→ Interjection-008-04 El Salem.pdf
→ Launch of Eva Ďurovec’s New Mindmapping Forms
→ Montez Press at Miss Read Berlin
→ MPR April Schedule & Merch

Inhoudelijk:

De interviews van Hilde Van Canneyt zijn voor kunstenaars een uitdagende zelfbevraging. Het zijn eerlijke woord-portretten die vaak letterlijk de taal van de gesprekspartner weergeven. Zo krijgt de lezer een unieke inkijk in het atelier en het hoofd van de kunstenaar. ‘Wat speelt er zich af achter het gordijn van het atelier en het beeldend kunstgebeuren? Wat gebeurt er tussen de eerste gedachtekronkel en het afgewerkt kunstproduct? Hoe moet je als kunstenaar alle elementen die in je geest borrelen, omzetten in een kunstwerk dat je kwetsbaar maakt, maar tegelijkertijd de kijker moet beroeren? Dat is Hilde’s vraagstelling: waarom sluit iemand zich op om te communiceren via een creatie? Hoe om te gaan met de fictieve wereld van het kunstwerk tegenover de niet altijd even mooie realiteit? Want kunst maken is een proces. Als publiek zie je slechts het eindresultaat, terwijl de weg ernaartoe even boeiend is. Meer dan tweehonderd kunstenaars lieten zich de voorbije tien jaar verleiden tot een openhartig gesprek met Hilde. 

Interviews met: 

Agnes Maes, Alda Snopek, Alle Jong, Anna Lange, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, AnneMarie Maes, Anton Cotteleer, Arpaïs Du Bois, Athar Jaber, Bart Lodewijks, Ben Benaouisse, Bendt Eyckermans, Benjamin Verdonck, Benny Luyckx, Berend Strik, Bert Danckaert, Bué the Warrior, Carl Uytterhaegen, Carla Arocha en Stéphane Schraenen, Catharina Dhaen, Cindy Wright, Colin Waeghe, Conny Kuilboer, Daniel von Weinberger, Dennis Tyfus, Dirk Eelen, Elisabet Stienstra, Eva Mouton, Eva Vermandel, Evi Vingerling, Femmy Otten, Folkert de Jong, Geoffrey Enthoven, Gerda Dendooven, Gideon Kiefer, Guy Baekelmans, Hans Bruyneel, Hans Klein Hofmeijer, Hans Op de Beeck, Hans van der Ham, Hester Scheurwater, Isabel Fredeus, Jan Henderikse, Jan van Munster, Jean Bilquin, Johan Creten, Johan Grimonprez, Johan Van Mullem, John Körmeling, Jonas Geirnaert, Jonas Vansteenkiste, Joris Van de Moortel, Kasper Bosmans, Katrien De Blauwer, Klaas Kloosterboer, Klaus Verscheure, Koen van den Broek, Koenraad Tinel, Kris Fierens, Kristof Van Heeschvelde, Laura van, Lee Ranaldo, Lieven Decabooter, Loek Grootjans, Louis De Cordier, Luc Dondeyne, Luc Tuymans, Lucas Lenglet, Luk van Soom, Maartje Korstanje, Marcase, Marcel van Eeden, Marilou van Lierop, Marinus Boezem, Mario De Brabandere, Mark Cloet, Michaël Borremans, Michel Couturier, Michèle Matyn, Mil Ceulemans, Nel Bonte, Nicolas Provost, Octave Landuyt, Orlan, Patrick Conrad, Paul Gees, Peter Depelchin, Peter Morrens, Peter Rogiers, Philip Aguirre y Otegui, Philippe Van Snick, Pjeroo Roobjee, Raoul Servais, Remy Jungerman, Renato Nicolodi, Reniere&Depla, Ricardo Brey, Rinus Van de Velde, Rob Scholte, Robert Zandvliet, Roel Heremans, Ronald Noorman, Ronald Ophuis, Ruben Bellinkx, Sarah & Charles, Sofie Muller, Stefan Annerel, Stephan Vanfleteren, Tatjana Gerhard, Thé van Bergen, Thierry Mortier, Tinka Pittoors, Tom Liekens, Veerle De Smet, Veronika Pot, Vincent Geyskens, Virginie Bailly, Walter Swennen, Werner Cuvelier, William Graatsma, Ysbrant, Yves Velter, Zoro Feigl, Jan Hoet, Philippe Van Cauteren en Willem Elias

CAConrad,

Reading performances
 

Friday 29 Abril 2022, 8 p.m
Saturday 30 April 2022, 12 p.m
 
BOOK HERE
 

This event has been programmed in the context of 13 Moons: Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return and will take place in–site with no online retransmission. Thus, we kindly encourage you to book your attendance through the link above. 
 
