Before your eyes open

Laura Hinrichsmeyer, Luisa Kasalicky, Andrea Zabric

15.05 – 04.07.2026

together with The Tiger Room at Heßstr. 48 b, 80798 Munich

We are told it is a mistake to think that the painter begins with a white surface. There is no empty canvas to be filled with life, for there is too much life already, too much clutter, too much stuff. “The painter has many things in his head, or around him, or in his studio.” And everything the painter has in his head is there on the canvas before him, before he begins his work. So many images! Thus before he begins, the painter has to empty the canvas, to remove what is there already. And to this argument I want to say, hmm. Perhaps. Or rather not.

Perhaps this is true of the painter, who is sure of himself and his place in the world, which is organised around him. But there are others who paint, better defined through a counter-subjectivity, which is non-unitary, not fixed. This subjectivity is not set against the clutter of life, but at home within it. For VO 2026, GiG Munich would like to introduce three painters, Laura Hinrichsmeyer, Luisa Kasalicky and Andrea Zabric.

Uns wird gesagt, es sei ein Irrtum zu glauben, ein Maler^* beginne mit einer weißen Fläche. Es gibt keine leere Leinwand, die mit Leben gefüllt werden müsste, denn bereits ist zu viel Überfluss, zu viel Material vorhanden. „Der Maler hat viele Dinge in seinem Kopf, um sich herum oder in seinem Atelier.“ Alles, was er im Kopf hat, ist bereits auf der Leinwand, noch bevor er zu malen beginnt. So viele Bilder! Bevor er anfängt, muss er die Leinwand leeren, das Entfernen dessen, was bereits da ist. Dazu möchte ich sagen: hm. Vielleicht. Oder doch nicht.

Dies mag auf den Maler zutreffen, der sich seiner selbst und seines Platzes in der um ihn herum geordneten Welt sicher ist. Es gibt jedoch andere, die malen, die sich durch eine Gegen-Subjektivität zeigen, die nicht einheitlich und nicht festgelegt ist. Sie steht der Überfülle des Lebens nicht gegenüber, sondern ist in ihr zu Hause. Für VO 2026 möchte GiG drei Malerinnen vorstellen: Laura Hinrichsmeyer, Luisa Kasalicky und Andrea Zabric.

* Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logik der Sensation (1981). S. 55. Beim Philosoph ist der Maler eine männlich gedachte Figur — der vorliegende Text nimmt diese Figur auf, um ihr eine andere Subjektivität entgegenzustellen.

Powidok slonca; Strzeminski, Wladyslaw (1893-1952); 1948-1949 (1948-00-00 – 1948-00-00); Pobrano z systemu MUZA Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie; malarskie / farba / olej; wyroby z wlókien / tkanina / p?ótno; wys. 73 cm, szer. 61 cm; MPW 1121 MNW; Wszystkie prawa zastrzezone.

Animal Elegance

Jakob Gilg, Anka Helfertova, Julia Klemm and Jonathan Penca

9.10. – 7.11.2025

with Pracownia Portretu, Łódź, Poland

Animal Elegance, installation view (Jonathan Penca, Colonna Sonora, 2025, acrylic and
gouache paint, acrylic resin, biro, pencil, gesso and ink on wood. 31 x 24 x 5 cm; Julia Klemm, A chimera is not a pet 2, 2025, steel, glaze, ceramic, pigment, 44 x 38 x 74 cm, )

Julia Klemm, A chimera is not a pet 2,2025, steel, glaze, ceramic, pigment, 44 x 38 x 74 cm,

Jonathan Penca, Colonna Sonora, 2025, acrylic and
gouache paint, acrylic resin, biro, pencil, gesso and ink on wood. 31 x 24 x 5 cm,

Animal Elegance, installation view , 2025

Jonathan Penca, inglers Groove, 2025, gouache, acrylic, watercolour, acrylic resin, pencil, gesso, ink and paper on wood, 52 x 30 x 5 cm; Jonathan Penca, Tufty Sequence, 2025, gouache, acrylic, acrylic resin, biro, gesso, ink and paper on wood, 40 x 19 x 5 cm)

Animal Elegance, 2025, installation view

Julia Klemm, Transcending territories, 2024, glaze, ceramic, pigment, 32 x 30 x 48 cm

Jakob Gilg, Alignment, 2025, pigment and acrylic medium on canvas, 180 x 110 cm; Jakob Gilg, Virgo, 2025, pigment and acrylic medium on canvas, 140 x 120 cm)

