt des Knickens eines widerspenstigen Materials. Im Prozess entstehen zick-zack-artig ineinander gefaltete Skulpturen. Durch den Spiegeleffekt der Stahloberflächen können auch die Seiten gelesen werden, die sich auf der Unterseite der gebogenen Flächen befinden. Dadurch kommt es zu Verschiebungen der ursprünglichen Chronologie der Texte und ihren Bedeutungen.

In einer anderen Arbeit mit dem Titel „Countdown Table“, von 2008, ist ein quadratischer Edelstahlrahmen zu sehen, dessen horizontale Verbindungen in eine leichte Kurvenform gebogen sind, gerade so, dass die Konstruktion ohne weitere Befestigung zum Stehen kommen kann. An der Oberkante ist ein Stück bedrucktes Offset- Papier befestigt. Das Blatt ist mehrfach senkrecht eingeschnitten, ähnlich wie die Telefonnummern-Abschnitte bei Angeboten oder Nachfragen so genannter Schwarzer Bretter. Fast wirkt der Ausdruck wie eine vergrößerte Variante eines solchen Zettels – nur ohne Angebot. Durch die leichte Biegung des Rahmens fächert sich auch der am Boden aufliegende Abschnitt des Blattes in einer angedeuteten Rundung auf. Alle Ziffernfolgen bezeichnen einen Countdown. Das Ereignis – oder vielmehr die Ereignisse –, die sie ankündigen, bleiben ungewiss.

In ihrer Arbeit stellt sich die Frage, wie die Bedeutung von Dingen mit deren jeweiligen Gestaltungs- und Präsentationsformaten verknüpft ist. Die Träger, Sockel und Rahmungen, mittels denen Ideen, Inhalte, Kunstobjekte aber auch Konsumprodukte kommuniziert und verteilt werden, sind das Ausgangsmaterial ihrer Objekte und Bilder. Die Konfrontation damit, wie die Oberflächen, die unseren Alltag ausstatten, konstruiert sind und was sie dabei über sich und über uns vermitteln, stellt die Künstlerin durch ästhetische Eingriffe, hintergründige Reduktionen oder ungewöhnliche Kontextualisierungen her. Wie entsteht Bedeutung? Sprache erscheint bei Kapper Williams meist als Textmarke oder als durch Rahmung neu editierter Text, als Design für ein fiktives Buch oder auch einfach als Stapel unbedrucktes Papier – abwesend.

Minutiös recherchiert sie in einem ihrer Projekte die ästhetischen, ökonomischen und biografischen Hintergründe für das Zustandekommen einer ganz bestimmten Buchcovergestaltung. Grafische Elemente des Buchdeckels werden isoliert und als Wandmalerei umgesetzt, die später als ein Element von Ausstellungsarchitektur in ihrer Einzelausstellung dient. Auch Standardformate der Kunstpräsentation wie Sockel und Vitrine finden sich in ihren Arbeiten immer wieder neu durchgespielt, zitiert oder – wie bei einer Reihe von unterschiedlich konstruierten und hochglanzlackierten Sockeln – einfach als Objekte an sich ausgestellt. Design, Ornament und Oberfläche sowie Sprachen der Präsentation und des Displays interessieren Kapper Williams als Resultate von Entscheidungsprozessen, anhand derer sich komplexe politische, historische und kulturelle Vereinbarungen sowie deren Widersprüchlichkeiten, Konstruktionen und Mythologien ablesen und analysieren lassen.

Ihre Typografie- und Textarbeiten, Objekte oder semifiktiven Annährungen an das Leben und Werk bestimmter Persönlichkeiten haben trotz ihrer reflexiven Immanenz immer zugleich auch den Sinn für das Paradoxale und für das Potenzial der Einbildungskraft des Betrachters, die vermutlich die besondere Sensibilität von Kapper Williams‘ Arbeiten ausmachen.

