Tag: art installation

The Flamekeepers

Lilian Robl

13.07. – 20.08.2023

Lothringer Studio, Lothringer Str. 13, 81667 München

flyer-flamekeepers4-B

Emma Hauck. Ingeborg Bachmann. Rabe Perplexum. Not points but lines. Lines which do not connect points but travel swiftly in between. The archive, history, memory are collections of points tied to one central point: Man, defined as white, male and rational. In her exhibition with GiG Munich, “The Flamekeepers” Lilian Robl seeks ways of remembering without memory, recording without constructing an archive. Just lines. Only lines.

Lilian Robl (*1990) studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich and at the Ecole de recherche graphique, Brussels, graduating as a master student of Prof. Alexandra Bircken in 2019. Her work was shown in numerous exhibitions: Top Space, Berlin (DE); Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin (DE); fructa, Munich (DE); Wienwoche (AT); Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (CH); Kunstverein Marburg (DE) as well as at film festivals: Les Instants Vidéo, Marseille (FR); Barcelona International Short Film Festival (ES); GRRL Haus Cinema, Berlin (DE); FILE, São Paulo (BR); Women’s Voices Now, Los Angeles (US); Non- syntax, Tokyo (JP); International Moving Film Festival (IR); Light Mattter Film Festival (US). She has received residencies at the Cité Paris (FR), among others.

Emma Hauck. Ingeborg Bachmann. Rabe Perplexum. Nicht Punkte, sondern Linien. Linien, die keine Punkte verbinden, sondern sich schnell dazwischen bewegen. Das Archiv, die Geschichte, die Erinnerung sind Ansammlungen von Punkten, die mit einem zentralen Punkt verbunden sind: Der Mensch, definiert als weiß, männlich und rational. In ihrer Ausstellung “The Flamekeepers” im GiG Munich sucht Lilian Robl nach Wegen des Erinnerns ohne Gedächtnis, des Aufzeichnens ohne Aufbau eines Archivs. Gerechte Linien. Nur Linien.

Lilian Robl (*1990) hat Freie Kunst an der Akademie der Bildenden Künste München und an der Ecole de Recherche graphique Brüssel studiert und 2019 als Meisterschülerin von Prof. Alexandra Bircken abgeschlossen. Ihre Arbeiten werden in Ausstellungen, z.B. Top Space, Berlin (DE); Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin (DE); fructa, München (DE); Wienwoche (AT); Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich (CH) sowie auf Filmfestivals, z.B. Les Instants Vidéo, Marseille (FR); Barcelona International Short Film Festival (ES); GRRL Haus Cinema, Berlin (DE); FILE, São Paulo (BR); Women’s Voices Now, Los Angeles (US); Non- syntax, Tokyo (JP); International Moving Film Festival (IR); Light Mattter Film Festival (US). Sie erhielt Residenzstipendien unter anderem an der Cité Paris (FR).

Electric bodies shooting through space

Janna Jirkova

25.11 – 30.12.2022

Lothringer 13 Studio, Lothringer Str. 13, 81667 München

Janna Jirkova, Electric bodies shooting through space, 2022, installation view
Janna Jirkova, Her Do, 2022, video, HD, 16:9, 7:32 min, Sound: Daniel Geßl
anna Jirkova, Feeler, 2022, monitor mount, spray paint, silicon, wax
anna Jirkova, Feeler, 2022, monitor mount, spray paint, silicon, wax
Janna Jirkova, Audiobun, 2022, headphones, silicon, hairwax, PVC, wire, hair donut
Janna Jirkova, Braidphones, 2022, headphones, silicon, wax, wire, nylon ribbon
Janna Jirkova, Electric bodies shooting through space, 2022, installation view
Janna Jirkova, Electric bodies shooting through space, 2022, installation view
Janna Jirkova, Electric bodies shooting through space, 2022, installation view
Janna Jirkova, Her Do, 2022, video, HD, 16:9, 7:32 min, Sound: Daniel Geßl
Janna Jirkova, Electric bodies shooting through space, 2022, installation view
Janna Jirkova, Her Do, 2022, video, HD, 16:9, 7:32 min, Sound: Daniel Geßl
Janna Jirkova, Her Do, 2022, video, HD, 16:9, 7:32 min, Sound: Daniel Geßl
Janna Jirkova, Her Do, 2022, video, HD, 16:9, 7:32 min, Sound: Daniel Geßl