Jonathan Penca, Clogmia, 2025, gouache, acrylic resin, gesso, ink, makeup powder and paper on wood, 44 x 30 x 5 cm

Jakob Gilg, I’m sorry, 2024, pigment and acrylic medium on canvas, 25o x 200 cm; Jakob Gilg, Kindling, 2025, pigment and acrylic medium on canvas, 70 x 50 cm

Jakob Gilg, Kindling, 2025, pigment and acrylic medium on canvas, 70 x 50 cm

Anka Helfertova, To be in a time of war ( I keep changing my address but war never loses my scent) 2025, bricks, stone, MDF board, silicon, pigment, ceramic, 55 x 120 x 77 cm and 40 x 30 x 30 cm

There is a fascist, who lives in my head, and he has been there for a while. I speak to him almost everyday about different things, mainly things I see in the news or read about online, but sometimes also about art. Recently I was telling him about the fish, Kluzinger’s wrasse, which reminded me of a passage I read in “A Thousand Plateaus” by Deleuze and Guattari. They ascribe to a tropical fish an animal elegance, because of the way it uses its colourful design to blend in with its surroundings. The lines of the design are abstract and yet have the capacity to construct an entire underwater world.

Look, I tell him, we think we know what a fish is, the way you think you know what a dog or horse or lion is, an animal, a species, a type. Certainly your lot has made enough statues and animal monuments – porcelain shepherd dog figurines graced your tables. A fish lives in water and like all other fish has scales, fins and gills. We can compare this fish to another and note down the similarities of their characteristics, in order to classify them, genus: Thalassoma, family: Labridae. You think we know what kind of an animal a fish is. There it is. Put it in an aquarium.

Ah, I say, but can we see the animal Deleuze and Guattari describe as possessing an English kind of elegance? With a refinement that does not seek attention, but that remains quietly unobtrusive? This involves the appreciation of the small and the detailed, like those drain moths found in Jonathan Penca’s paintings, charming us with their fuzzy faces and furry wings. More than that, unobtrusiveness requires an effort. To go through life unnoticed is not easy and drain moths have a life cycle with four stages, larvae feeding on toilet sludge before developing into pupae.

There are animals we see and animals we do not. The animals we do see, we organise and use, tame and breed. We control them as meticulously as Eadweard Muybridge did, when he set up multiple cameras to capture the image of the horse in motion or a lion in a cage, the starting point of Jakob Gilg’s paintings. We assign animals different roles: you there, you look soft and cuddly, you will be a pet. And you, you over there, so powerful and strong, you we will make into a symbol. Kitsch ceramic cats and scaled-down digital scans of lion monuments tumble, shatter and recombine in Julia Klemm’s work.

But this animal you don’t see, is something other than a molar entity, a different “affair” as Deleuze and Guattari would say, involving “becoming” not “being.” And it might seem we are meant to think this becoming morphologically, as the becoming of something else, a change from one permanent state to another, equally permanent one. A human could become a cat perhaps – or a cat, a human – as in the work of Anka Helfertova. Violence swirls around and we try to find our peace, not to lose ourselves within. To think becoming is to think loss, the elimination of all of our complaints, demands, unsatisfied desires, “everything that roots us in ourselves,” so that at the end, we are left with nothing, which is also everything. Becoming-animal is always a becoming-imperceptible, a shrinking best found in science fiction novels, the shrinking man becoming smaller and smaller without ever disappearing. Because when animals are thought in their becoming, the molecular comes into play, those invisible abstract forces that in their millions of interactions are actually responsible for constituting a world. To think an animal in its becoming is to engage with these molecular forces at work.

This is the demand elegance places on us: to think less of ourselves and more of the other. It is to be more attuned to our surroundings by paying attention to what continues to constitute us, which is always small and inorganic, indiscernible and impersonal. Elegance is a kind of molecular attention, but with a focus that opens out onto the world. To think things in their becoming molecularly is also to think in terms of the cosmos in its entirety. And then we might indeed stop seeing fish, but we will begin to see everything else.

