Merike Estna: fragments from the shattered toe
Opening: 29 October 2017, 6.30 - 9 pm
Exhibition continues until 25 November 2017
Merike Estna's solo-exhibition at Kunstraum incorporates an intricately painted stage/floor painting which, over the course of the exhibition, hosts a series of performance events from international dancers, musicians and artist, against a backdrop of Estna’s large-scale curtain painting and other new works.
In her practice Estna seeks for the conceptual integration of painting and daily life, often inscribing the languages, processes and applications of painting onto scenic design and stage-setups. Estna embeds patterns and colour combinations derived from applied arts vocabularies – which haven't traditionally been accepted in the discourse of painting – juxtaposed with what have become familiar motifs of digital communication. Estna's work challenges the masculine territory of painting and questions the strict visual separation between painting and craft discourses. The works are often activated by visitors or gallery staff: as drinks or cakes served, as clothing or hand towels. Her installations become a meeting point for exchange between visitors and the often unstable qualities of painting.
Supported using public funding by Arts Council england; Cockayne – Grants for the Arts and The London Community Foundation; Republic of Estonia Ministry of Culture and The Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center; and Eesti Kultuurkapital. Merike Estna's work's courtesy of Temnikova & Kasela, Talinn.
Kunstraum FIVE YEARS PARTY
Saturday, 7 October, 7 - 11 pm
Kunstraum first opened its doors in September 2012. Join us during Frieze week to celebrate five years of Kunstraum! Featuring screenings of performance videos commissioned by Kunstraum from Alex Cecchetti and Fay Nicolson, followed by a performance by musician Steev Lemercier, all within the exhibition of Merike Estna.
Also launching new editions by Alex Cecchetti, Merike Estna and Fay Nicolson.
Jennifer Tee’s Structures of Recollection and Perseverance is a total environment, in a display structure inspired by the exhibition design of Brazilian Neo-Concrete artist Hélio Oiticica. Tee’s Kunstraum exhibition runs in parallel to her show at Camden Arts Centre, the overall project departing from two concepts: Let it come down, alluding to events outside of our control, and Resist, which responds to this provocation both physically and spiritually.
Tee’s installation for Kunstraum combines her own works with ethnographic objects, artefacts, books, plants and works by other artists. A central motif in Tee’s practice is the term ‘the soul in limbo’: the artist imagines the soul as caught in an unnamed conceptual or psychological place on the border between the here and the possible. Structures of recollection and perseverance plays on this theme as it lingers on slippages of death, dreaming and the unconscious. The featured objects have been chosen by Tee for their attitude of resistance towards structures that seem difficult or impossible to change, with many of them employing a specifically ‘female’ form of defiance.
Jennifer Tee: Structures of Recollection and Perseverance includes a reading room selected by poet Jane Lewty. The exhibition is accompanied by a booklet including texts by Thomas Cuckle, Brenda Guesnet and Jane Lewty.
Jennifer Tee’s parallel exhibition at Camden Arts Centre entitled ‘Let it Come Down’ continues until 17 September 2017.
Jennifer Tee
Upside down palm tree (Trachycarpus Fortunei), 2017
In his memoir ‘Tristes Tropiques’ (1955), anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss recalls his visit to Brazil and his instant infatuation with the country. He details his paradoxical experience of being immersed in the culture as a researcher, while simultaneously remaining a detached observer and a perpetual outsider. The palm tree has similarly been violently severed from its roots and turned upside down, caught in a state between exotic attraction and alienation.
Burial Urn in the Form of a Female Figure
1000-1500 AD, Colombia
Terracotta
Private collection
Ancient burial urns such as this one were found in chambers inside deep shafts of tombs in northwestern Colombia, and functioned as repositories for the bones of the deceased after their flesh had been removed. These bones were considered to be seeds from which new life could spring, and the urns were thus vital links to the honored dead. With its womb-like shape, the urn emphasises the proximity between death and fertility, and attains a life-like quality through very simple aesthetic features.