I have long, straight hair, slightly dry at the ends, too seldom cut. When I read or write, I tuck the loose strands behind my ear. It is always present, over there, too much to count yet infinitely countable. Oddly, I think of hair when I read Brian Massumi’s definition of the virtual (“Envisioning the Virtual” in The Oxford handbook of Virtuality, 55-70), and not only because of his arguments about value (because you are worth it!). For he opposes the virtual to the actual, rather than the natural or the real, and explains through Whitehead’s opposition of the sensuous and non-sensuous. Hair is sensuous because it exists over there, ready to be counted. There is a reference to space – counting unfolds in time. But hair is also virtual I guess, because it also appears to perception all at once: I do not have to pick a strand and start counting. Hair is there in one fell swoop, or rather swoosh. I already have a rough idea of a number – through habit, previous knowledge and earlier, other experiences. But as soon as I try to locate and fix this dimension – to grasp it in my hand – this virtual aspect disappears into the actual. Massumi describes the non-sensuous as having “a strangely compelling, shimmering sterility” (60) and this makes me think of the hair in this exhibition, Electric bodies shooting through space, silky white curtains on which the video work, Her do, shimmers. 

In her work, Janna Jirkova plays with the natural and the artificial. Natural are our bodies: nails, mouth, belly, hair; artificial is the technology, both high and low tech, she attaches to her body in cyborg-like fashion. The electric bodies shooting through space are us, joggers wearing headlights in the dark, Major Tom floating in a tin can. But it is not that technology functions as some sort of extension of our body and its capacities, rather, Jirkova shows how our bodies are already artificial (and by extension, the artificial is already also natural). “Self-prosthetic” is Massumi’s term (64). 

The English labels Jirkova reads out in her video, “pretty package… high performance …. the type I like” – but also negatively, “broken … malfunctioning” – are ways to describe both: the human body and technology, the natural and the artificial tangled together in language. On the shimmering screen, we see purple hair being used to tickle a belly, except that the hair is another video projection and the belly, a plaster cast. Again, she touches her navel, but this is on a mobile phone screen, forward facing, in a pouch of a rubber apron, worn over a white protective suit. “Samson, Samson, show me your hair!” Her hair, the hair of the empress Elisabeth. There is body hair shown as a video of a fern unfurling, and the abstract red and pinks are made by placing fingers over the recording device. Jirkova sets out to produce a field of tensions between different modes of existence, actual and virtual. These are tensions that come with the contrast between the sensuous and the non-sensuous. As Massumi argues, modes do not add up to anything – they do not form anything. Experience emerges when the pressure becomes unsustainable and these tensions break (62). 

Through this intensive force field all of our experience is conditioned. What we bring to the conditional field phenomenon is our tendencies, in which they are a formative factor. Only these tendencies can be either natural, in the sense of a genetic predisposition or artificial, as in learnt. For Massumi, art and technology merely extend the body’s pre-existing regime of natural and acquired artifice, “already long in active duty in producing the virtual reality of our everyday lives” (64).  We are caught between our tendencies in an intensive force field of emergence, indeed like “motes,” “caught up in a tumult of non-Newtonian motion” (Beckett, Murphy, Chapter 6).

Magdalena Wisniowska  2022

Electric bodies shooting through space

Janna Jirkova

25.11 – 30.12.2022

Lothringer 13 Studio, Lothringer Str. 13, 81667 München

 

GiG Munich is happy to announce that the third of the exhibitions series ‘Re-collection’ at  open on the 25th of November at Lothringer 13 Studio, ‘Electric bodies shooting through space’ featuring the work of Janna Jirkova. Save the date and hope to see you there!

The strange elements of Janna Jirkova’s latest video work Her Do, are some of the most physical and tactile parts of our bodies: our hair, nails and belly. They are always over there, here, hair ready to be fiddled with, or stroked or smelled – a belly button to kiss or to tickle. Nails to be bitten. I pull out a hair out of my mouth. But in her video we see them projected or on a mobile phone screen, as a plaster cast or an unfurling fern leaf. They are real and yet not real, direct and mediated. They are no longer over there, filling our space, ready to be touched, but appear, as it by themselves, a result of a tension between what is sensuous and what is not sensuous that for Brian Massumi constitutes virtuality.