Magdalena Wiśniowska 2025

A chimera is not a pet

Julia Klemm

28.06 – 26.07.2025

together with The Tiger Room at Heßstr. 48 b, 80798 Munich

Julia Klemm, A chimera is not a pet, 2025, installation view

Julia Klemm, A chimera is not a pet 3, 2025, steel, glaze, ceramic, pigment, 46 × 34 × 42 cm

Julia Klemm, Evasion, 2025, steel, glaze, ceramic, pigment, cloth, 23 × 23 × 65 cm

Julia Klemm, Transcending territories, 2024, glaze, ceramic, pigment, 32 × 30 × 48 cm

Julia Klemm, Julia Klemm, Transcending territories, 2024, glaze, ceramic, pigment, 32 × 30 × 48 cm (detail)

Julia Klemm, A chimera is not a pet 4, 2025, secondhand ceramic figures, steel, glaze, ceramic, screws, 27 × 46 × 260 cm

Julia Klemm, A chimera is not a pet 4, 2025, secondhand ceramic figures, steel, glaze, ceramic, screws, 27 × 46 × 260 cm (detail)

Julia Klemm, A chimera is not a pet 2, 2025, steel, glaze, ceramic, pigment, 44 × 38 × 74 cm

Julia Klemm, Untitled, 2025, secondhand ceramic figures, glaze, ceramic, fired soft toy, chandelier, 12 × 14 × 11 cm

Julia Klemm, Double trouble, 2025, ceramic, steel, pigment, glaze, 24 × 34× 60 cm

Julia Klemm, A chimera is not a pet 1, 2025, secondhand ceramic figures, glaze, ceramic, steel, fired soft toy, 15 × 25 × 14,5 cm

Julia Klemm, Mimicry, 2025, second ceramic figures, steel, chandelier, glaze, ceramic, 12 × 14 × 8 cm

Julia Klemm, Gryphon, 2025, secondhand ceramic figures, glaze, ceramic, steel, fired soft toy, 18 × 22 × 17cm

The problem I think, is that too often a chimera is seen as a pet. We visualise chimeras as these mythical fire breathing monsters, maybe with a lion’s head, a body of a goat, and a serpent for a tail. Three distinct animals are combined into one, their individual characteristics clearly visible for us to see. In contrast, biologically,a genetic chimera is often invisible, a nightmarish combination of two different sets of DNA, a result of one or more zygotes fusing together during the early stages of prenatal development. How this alien DNA might manifest is not altogether clear, but you hear stories of mothers having different DNA than their children, and the DNA from semen and saliva not matching in rape tests. To look for distinctions in chimeras would be the first step towards their domestication, treating the hybrid animal as another family member, a pet. But you cannot cuddle the long lost twin you might be carrying with you, inside.

Julia Klemm’s ceramic work often involves a combination of several smaller ceramic pieces, each with their own specific animal DNA. Sometimes these are readymade figurines of cats, lions or horses, glossy and kitsch, inhabitants of Flohmärkte and Omas’ living rooms. At other times, these are recreations of existing public art, of lion statues such as those found on Odeonsplatz, scanned, scaled down and then modelled with a 3D-printed negative mould. Rarely, an animal-type structure is moulded in clay by Julia on the spot, traces of fur scratched with a serrated scraper onto its surface. These smaller animal ceramics are first broken, smashed into almost unrecognisable fragments before they are combined, their intertwining made permanent by the heat of the ceramic oven. I look for these fragments as I walk around the work and try to classify them: look, here are some lion’s legs, and here, a cat’s head, but upside down and half-broken, so that I can see the form inside and outside. Focussing on the surface helps, as I detect the glossy spots of a panther or the layer lines of the 3D printer.

In doing so, I am looking for a pet, with fur strokable like a pastel-coloured soft toy. I try to make the strange shapes of Julia Klemm’s work once again familiar to me. But their outward appearance is a result of a logic that remains hidden. The work demands I see it as a multiplicity, which means in animal terms, as a population. And science teaches us that a population is not a fixed set of individuals of the same species, but an always evolving, interacting mass that changes in relation to its location and environment. The alliances made in a population are not just of the filial kind between individual members of the group, but those made with other groups, other animals, with plants, and with geography. To see the inner workings of the animal in Julia Klemm’s ceramics, I need to step away from the animal and take a more expansive view, one that acknowledges population change forged by mutation. It is very alien to see the world in this way, as foreign and as violent as the shards of steel that interpenetrate the work, both holding it together and ripping it apart.

