Invitation Exhibitions Opening Nicola Arthen | Benjamin Francis | 10 July 2021, 14:00-18:00

Nicola Arthen
An Intricate Well
Am I an Object, part II

Opening: 10 July, 14:00-18:00
10 July – 15 August 2021
Thu-Sun, 14-18 hrs

Less than 70 kilometres from the exhibition space is a landscape in which there sit a few very particularly shaped building blocks of red sandstone that arrived there a hundred years ago. They have entered the space in the language of modern logistics – the kind of containers you would expect most of the products that travel this world currently are housed in. It’s a language so familiar and basic, it’s almost dull: The surface of brown, recycled material, the wavy layers of paper sandwiched in between, curvy edges, dented corners, coloured straps, labels written for devices or a professional knowledge. It is its ubiquity which makes it a language. We know what to expect and what diverts from expectation – the building blocks require an odd grammar.

Nicola Arthen is an artist based in Amsterdam and London. His practice is an investigation into the mutual relations between objects’ and humans’ capacities, a negotiation between site and experience. By isolating artefacts from their peripheral state and turning them into protagonists, he is invested in their stories, struggles and unique qualities, as well as the poetics and politics of labour to reproduce these. He focuses on unexpected encounters in systems of standardisation – the trace of an individual’s hand or personal considerations in a serial product: a makeshift, cobbled up water meter, a smooth assembly line choreography to cope with the machines’ rhythms, a hesitation in a computer-generated voice. His work takes the form of installations and time-based mediums, often contributing to a moderated spatial environment.

Benjamin Francis
A Body without its Flesh
P/////AKTPOOL part 2/3

Opening: 10 July, 14:00-18:00 
Performance at 15:00 and 16:30

10 July – 15 August 2021
Thu-Sun, 14-18 hrs

While self-consciousness depends on internal and external processes inside and outside of the body, the body as such does not likewise depend on a self-consciousness, causing a form of asymmetry in their joint movement. The body creates errors that influence our ability to be fully conscious, which in turn causes us to unconsciously feel things or to be touched by something without actually
sensing [removed];

A Body without Its Flesh is an ongoing research project that started from Benjamin Francis’s interest in dance performances and the realization that the errors that occur during the rehearsals in a dance class are often more interesting than the eventual performance. After the project’s initial output (the 2020 performance Copy and Paste as well as some sculptural works) his research into the non-harmonic chords and errors shifted to related themes such as discipline, power relations, hierarchy, religion and cleansing, resulting in a new performance that is dealing with some of the dogma’s  that exist within the art world as well as the notion of making [removed];

Francis has created a setting that is both theatrical and ceremonial: a stage, a classroom and a morgue –  inhabited by sculptures and props that reflect on the different references and, at set times, by performers and an [removed];A Body without its Flesh is both an exhibition and an activated setting for a performance, addressing internal and external structures, body and space, repetition and imitation, decay and restoration. Our tongues are being cleansed and our computers are being rebooted. That what is uncertain  is afraid of falling into the abyss, to a point where it becomes formless.

Performers
Ewan McSorley
Kleopatra Vorria
Benjamin Francis
Xam van Kempen
Eleonora Johanna Remmen

Production assistant
Ewan McSorley
Tycho Hupperets

Sound
Barry de Bruin

Janina Frye
fuse, shape, melt, decompose, fade
Limited edition 

Opening: 10 July, 14:00-18:00
10 July – 15 August 2021
Thu-Sun, 14-18 hrs

fuse, shape, melt, decompose, fade is a new limited edition artwork by Janina Frye, commissioned for the P/////AKT Collection in an edition of 15 plus 5 AP. The edition will be on view in our P/////AKTSALON from 10 July 2021.

Janina Frye’s sculptures and installations present a concept of the human — a transformative system with connections, overlaps and entanglements linking the body to the outside world. Through the lens of new materialism, systemic theories and her personal observations, she puts forward the idea that the human skin is not a border, but an interface to the outside world. She explores how changes in our lives such as new technologies and scientific insights, as well as social, economic and climate changes, confuse the contemporary binary logic between human/object, animate/inanimate, nature/culture. She wonders how these changes induce, a process of alienation from how we perceive our bodies.

Frye is interested in the ‘the invisible’, in which immaterial and imaginary entities, fictions, phantoms and emergent processes influence this process of alienation.

For the edition fuse, shape, melt, disintegrate, fade Frye was inspired by the concept of panpsychism. Thomas Nagel describes panpsychism as a view that the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties, whether or not they are parts of living organisms. Any living organism, including a human being, is a complex material system. It consists of a huge number of particles combined in a special way. Each of us is composed of matter that had a largely inanimate history before finding its way onto our plates or those of our parents. It was once probably part of the sun, but matter from another galaxy would do as well. If it were brought to earth, and grass were grown in it, and milk from a cow that ate the grass were drunk by a pregnant woman, then her child’s brain would be partly composed of that matter.¹

¹ Nagel, T., Panpsychism. In Mortal Questions (Canto Classics 2012, pp. 181-195), Cambridge University Press.

P/////AKT works in accordance with the guidelines of the RIVM.
Please read our covid-19 protocol here.

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

Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts and Ammodo