13 Moons: Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return was made possible with the generous support of INJUVE.

KETS

EVENTS

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Francis Alÿs is presenting The Nature of the Game in the Belgian Pavilion (Flemish Community) as part of the 59th Venice Biennale, from 23 April to 27 November 2022. The exhibition curated by Hilde Teerlinck, will feature a selection of new short films related to his series of children’s games, a body of work started in 1999 which has gained a central position in his practice. The films were shot during Alÿs’ recent travels to Hong Kong, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Belgium, Switzerland and Mexico. Filming without interfering in the games, Alÿs reveals the hidden rules of playing, the ingenious interaction of the children with their environment, their deep complicity and their hopeful mood and joy.

The installation in the Pavilion invites the visitor to walk through a labyrinth of screens as if they were in the middle of a global playground. The sound and image of the different films interact with each other, fragments forming together a whole, allegories translating the complexity of a sometimes harsh reality. A series of paintings covering a period from 1994 to 2021 accompanies the presentation providing the context in which some of the films were made. From Kabul to Ciudad Juárez, from Jerusalem to Shanghai, they unfold Alÿs’ distinct poetic sensibility towards social and political concerns.

As anthropologist David MacDougall writes, “Taken together, these films reveal some wider truths: that many children’s games are specific to girls or boys, that most are competitive but also cooperative, and thatchildren are adept at making do with little, adapting a wide range of environments and spaces for their own purposes. In this they create a world parallel to that of adults, one that overlaps with it but uses its physical resources quite differently.”

However, children’s games tend to disappear. The rise in urban traffic, social medias and digital games and the parental fear of letting children play in the public space means that the tradition of playing outdoors becomes less common each day. This process might have experienced an acceleration due to the consequences of COVID-19 in the last few years, creating an urgent need to register them, now.

The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by DCV Books. It is a facsimile edition of Alÿs’ notebooks on children’s games, something overall very visual. Anthropologist Michael T. Taussig, for whom fieldwork notebooks are an indispensable tool, argues that drawings in notebooks develop a life of their own, a life which is often fed by what can’t be written down.

On the occasion of the opening days of the Venice Biennale, the gallery will be exceptionally closed on 20/04.

Damien & The Love Guru

Installation view 

Raffaela Naldi Rossano, Giuseppe Desiato and Le Nemesiache
How she spins
curated by Sonia D’Alto

‘How she spins’ will be on view until 16. April 2022 

Installation view 

 Installation view 

Installation view 

Giuseppe Desiato, Untitled, 1969, mixed media on canvas backed-paper, 38 x 24,5 cm
framed: 42 x 28,2 x 4 cm
courtesy of Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

Giuseppe Desiato, Untitled, 1969, mixed media on canvas backed-paper, 38 x 24,5 cm
framed: 42 x 28,2 x 4 cm
courtesy of Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

Raffaela Naldi Rossano, 15. Never ending fear – VAGINA DENTATA (the illusion of being one with you), 2021-2022
cotton paper from Amalfi, mirror, glass, sea water, organic elements, black ink, 28 x 37 x 3,5 cm

Raffaela Naldi Rossano, 08. Two sirens together (a chair on Hydra), 2021
cotton paper from Amalfi, mirror, glass, sea water, organic elements, black ink, 26 x 34 x 3,5 cm

Raffaela Naldi Rossano, 05. Tinos / Athens – Touching your hips (sunlight from your eyes), 2021
cotton paper from Amalfi, mirror, glass, sea water, organic elements, black ink, 60 x 40 x 3,5 cm

Raffaela Naldi Rossano, 23. Y – Neapolis Androgena, 2020
cotton paper from Amalfi, mirror, glass, sea water, organic elements, black ink, 83 x 60 x 3,5 cm

 