L’Inconnue de la Seine
Death mask
Plaster, 15 x 30 x 25 cm
Modern reproduction by Atelier Lorenzi, Paris
Around the late 1880s, the dead body of an unidentified young woman was pulled out of the Seine in Paris, France. A pathologist at the Paris Morgue was so taken by her beauty — and the resting smile on her face — that he made a wax plaster cast of her face. In the following years, copies of her death mask became a popular fixture on the walls of artists’ homes, and inspired numerous literary works. While we might consider death as a cruel and unavoidable fact, ‘L’Inconnue de la Seine’ almost seems to have escaped it, or perhaps found bliss in her untimely ending.
The caster I visit every day has two masks hanging next to his door. The face of the young one who drowned, which someone copied in the morgue because it was beautiful, because it was still smiling, because its smile was so deceptive – as though it knew.
– Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926),
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)
Parangolé Xoxoba-Homage to Nininha of Mangueira (1964)
Textile cotton, red and green, 134 x 92cm
Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980)
Collection of Witte de With Center of Contemporary Art, NL
Hélio Oiticica was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937, and became one of the leading figures of the Neo-Concrete artistic movement in Brazil. While educated in a Western tradition, he became an advocate for a specifically Brazilian sense of aesthetics and cultural concerns. In his work, Oiticica placed a high importance on the lived experiences (vivências) of communities and his audience. The cape is part of Oiticica’s series ‘Parangolé’, with which he aimed to search for an “infinite dimension of colour as it relates to structure, space, and time”. The resulting works were ‘habitable paintings’ in the forms of clothing, capes, banners, or tents.
Oiticica intended for the capes to be dressed in, danced in, and displayed. Visitors are welcome to activate this work through movement and dance.
Complete set of Canopic jars
800-900 BC, Egypt
Collection: The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, US
30 x 13 x 13 cm (set of 4), Modern reproduction
The Ancient Egyptians used so-called ‘canopic jars’ for the safekeeping of particular organs after a person’s death, as they believed that they would be needed in the afterlife. A set would always consist of four jars, each designated for one organ: the stomach, the intestines, the lungs, and the liver. They did not make a jar for the heart; the Ancient Egyptians believed it to be the seat of the soul, and so it was left inside of the body. These replicas of canopic jars highlight the contrast between the contemporary treatment of death within society as opposed to many Ancient cultures, where death occupied a central role in cultural life and was met with a great deal of both material and spiritual preparation.
When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
– Marcel Proust (1871-1922),
In Search of Lost Time,
À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927)
Vol I: Swann’s Way
Reading event with Jane Lewty and Jennifer Tee
12 July 2017, 7 pm
As part of Jennifer Tee’s solo exhibition ‘Structures of Recollection and Perseverance’ at Kunstraum, London, the artist invited poet Jane Lewty read her text from the accompanying publication accompanying the exhibition, followed by readings from the Resist stack of books featured in the reading room of the exhibition. Listen to the recording here:
How Can You Love Me Knowing That I Could Never Love You? is the first installment of a three part project by Johnston Sheard.
The first act by Johnston Sheard, is a seance of humming tongues serenading to a piano piece composed by the artist, with pedal steel guitar accompaniment. The gallery, returning to its previous guise as a place of worship, is divided into a known and an unknown realm by a tabernacle of dead flowers. A choir of singers attempt to defy the impending ephemerality of mortal love by disseminating their emotions across the divide into the unknown eternal. Making indelible transmissions to their eternal paramours like the entangled supernatural photons of quantum physics.
In the second act by Nils Alix-Tabeling, the unknown realm responds in the form of a film depicting a hypothetical sphere of fairytale archetypes hidden within the quantum. Protagonists struggle to become human through a surrealist narrative of disappearances and teleportations. Schizophrenia is questioned as a supernatural power that can penetrate the layers within polysemic objects, enabling protagonists to transition between the visible and invisible, and communicate with the unknown.