Janna Jirkova, * 1991 in Munich, studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich from 2012 till 2019 as a student of Olaf Nicolai. She is the recipient of several grants, including the Erwin and Gisela von Steiner foundation project grant and the young art/ new media project grant of the city of Munich in 2021. In 2022 she received funding from Stiftung Kunstfonds. Her most recent exhibitions include the group exhibition Limonare at Orangerie München (2021) Titanen, Drachen Eisberg, at Halle 50 at DomagkAteliers (2021), Going Nowhere at Cafe Cosmos (2022) and the Debutanten presentation at Galerie der Künstler*Innen, combined with a catalogue release. 

Animals on my mind

Julia Klemm, Zuza Piekoszewska

21.10 – 6.11.2022

Lothringer 13 Studio, Lothringer Str. 13, 81667 München

Animals on my mind, 2022, installation view
Zuza Piekoszewska, Old body, 2020, bioplastic, copper spray paint
Zuza Piekoszewska, The nest, 2022, jute, bioplastic
Animals on my mind, 2022, installation view
Animals on my mind, 2022, installation view
Zuza Piekoszewska, I’d rather not open my eyes, 2022, mixed
media, fabric, fibre, jute
Zuza Piekoszewska, Ganglions, 2021, bioplastic
Zuza Piekoszewska, Home for troubled eggs, 2022, mixed media
Julia Klemm, pack (series), 2022, ceramic, pigments, dimensions
variable
Julia Klemm, pack (series), 2022, ceramic, pigments, dimensions
variable
Julia Klemm, pack (series), 2022, ceramic, pigments, dimensions
variable
Zuza Piekoszewska, Superrock, 2022, mixed media
Animals on my mind, 2022, installation view
Julia Klemm, pack (series), 2022, ceramic, pigments, dimensions
variable
Zuza Piekoszewska, Serene morning on the cornfied, 2022, mixed
media
Zuza Piekoszewska, The angular dog, 2022, mixed media
Julia Klemm, pack (series), 2022, ceramic, pigments, dimensions
variable
Julia Klemm, pack (series), 2022, ceramic, pigments, dimensions
variable
Julia Klemm, pack (series), 2022, ceramic, pigments, dimensions
variable

Zuza Piekoszewska, Complex problems, 2022, fibre on canvas

Last night I tried to think of the first animal I can remember. My grandmother’s black, shaggy dog perhaps? Or earlier, as my mother would say, the jellyfish that stung me on my wrist. I was only two then. Or earlier still I remember the fish on the beach I would make out of the warm sand. But maybe I am thinking about this wrong, maybe it is not about the actual animals I might or might not remember, but rather that all memories belong to the animal kingdom. Maybe memories are like animals.

First of all, there are the individual memories of different things that happened to us, personal memories like family pets, domesticated. Zuza Piekoszewska shows a small landscape of fields in the early morning mist as described to her by her parents. Elsewhere she remakes a kind of very specific dish cloth her mother used in mid-90s Poland, pastel, striped, homely. Julia Klemm’s lions do not prowl but play around the rubble like kittens. The lions though are a different type of memory. They belong not just to us, but to our culture, much like in the taxonomist’s biological classification, a species belongs to a genus. These animals are ordered along evolutionary lines, significant events of our shared past marking out a historical trajectory. These lions that Julia Klemm gathers, derives from 3D scans of bronze and stone lions dotted around European capitals, traditional symbols of strength, courage and nobility in our Judeo-Christian tradition.   

Finally there are the memories of the pack, memories like the swarm of cicadas that emerge all together and so suddenly, after 17 years of underground sleep. History has no place for such memories; this kind of animal is missing from the taxonomist’s classification systems.  It is less about individuals, identification and contextualisation and more about how to think the animal as already a population. Memories are never single – there is never the one lion. An animal before it is this or that animal, my animal, yours and ours, is an animal like another, but also different. I mean lions as the same but also as mutants, the repetition of genetic material always harbouring mutation. These memories of the pack are always unknowingly carried with us. I am a product of memories I do not even remember; we are a multiplicity of memories that history cannot contain. The most interesting things happen in between the lines, in shared proximities where the discernibility of points disappears. As Deleuze and Guattari write, 

The line-system … of becoming is opposed to the point-system of memory. Becoming is the movement by which the line frees itself from the point, and renders points indiscernible…(Thousand Plateaus, 294)

 Here becoming is an anti-memory. To really learn how to remember animals, we must first forget. 

