→ Exhibition 29 Sept – 24 Nov 2018
Published by Kunstraum, London (2018)
Editor: Thomas Cuckle
Text by: Thomas Cuckle, Nils Alix-Tabeling, Camille Houzé, Hannah Conroy
Design: Kristin Metho
Photography: Tim Bowditch
Pages: 40 (8 colour)
“While the three texts in this publication were being written, the gallery space of Kunstraum was inhabited by a curious host of denizens: a maquette for a cockerel, with a shell for a wing and a strange growth from its belly; a two faced polymorph, like Medusa with a head-set of snakes; a many-tentacled ghostly form with the face of a woman; amongst others, overlooked by a pair of heroic bee-keepers. These creatures have exerted a subtle influence over the Kunstraum team, directing our research towards the more alien realms of the natural world and the darker places of human imagination.
Within their gallery habitat are two horizontal surfaces – a table and a skateboard – each inset with patterns of intricate marquetry, which describe biospheres of variable and indeterminate proportions. Abstracted forms mutate into micro-organisms usually invisible to the eye (microscopic scale) or into insects’ internal and sexual organs (miniature scale). They could equally well represent forms on a sub-atomic level or else on of galactic proportions. The micro–macro space of Anna Hulačová’s Graceful ride is the shifting ground in which our conversations and writing have traced a web of symbolic citations, from mythology, from history, from a world of life and organic matter.”
– Thomas Cuckle
page 4
“Experiencing a newly found curiosity they slowly arose to the surface of the Mediterranean sea, as if emerging from a dark stomach, escaping from the bile and acids of a Naïade.”
– Nils Alix-Tabeling
La Lactation des Naïades
page 11
“Emerging from the cavities of putrefied bodies, bees were seen as ghosts rising back from the kingdom of the dead.”
– Camille Houzé
a digression on ghostly bees & luxury insects
page 25
“If indeed we are all bodies of water and this water holds a historical memory as it passes from organism to organism, through a sea of life and death, then surely reattachment to water would avert calamitous events.”
– Hannah Conroy
I am apocalyptic
page 33