Eine nicht definierte Anzahl von Blättern herkömmlichen Kopier- bzw. Druckerpapiers ist auf die Höhe eines Meters gestapelt. Die Kanten schließen einheitlich ab, so dass ein aufrechter Kubus entsteht, der zugleich Assoziationen an einen leeren Sockel im Raum der Ausstellung weckt. Der Stapel ist auf einer rechteckigen, schwarz durchgefärbten MDF Platte positioniert, die am Boden liegt. Die Arbeit veranschaulicht ein wichtiges wiederkehrendes Motiv innerhalb der Arbeit von Pernille Kapper Williams, das in dem Reiz besteht, Vorstellungen potenzieller Handlungen oder Zusammenhänge zu evozieren, deren kommunikative Wirkung sich nur durch die Einlassung jedes einzelnen Betrachters realisieren lässt. Ihre Textbilder und Skulpturen sind als fundamentale Kritik an dem Verlangen zu verstehen, zu kontrollieren, Zugriff zu haben oder zu besitzen. Sie produzieren bewusst Spannungen, die zwischen dem gebotenen Artefakt, seinen Anspielungen und der geforderten Aktivität der Betrachter liegen.

Der Stapel Papier ist nicht nur Metapher für das unvollendete Projekt, die „noch ungeschriebenen Texte”, sondern auch für den Sockel, den potenziellen Ort des Werks, der immer wieder variiert in verschiedenen Arbeiten von Williams erscheint und mit dem der Betrachter nicht selten allein bleibt. „579m2 or 0,061m3 or 1m Pile of Unwritten Writings” führt aber auch die visuelle Präzision der Künstlerin und ihren genauen Blick für das Detail vor. Durch die Stapelung werden notwendigerweise die Schnittkanten des standardisierten Kopierpapiers in einer Menge sichtbar, die man im Alltag nicht kennt. Erst durch diese Anhäufung treten die verschiedenen Schattierungen in das Blickfeld wie die unterschiedlichen Schichten einer Tortenfüllung. So stellt die Skulptur die Variationen bzw. Ungenauigkeiten des maschinellen Schneideprozesses als ästhetische Erfahrung aus. Das (gesellschaftliche) Versprechen des industriellen Standards als letztes verlässliches Moment erscheint hier wie alles andere auch als Konstruktion, die mal besser und mal schlechter hält.

Die Arbeit „After Christine Kozlov” gibt vor, ein Originaltonband zu präsentieren, das den Mitschnitt einer Performance der Künstlerin Christine Kozlov enthält, die, wie der Text unter dem Tonband beschreibt, aus einer 90-minütigen Lesung eines deutsch-dänischen Wörterbuchs besteht („Von A bis Ablesen”). Ob diese Performance wirklich jemals stattgefunden hat, könnte mit kunsthistorischen Mitteln oder etwas Sachkenntnis schnell überprüft werden. Die Information ist aber nicht relevant für das Stück. Die Arbeit weckt zum einen die Fantasie und die Vorstellung von einer möglichen Aktion und der Entfaltung ihres ästhetischen Potenzials. Daneben stellt „After Christine Kozlov” aber noch die Ästhetik der Musealisierung selbst aus und damit auch das Dilemma der Unzugänglichkeit jeder auf Zeit und Handlung basierenden künstlerischen Arbeit innerhalb eines archivarischen Bezugsrahmens. Durch das überpräzise museale Design macht die Arbeit das Vakuum, das zwischen Artefakt und eigentlicher Handlung besteht, emotional erfahrbar.

Das persönliche Begehren des Betrachters nach Erfahrung wird von der hermetisch autoritären Oberfläche des Objekts nicht bedient. In diesem künstlich evozierten Leerraum entsteht aber zugleich die Chance des Betrachters und der Raum für die eigentliche Wirkweise der Arbeit: Vielleicht ist die Vorstellung der Performance – die Imagination ihres Potenzials – interessanter, als es der Besuch der tatsächlichen Aufführung überhaupt gewesen wäre? Es stellt sich dadurch die Frage: Wozu also brauchen wir ein Original überhaupt? Die Arbeit spielt mit der schon alten, aber erstmals durch die Concept Art explizit praktisch formulierten Idee vom Kunstwerk als Vorgang, der sich letztlich im Bewusstsein des Betrachters realisieren kann.

Arbeiten

Nora Schultz, Ergodynamische Stühle, 2009
Nora Schultz, Auto-Scale, 2009
Nora Schultz, Frau und Untitled am Strand, 2008-2009
Nora Schultz, Ethnohängematte, 2009
Nora Schultz, Car with Cancer, 2009
Nora Schultz, Car-Collage, 2009
Nora Schultz, Auto-Schaschlik, 2009
Nora Schultz, Ohne Titel, 2009

(english version)

An exhibition presenting new works by artists Nora Schultz (*1975, currently living in Berlin) and Pernille Kapper Williams (*1973, currently living in Brussels).