Magdalena Wisniowska, 2022

Reading the Air

Kalas Liebfried

19.11.2021 – 21.01.2022

Kalas Liebfried, Reading the Air, 2021, installation view

Kalas Liebfried, Reading the Air, 2021, installation view

Kalas Liebfried, Sonic Ghost (Franz Marc In The Jungle, Breathing), 2021 custom made kimono, hi-fi system, speaker

Kalas Liebfried, Sonic Ghost (Franz Marc In The Jungle, Breathing), 2021 custom made kimono, hi-fi system, speaker

Kalas Liebfried, Sonic Ghost (Franz Marc In The Jungle, Breathing), 2021 custom made kimono, hi-fi system, speaker

Kalas Liebfried, Reading the Air, 2021, installation view

Kalas Liebfried, Death Mask (Choromatsu Listenining To ‘In the Air Tonight’), 2021 silicon, hair, headphones, mirrors, wooden box and stand 

Kalas Liebfried, Death Mask (Choromatsu Listenining To ‘In the Air Tonight’), 2021 silicon, hair, headphones, mirrors, wooden box and stand 

 

Kalas Liebfried, Death Mask (Choromatsu Listenining To ‘In the Air Tonight’), 2021 silicon, hair, headphones, mirrors, wooden box and stand 

Kalas Liebfried, Death Mask (Choromatsu Listenining To ‘In the Air Tonight’), 2021 silicon, hair, headphones, mirrors, wooden box and stand 

Kalas Liebfried, Death Mask (Choromatsu Listenining To ‘In the Air Tonight’), 2021 silicon, hair, headphones, mirrors, wooden box and stand 

Kalas Liebfried, Death Mask (Choromatsu Listenining To ‘In the Air Tonight’), 2021 silicon, hair, headphones, mirrors, wooden box and stand 

Kalas Liebfried, Death Mask (Choromatsu Listenining To ‘In the Air Tonight’), 2021 silicon, hair, headphones, mirrors, wooden box and stand 

Kalas Liebfried, Japanese Landscape (Blue Screen Ambience), 2021 print on affiche paper, aluminium frame
Edition of 20 (+2AP)

Kalas Liebfried, Japanese Landscape (Blue Screen Ambience), 2021 print on affiche paper, aluminium frame
Edition of 20 (+2AP)

Kalas Liebfried, Skinning (Walkman Emblem), 2021 silk paper, varnish
Edition of 3 (+1AP)

Kalas Liebfried, Skinning (Walkman Emblem), 2021 silk paper, varnish
Edition of 3 (+1AP)

Kalas Liebfried, Marbled Evolution (Choromatsu‘s Ear), 2021 silicon, Edition of 10 (+2AP)

 

Photography: Mathias Reitz Zausinger

When we first see Choromatsu, the monkey starring in Sony’s groundbreaking commercial, he is standing still, eyes closed, listening to music on his walkman. He seems at peace, lost in his hidden inner world. He breathes deeply and slowly. We then read in subtitles below, ‘The progress in sound continues, but what about mankind?’ For music can now be everywhere. Not limited to the concert hall or the family piano, the radio or the hifi, it is now outside, with us, in nature.

For Kalas Liebfried, this is the point at which music becomes truly impressionist, catching up with the history of art. Impressionism in painting was in part a consequence of artists, who with the help of the then newly developed tubes of paint, taking their easels outside and painting en plein air. Impressionism for him is thus less about a technique or style of painting and more about bringing the outside in, or rather the inside out. 