Featuring:
Piano – Eeva Reetta Laiho
Pedal Steel Guitar- Jez leather
Saxophone – Jeff Bennett
Drums And Percussion – Keef Winter
Choir Conductor – Eleanor Westbrook
Vocal Workshop facilitator – Elena Dana
Cinematographer : Thomas Depas
Actors : Anastasia Bay, Arthur Egloff
Sound : Johnston Sheard
Special thanks to Zoé Denys and Dominik Krauss.
Supported by Fluxus Art Projects and using public funding by Arts Council England
For a week, converging on 10 June, Beth Collar and Hannah Still will work alongside each other and in relationship, rather than in collaboration, transforming the space of Kunstraum into a working environment – holding space for silence, apathy, antagonism and affection – that will become the backdrop to performances that take their ongoing conversation about ways of feeling, thinking through and thinking about the stomach brain, brain stem, inner speech and free speech as their shared starting point.
Hannah Still is an artist and writer. Most recently she has been thinking around the poetics and politics of the interview, the absence of fiction within fiction and the micro-conditions of the documentary image.
Beth Collar is an artist. Her practice examines the external forces that meld her personality, alter her desires and guide her behaviour. She is interested in the visual languages of systems of power; how the verbal can interact with the physical and through this how histories are exhumed and repurposed.
Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Inspired by Graham Harman’s essay On Vicarious Causation, Performing Objects speculates on the performativity of objects through a selection of videos by Isabelle Cornaro, Benedict Drew, Anna Franceschini, Rebecca Lennon and Zoe Williams, and additionally draws parallels between object-oriented theories and the objectification of the human body.
While the videos offer glimpses of a world beyond the scope of human interrogation, the surrounding space designed by Zoe Williams and the durational choreographed performance by Anna Franceschini suggest a celebration of fetishism/eroticism and a bidirectional contamination of body and object, respectively.
In a context where distinctions between subjects and objects are blurred, each playfully mimicking the other, art historian Maria Walsh and philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant reflect on pornographic literature and the treatment of flesh, and discuss how, or even if, it is possible to re-contextualize or re-interpret the human body.
With performances on:
Saturday 22 April
Sunday 30 April, 6pm
Saturday 6 May, 1pm
Thursday 18 May, 7pm
Saturday 27 May, 6pm
—
Developed during a six week residency in Kunstraum, Swiss artist Sophie Jung’s Producing My Credentials folds writing and performance within a complex environment, where precious items from her vast archive of made and found stuff, watercolour drawings of hermit crabs, papier maché tubes, collected cream jugs, left-over lamp shade carcasses, discarded building material and organic detritus sit side by side. Activated by a series of performances, each will be an undoing of the last, a rewinding, a new beginning – a pre-recorded version of a pre-failed rehearsal or a stuck auto-cue. The total work is a constantly remixing libretto for a never-to-be finished opera on precarity and wobbly legs.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with commissioned texts by Paul Clinton, Tom Morton, Megan Nolan and Sally O’Reilly, designed by Kristin Metho.
Download texts:
Episode 2 – You know I like a laugh
Episode 3 – The one with or without
Episode 4 – My cholesterol was raised by wolves
Episode 5 – A poem for the lost nerve ends our collective solar plexus
Episode 6 – It’s late some say by sin and some by virtue fail
An exhibition taking place at Kunstraum and on the South wall of Gallery 4 of the National Gallery from 9 September till 5 November, 2016, on the occasion of the research and release of “Isa Genzken’s Ring”, a publication edited by Olivier Foulon, published by (SIC), Brussels and Kunstraum, London, with the support of Henry Moore Foundation and Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles.
Thursday 11 August, 7pm
Fiona James: GUTLESS SPEECH (and other impossible thoughts)
GUTLESS SPEECH is the first public edition of For that Rare Diagram Freak, a collective research project supported by Kunstraum, set to develop over four live events throughout the next year. The first edition will feature a physical workshop guided by Andrew Kerton and a performative talk by Fiona James.
—
(Flexing the rod, undoing the bind, dumbing down loosely)
NO NO NOA NOAW NOAWA
Andrew Kerton’s workshop will draw on a range of somatic practices such as Body Mind Centering, Middendorf Technique and Embryology with the intention of exposing inherent patterns that manifest in the flesh. Though different in technical approach, these methods reference the development of the human body on a cellular scale, suggesting how the brain’s plasticity might be harnessed through movement and rhythm to enhance our capacities for thought and self development.
