Damien & The Love Guru

We are pleased to share a selection of the documentation of
HC “Fuoco Alle Galere” at the gallery in Brussels

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Mario e Caetano,2023,porcelain,17.5 x 12 cm (espresso cups) 5.5 x 16.5 cm (espresso plates) 
6.89 x 4.72 in (espresso cups) 2.17 x 6.5 in (espresso plates)

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view 

Fuoco Alle Galere 11/14, 2023, porcelain, 29.3 x 29.3 cm / 11.54 x 11.54 in

Fuoco Alle Galere 6/14, 2023, porcelain, 29.3 x 29.3 cm / 11.54 x 11.54 in

Fuoco Alle Galere 14/14, 2023, porcelain, 29.3 x 29.3 cm / 11.54 x 11.54 in

Fuoco Alle Galere 5/14, 2023, porcelain, 29.3 x 29.3 cm / 11.54 x 11.54 in

Fuoco Alle Galere 8/14, 2023, porcelain, 29.3 x 29.3 cm / 11.54 x 11.54 in

Fuoco Alle Galere 3/14, 2023, porcelain, 29.3 x 29.3 cm / 11.54 x 11.54 in

Fuoco Alle Galere 7/14, 2023, porcelain, 29.3 x 29.3 cm / 11.54 x 11.54 in

Fuoco Alle Galere 9/14, 2023, porcelain, 29.3 x 29.3 cm / 11.54 x 11.54 in

Fuoco Alle Galere 12/14, 2023, porcelain, 29.3 x 29.3 cm / 11.54 x 11.54 in

Fuoco Alle Galere 2/14, 2023, porcelain, 29.3 x 29.3 cm / 11.54 x 11.54 in

Fuoco Alle Galere 1/14, 2023, porcelain, 29.3 x 29.3 cm / 11.54 x 11.54 in

COFFEE SICILY

Anna Castelli, Franco La Cecla

Go to the bar in the morning, nod to the guy at the coffee machine. Watch, out of the corner of your eye, how his wrist is at a right angle while pressing the powder, just the right amount; how he screws the portafilter to the machine; and how the steam passes through with the right pressure. Watch the drops fall, one by one, into the spotless cup. Accept with a competent eye that a minimal amount of thick liquid, in other parts of the world, would not be considered something to drink. To be fair, coffee at the bar is not a drink; it is concentrated sweat, a night dew, a dense patina, a hint rather than a reality. However, it gives you the impression that things are as they should be, that the world is beginning this morning “as it should”. On this island, where things are better hinted at than said, one doubles in a continuous ambiguity. There is value in absolute beginnings that are announced – but not declared, like coffee. Sniffing, stirring, sipping, making sure the cup is hot, risking the lips or more cleverly using a teaspoon to lay a few drops on the rim to cool it down; there is a shared expertise between you and the barista, a need to prove daily that you know how things should be done. Only a few emphasize the effects of coffee but all agree that it is essential; without it there is no point getting out of bed. In a land where “going to sleep” means “to lay down”, back in Demeter’s maternal embrace, staying up- right is an ongoing challenge. Past the morning, coffee is essential to get through the day, to finish lunch, to face the afternoon evil hour. There is an intimate dimension to daytime coffee; it is a part of contemplating existence, of accompanying it with a knowledgeable and somehow bitter nod: yeah, that’s right. Or if you sip coffee with friends, it is necessary to talk, to agree and deny. In a circle of friends the coffee serves to reiterate: of course, that’s it.

At some point you lose count, you can drink six or seven of them. After a certain moment they are the assent of the evening, of the night, of the wee hours. You look out on the balcony; you can’t get to sleep; you hope for the relief of the marble slab of the kitchen table. You make yourself a cup of coffee. You sit up and begin to think that you are the only witness of the night; a thin breeze comes in from the plane trees on the street. You let out a sigh, look up and realize that, in the building across the street, a person like you is sitting and sipping her coffee. And then, if you look closer, there are three, four, five more balconies illuminated, more insomniacs and more cups.

This island of insomniacs and night owls finds solace as the light goes down. It accepts the weight and effects of the sun, knowing how the strong light blurs the contours. Noon is the realm of total ambiguity. Who knows what is true and what is not. So many words are wasted: it seems that, he says that, depending on, mah, who knows. Borges declared that he was happy in Palermo because Sicily is the home of doubt, from Gorgia di Lentini, the sophist, to Pirandello, to Sciascia. You travel like HC and brush against green hills of perplexity, golden sands of duplicity, agaves of thorns and wind, illegal buildings that cling to the certainties of Etna to deny them. In every journey in this world you get loaded with im- pressions. Once you bring them back home, they turn upside down, split and do not allow themselves to be grasped. Then you must accept that you caught only a part, that you did not see what was beyond the corner of your eye. You must return, revise, repent and turn around. Here, there is something that always contains its opposite, the young Kore kidnapped by Hades also turns into the Goddess of Darkness, the weeping mother who accepts the obscene jokes her friends play on her to comfort her. Here the reflection of things is always ready to tease you a little.