The works of Nora Schultz emerge through interactions with collected materials, found objects, texts and signs. They are engagements with the visuality of these things and the spatial-social dimensions connected with it. Formal characteristics, weight and functions as the carriers and representatives of cultural reality are reformed and recoded in an aesthetic play of treatment, rearrangement, displacement, appropriation or copying.  Nora Schultz blends sculptural approaches with the possibilities of performance, graphic printing, text production and photography as well as with the formats of presentation and reproduction attached to these media. Her works start from an active interest in materials and their contexts without having a preconceived visual product in mind. Structured like experiments that emphasize elements of production, they often appear as stages of a continuous working process.

For Kapper Williams, poetry is a game with the rhetoric of publication, presentation and mediation. Her work poses the question of how the meaning of things is linked to their respective formats of structure and presentation. The media, pedestals and frames by which ideas, contents, art objects, but also consumer products, are communicated and distributed are the starting points of her objects and images. Via esthetic interventions, subtle reductions or unusual contextualization, the artist confronts the question of how surfaces that furnish our everyday experiences are constructed and how individuals are intrigued by them. How does meaning originate? In Kapper Williams’s work, language appears mostly as a font, as a text newly edited through framing, as a design for a fictitious book, or simply as a stack of blank paper – absent.

Nora Schultz

The works of Nora Schultz emerge through interactions with collected materials, found objects, texts and signs. They are engagements with the visuality of these things and the spatial-social dimensions connected with it. Formal characteristics, weight and functions as the carriers and representatives of cultural reality are reformed and recoded in an aesthetic play of treatment, rearrangement, displacement, appropriation or copying.  Nora Schultz blends sculptural approaches with the possibilities of performance, graphic printing, text production and photography as well as with the formats of presentation and reproduction attached to these media. Her works start from an active interest in materials and their contexts without having a preconceived visual product in mind. Structured like experiments that emphasize elements of production, they often appear as stages of a continuous working process.

This is vividly illustrated by, “Countdown Performance”, 2007. Schultz repeatedly reshapes a surface of thin, rustproof steel into new configurations and forms that become recognizable and readable as a sequential numerical countdown (10 to 0), an action documented in a series of eleven photographs. Schultz subsequently bends the sheet into a template resembling a bowed “0” which she calls the “Zero Ruler”. The Zero Ruler, marked with numerous dents and kinks from the Countdown Performance and the process of bending, is used later as a ruler for a series of large-sized drawings. One such drawing is, “Corner Panorama”, 2007,one meter wide and three meters high, is suspended in a corner of the room, to achieve the quality of an installation, becoming a stage or space in which the Zero Ruler – lying on the floor and again bent into the form of a zero – appears as an object.

Another series of Schultz’s sculptures result from transcribing her own original or found texts to thin stainless steel sheets during performances. The texts were read aloud during an opening performance at Galerie Meerettich Berlin, page by page, then etched or pasted onto the delicate steel surfaces with solvents and paper. The steel is bent after each page, producing zigzag-like sculptures folded into each other which creates tension between the fine, detailed act of transcription and the physical bending a refractory material. Due to the steel’s mirror-like quality, the pages on the undersides of the surfaces can still be read, leading to a shift in the original chronology of the texts and their meanings.

In another work, “Countdown Table” (2008), a square frame of stainless steel is visible. Its horizontal connections have been bent into a slight curvature, just enough to allow the construction to stand without additional support. A piece of printed offset paper is affixed to the upper edge; the bottom edge of the page has a number of vertical cuts, similar to the detachable phone numbers found on bulletin board advertisements. This creates the impression of a larger version of such an ad only without any offer. Due to the slightly rounded form of the frame, the bottom of the page fans out over the floor in an implied curve. All of Schultz’s numeric series denote a countdown; yet it remains uncertain which event, or rather which events, they signalize.

Pernille Kapper Williams

For Kapper Williams, poetry is a game with the rhetoric of publication, presentation and mediation. Her work poses the question of how the meaning of things is linked to their respective formats of structure and presentation. The media, pedestals and frames by which ideas, contents, art objects, but also consumer products, are communicated and distributed are the starting points of her objects and images. Via esthetic interventions, subtle reductions or unusual contextualization, the artist confronts the question of how surfaces that furnish our everyday experiences are constructed and how individuals are intrigued by them. How does meaning originate? In Kapper Williams’s work, language appears mostly as a font, as a text newly edited through framing, as a design for a fictitious book, or simply as a stack of blank paper – absent.