Magdalena Wiśniowska 2025

Roztopy

Dominika Olszowy, Klaudia Figura, Julia Woronowicz, Czaro Malinkiewicz, Paweł Marcinek, Przemysław Piniak, Zuza Piekoszewska, Maryna Sakowska, Karolina Szwed

curated by Przemek Sowiński (Łęctwo, Poznań) and hosted by The Tiger Room

9.05 – 14.06.2025

Opening: 9.05.2025, 5pm

Heßstr. 48 b, 80798 Munich

Julia Woronowicz, Sphinx and Foal, 2024, courtesy of the artist

The exhibition “Roztopy” explores the relationship between a characteristic Polish landscape of melting snow, folklore, and tradition, and what remains following the political, social, and economic upheavals of the 1990s. “Roztopy” translates as snowmelt, a transitional period in which one condition changes into another. It refers to a specific moment in time that captures the tension between what has passed and what is to come. The show features recent work of young Polish artists, approaching the theme from an economic perspective, the shifting locations and the resurfacing of emotions that are becoming more obvious after a period of stagnation. Just like any transformation, melting snow reveals what lies beneath. Cracks, debris, and everything else that went unseen is forced into a confrontation, just like we face buried memories. The works are connected by the notions of transgression and experimentation. This is a story about the mud we bring from the streets into our own homes.

Roztopy widmet sich der Verbindung zwischen der schmelzenden Schneelandschaft Polens, ihrer Folklore und Tradition sowie den Spuren, die die politischen, sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Umbrüche der 1990er Jahre hinterlassen haben. Roztopy bedeutet Schneeschmelze – eine Übergangsphase, in der ein Zustand in einen anderen übergeht. Der Begriff beschreibt einen Moment der Spannung zwischen Vergangenem und Zukünftigem. Gezeigt werden aktuelle Arbeiten junger polnischer Künstler*innen, die sich dem Thema aus einer wirtschaftlichen Perspektive nähern und die Veränderungen sichtbar machen, die nach einer Zeit der Stagnation einsetzen. Wie die Schneeschmelze verborgene Risse und Trümmer freilegt, zwingen uns die Werke, sich mit verschütteten Erinnerungen auseinanderzusetzen. Was die Arbeiten vereint, ist die Bereitschaft zum Experiment und das Spiel mit Grenzen. Die Ausstellung erzählt die Geschichte des Schlamms, den wir unweigerlich von draußen mit nach Hause bringen.

The Brutality of Spring

Anna Łuczak, Sophie Schmidt

14.12.2024-2.02.2025

Anna Łuczak, Sophie Schmidt, “Brutality of Spring,” 2024, detail (porcelain plates, white paint, wood ribbon, metal plate holders, cutlery, make up). Photo: Thomas Splett

A person has died.

Andrea Éva Győri is dead.

These two statements are not the same, though they might seem very similar. When I say, E. is dead, I think of her and how she was, someone I never met but heard so much about: the tone of her voice, her laugh, her enthusiasm and strong personality. She is someone with a consciousness, a memory, a personal identity. But when I say, a person has died, I mean something different. The logic is different because it is impersonal. It has nothing to do with E. and yet everything to do with her. A person is singular – the one – yet not particular. I cannot say anything specific about a person. A person is dead is an indefinite statement, because a person is a life, and life is indefinite, singular, impersonal.

How can I describe a life? Without talking about E. who lived? Deleuze was right, this requires an empiricism, an empirical kind of thinking, an almost scientific kind of rigour. I keep making lists:

There is the Marzanna, an effigy out of twigs and straw that Polish children drown in a nearby river as spring approaches.
There is the life cycle of the salmon, swimming upstream and spawning, then dying and their bodies fertilising the river.
Did you know that skeletal muscle stem cells continue living up to 17 days after all other cells have died?
That scene in Dicken’s novel, “Our Mutual Friend,” when the Rogue lays dying in Miss Abbey’s first-floor bedroom. While he barely breaths everyone tries to help, but as soon as his eyelid trembles, his nose twitches, the doctor and the four men grow distant and caution returns.

Anna Łuczak and Sophie Schmidt made a series of porcelain plates together, as individual responses to E.’s passing. Anna made the plates and wrote the texts, Sophie painted images:

There is the day of E.’s diagnosis. The breast cancer.
There is the day at the crematorium.
And the time just after, laying on the floor.
There is salmon spawning, seeds germinating.

The plates refer to the domestic language of the vanitas. We eat on them with fork and knife, we wash them and we put them away. The colourful ribbons belong to the “kapliczka,” the wayside shrine found on nearly every road in Poland, equally catholic and pagan. Sophie Schmidt’s wooden structures hold everything together ever so precariously, extensions of the body, with the body’s fragility, strength and breakability.