This inside longing for the outside is what Adorno means when he writes after Kant, 

Authentic artworks, which hold fast to the idea of reconciliation with nature by making themselves completely a second nature, have consistently felt the urge, as if in need of a breath of fresh air, to step outside of themselves. Since identity is not to be their last word , they have sought consolation in first nature: Thus the last act of Figaro is played out of doors (…)

Art can be a copy of nature, in that something, anything, can be painted or drawn from life. But in the Kantian aesthetics Adorno is working with, art is like nature, because the aesthetic experience of art is based on and is the same as the aesthetic experience of natural beauty. Already when we experience nature as beautiful, we experience it as something more than it is, an image if you will. The nature that we see and feel is both the same nature as always and yet different, because it is beautiful for us. For art to share in the beauty of nature it must also have this ‘more’ and become in this way a ‘second nature’. Art that must be both itself and an excess, steps outside of itself, and this is why it seeks nature, even if, as Adorno mentions, it is only by staging Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro’s fourth act in the moonlit garden.  In nature, art can take a breath. It breathes. 

The advert for Sony’s walkman marks a moment in time in which the reconciliation between art and nature that Adorno had deemed impossible, seemed almost tangible: a rare moment of technological joy and optimism. Liebfried’s exhibition ‘Reading the Air’ is a reminder of the tangibility of this reconciliation. We see a hyperreal Choromatsu, listening with his headphones; we see his hands holding the walkman. And what we hear is the inside that always surrounds us – that we bring with us outside. This is the sound of our own breath, air rushing through the canal of our inner ear. 

Reading the Air

Kalas Liebfried

19.11.2021 – 21.02.2022

 

 

 

 

Opening: 19.11.2021, 6 – 9 pm (please note corona restrictions apply)

GiG Munich is happy to present its final exhibition of 2021, ‘Reading the Air’ with new work by Kalas Liebfried. The exhibition is part of the ‘Thinking Nature’ series hosted by GiG Munich and funded by the Department of Art and Culture, Munich.

In 1987 Sony released the iconic and groundbreaking commercial for its Walkman, featuring the Japanese macaque Choromatsu. We first see Choromatsu in profile, eyes closed, listening to music on a Walkman while standing in the mountains at the edge of a still lake: Choromatsu contemplates. Written underneath we can read, “The progress in sound continues, but what about mankind?”. This becomes the central question of Liebfried’s exhibition, a study on the technological progress in music and otherwise, the historical relation between Japanese and Western aesthetics with reference to impressionist concepts of nature and work by Franz Marc, as well as the impact of technology on the human condition and how this changes the capability to experience natural habitats. The “air” of the exhibition and its ambient methodology, is “In the Air Tonight”, the song by Phil Collins, which here the fragmented figure of a hyper-realist Choromatsu is destined to listen to forever, looping over and over again.

Link: https://vimeo.com/538598417

Kalas Liebfried (*1989 in Svishtov, Bulgaria) studied sculpture and time-based media at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and Philosophy at the LMU Munich. Central to his installations and performances is the exploration of the sculptural and socio-political potentials of sound. Liebfried is co-running the independent art space “Rosa Stern” and is founder of “PARA” (non-label sound art organization). His works have been shown in solo presentations at i.a. the galleries of the Goethe-Institut Paris and Sofia (2021) and Nir Altman Gallery (2019); group exhibitions and performances at i.a. Lenbachhaus Munich, Sofia City Art Gallery, Onassis Foundation Athens, Pinakothek der Moderne and Kunstverein Munich. Recent awards i.a. project stipend Stiftung Kunstfonds (2020) und Kulturpreis Bayern (2019). In 2021 Kalas Liebfried published his first monograph “Obscure Ambience” (Edition Metzel).

 

 

Low Affinity

Johanna Strobel

14.10-14.11.2021

 

 

Johanna Strobel, Low Affinity, 2021, installation view

Johanna Strobel, Low Affinity, 2021, installation view

Johanna Strobel, Low Affinity, 2021, installation view

Johanna Strobel, Low Affinity, 2021, installation view

Johanna Strobel, Low Affinity, 2021, installation view

Johanna Strobel, deep connectedness, 2021, usb 2.0 extension cords, paraffin, LEDs, plugs, size variable

Johanna Strobel, deep connectedness, 2021, USB 2.0 extension cords, paraffin, LEDs, plugs, size variable (detail)

Johanna Strobel, Low Affinity, 2021, installation view

 Johanna Strobel, low affinity (blue), 2021, USB 2.0 extension cords, paraffin, LEDs, size variable, approx 200 x 30 x 30 cm