In one of her projects, she meticulously researches the esthetic, economic and biographical background for the materialization of a very specific book cover design. Some graphic elements of the book cover are isolated and transformed into a mural that subsequently serves as an element of the exhibition architecture in one of her solo shows. Her work also often plays with, or references standard formats of art presentation such as pedestals and display cases, as in the case of a series of constructed and high-glossed pedestals, simply displayed as objects in and of themselves. Design, ornament and surface, as well as languages of presentation and display are of interest to Kapper Williams as a result of decision-making processes, through which complex political, historical and cultural arrangements, as well as their inconsistencies, constructions and mythologies, can be read and analyzed. Despite their conceptual immanence, her typographic and textual works, objects or semi-fictive approaches to the lives and work of particular personalities always retain a sense of the paradoxical and enable the potential of the viewer’s imagination.

An undefined number of sheets of common copy or printer paper are stacked up to the height of a meter. The edges are uniformly aligned, forming an upright cube that simultaneously recalls associations with an empty pedestal in the exhibition space. The stack is positioned on top of a rectangular, solid black medium density fiberboard resting on the floor. The work illustrates an important recurring motif in Pernille Kapper Williams’s work, which consists in the impulse to evoke images of potential acts or connections whose communicative effects are realized only through the engagement of each individual viewer. Her text pictures and sculptures fundamentally critique the desire to understand, to control, to have or own access. She consciously produces tensions between the exhibited artifact, its allusions and the required activity of the viewer. The stack of paper is not just a metaphor for the unfinished project, the as yet ‘unwritten texts’, but also for the pedestal, the potential location of the work, which appears time and again in various works with which the viewer often remains alone. Yet “579m2 or 0,061m3 or 1m Pile of Unwritten Writings”, also demonstrates the visual precision of the artist and her exact attention to detail. By stacking the standardized copy paper, the edges become visible in a quantity not usually seen. Only in this pile do their various shades become visible, like the layers of a cake. By doing so, the sculpture exhibits the variations and inexactitudes of the mechanical process of cutting as an esthetic experience. The societal promise of the industrial standard as the final reliable arbiter appears here, like everything else, as a construction that sometimes works well and sometimes poorly.

The work, “After Christine Kozlov”, claims to present an original tape with the recording of a performance by the artist Christine Kozlov, which, as described in the text below the tape, consists of a 90-minute reading from a German-Danish dictionary (“from A to Ablesen”, lit. to take a reading). It would be easy to determine whether this performance actually took place through art historical research or simply with some relevant knowledge. Yet this information is irrelevant to the piece. On the one hand, the work sparks the imagination to consider the  possibility of  the action, the unfolding of its aesthetic potential. Yet “After Christine Kozlov”, also exhibits the aesthetics of the museum-institutionalization itself and hence the inaccessibility of every artistic work based on time and action within the framework of the archive. By means of its overly precise museum-like design, the work renders the vacuum between artifact and actual act, accessible as an emotional experience.
The viewer’s personal desire for experience is not served by the hermetically authoritarian surface of the object. Yet in this artificially evoked empty space, the chance arises for the viewer and the room to experience the actual efficacy of the work: perhaps the presentation of the performance, the imagination of its potential, is more interesting than attendance at the actual performance ever would have been. Hence we must pose the question: do we need the original at all? The work engages with the old idea, though first explicitly formulated in a practical form by conceptual art, of the artwork as a procedure that can be finally realized in the consciousness of the viewer.

Kurator / curator
Soeren Grammel

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Filmabend, Dienstag den 30. Juni um 19 Uhr

Künstler-Filme von von Terence Gower, Pia Rönicke und Heidrun Holzfeind.
Dauer 1 Std. und 15 Minuten

The Curve is Ruinous:
‘Utopian society’ is a term used to describe a real or visionary political, social and economic community or social ideal. Utopia is, however a paradox, indicative of perfection yet also of a something not realistically possible. In each of these films, the meaning of the utopian society is on trial through these artists’ personal imagined utopian societies and also their interpretations of real social utopian constructs that still exist today. In both, a comment is made on the success of the traditional modern utopian society, most simply defined by the utopian structures of straight line modernist architecture, as championed by architects such as Le Corbusier, Niemeyer and van der Rohe, in which functional, balanced, clean and ordered living was the central focus. In these designs, the curve was considered negative, the opposite of the positive modernist way of life, similar to the way that deviating from the systematic straight line of life progression is often considered to indicate failure for an individual. The irony of this statement is made clear through these films as these artists offer critical considerations of such utopian social constructs to consider the point when such utopian ideals fail and dystopia dominates. These films emphasise the need for us to reconsider what it means to desire such uniformed systems of societal control and encourage the exploration of new societal models of living. (Laura Barlow)

