Koen Kloosterhuis, Spaghetti Rain
Turning to Dust and Bones, part 2

Opening: Saturday 25 June, 20-24 hrs
26 June – 31 July 2022
Thu – Sun, 14 – 18 hrs

1.
The garden of Koen Kloosterhuis’s father is a place that no longer exists, or only in his mind’s eye, where it lives on as a fictionalised memory  as well as a place of fiction that can be altered at will. As part of the surroundings where one grows up, the garden is a world on a reduced scale and a default setting to which one relates all other things.
The garden is also a place in between the private and the public, or rather: the most private of outdoor spaces. As such it is a contradictory domain – in the case of this specific garden a domain that was inhabited by a collection of  historical, mythological and animal figures that had no apparent reason to be there other than in their capacity of a seemingly accidental assembly of garden statues. This gathering remains a mystery to which there’s no conclusive solution to be made and therefore it is also a question that, for Kloosterhuis, precedes artistic production – born from the wish to make sense out of what wasn’t evident and to (re)connect these entities with each other and their now lost context. For Kloosterhuis this is the reason takes this particular garden as a starting point for his sculptural installation at P/////AKT.

2.
Artistic production thus becomes a means to bridge unbridgeable distances and to create unity from what appears to be random. To finish this process of putting things together and to realise a finished work eventually also leads to the artist’s own eviction from the work, which remains inanimate and ‘unfulfilled’. Kloosterhuis’s attempt to piece together the remnants of the lost garden statues and to bring  the into the present as a presence (into a new  eloquent and inhabited body) has a Frankensteinian twist to it, but is also reminiscent of other creatures that exist in popular culture and mythology. The statues themselves not only come from a lost world but also from the domain of kitsch, which is in itself a hollowed out form of visual culture – a reduction of something that once was extremely meaningful to something meaningless, of something functional or ritual to decoration (in terms of Vilém Flusser a spectacle or apparatus that leads to absence and death).  In order to create a living, inhabited sculpture, the maker should therefore somehow attempt to embody it with his own living matter and get it to speak about its (changed) role and context.

Tilde ~ 1934
Polina Kanis, Pejvak (Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari)

Opening: Saturday 25 June, 20-24 hrs
26 June – 31 July 2022
Thu – Sun, 14 – 18 hrs

Curator: Masha Domracheva
Production and technical support: Matteo Casarin, Brian McKenna, Alex Fischer

The exhibition explores two utopian botanical projects both initiated in 1934

The work of artistic duo Pejvak is telling the story of an expedition to Japanese-occupied Manchuria led by artist, scientist and mystic Nikolay Roerich and commissioned by the US Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace. Roerich and Wallace had a double agenda. Wallace regarded Roerich as his spiritual leader and secretly supported the painter’s mission to establish a pan-Buddhist society based on high spirituality and cooperative labor, known as the Sacred Union of the East. Roerich in turn was supposed to collect drought-resistant plants that would be able to stabilise and restore American soil.

The work of Polina Kanis explores an ideological project accidentally started by Soviet scientist Fyodor Zorin in the botanical garden of Sochi. He planted a wild lemon tree and then grafted other citrus fruits onto its crown. A tradition grew: throughout decades prominent international figures added grafts of different citrus varieties to the tree. Today there are more than 630 of these additional shoots, representing 167 different countries and a utopian vision of political and ecological symbiosis.

So, a recently developed branch of science — breeding — became extremely important for the rise of the agricultural sectors of the world economy, and two so called ‘camps’ —USA and USSR in particular. That is not a coincidence as ideas about new forms of life often appear on the ruins of societies collapsed after a recent crises, when they are about to resurrect, and the new world is to be built. But what new world were supposed to be built? What was given a start at the same time in 1934 in the world politically and socially? And what those visionary projects, explored in the exhibition, mean to us today? Can we consider them utopias today, knowing that they were echoing imperialist logic? And lastly, how shall we reconsider the concept of utopia within decolonial thinking?

The exhibition was first opened on May 13 within Amsterdam Art Week, and supposed to function until June 19, but due to unpredictable organisational issues with the space it had to be closed the day after. Soon after these events, P/////AKT team has kindly offered to reopen the show in P/////AKTPOOL.

Raphaël Langmair
Again (Monochrome)

Opening: Saturday 25 June, 20-24 hrs
26 June – 31 July 2022
Thu – Sun, 14 – 18 hrs

16,5 x 25 x 3 cm
2 burnt slices of bread, cardboard box, ink stamped text
signed, numbered, dated
edition of 5, published by the artist

P/////AKT is proud to present Again, (Monochrome) a new edition by alumn Raphaël Langmair:

He finds an object and makes a replica, although differently from its original. In the past he used ink of an octopus for making one in print of that same octopus. In another work he takes a fruit market crate and rebuilds it into a triangle shaped one. Recently one morning he burnt his toast. He took another slice of bread in order to make a toast again. While waiting he decided to burn deliberately the next one as well that brought him two burnt toasts that he turned into a piece, hence the title of this edition: Again. (Kees van Gelder)

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P/////AKT would like to thank:

Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts and 

Stadsdeel Amsterdam Oost.