How She Spins brings together a selection of works that share a performative practice addressing language as a form of rebellion and ceremonial celebration. The modern mythology and cartography of the artist is replaced by de-egoisated subjectivities, geographically deriving from the coasts and the city of Naples, whilst belonging to multiple existences. Dedicated to the practice of Raffaela Naldi Rossano and expanded through a dialogue with works by Giuseppe Desiato and Le Nemesiache, the exhibition project explores possibilities to revisit and rewrite narratives and mythologies of modernity, with thanks to ritual and spiritual interventions. Raffaela Naldi Rossano (1990, Naples) has founded her practice at the intersection of post-historical narratives, magical language and the rewriting of Mediterranean mythology, breaking down the bonds of language and logic of secularised power. Her work evokes a political and spiritual confabulation based on gestures, stories, and the recovery and invention of symbols, bodies and objects. Oracular fortellings, divinations, regressive hypnosis, and ephemeral actions inform her practice on display, which dialogues with the intimate and ritualistic artistic practices of others that focus on sinking the nature of existence in the transformation; a perpetual contrast with a fixed identity. Giuseppe Desiato (1935, Naples) embodies the rejection of the artist’s identity by playing the role of a popular storyteller, embracing the events of the everyday. In his work Desiato addresses tales of the past and present life within the limits of acceptability from the system of social languages. Le Nemesiache collective, founded by the philosopher, artist and writer Lina Mangiacapre in 1970, embeds mythological methodologies in feminism. The group proposes a different perspective on the relationship with the world of ‘work and the economy’, working together to create multidisciplinary projects involving rewriting, revisiting and re-staging of old storytellings in order to invoke ancestors, beings and entities. In this regard, the exhibition project adopts a transhistorical approach that experiments with temporalities. The constellation of drawings and moving images that traverse the space of the gallery articulate an emanation of multiple realities, through works of a pluralized ‘I’, of a doubling ‘me’. The title of the exhibition, How She Spins refers to a tarot card(1), Wheel of Time. This card bears the number 23, symbolically resonating with the multiple meanings within Naldi Rossano’s site specific drawing installation for the show(2) and the process of care and weaving that characterises both her drawing and her work in general. The 23 drawings on salt-washed paper are realised through ritual materiality and composed of symbols and secret codes. In the space, they compose the script of a divination: traces of purification and initiation for different and alternative forms of worlding. The drawings are an attempt to create an alphabet whose narration agency is inscribed in the body unconsciously: signs of a script that would like to overcome the space and time paradigm of our culture. Symbols and traces from the drawings not only seek a different language and world, but embody the strength of intuitive desire, moving toward the unspeakable. Every drawing, immersed in sea salt water resonates with personal, solitary and collective rituals. Created on cotton paper from Amal, sprinkled with organic materials such as sand and mended in a continuous gesture of repairing and transforming, the work is placed and framed on mirrors. Since ancient times, water and reflective surfaces have been considered a source of magical power and prophetic visions. Additionally, the mirror suggests a sense of relationality, like the mutual existential transformation that guides the gesture and the forming of their being. In the same spatial script, Giuseppe Desiato’s works on paper reveal the chromatic and formal refined care of his work. The tension doesn’t renounce joy nor vitality of an erotic and mystic process of creation. His drawings unfold ancestral contradictions and sensibility eradicated in Mediterranean culture, emanating poetical and political sensation from and beyond its cultural limits. With Desiato as with Le Nemesiache, Naldi Rossano shares ephemeral processes, expressed by ritualistic components of their works, articulating an attempt to overcome the power and social structure through symbolic and sacred elements. Temporal and subjective rhythms of bodies are presented through artworks in a way that destabilises the rational register and restructures the system of language and power on which it is built. In the film ‘Le Sibille’(3) Le Nemesiache presents a ritual to disclose an archaic and mythic past to denounce the historic and present violence suffered by women and to express the consciousness of the environment’s and social anomalies. The Sibyls, mythical and allegorical figures, are chosen as a symbol for their ability to predict the future, embodying insurrectional spirituality and ritual celebration. The women’s bodies, the landscape and props of the film, present poetry through rituals embodied practice wholly distinct from the linear structure of our language. Naldi Rossano mirrors a different path, wheeling a journey that crosses the sea and its islands, chasing the powerfully charged origins of arcaich (pre-classic) rituals around the mediterranean sea, which disrupted the conventional idea of domesticity and social convention. The divination already reflects another vision: “La casa sarà sempre la chimera, basa il tuo istinto sull’incontro”(4). A metal fence(5), whose surface gathers messages, continues to link to the body and the unconscious. The irrational, emotional and magical sphere become the insurrection to language and cultural norms influencing the will for the subject to escape from the sense system. The encounter over the railing is a ‘Chimera’, a female monstrosity:

I am Medusa, one of many monsters, one of the unacknowledged sovereigns […] Formidable Gorgon.