Fuoco alle Galere! (Burn Down the Prisons) could be the slogan of an absolute yearning for freedom for all. Here in Sicily it takes on an ambiguous tone. In the island where prisons are also the site of Mafia con- spiracies, the underside of the realm of corruption, yes, maybe getting rid of them might be advisable. But to think that this is the same Mafia that was broken up by Falcone and Borsellino, the very same people could easily go for a stroll along the main street… Well, that’s what boss Messina Denaro did (walked around his village for 30 years without any- one recognising him!). In short, “fuoco alle galere” is a slogan that the mobsters made their own, but it is still a legitimate aspiration of a healthy society. If there is one thing that Sicily teaches, and immerses you in, it is the gray areas, the nuances, and not believing that black and white are sharply distinct. It is an excellent base upon which to develop both a formal and informal itinerary for the creation of an artwork, which could go on and explore backlighting. HC’s doubled cups, their ceramics, their portraits of Sicily in black and white, fit into the chiaroscuro of doubt. They are the physical manifestation of those who arrived here wondering if they should really trust what they have glimpsed: the woman peeking at you from the shutter, the gaze of the “double” saints like Cosmas and Damian, reincarnations of the twins Castor and Pollux rescuers of the Argonauts and all sailors. Ambiguity is also the splitting of the shadow that one discovers of oneself at sunset, the elusive twin-ness that each of us carries. The inseparable Cosmas and Damian, who cannot live without each other, could make use of our artists’ twin cups that play with their propensity to be doubly left-handed. If you take your coffee with sugar, don’t forget that you have to keep stirring it for a long time. It brings out a slight ripple of foam and leaves, at the bottom, the crust of a temporary victory over the bitterness.

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Mousse Magazine – Exhibition Highlights 
Contemporary Art Library

Calle Luis Hoyos Sainz 2, (int) 
39001, Santander,
Spain.

www.fluentfluent.org

Against the backdrop of systemic violences used by political narratives to burst into bodies, the beginning of the summer comes to fluent as a possibility for contact and resistance. The current and upcoming season presents a series of exhibitions and programmes aimed at unfolding collective–becomings and ecologies of engagement that we are excited to announce below. 

These projects also expand through a new selection of publications just arrived to our bookshop:

Iris Touliatou, low theory.
Last days: Exhibition open until July 7th, 2023.

low theory, the first solo exhibition in Spain by Greek artist Iris Touliatou is still on view until Friday, July 7th. The exhibition looks at how people figure themselves out by arrangements of materials, in formats and positions that enable them particular vantage points and ways of doing things. New variants to a body of on–going scores, and a newly commissioned work, expand from a series of institutional and infrastructural parameters in the will to examine the affective side of fragmentation and failure and the unruly forms of relationality.

Iris Touliatou lives and works in Athens. Recent solo exhibitions include Gift, Kunsthalle Basel (2023); mothers, RODEO Piraeus/London (2022); appendage, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (2022); Her work has been included as part of Siren (some poetics), Amant, New York (2022) the 2021 New Museum Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone, New York (2021–22); Work and Leisure, Milan (2022); When I state I am an anarchist, PLATO, Ostrava (2022); Eclipse, the 7th Athens Biennale (2021); Anti Structure, DESTE Foundation, Athens (2021) and The Same River Twice, Benaki Museum, Athens (2019).

Aulas y ausencias:
Notes on art, politics and education in a given context.
Exhibition opening: Friday, July 14th
July 14th –– September 15th

“The archive is meaningful in its context, it is not “truth”, it belongs to an entire social environment(*)”.

This archival exhibition features printed and audiovisual materials, legislative documents, publications and photographs, whose axis examine the relationships between forms of artistic and humanistic education and the social landscapes in which they exist.

The examination on how artistic and humanistic pedagogies revert into demographic flows and the distribution of cultural agency, illuminate, seemingly unnoticed, power dynamics. Through the compilation of meaningful historical and contemporary initiatives and practitioners, cutting across these relationships, the archive is structured in four volumes which delve into its inherent functionings; and is expanded by the invitation to a series of policy–makers to engage in working–sessions around the genealogies, limitations and potentialities of educational structures.

The archival display and its transformation into a workplace thus serves as an encounter between a historical conversation and its echoes in the present.