Johanna Strobel, low affinity (blue), 2021, USB 2.0 extension cords, paraffin, LEDs, size variable, approx 200 x 30 x 30 cm, (detail)

 Johanna Strobel, low affinity (white), 2021,  USB 2.0 extension cable, paraffin, LEDs, size variable, approx 200 x 35 x 35 cm (detail)

Johanna Strobel, low affinity (red), 2021, USB 2.0 extension cable, paraffin, LEDs, size variable, approx 200 x 30 x 30 cm (detail)

 Johanna Strobel, the duration of the present (red/blue), 2021, oil on wood, microcontroller, minimotors, acrylic mirror, USB cable, plug, 30 x 20 x 20 cm

 Johanna Strobel, false friends,2021, acrylic mirrors, glass, aluminum, clockworks (clockwise and counterclockwise), LEDs, USB cable, each approx. 25 x 25 x 5 cm 

 Johanna Strobel, figures, 2021, oil on wood, microcontroller, motion sensor, USB cable, LEDs, plug, acrylic mirror, rubber bands, 30.5 x 46 x 10 cm

 

 

 

The word ‘plane’ conjures up an image of a brightly lit field, on which everything and anything may stand.The field in this image is squarish, with a mathematical axis, ‘x’ cutting one way, ‘y’ the other, and ‘z’ upwards and downwards, together mapping out a grid with each thing in its own little box. To make connections between things we draw (mostly) straight lines, from one point to another.

Deleuze and Guattari would argue that we have this image of the plane because of the link between ‘plane’ and ‘plan’. When we think of a plane this way, it acts as a hidden principle.We may not see the grid itself, but the grid is what makes things visible to us. It causes the given to be given by giving things their structure, organising them, charting their development and growth. It is a plan(e) of organisation and development, a genetic plan(e) of evolution. Because we do not see the principles by which it organises things, only the result of its labours, the plane is transcendent to us and things, and likened to an idea in the mind of God.

For us the viewers, marked as we are by the ‘confirmation and selection bias’ and victim to the ‘clustering illusion’ we look for these hidden principles finding patterns where there are none, making connections between things that are not in any way related. One such idea is central to the work Johanna Strobel shows at GiG Munich, the idea of aether, the fifth element of a classical world of four, in which everything can be divided into fire, earth, air and water. It was used to explain how stars stayed up in the sky, and moved across the heavens.

But there is another idea of a plane, in and on which there is no form or structure, only activity and its lack.This plane is populated by sub-atomic particles always in the process of transformation, but with no specific aim in mind. Depending on their activity, their speed and slowness, they compose assemblages, as Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘compositions of speed’. But they do not develop, organise according to a principle.They connect, disconnect, transform, reform.What happens, happens, in endless proliferation. Instead of development there is constant dissolution.

Johanna Strobel’s work conjures up both plan(e)s.There is a longing for principle, apparent in her systematic approach, plug going into socket, light being red or blue, going on or off.We can map this world quite easily on a grid. It is clean, white, metallic.There is also the understanding of a far more dissolute world in which entropy rules, of information lost through USB cables and mnemonic devices of knot-making failing.This world is unstable, reckless, and somehow also inexplicably present.

 

 

 

Low Affinity

Johanna Strobel

14.10 – 14.11.2021

GiG Munich is happy to present the next instalment of the series Thinking Nature, featuring new work by Johanna Strobel. For her solo exhibiton low affinity, Johanna Strobel creates rhizomatic macramé-like structures from USB extension cords, using them to power her plexiglas and paraffin sculptures. 

Enthropy, the fact that once the USB 2.0 cable exceeds a certain length information gets lost while power still remains, forms the central component of this work. It ties together the ancient idea of ‘ether’ as a medium through which light travels, the fluid physics of translucency, and the decorative and practical craft of knot-making. Her practice is informed by her background in science, and explores such unwieldy concepts like time and space, information and entropy, language, the creation, attribution or suspension of meaning and the everyday perception and precipitation of these concepts in mundane life. 