Programm / programm

Wilderness Utopia
Terence Gower, 2008, 3:00
Wilderness Utopia is an interpretation of the unrealized modern utopian society, ‘Hirschorn Ontario’, Canada, a personal utopia imagined and desired by Thomas Hirschorn to be designed by architect Phillip Johnson, for the workers of the newly opened uranium mines. Gower’s sleek animation, accompanied by strangely euphoric music inadvertently critiques the foreboding implications of such control over a community.

Urban Fiction
Pia Ronicke, 2000, 16:00
A fictitious illustrated story sets the construct in which an urban subject narrates a text in various locations around a city; an urban fiction in seven acts. Taking an imaginary conversation between the opposed minds of the Swiss Architect Le Corbuisier and the Danish Artist Constance on their ideas of the form and purpose of the modern city, Urban Fiction constructs an ambiguous manifesto to suggest the possibilities of how a urban utopian environment should be created and how the urban subject should function within it.

The Polytechnic
Terence Gower, 2004, 8:00
Still black and white images, taken upon the completion of Mexico's Instituto Politecnico Nacional in 1963 are used to produce an animated virtual tour of the university in pristine condition. No mention of the university name or geographical location creates a distance between these images and any characteristics or tensions attached to the University, such as the student riots of 1968. The highly ordered tour emphasises the absurd formal and functionalist organisation or the building and stresses the internationalist aspect of its design. The building is situated as a universalist Modernist project in its original form; intended to support the country’s industrialization and national development process and offer an education to a range of individuals in society, particularly those less well off.

Corviale -II Serpento
Heidrun Holzfeind, 2001, 34:00
Corviale – II Serpento shows the contrast between the actuality of everyday life and the promises of modernist structures for a society. The film focuses on the 9,500 inhabitants of Corviale, Rome, a 1 km long housing complex, commissioned in 1972 by the Institute for social housing to provide much needed housing for the working class. The village is based on Le Corbusier’s Unité d'Habitation of Marseilles. Holzfeind speaks directly to a society that openly comprehends the positive and negative effects the unrealized project with incomplete infrastructures, which are considered to have caused high unemployment rates, criminality and ultimately fuelled the outsider prejudices that characterize Corviale as a ghetto.

Outside the Living Room
Pia Rönicke, 2000, 8:00
Pia Rönicke takes on the role of the poetic urban planner to create a fictional vision of reconciliation between nature and urbanism. Set to an emotive soundtrack, the viewer takes a dream like journey through various animated landscapes to encounter fictional and recognisable urban cityscapes reconstructed to arrange nature as the dominant force; Manhattan skyscrapers are surrounded by dense forest and rice fields are found on top of Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments. Nature takes center stage and the buildings provide the supporting structure to enable Rönicke’s utopian society, rooted to a natural existence. Outside the Living Room subtly criticises the dominant force of the built environment and suggests a new way of life for society.

Ciudad Moderna
Terence Gower, 2004, 6:00
Drawing together a selection of clips of 1950’s and 60’s Mexican Modernist architecture; interiors, facades or street scenes taken from the popular Mexican film Despedida de Casada (1966), Ciudad Moderna considers the impact of the built architectural environment on the human experience of the modernist city. Through re-editing the film in a playful manner with a light-hearted soundtrack, Gower celebrates the architecture of Mexico, such as the Museum of Anthropology or the apartment buildings of Avenida de la Reforma, to re-present an image of the modernist Mexican city and show an appreciation for the opportunities it represented for the urban individual.