Through the deployment of vibration and its vocal release, we will consider how the attributes of language are influenced by our material structure and where this knowledge can be directed towards collective frames of agency. How can our simplistic physical fundaments and needs (eg. breath) be used to reconfigure thinking, and how does utterance extend and reinforce from the basics of necessity?
—
CURE ME OF MY ‘WHAT’?
WHY WOULD I WANT THAT?
(vibrbrbrbrbatory notes)
Fiona James’ performative talk will credit theories influencing the wider project (e.g. Wilhelm Reich’s theories on the orgasm; Schulamith Firestone’s notion of the technical; Catherin Malabou’s use of epigenetics; Reza Negarestani’s brand of in-humanism) while providing points for a discussion that will influence the research’s direction.
As a pre-emptive set of notes, these simple conceptual gestures will be ordered for delivery in light of Kerton’s workshop, allowing the overriding rational to be developed in an exposed collective space. In this way the workshop will serve as conceptual material for consideration, while also influencing the physical conditions that participants bodies can receive and respond to.
Image caption: Fiona James, The Leaky Lecture Series, 2015, at FLUID PHOSPHORESCENCE, Residency Unlimited, New York, Curated by Mette Kjærgaard Præst. Photo by Samuel Draxler.
They will get a strong return
I will not serve your clients well
On what they have to pay to learn
Its not too late to evaluate
The state of education’s through
Do not leave your grade to fate
On Friday 5th August Kunstraum presents the first in a new series of performance commissions, with a live enactment of Fay Nicolson’s text OVER AND OVER PURE FORM.
Accompanied by a chorus of four performers and live percussion, Nicolson’s OVER AND OVER PURE FORM meditates on the reality of art education today and how bodies, behaviours and attitudes are moulded through formal terminologies or ideologies. Structured around a typical first semester at art school, the performance draws on module components including studio exercises, a critical studies lecture and the all-important evaluation.
OVER AND OVER PURE FORM reflects on the changing nature of art education, drawing on Nicolson’s own experience alongside texts by Friedrich Schiller, Thierry de Duve, Charles Madge and Barbara Weinberger. Between 1967–73, ‘Mass-Observation’ pioneers Madge and Weinberger conducted a sociological study of an art school, observing the emotional affects on students when subjected to a specific artistic value system. Thiery de Duve’s 1994 text ‘When Form Has Become Attitude – And Beyond’ charts a historic shift in the fundamental attitudes in art education, from ‘genius’ to ‘creativity’ to ‘criticality’.
Nicolson borrows from various teaching models, including the visual exercises of Josef Albers and Oscar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus, and the formal methods developed by Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore at the University of Newcastle. The title of Nicolson’s text is taken from the diary of Oscar Schlemmer, who’s practice and teaching revolved around the body.
OVER AND OVER PURE FORM’s concluding section, the evaluation, constructs a critique of the neoliberal condition of art education – cold and rational assessment criteria divorced from emotional and social experience. Borrowing from Schiller’s idea of ‘Play Sense’, Nicolson presents a manifesto – calling for an art education which revalues physical experience.
Fay Nicolson – OVER AND OVER PURE FORM
Running time: 30 minutes
Chorus: Jasmin Aldridge, Helen Davison, Lillian Wilkie and Madalina Zaharia
Percussion: Cédric Fauq
Assistant: Tilly Sleven
Jumana Emil Abboud’s project takes its title from a 1920′s study by the pioneering ethnographer Dr. Tawfiq Canaan, documenting sites that were thought to be haunted by spirits, good and bad. In Palestinian traditions these ‘haunted’ or ‘blessed’ sites are activated through storytelling, folktales, and an expansive fairy-tale practice.