Johanna Strobel is an interdisciplinary artist from Germany, currently based in New York. She holds degrees in Information Science and Mathematics and graduated in painting and graphics from the Academy of Fine Arts Munich with Honors (Meisterschuelerin of Gregor Hildebrandt) in 2017. In 2020 she received her MFA from Hunter College New York (New Genres). Since then she has participated in numerous exhibitions in Germany, Italy, Taiwan and the US, with a solo exhibition at the Municipal Museum Cordonhaus Cham, 2019. In 2020 her work has been included in The Immigrant Artist Biennial, New York, USA, Jahresgaben, Kunstverein Munich, Germany and featured online by Hauser & Wirth. Johanna was a fellowship artist in residence at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn in 2021.  


The exhibition will include an online discussion event with Dr. Beth Lord, Professor of Philosophy, School of Divinity, History, Philosophy and Art History at the University of Aberdeen.    

Low Affinity

Johanna Strobel

CANCELLED

16.07. – 3.09.2021

Sadly, the exhibition will have to be postponed till further notice. The work was lost in the post. Hopefully we can make the exhibition happen later in the year, most likely in October. We apologise for the inconvenience caused.

GiG Munich is happy to present the next instalment of the series Thinking Nature, featuring new work by Johanna Strobel. For her solo exhibition low affinity, Johanna Strobel creates rhizomatic macramé-like structures from USB extension cords, using them to power her plexiglas and paraffin sculptures.

Entropy, the fact that once the USB 2.0 cable exceeds a certain length information gets lost while power still remains, forms the central component of this work. It ties together the ancient idea of ‘ether’ as a medium through which light travels, the fluid physics of translucency, and the decorative and practical craft of knot-making. Her practice is informed by her background in science, and explores such unwieldy concepts like time and space, information and entropy, language, the creation, attribution or suspension of meaning and the everyday perception and precipitation of these concepts in mundane life.

Johanna Strobel is an interdisciplinary artist from Germany, currently based in New York. She holds degrees in Information Science and Mathematics and graduated in painting and graphics from the Academy of Fine Arts Munich with Honors (Meisterschuelerin of Gregor Hildebrandt) in 2017. In 2020 she received her MFA from Hunter College New York (New Genres). Since then she has participated in numerous exhibitions in Germany, Italy, Taiwan and the US, with a solo exhibition at the Municipal Museum Cordonhaus Cham, 2019. In 2020 her work was included in The Immigrant Artist Biennial, New York, USA, Jahresgaben, Kunstverein Munich, Germany and featured online by Hauser & Wirth. Johanna was a fellowship artist in residence at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn in 2021.

The exhibition will include an online discussion event with Dr. Beth Lord, Professor of Philosophy, School of Divinity, History, Philosophy and Art History at the University of Aberdeen.

Plastique Fantastique

Zero Time

30.11.2019 – 17.01.2020

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-1Plastique Fantastique, Zero Time, 2019, exhibition view

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-2Plastique Fantastique, Zero Time, 2019, exhibition view

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-3Plastique Fantastique, Zero Time, 2019, exhibition view

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-4Plastique Fantastique, Zero Time, 2019, exhibition view

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-5Plastique Fantastique, Plastique Fantastique Comic Communique:The Story of Cimon, BoDroNo, Eurnikern, NanOr/5, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, Ribbons, Plywood, Silver Blankets, 2400 x 2400 mm

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-6Plastique Fantastique, Plastique Fantastique Comic Communique:The Story of Cimon, BoDroNo, Eurnikern, NanOr/5, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, Ribbons, Plywood, Silver Blankets, 2400 x 2400 mm (detail)

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-7Plastique Fantastique, Zero Time, 2019, exhibition view

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-9Plastique Fantastique, Plastique Fantastique Avatars: Nan0r/5, BoDroNo, Drone Monkey, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, 2200 x 1400 mm

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-10Plastique Fantastique, Plastique Fantastique Avatars: Termites, Pixel, Funnel Face, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, 2200 x 1400 mm

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-12Plastique Fantastique, Plastique Fantastique Avatars: Nan0r/5, BoDroNo, Drone Monkey, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, 2200 x 1400 mm (detail)

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-13Plastique Fantastique, Plastique Fantastique Avatars: Termites, Pixel, Funnel Face, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, 2200 x 1400 mm (detail)

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-17Plastique Fantastique, CIMON, 2019, Polystyrene, Ribbons, Paint, Foam, I-Pad Screen, 500 x 500 x 500 mm