Running time: 1:15
Biografien

Terence Gower

Terence Gower is a Canadian artist based in New York. He has exhibited his work in galleries and museums in the US (Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; New Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Queens Museum, and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; ICA Boston; UCLA Hammer Museum, LA; and ICA Philadelphia), Mexico City (La Colección Jumex; Galería Arte Mexicano; Laboratorio Arte Alameda), Canada (The Power Plant, Toronto; Gallery 101, Ottawa; Artspeak, Vancouver), Germany (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Bonn; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig; Galerie M+R Fricke, Berlin), and Latin America (XIII Bienal de la Habana, Cuba; XI Mostra da Gravura, Curitiba, Brazil; and Centro Recoleta, Buenos Aires). Gower's videos have screened at festivals and museums in Barcelona, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Florence, Mexico City and New York.
Gower has curated exhibitions and screenings for several museums and art centres such as New Museum, New York and Hammer Museum, LA (Modern Shorts), Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (Public Practice / Private Lives), El Museo del Barrio, New York (The Conceptual Trend), Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico (Pasaje Iturbide), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (The Counterfeit Subject), and the San Francisco Art Institute (Tendencies).
He has published seven editions and multiples and has created public projects for Cologne, Germany, Mexico City, and New York City. Ciudad Moderna, a monograph on Gower's videos, was published last year by A&R/Turner, Mexico City and a second monograph, Display Architecture, about Gower's pavilion projects was released this year by Navado Press, Berlin.

Pia Rönicke
Pia Rönicke (b. 1974, Roskilde, Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen. Her work has been the subject of numerous international solo exhibitions including; Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz; Croy Nielsen, Berlin; Lunds Konsthall, Lund; Tate Modern, London; Display Gallery, Prague; Trafo Gallery, Budapest; MAK, Los Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
Rönicke’s work has also been featured in many group exhibitions, including; Gallery TPW, Toronto, Ontario; Quadrennial for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Sala Rekalde, Bilbao; Artists Space, New York; Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna; ACCA, Melbourne; Venice biennale, Utopia Station, Venice; Busan Biennale, Korea; Manifesta 4, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt/Main; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.
Rönicke has also undertaken a number of residencies, including; AIAV, Japan (2004); MAK Schindler Residency, Los Angeles and IASPIS, Stockholm.

Heidrun Holzfeind

Heidrun Holzfeind (b.1972 in Lienz, Austria) lives and works in New York. Holzfeind has shown independently at, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City; Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck; Artists Space, New York; W139 gallery, Amsterdam; Flacc, Genk; Austrian Cultural Forum Rome; Swiss Institute, New York.
Holzfeind has also featured in numerous group exhibitions and screenings including, Centre d'Art Santa Monica, Barcelona; Zendai MOMA, Shanghai; Documentary Fortnight exhibition, MOMA, New York; Manifesta 7, Rovereto, Italy; PhotoCairo 4, Cairo; Architecture Museum Basel; Exit Art, New York; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Salzburger Kunstverei, Salzburg; Impakt Festival, Utrecht; Bildmuseet Umeå, Sweden; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Witte de With, Rotterdam.
Holzfeind has undertaken residencies at Air lab, CCA-Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, at Swing Space, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, and residencies sponsored by the Austrian Arts Council in Mexico City, London and Rome. In September and November 2009 Holzfeind’s work will be shown at CCA, Ujazdowzki castle, Warsaw and De Vleeshal, Middelburg, Netherlands.


Das Programm wurde von Laura Barlow zusammengestellt. Barlow (*1980) ist Kuratorin, studiert am Bard College/New York und hat 7 Wochen in Graz gelebt und am Grazer Kunstverein gearbeitet.{/slide}

Kurator / curator
Søren Grammel

REVIEW of the exhibition by David Catherall

Finding a balance: Virtuoso and the origin of material

Conditions of display and methods of presentation are core values when considering the reception of objects and images in the material world. Surface, lighting, colour, texture, are all perceptive concerns in relation to the mediation of language between passive consumerism and intense receptivity. Sensation, reaction, and stimulation are a language used to interpret or compel the visual and physical qualities of representation and vernacular. This applies to the silhouette created when shadows of bureaucracy intervene in the celebration of aesthetic pleasure, beauty, and tact; leisure, and exchange with that of the industrial, manual, work-force; labour. Throughout the joint exhibition of Nora Schultz and Pernille Kapper Williams, investments have been made into digging up the groundwork of frame and display techniques and their related economies of production. These economies refer directly by and large to material concerns of movement between historic decorative design objects, and industrial manufactured building materials, both intrinsically connected to commercial, social, cultural values as well as those of artistic merits and practise. Positioned within this crux, democracy appears to level-out the prosaic hierarchy of excess and function in the sense of an imbalanced ratio of experience and reflexivity.

