past

Sture Johannesson

Sociodelic Paths

30/10/11 – 14/1/12

>exhibition views<

Computer Paragraph in Yellow and Blue, or: To live outside

the law you must be honest (Bob Dylan),1971

computer-generated drawing, silk screen, IBM 1130, programmed

by Sten Kallin, CalComp plotter

Keller/Kosmas (Aids-3D)

Avoid, Control, Accept, Transfer

11/2/12 – 31/3/12

>exhibition views<

text by Keller/Kosmas

In their debut at the gallery, Nik and Dan have continued to dynamically hedge their positions with a new body of sculpture and installation. Following protocol, they have more or less performed the following assessments: Identified assets and identified which are most critical, identified, characterized and assessed threats, assessed the vulnerability of critical assets to specific threats, and then determined the risk to those assets.

The array of defensive solutions they exhibit range in tactic from high energy density figurative painting, customized flood prevention, to a system of charitable body movements.

Ideally, the predetermined risks to the exhibition’s success will have been effectively managed, explicitly address uncertainty and assumptions, create value- (The gain should exceed the pain), and be capable of continual improvement and reassessment.

Florian Auer

How to Spend It

7/4/12 – 26/5/12

>exhibition views<

How to Spend It

Florian Auer´s exhibition does not represent one of the ubiquitous attempts to deal, critique, or justify (and, finally, philosophise about) what has happened before and ever since the fall of the Lehman tower. It rather stages discretionary placeholders for the process in which a straight forward and niche exercise of calculating figures plus dealing with people and partners in the backrooms of industrial powerhouses became the center of both economic and public attention (and not least desires).

The presentation of financially loaded objects is hereby the focal point of the show. Many of them might be recognisable to some, none of them is invented or innovated; but made by the artist. They all are unified by the joy and the highs of professionalism, ideal and material.

And this is where the molds and frames are breaking. Between the offices and the studios, between tools and innovations, based on risque business.

The lows are less clear, however, present. Look back at what happened near Time Square in 2008 (and forget about Wall Street for a moment). Look at the Tombstones.

After all, we live in financial times. Including sushi.

The Still Life of Vernacular Agents

Michele Abeles, Lutz Bacher, Getho J. Baptiste, Peter Coffin, Kendra Frorup, Celeur J. Herard, Adriana Lara, Katja Novitskova, Racine Polycarpe, Fatima Al Qadiri and Thunder Horse Video, Evel Romain, Ettore Sottsass

curated by Nadine Zeidler

2/6/12 – 4/8/12

>exhibition views<

Ettore Sottsass, Study for Tea Pot, 1973

The Still Life of Vernacular Agents is an assembly of works that come together to negotiate the following agenda:

High definition imagery, digital manufacturing, genetic engineering, and increasingly refined forms of virtual communication foster the debate on how these new realms of hybrid mediators challenge our concepts of being and reality.

The schizophrenia of division – between culture and nature, subject and object, life and death – as introduced by the Enlightenment has already been detected. A critical break with the supposed tribal naiveté – that interpreted natural objects as signals for human affairs, and which likewise viewed human songs and magic spells as potential forces of nature – did not really take place. While modern society became comfortable in its empire of dualism, it actually never stopped producing hybrids and networks. Threatening the categories of rationality, they were sent off to populate repressed spaces and the unconscious of the modern mind.

The expanding network of agents that connects subjects and objects in multiple forms and changing constellations calls for a new preoccupation with these mediators that make things talk, and through which references can be mobilized.

Slavs and Tatars

Not Moscow Not Mecca

12/9/12 – 3/11/12

>exhibition views<

Slavs and Tatars, The Dear for the Dear, 2012

>german version<

Founded in 2006, Slavs and Tatars is a collective that describes itself as a “faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China know as Eurasia”. Based on their research into the region and the various intersections of Slavic, Caucasian and Central Asian cultures, Slavs and Tatars’ work takes on the form of various media such as lectures, publications, prints, sculptures and installations.

In The Faculty of Substitution the artists investigate the role of the sacred and syncretic as a vehicle for social change. “Substitution allows us to tell one talethrough another, to adopt the innermost thoughts, experiences, beliefs, and sensations of others as our own”. In an effort to challenge the very notion of distance, Slavs and Tatars look into points of comparisons between the Orient and the Occident, modernity and Islam. Through moments of cognitive dissonance, The Faculty of Substitution discovers affinities among the apparently incommensurable and introduces histories beyond the grand hegemonic narratives of Communism and Islam.

Conceived as an installation for the Vienna Secession in May 2012, Not Moscow Not Mecca writes the “collective autobiography of Central Asia through the flora and not the fauna”. The exhibition activates fruits such as the quince, the sour cherry, the mulberry, or the watermelon as bearers of knowledge from various cultures and presents them as real and imaginary offerings in an open shrine. Each fruit stands for a linguistic, spiritual, emotional, or political form of syncretism across the steppes of Eurasia.

Katja Novitskova

MACRO EXPANSION

17/11/12 – 19/1/13

>exhibition views<

Thousands of forms demise each year and thousands are born anew. For every extinct butterfly with a unique wing pattern a silicon wafer is printed, for every dying mosquito a digital image is uploaded. Fueled by human attention and primordial carbon, these massive populations of info-matter are roaming the Earth.

Recovery and Prosperity, the two successive phases of an upcoming economic expansion, will be marked by a rise of unseen species. So specific will be the ecological reality we cannot predict their agency. What we can do is render our emotional energy these beings will need to feed off: a map of formal intensities, unfolded from art and commerce. After months of neurochemical translations an ancient signal emerges. An animal. Bonding.