PRAXIS
Call for applications open until August 20th.
Study Programme running from September 20th to December 20th
 

Praxis is an intensive study programme running during 14 weeks (180 contact hours). 
Reacting to current conditions of great narrative anxiety where detachment and hyper–mediation have replaced the openness of the narrative; emotion and affectivity are at the forefront of this new phase of neoliberalism. Considering these challenges and the subsequent role of the arts and humanities, Praxis aims to develop socially transformative prospects that repair the social realm from reduced listening and re–articulate aesthetics, and making processes. In this, the words of Audre Lorde resonate with the logics and dynamics that organize and structure this programme: ”(…)is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. (…) It is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives’’.

Building upon this ethos, the programme is open to a maximum of twenty participants and encourages applications from different fields of knowledge. This diverse spectrum of practices seeks to unfold an experimental and ephemeral community of learning.

How can a transitory, moving community gathered in a small Atlantic city contribute a shift in the social landscape within and beyond the direct context?

Damien & The Love Guru 

The gallery is excited to present documentation of the various participations in Basel. 
Liste Art Fair Basel with a solo presentation by Mickael Marman, Art Basel Parcours with an installation by Julian Irlinger in collaboration with Galerie Thomas Schulte, Basel Social Club with works by Emanuele Marcuccio and Anne Fellner & Mathis Pfäffli at Swiss Art Awards.

Mickael Marman at Liste Art Fair Basel 

For this years edition of Liste Art Fair Basel the gallery presented a solo booth with a combination of more recent and new paintings by Norwegian / Gambian artist Mickael Marman. Alongside the biographical and cultural-historical information encap-sulated in Marman’s paintings, one is presented with a heterogeneous but concerted assortment of prose. For those unfamiliar with Schpaa it is an interesting portrait of its times in terms of cinematography, slang, and cultural stereotypes. Based on what can be deduced from Marman’s texts, his participation in the film, which is still circulating in some circles, has been as much a nuisance and obstacle to him as it has been a boon.

Installation view 

Installation view 

C.N.T.L.S.P, 1998-2023, gravel, sand, paper, laquer, spray paint, oil, pigments, acrylics, 140 x 170 cm / 55.12 x 66.93 in (left)
Untitled, 1998-2023, oil, spray paint, acrylics, paper, oak artist frame, 140 x 170 cm / 55.12 x 66.93 in (right)

Untitled, 1998-2023, pigments, spray paint, acrylics, oil, paper, epoxy, oak artist frame, 140 x 190 cm / 55.12 x 74.80 in

Installation view 

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Julian Irlinger at Art Basel Parcours, Kunsthalle Eckbar
 

Fragments of a Crisis is a site specific project for Kunsthalle Eckbar at the Kunsthalle Basel by Julian Irlinger. It situates a video and readymade toy houses in the venue’s display.
This juxtaposition is meant to create a cross historical dialogue to extend the institutional discourse through daily life objects of a more recent history. The readymade timber-frame houses—Fachwerkhäuser—in this work are representations of an architectural trope of central-European cultural identity, a style first mentioned in 33 BC by the Roman architect Vitruvius in his work De architectura. Since the 1970s, reproductions of these buildings have been featured, in various incarnations, in the Playmobil line of toys. Julian Irlinger’s work for Art Basel Parcours gets its title from an earlier work of his also called Fragments of a Crisis, a result of the artist’s extensive research into Notgeld—an emergency currency that was issued during the hyperinflation crisis in Germany in the 1920s. The banknotes were designed by numerous artists, incarnating shared political values and divergent artistic ideals. By selecting and focusing on the illustrations of the banknotes in his personal archive, as seen in his video, Irlinger draws attention to the political unconsciousness during the crisis.
 

Fragments of a Crisis, 2023, HD video, 11’30” (loop), digital projection; Untitled (Fachwerkhaus), 2019/2021,
readymade toy houses,
Installation view

 Untitled (Fachwerkhaus), 2019/2021, readymade toy houses
Installation view  

Untitled (Fachwerkhaus), 2019/2021, readymade toy houses
Installation view  

Untitled (Fachwerkhaus), 2019/2021, readymade toy houses
Installation view  

Fragments of a Crisis, 2023, HD video, 11’30” (loop), digital projection; 
Untitled (Fachwerkhaus), 2019/2021, readymade toy houses
Installation view  

Fragments of a Crisis, 2023, HD video, 11’30” (loop), digital projection; 
Untitled (Fachwerkhaus), 2019/2021, readymade toy houses
Installation view  

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Emanuele Marcuccio at Basel Social Club

A soft comet-shaped sculpture sometimes falls on a table, sometimes it ends up in a box, in the case of Comet Nera and Cometa Blu, the star, as it falls, remains attached to a well-painted metal plate hanging on a wall. Imprisoned by a mysterious force, it twists, showing a new unexpected shape. 