This exhibition reads like a magazine spread or a trade catalogue of a semi-public showroom, a layout of carefully selected things; crafted, built, collected, assembled, ranging from the lineage of process and manufacture; prototype, production, display, documentation. The governing conditions of display exist in the promotional potential of leisure and the appreciation / speculation for imagined living is embedded in the framing devices and mediation of language between object, surface and presentation. Read as a three-dimensional un-folding of pages, reveals the layout and textual-visual components that emit particles of information and control the situation like an editorial gesture, what material goes in and what stays out, how it is finished, and how it is arranged, henceforth what is communicated and what is elucidated from these pages. The use of certain display, hanging, framing devices regarding the set of works by the two artists give the general impression of finding ‘its’ own balance as an exhibition that acknowledges the demands of the neutral contemporary conditions of presentation and the value of historic tropes.

The shiny, flawless ‘L-shaped’ pedestal that Kapper Williams employs as a framing device for Du Bon Ton (2009), coated in blackboard paint, resembles powder-coated steel, adorned with dovetailed stained wooden boxes, glass mounts for images and texts, perspex bookends and the illumination of artificial light from the copper lamp is reflexive in what materials (in both sense of the word, subject and physical) she chooses as furnishings. Here we are confronted with a plethora of historic visual information that illustrate the furnishings and finishings of the economy that they represent. A selection of pre-existing antique paper-ephemera, books, illustrations, hand blown glass, marbled samples and various other art deco artefacts, all polished, lacquered, and buffed, reflect the surface of the device that accepts them, the plinth and the wooden display cases. The language of display lends itself historically from the mercantile presentations of commerce and its associated values of taste and acquisition. These objects on display offer an idealism or a redefinition for a modern approach to metropolitan life, encompassing aspects of an everyday existence that potentially narrate various fictions and fantasies of the aspiration and the desire to surpass the banality and commonplace of generic consumerism. It operates in-between space of authorship and readership using specifically, fashion designer and entrepreneur Paul Poiret and the exclusive Parisian magazine Du Bon Ton, as twentieth-century progenitors of rebellion towards the industrial, mass-produced commodities to produce a dialogue with how contemporary models invest this vocabulary as propaganda towards hedonism. The Way We Move (2009) and Untitled (Duster) (2009) appeal to the Bourgeois reception of beauty in terms of apparent authenticity; The fabrics are a twenty-first-century re-make of a design based on an original Poiret jacket from the 1920s which has been re-constructed through digital manipulation of photographs, and the Ostridge-feather duster a new product meant to look vintage available from the retailer Manufactum which specializes in home and decoration products advertised as being produced in the tradition of German craftsmanship, as drag-act of feigning elegance. Like the gloss of the magazine, the plinth showcases a similar logic- as a visual documentation of high society in twentieth-century European capitalism, unsure of its own authenticity.

Coercely Nora Schultz’s abstracted bent, cut and folded metal forms resembling chairs, automobiles, beach mats, and a hammock displace this treatment of material. In Ergodynamische Stühle (2009) (lit. Ergonomic Chair) iconic frames of Marcel Breuer’s Bauhaus tubular steel chairs become the literal frame to present curved metal sheets portraying ironic ‘ergonomic designs.’ Built around the measurements, dimensions and physical properties of the chairs structure itself, the metal sheets conform to these specifications as a pre-defined context and set of rules that determine what is perceived as ‘chair’ and that of ‘ergonomic,’ suitable for sitting in for prolonged periods of time, the body is supported in theory by the structure which accepts it, eliminating physical effort. However, the sheet metal formed around these structures offer no logic into functioning as such, the reception is purely visual, comfortless as they take on the appearance as a shell, sketch, or prototype under development. They possess elements of formal behaviour as to what ‘chair’ implies – bent, curved, to the proportions of the frame, metal upon metal shaped inside and out around the frame to connect them as a unified thing. The language of structure is animated by the presence of human activity by inserting the ‘originality’ of the ‘work’ into ‘frame,’ as signifier of expectance of ease.