Abboud’s project is an attempt to locate 125 sites identified by Canaan’s study. With the remapping of the landscape – new towns, infrastructure, settlements, etc. – many of the sites have been buried, dried out, or obliterated. In the villages only the older generation recall such and such a haunted site, their knowledge often accompanied by fables once rumoured upon the village. Through the journey to locate the long-lost sites and the stories which belong to them, Abboud has produced a new body of works in film (made in collaboration with cinematographer Isa Freij), drawing and painting. Weaving folk stories with the present political reality, the project moves between fact and fiction, past and present.
Jumana Emil Abboud: Haunted Springs and Water Demons in Palestine is produced in collaboration with BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and is supported by A.M. Qattan Foundation; British Council, Palestine; Rana Sadik and Samer Younis. Special thanks to Delfina Foundation and Raven Row.
Abboud’s exhibition at BALTIC runs from 6 May to 2 October 2016. Earlier drawings in the exhibition were commissioned by the Southbank Centre / Hayward Project space.
Jumana Emil Abboud, From cub to boy: the power of water, 2015
gouache and pastel on paper, 21 x 28cm
Jumana Emil Abboud, Bride I & Bride II, 2016
acrylic, gouache and pastel on paper, 28 x 39cm
Jumana Emil Abboud, Cocoon, 2015 (detail)
pastel, pencil, spray-paint and acrylic on paper, 73 x 110cm
Jumana Emil Abboud, Rocks II, 2016
acrylic, gouache and pastel on paper, 120 x 80cm
Photographer: Tim Bowditch
Sunday 29 November, 5pm
An evening of performative readings by Maria Gorodeckaya, Dorine van Meel, Megan Nolan,
Rianna Jade Parker (The Lonely Londoners), Naomi Pearce and Nina Power
Music and sounds produced and performed by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier and Olle Holmberg. Voice-over by Dorine van Meel.
Disobedient Children is kindly supported by the Elephant Trust and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Photographer: Tim Bowditch
Alex Cecchetti, Copy of Marie-Madeleine otherwise said Marie l’Egyptienne, 1311-2015, silicone and plaster
Alex Cecchetti, Chapel of Female Masturbation, or teaching to a young boy, 2015, blackberries on wall
Alex Cecchetti, Dancing with a teapot, 2015, oil on paper
Alex Cecchetti, Arabesque, 2015 , walnut wood
Alex Cecchetti, Song of Solitude, 2012 , china ink on paper and birdcallers
Photographer: Tim Bowditch
Barbara Visser
Manual/2: The Patient Artist
25 April – 13 June 2015
Events programme:
Saturday 28 March, 5-7pm
Marie Kølbæk Iversen will present a selection of her work, be in conversation with
Mette Kjærgaard Præst, and screen a prepremiere of a her work Io/I (working title).
Wednesday 1 April
‘S’ a Screening
Film screening organised by artist Jacopo Miliani
Thursday 9 April
Liquid Swords – An annotation of Hip Hop and Contemporary Art
An evening with: Live streaming from New York, thoughts on Whitney Houston
and modernistic architecture, Deleuzian rap jamming session and much more.