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-18Plastique Fantastique, CIMON, 2019, Polystyrene, Ribbons, Paint, Foam, I-Pad Screen, 500 x 500 x 500 mm

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-19Plastique Fantastique, CIMON, 2019, Polystyrene, Ribbons, Paint, Foam, I-Pad Screen, 500 x 500 x 500 mm

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-20Plastique Fantastique, Spacehex Dragon, 2019, Digital Print, Plywood, Wood, Ribbons, Metal and Wood Table, Perspex, 2200 x 1000 x 800 mm

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-21Plastique Fantastique, Spacehex Dragon, 2019, Digital Print, Plywood, Wood, Ribbons, Metal and Wood Table, Perspex, 2200 x 1000 x 800 mm (detail)

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-22Plastique Fantastique, Spacehex Dragon, 2019, Digital Print, Plywood, Wood, Ribbons, Metal and Wood Table, Perspex, 2200 x 1000 x 800 mm (detail)

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-23Plastique Fantastique, Spacehex Dragon, 2019, Digital Print, Plywood, Wood, Ribbons, Metal and Wood Table, Perspex, 2200 x 1000 x 800 mm (detail)

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-24Plastique Fantastique, Mars Earth Sigil, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, Ribbons, Plywood, 3000 x 1400 mm
Plastique Fantastique, Witches Ladder, 2019, Rope, Feathers, Dimensions Variable

 

am_Plastique-Fantastique-25Plastique Fantastique, Mars Earth Sigil, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, Ribbons, Plywood, 3000 x 1400 mm
Plastique Fantastique, Witches Ladder, 2019, Rope, Feathers, Dimensions Variable
photos: Jonah Gebka, Magdalena Wisniowska

 

To a certain extent we are all used to the idea that art involves fiction. The events described by a novel are not real, neither is the play performed in the theatre, nor the bunch of flowers painted on a canvas. When Plastique Fantastique presents “Zero Time,” an exhibition which deals with a question familiar from science fiction – whether we, as a people, should stay on planet earth and try to sort out our mess, or whether we should leave instead, and seek our future elsewhere – it is tempting to think that the exhibition with its video, performance and installation, is that which is fictional. But this is not what the work demands from us. The kind of “fictioning” pursued by Plastique Fantastique shows that it is our reality, and not the video or performance, which is fictional – they disrupt the structures of our dominant world order to reveal them as myth. 

It is not that the exhibition presents a fiction, but involves the practice of “fictioning”.  Plastique Fantastique is an art collective of Simon o’Sullivan, David Burrows,  Alex Marzeta,  Vanessa Page and Benedict Drew. Simon o’Sullivan , professor of Art Theory and Practice in the department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths and David Burrows, Reader in Fine Art at the Slade, work in theory as much as in practice, and they define the meaning of “fictioning” in their 2019 book, Fictioning: The Myth Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy. In their introduction, they trace the concept of fictioning philosophically through Plato’s contaminated opposition between poetry and philosophy – poetry being fictional, philosophy, having to do with truth – showing how more recently Deleuze replaces this opposition with Nietzsche’s fantastic theatre of metamorphosis. They also show how the tension between fiction and truth has been addressed by contemporary art, arguing that there is an efficacy of fiction when it is experienced as fact.  As a performative gesture fictioning is generative of social identities and relations. It brings about a truth which does not yet exist by fictioning it.

I like to understand the shift in relations produced by their performative fiction, in terms of the experience this kind of fictioning engenders.  It is not the relation of a predetermined human subject to its equally determined object. It is rather, the chaosmotic process of combining the sensory event with its network of associations, an affection and all the affects beyond experience, which it harbours. The ‘I’ is not what experiences the work of art. The ‘I’ here is produced in the encounter. When I engage with art I like to think this involves a different “I” to my everyday one, maybe there isn’t even an “I” here to speak of, but the complete participation in a creative activity. 

Plastique Fantastique creates a world very different from our own: a more colourful one, more glamorous, glittery, extravagant.  A future techonologically advanced world, but also a medieval, mystical one. It runs parallel to ours and we are welcome to visit it anytime Plastique Fantastique might exhibit or perform. 

Magdalena Wisniowska 2019