I am she. She, me. My sisters, Stheno and Euryale, howl with ferocity and mourning and rage. We are.

Monster Women. So many many many more of us. My sisters. My kin(6)

Historical narratives and classical fiction are reversed and readdressed by a plurality of voices: the sound of waves, the echo of many waters, the voices of different sirens, the seduction of mythical figures. She spins the wheel, poetically. She has become an autobiographical fragment, whose desires and uncertainty crash on the shores of a city to be re-found from the source. Parallels and sundials mingle with a new language, ceremonially infused. Oppressive structures of meaning and narration inscribed within the language have been refused. She is becoming a ‘prophet of the present’(7), lying beyond the realm of information and exceeding a linguistic map(8) emerging from spiritual communication and generating imaginative possibilities. Within this realm of imaginary and sacred languages, she spins multifarious possibilities of meanings. Becoming is a trace of existence and an affirmation of erotic and mystic power, changing the present modes of perception and representation, transcending the existing hegemony. Prophecy is not a prediction of the future, but an awareness of what is not recognised or perceived.

Text by Sonia D’Alto

1. Tarot cards from a system of divination of the Tantric tradition. Crafted by artist Penny Slinger, the cards are a mirroring device that evokes subtle memories, sentiments, desires and fears.
2. The number 23 is used here to propose a score, mirroring many meanings. The divination of the 23rd tarot card is to locate oneself in the position of the spinner, indicating the need to transform the world. 23 is also the number of the letters from the Latin alphabet, the number of chromosomes that determine human sexuality, the number which the old Egyptian calendar started with. In this regard, 23 as reference to androgyny that relates to the possibility of recomposing the original male/female laceration, also introduces the possibility of overcoming polar division and sexual repression.
3. The film was awarded Best Direction at the Trieste Science Fiction Festival. Venice Biennale 1987. Cannes Film Festival 1981. First Feminist International Film & Video Amsterdam.
4. ‘Home will always be the chimera, base your instincts on encounters’.
5. CET 14°13‘55.78“E 40°50‘9.53“N is a metal railing made in 2021 for the terrace of Residency 80121, the experimental platform founded by the artist in Naples. Naldi Rossano also works with architectural and domestic conventions and norms. Its’ surface is inscribed with a code of symbols, articulating possibilities beyond the household language, as a further rebellious proposal to change conventions we inhabit.
6. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1.4 (1976).
7. Hélène Cixous, L‘indiade ou l‘Inde de leurs rêves,Théâtre du Soleil éditions Théâtrales, Paris, 1987
8. Federico Campagna, Prophetic Culture, Recreation for Adolescent, Bloomsbury, London/New York, 2021.

Raffaela Naldi Rossano (b. 1990, Naples) lives and works in Naples, Italy. Her installations integrate sculptures, moving image, sound, group experiences and poetry, and are conceived as in-between spaces where meaning around hidden and suppressed histories, individual or collective, is recreated and exposed. Through them, she aims to pursue a breakdown of the architectural environment and a feminist reappropriation of space and landscape, in a poetic articulation of the territory.

She is currently working on an ongoing research and film project, entitled ‘Tessitura/Warp’, which revolves around the myth of the Siren Parthenope—the founding myth of the city of Naples—utilised here as an open vessel of meaning and desire, a space for shared narration and relationship. In her grandmother’s home in Naples, she established Resi- dency 80121, an ongoing renovation and transformative project to host others to inhabit the space and create alternative ways of being together. Raffaela Naldi Rossano is one of the participating artists in the 2020 edition of Quadriennale D’Arte, Rome, curated by Sarah Cosulich and Stefano Collicelli Cagol. Among her recent exhibitions: ‘Utopia Distopia: il mito del progresso partendo dal Sud’, curated by Kathryn Weir, Madre, Naples (2021); ’There is no Time to Enjoy the Sun’, Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples (2021); ‘Waves between Us’, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene; ‘I Confess’, curated by Chus Martinez, der TANK, Basel (2019); ‘Doing Deculturalization’, Museion, Bolzano (2019); ‘Partenope’, Aetopoulos, Athens (2019); ‘May the Bridges I Burn’, Manifesta, Palermo (2018).