Commentary I

The origin and treatment of materials is attributed to the presentation of such in the transcendence of the static potential of visual culture to solely occupy the aesthetic realm and that of commodity capital. In this exhibition these concerns offer a complex rendering of contemporary economics of a capital structure defined by the labour division and its contended contributions to modernity. Idealism and the subsequent ordering and arranging of spatial and social conditions form the relationships that in turn comment on the formal properties of products and inter-linked parallels to form itself, in a contradictory nature of acceptance and denial continually in play and in dialogue. To elaborate, formal components and social-cultural legacies interact under the brief headline of ‘contemporary art’ amidst the current international hyper-paced buyer’s market of subjectivity and information exchange. In this case the viewer is bombarded with a plethora of shapes, sizes, colours, and textures that evoke a sensual-visual experience of tact and pleasure in the physicality and tangibility of beauty and potential desire. The subtle relationship between the work of the two artists in this exhibition exists in the mediation of approach and interaction towards the origin and treatment of materials within the realm of production and presentation. This can be seen as an experimental dialogue that is focused on a circulation of objects in conflict with the authority of creation, the formal and material structures of observation and creation, and the concealment and revelation as such.

Car with Cancer (2009) by Schultz resembles the shape of a car suspended from the ceiling, the body, shell, or frame of a vehicle intended as the façade, the exterior protection of interior space in its basic form, bearing the weight of a solid black mass – cancer, pulling it down, an incomplete whole, the surplus, excess of unnecessary material impeding the function and performance of the interior; ornament without decoration, superfluous, overpowering, negative positive space. Again, in Car Collage (2009), the image exhibits the literal frame of contemporary luxury goods- devoid of their markings, labels and wholeness through the cut-out subtractive rendering of two-dimensional space; reductive rendering as a transparent three-dimensional exterior, a hollow skeleton, matter-less, fragile, the corrupted body without interior form, under production, half-formed. The manipulation of subtractive handling, the removing of space, removing of surface, removing of content elucidates positive and negative space, black and white, as the diminutive violation of production. In the case of Car With Cancer, the black mass of steel can be regarded as the surplus material or the un-wanted / un-needed growth impeding function.

The A4 text sheets Untitled (Tableau DCCVII & Tableau DCLXXIII) by Kapper Williams remove the surplus from decoration as a German – English translation of titles given to colour, properties and attributes that physically describe the palette of language pertaining to the visual senses. They exist as the universal language that translates as the fundamental building blocks to visual construction and analysis of formal qualities in objects and images. This applies in reference to printing and design industries; adjectives that affix a concrete meaning, and have a mathematical value of pigment, luminosity, saturation, and hue; additive renderings. Likewise, the isolation of the Du Bon Ton illustration plate titles aestheticize typographic fonts, and include their own set of rules and dimensions; curves, angles, and lines that add visual elements literally to language. Separated from their origins, they contextualize the significance of descriptory functions of imagery in terms of associative values of connotations with the illustrations. Titles such as The Embarrassment of Paris, and Do Not Tell generate projections into the aforementioned narratives and judgements placed on the values of products. Holding the relationship of image and text together, the books Who’s Who in Graphic Art and Ornamentik operate as collections of paper that contain the excess of ornament and decoration as a portfolio or lexicon of international styles and accomplishments, collections of knowledge and information bound in the documentation and representation of photographs, texts, and footnotes. 

Commentary II

Formalism, the structure to determine a systematic procedure to approaching the production of things considering scale and material of how they are to be manufactured and displayed; a procedure here that implies a representational approach and that of establishing an equilibrium towards manufacture and presentation. Rationalized decision-making sets a criteria on how these procedures occur, what is available on the market, and how these demands fit the site or context of presentation. Congruent with performance, things are manifested and exhibited simultaneously, such is the case with various working methods in this situation, collecting and forming materials to a simultaneous pre-determined visualisation open to interpretive intervention. First, materials collected ‘on site’ one of these economies is based on what is readily available in the local environment, research is not a major part of the accumulation process, but is substituted by needs for what are within the means of local building suppliers and DIY stores, leftovers from building sites, and collections from hunting and gathering type findings. Size and scale is dictated by the ability to manipulate these supplies by use of hand or basic tools often used by DIY enthusiasts, or therefore within the economy of the democratic. Second, programmation of source and accumulation of sought out virtuoso of a particular field- acquired value that exists within an economy of exchange- ideas, objects, commerce, simulates the role of the connoisseur.   Nevertheless, the balance, dialogue, and mitigation between leisure/labour, democratic/aristocratic, and decorative/functional is the bureaucratization of language and its role in the formal structure of the methodology of a visual, sensual, and tangible approach to display and presentation that affords us the luxury of experience and reflexivity.

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