In the works of Emanuele Marcuccio, forms are constantly questioned, renegotiated. Making use of both minimal metal artefacts, readymades and photography, the artist develops a strategy whereby associations take the form of allegories. In his serial works to date, surface and depth, information and voids, authenticity and artifice, the legit and the fake, that is classic dualisms and cherished ideals generally, get diluted and mixed up not to the point of conceptually rather exhausted synthesis or crash, but as tentative environments that play style and idea off against one another. Emanuele Marcuccio is an Italian artist living in Milan, Italy

Cometa nera, 2017 – 2022, powder coated steel, textile and aluminum, 100 x 70 x 15 cm / 39.37 x 27.56 x 5.91 in

Cometa blu, 2017 – 2022, powder coated steel, textile and aluminum, 80 x 70 x 15 cm / 31.5 x 27.56 x 5.91 in

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Anne Fellner at Swiss Art Awards
(prize winner) 

Anne Fellner’s presentation “Stadt Land Fluss” consists of four paintings, both abstract and figurative, for which stretched textiles serve as material carriers. The key to the narrative that unfolds across the paintings is a text written by the artist in the 90s, which appears in one of the works: Relic. The sheet of paper with the text, written in the curly handwriting of a teenager, it is set against Rothko-style blocks of green, red and blue, whose paint is applied in loose, translucent dabs. The text talks about a box that was never opened – it’s a tale of a promise not fulfilled, a secret never unlocked. A young woman seen from behind guides us in the other paintings, variously set in a city scape and a pastoral landscape, while the third painting – with its dancing, dynamic dabs and lines on deep blue velvet – is entirely abstract. Here, longing, promise, and naiveté are on display rendered in a sophisticated, layered and confident painterly language that seduces and repels, equal part sincerity and kitsch, cleverly mobilizing different painterly styles and cultural references.

Installation view

Installation view

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Mathis Pfäffli at Swiss Art Awards

Mathis Pfäffli is a Swiss artist living in Zurich. His work meanders between drawing, object, installation. A told story can play a role, often you have to imagine the narratives yourself. The boundaries of the works are sometimes not easy to recognize, much frays at the edges and mixes with the existing

Temporary Relations (Zollikerstrasse 249), 2023, glass, aluminum, plastic, reused steel tubes, collected glass vessels, lost things found somewhere in the gaps of the pavement, a tiny shell, flint stone, replica of an ancient figurine, parts of a heating system from an abandoned nursery, a small square stone (from an ancient roman site), found devices, LED tube. electrical wire, variable dimensions 

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If you would like to request more information about the following artists please click here

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CURRENTLY

HC
Fuoco Alle Galere
14. April – 1. July 2023
Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels

Alison Yip and Tiziana La Melia 
confessions on sparkling hill
3. February – 1. July  2023
Damien & The Love Guru, Zürich

Hyesoo Park – Goodbye to Love – Memorabilia of a broken heart (2019)

Is je hart wel eens in duizend stukjes gebroken? Weet jij nog hoe je je voelde toen je smoorverliefd was? Deel je mooiste, meest emotionele of pijnlijkste verhalen over de liefde voor de tentoonstelling Goodbye to Love.
 
👋 Op goodbye2love.com/NL kun jij digitaal (en als je wilt anoniem) je verhaal kwijt, via een bericht, het delen van een herinnering, een foto of een hartenwens. Tijdens Festival MAAS! (7-10 sept.) kun je ook items inleveren die te zien zullen zijn in Memorabilia van een Gebroken Hart: een bijzonder liefdesarchief
 
Goodbye to Love opent dit najaar bij Marres. Hierin zal prachtig werk van Jinju Lee, James Webb en Hyesoo Park getoond worden. De Koreaanse kunstenaar Park vergaarde de afgelopen 10 jaar meer dan 1.000 verhalen en 100 voorwerpen die door haar werden geïnterpreteerd en gebruikt voor video’s, sculpturen, installaties en publicaties. Voor Goodbye to Love bereidt ze momenteel een nieuw installatiewerk voor dat bestaat uit verhalen, memorabilia en gefilmde interviews over de liefde, geoogst in de regio Limburg. 
 
Maak deel uit van deze bijzondere tentoonstelling en deel jouw verhaal!

De Limburg Biënnale komt er weer aan in 2024! Deze editie organiseren we samen met Odapark Venray. Hou onze sociale media en website in de gaten voor meer informatie.
 

AGENDA