Neverending Story, an artist e-book for MACRO EXPANSION will be released in early 2013.

Carson Salter (AmbI)

a presentation on contemporary artist’s enterprises

thursday 24/1/13 7.30pm

Carson Salter, MIT artist and researcher will discuss artists who bring their knowledge to non-art markets. A short history of the artist-as-consultant (e.g. Artists Placement Group, Ocean Earth) and relevant contemporary cases (K-Hole, Rhei Research, etc.) will be framed in terms of productive ambivalence + ambiguity.

Those interested in enterprise as well as contemporary art are invited to attend. Carson Salter will be available for open office hours at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler from 21-24 January. If you are interested in meeting to discuss this topic, please contact the gallery.

Carson Salter (b.1984) is an artist, currently researching Art & Enterprise at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He attended Colorado College, B.A. 2007, and The Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles, MSA^ 2010. Salter positions himself as a consultant and business-services provider, specializing in knowledge management and contemporary enterprise culture. Past projects include The Teachable File (teachablefile.org), a self-improving catalog & resource on independent art education, and Cambridge Book, an art book consultancy. His current work facilitates the introduction of artists into non-art markets.

K-HOLE and ECKHAUS LATTA

BRAD and YOU

2/2/13 – 2/3/13

>images<

K-HOLE is a trend forecasting report by Greg Fong, Sean Monahan, Emily Segal, Chris Sherron, and Dena Yago. ECKHAUS LATTA is a fashion label by Zoe Latta and Mike Eckhaus. Both groups are based in New York.

The deodorants BRAD and YOU are the result of a conversation between both groups regarding anxiety. BRAD smells like Old Spice. YOU is composed of dirt, counterfeit Chanel No. 5, vetiver, rose, Marlboro Lights, pepper, smoked barley, saliva, and lanolin. Both were made by hand in upstate New York.

K-HOLE’s third report, which features the K-HOLE Brand Anxiety Matrix, is available as a free PDF download at www.khole.net and as a set of 100 limited edition USB carabiners.

ECKHAUS LATTA will be presenting their third collection during New York Fashion Week A/W 2013.

The deodorants will be available for purchase at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler and online atwww.khole.net.

www.khole.net

www.eckhauslatta.com

Ecology 1: Art & Democracy
A conversation between Daniel Keller, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Timur Si-Qin andHito Steyerl

Saturday 20/4/13, 5pm

Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 29
10178 Berlin
1st floor, room 01088

Daniel Keller, Timur Si-Qin and Hito Steyerl will lead a discussion, convened by Christopher Kulendran Thomas, to consider whether the increasingly networked condition of art holds the potential for art’s radical democratization.

As art’s existing institutional forms, such as the gallery, are reconfigured within broader ecologies, what does it mean to risk art’s very status as art?

What might art be for as a widespread part of daily life?

What could be at stake in negotiating art’s entanglement with non-art processes such as those of commerce or the state?

What might be left of art on a level playing field with branding or business or government?

And what possibilities might emerge from the art of networks, as sites of intersection between human and non-human materiality, for democracy itself?

Christopher Kulendran Thomas

When Platitudes Become Form

16/3/13 – 20/4/13

>exhibition views<

Taking as materials the whole system by which art is distributed, existing artworks are purchased from the politically unstable margins of international art power and reconfigured to fund a part-clandestine evisceration of contemporary art’s globalising mission. Through this ongoing insurgent enterprise, cultural exchange is explicitly perverted by the underlying colonial trading patterns that it usually masks. Art here is ecologically contingent within its networked reality. Counter-manipulating imperial interdependencies of art and war, a conspiracy of consequences is set in motion that extends beyond the work’s as yet visible horizons.

present

Avery Singer

The Artists

26/4/13 – 22/6/13

>exhibition views<

If one views the past, be it in glances through old magazines, in movies of lost eras, or in visions of what was to come, the stream of history is laid bare, flowing forward to the present day.If one stops at a certain point and ignores what has followed, the stream opens up and the flow is forced to take whatever path we fancy.

The Artists presents a romanticized and slapstick vision of how we are or are not living. Staged figures occupy the realm of unrealized buildings or monuments, their geometric stylization skewing human forms into architectural plottings. The eyes of the dreamer rest upon both a forgotten vestige and a future transpired, with a sense of sentimentality overshadowed by a cold and uncanny pallor. These opposing viewpoints converge to produce glimpses of alternate timelines, where idealized visions of contemporary life and bohemia are filtered through past conventions. The mythologized status of the artist as a social being is examined as it exists and as it has been fantasized.

The works’ colorless palette and constructivist aesthetic hint at records of nonexistent times, commemorating absurd regimes that never came to fruition. Noirish shadows spread under expressionistic backlighting; the breezy theatricality of a performance piece freezing into history painting, a communion between artist friends becomes enshrined in neoclassical simplicity. Contemporary media, meshing with bygone trends of the historical avant-garde, produces a perspective of aesthetics that falters to find a foothold on the accepted timeline of art history.

All the works here can be seen as dedications offered as passionate answers to the necessity of fleeting and overburdened ideas. The paintings project unrealized actions and sculptures, the writing - Cologne Painter – an exhibition never to be displayed. Cologne Painter is satire poking fun at the sanctioned language of the press release, and a part of a collection of writings to be published in novel form under the title Press Release Me.