Giuseppe Desiato (b. 1935, Naples) lives and works in Naples. Intimately linked to his city, he has lived its popular culture but also entered the international debate thanks to frequent associations with Fluxus and Viennese Actionists. Desiato stands out for his deeply transgressive practice. Despite his approach being far removed from the art market and its dynamics, from the 1970s onward he came into occasional contact with historic galleries, most of which are no longer active today but were at the time closely allied to body and performance art. A first retrospective exhibition was dedicated to him on the occasion of Manifesta 7 (2008). Recently, his work was included in the group exhibition Tutto. Perspectives on Italian Art, Museion, Bolzano (2018), and Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2019). A solo exhibition of his work curated by Elena Re was recently presented at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin (2021).

Le Nemesiache taking their name from Nemesis, the Greek goddess of revenge against the masculine Hubris, Le Nemesiache was a group and a political reality who embedded mythological methodologies in feminism. Founded by philosopher, artist and writer Lina Mangiacapre in 1970, they have been active in Naples for many decades from the 1970s through their militant engagement and artistic practice ranging from performance to activism, from films to poetry, costumes to colleges and from theater to music, blurring the lines between art and politics. Their approach was always addressing history and landscape issues, activated through a radical spirit of solidarity. Rooted within the struggles of women who have resisted colonisation, their ritualistic practice was entangled with the sensibility of harmony and beauty in regard to the archaeological ruins and the landscape of the Neapolitan territory. As they themselves wrote in 1981, the references to the mythical past of Naples were not a nostalgic gesture but a way to “reject the reduction of an entire civilization, such as the Neapolitan one, to the folklore and subcultural status in which it has been confined. Feminism in Naples was born from Naples and its roots, from the reality of the struggles of women who have never allowed themselves to be colonized and will continue—alongside men, and sometimes against or simply distant to them—, the story of the life of HARMONY, to revenge all the violence that has been done to Naples; to the SIBYLS, to life, to Beauty.” (Statement, 1981). In 2020, the activity of Le Nemesiache was rediscovered and presented in the exhibition From the Volcano to the Sea. The Feminist Group Le Nemesiache in 1970s and 1980s Naples curated by Giulia Damiani in dialogue with Sara Giannini (Curator, If I Can’t Dance) and Arnisa Zeqo (Artistic Director, Rongwrong) at If I Can’t Dance, in Amsterdam.

⏧

CURRENTLY

Christiane Blattmann 
The Law
4. February – 30. April 2022
Damien & The Love Guru
Zurich

Anne Fellner
duo show with Alessandro Carano
Depth of Field 
29. March – 7 May 2022
Castiglioni in collaboration with Damien & The Love Guru 
Milano

Christiane Blattmann 
Sharon Van Overmeiren 
Sour Well
group show with Henrik Potter
12. March – 30. April 2022 
Nir Altman 
Munich

Anne Fellner
Energy Patterns 
group show 
16. February – 23. April 2022
Galerie Tobias Naehring 
Berlin

Emanuele Marcuccio
D’Après Cavenago
2017-2021
suns.works / Damien & The Love Guru 
Zurich

Jannis Marwitz
La réforme de Pooky 
19. February – 8. May 2022
group show with Fabienne Audéoud, Sarah Benslimane, Elise Corpataux, Gritli Faulhaber, Sophie Gogl, Jasmine Gregory, Nanami Hori, Tom Humphreys, Marc Kokopeli, Matthew Langan-Peck, Sophie Reinhold, Marta Riniker-Radich, Christoph de Rohan Chabot, Thomas Sauter, Grégory Sugnaux, SoiL Thornton, Amanda del Valle, Jiajia Zhang
curated by Grégory Sugnaux, Paolo Baggi and Nicolas Brulhart
Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg
Fribourg

Jasmin Werner 
Stufen zur Kunst 
11. March 2022 – March 2023
Kunstverein Hannover
Hannover

Emanuele Marcuccio
Der Radwechsel
30. March – 30.April 2022
group show with Jenna Bliss, Noémie Degen/Simon Jaton, Martin Ebner, Georgia Gardner Gray, Julia Haller, Sveta Mordovskaya, Matthias Noggler, Lukas Posch, Allen Ruppersberg, Michael E. Smith, Joanna Woś, Steffen Zillig
curated by Lukas Posch
Universitätsgalerie im Heiligenkreuzerhof
Vienna

UPCOMING 

Magnus Andersen
Readers Remedy
26. April – 2. July 2022
Damien & The Love Guru
Brussels 

Vanessa Disler 
Anastasia Pavlou
shared booth with Hot Wheels Athens
28 April – 1 May 2022
Discovery section
Art Brussels 

Vanessa Disler 
Opening 13. May 2022
Damien & The Love Guru 
Zurich