Participating and presenting: Ingen Frygt | Hannah Heilmann | Agatha Valkyrie Ice
with Dorota Gaweda and Egle Kulbokaite | Mathias Kryger | Renyi Ng | Mette Woller
Liquid Swords is conceptualised and organised by Mette Woller
Joachim Koester, My Frontier is an Endless Wall of Points
(after the mescaline drawings of Henri Michaux), 2007
16 mm black and white film loop
Tyler Coburn, NaturallySpeaking, 2013/14
text, screensaver, monitors, furniture
Jacopo Miliani, Alphabet, 2013
25 photographs
Luca Frei, Soldering without fire / Bleeding to death, 2015 (details)
acrylic
Luca Frei, Corrections, 2015
Giclée print on paper
Unlearning to speak – exhibition text
Photographer: Tim Bowditch
Language is made to be obeyed not believed
Saturday 13 September, 5-7pm
Vladimir Tomić, Unfinished Journeys
Alex Cecchetti, Theory of Rising
Frances Loeffler in conversation with Alex Cecchetti
No poem is intended for its reader
Saturday 20 September, 5-7pm
Gudrun Hasle, Transledag deslaxea
Gro Sarauw, Taxi Dancer
Lucy Clout, The Extra’s Ever-Moving Lips
In-conversation with Gudrun Hasle and Gro Sarauw
New grammars of the body in protest
Saturday 27 September, 7-9pm
Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, Hold Your Ground
Sabel Gavaldon in conversation with Karen Mirza
Werker Magazine
The thing made real
Saturday 4 October, 5-7pm
Fiona James, Leaky Lecture Series
Henning Lundkvist, Orgelshtick
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso in conversation with Henning Lundkvist
Curated by Mette Kjærgaard Præst
Zin Taylor, The hiss of a snake, the sound of a form, 2014
ink, paper, photograph, snake skin, 70 x 50 cm
Zin Taylor, ZigZag / Solid Foam – Thoughts throwing shapes, 2014
ink, paper, photograph, 70 x 50 cm
Zin Taylor, Snake Lamp with ZigZag base, 2014
Zin Taylor, Snake Lamp with ZigZag base, 2014
Zin Taylor, The Brain, 2014
ink, paper, photograph, 70 x 50 cm
Courtesy Zin Taylor; Supportico Lopez, Berlin; and Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto. Photography by Sam Drake.
Eva Fàbregas, Settlement, 2014
Eva Fàbregas, Untitled, 2014
Eva Fàbregas, Settlement, 2014
Andrew Lacon, Reproduction of Sculpture, 2014
Andrew Lacon, 3 coloured lights, 2014
Andrew Lacon, 3 coloured lights, 2014
YEARS, Stella and Florence’s Syndrome, 15:20 mins, 2013
ALLAN.STEFFEN.ROBERT, SNIPER ON THE SUN, 23:23 mins, 2014
Søren Aagaard, Magnus Frederik Clausen, Peter Larsen and Jørgen Michaelsen, Shall We Dance, 20:00 min, 2009
Fredrik Paulsen and Carl Palm, Bench, MDF and steel cylinder, 2014
Thanks to Calvert 22 Gallery, Chisenhale Gallery, Pump House Gallery, Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc, Guillaume Breton, Patrizio Di Massimo and Zabludowicz Collection
Alberto De Michele
Adriano (Portrait), 2006-2007
video loop
Jan Peter Hammer
The Fable of The Bees, 2012
HD video
8 mins
courtesy Supportico Lopez, Berlin
Priscila Fernandes
In Search of the Self, 2009-2010
HD video
16 mins 17 seconds
Alberto De Michele
Adriano (Subtitles), 2006-2007
video
16 mins 30 seconds
Rossella Biscotti
Yellow Movie, 2010
16mm film with optical sound, subtitles in English
22 mins
Late Nights & Early Mornings
with Florian & Michael Quistrebert and Relief Journal Launch
launch event 27 September 2013, 6 till 8.30pm
Edward Clydesdale Thomson, The Distracted Gardener, 2013
painted steel, printed textiles, steel eyelet
Florian & Michael Quistrebert, Overlight 2, 2013
aluminum pigment, various paints on canvas, LEDs, batteries
Florian & Michael Quistrebert, Overlight 3, 2013
modeling paste, acrylic paint and iridescent coating on canvas
Florian & Michael Quistrebert, Overlight 1, 2013
modeling paste and acrylic on panel, LED, batteries
Edward Clydesdale Thomson, The Distracted Gardener, 2013, painted steel, printed textiles, steel eyelet Jacob Dahlgren, Unit of Measurements, 2011, Tape Measures Jacob Dahlgren, Neoconcrete Space, 2012, Video 
Willem Besselink, slapen / waken (asleep / awake), 2013, series of light boxes Willem Besselink, iCal, 2012, high gloss house hold paint on panel Jacob Dahlgren, Unit of Measurements, 2011, Tape Measures Jacob Dahlgren, Neoconcrete Space, 2012, Video 
Willem Besselink, slapen / waken (asleep / awake), 2013, series of light boxes Willem Besselink, iCal, 2012, high gloss house hold paint on panel 
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