Eine Person ist gestorben.
Andrea Éva Győri ist tot.
Diese beiden Aussagen sind nicht identisch, obwohl sie sehr ähnlich erscheinen mögen. Wenn ich sage: „E. ist tot“, denke ich an sie und an die Person, die sie war, obwohl ich sie nie persönlich kennengelernt, dafür aber viel über sie gehört habe: vom Klang ihrer Stimme, ihrem Lachen, ihrer Begeisterung und starken Persönlichkeit. Sie ist jemand mit Bewusstsein, Erinnerung und einer persönlichen Identität. Aber wenn ich sage, „eine Person ist gestorben“, meine ich etwas anderes. Die Logik ist eine andere, weil sie unpersönlich ist. Es hat nichts und alles mit ihr zu tun.
Eine Person ist einzigartig – genau die eine – und doch nicht besonders. Ich kann nichts Spezifisches über eine Person sagen. „Eine Person ist tot“ ist eine unbestimmte Aussage, denn eine Person ist ein Leben, und Leben ist unbestimmt, singulär, unpersönlich.

Wie kann ich ein Leben beschreiben? Ohne über E. zu sprechen, die gelebt hat? Deleuze hatte Recht, dies erfordert Empirie, eine empirische Art des Denkens, eine nahezu wissenschaftliche Gründlichkeit. Ich mache immer weitere Listen:

Da ist die Marzanna, eine Puppe aus Zweigen und Stroh, die von polnischen Kindern in einem
nahegelegenen Fluss ertränkt wird, wenn der Frühling naht.
Da ist der Lebenszyklus der Lachse, die stromaufwärts schwimmen und laichen, dann sterben und mit
ihren Körpern den Fluss befruchten.
Wussten Sie schon, dass die Stammzellen der Skelettmuskeln bis zu siebzehn Tage weiterleben, nachdem
alle anderen Zellen bereits abgestorben sind?
Diese Szene in Dickens’ Roman „Unser gemeinsamer Freund“, als der Schurke sterbend im Schlafzimmer von Miss Abbey im ersten Stock liegt. Während er kaum noch atmet, versuchen alle zu helfen, aber sobald sein Augenlid zittert, seine Nase zuckt, werden der Arzt und die vier Männer misstrauisch und zurückhaltend.

Anna Łuczak und Sophie Schmidt haben als individuelle Reaktionen auf E.s Tod gemeinsam eine Serie von Porzellantellern entworfen. Anna schrieb Texte, Sophie malte Bilder:

Da ist der Tag von E’s Diagnose. Der Brustkrebs.
Da ist der Tag im Krematorium.
Und kurz danach, als wir auf dem Boden lagen.
Der Lachs laicht, die Samen keimen.

Die Teller verweisen auf die häusliche Sprache der Vanitas. Wir essen auf ihnen mit Gabel und Messer, wir waschen sie ab und wir räumen sie weg. Die bunten Bänder gehören zu den „kapliczka“, den Bildstöcken, die man in Polen an fast jeder Straße findet, gleichermaßen katholisch wie heidnisch. Sophie Schmidts Holzkonstruktionen halten alles auf äußerst fragile Weise zusammen, sie sind Verlängerungen des Körpers, mit seiner Zerbrechlichkeit, Stärke und Brüchigkeit.

Magdalena Wiśniowska 2024

The Brutality of Spring

Anna Łuczak, Sophie Schmidt

14.12.2024-2.02.2025

Opening: 13.12.2024, 6-9 pm

In Poland every year in spring, school children gather together at the banks of frozen rivers to drown the Marzanna. I remember throwing stones at the doll to make her sink faster. We then walked home without looking back.
Salmon swim upstream to lay their eggs in their home river. They die and their decomposing bodies help fertilise the water.
Everyone helps the rogue in the Dicken’s novel as he lays dying in Miss Abbey’s first-floor bedroom. But as he grows warm – “Did that eyelid tremble? Did that nostril twitch?” – the doctor and the four men cool and “their faces and their hearts harden to him.”

These occasions recognise what for Deleuze is not reducible to experience, but which nevertheless can be confronted: a life. Not the lived, individual life, so full of things that need to be done, but a life, singular and impersonal, indefinite; a life with no moments, but only the in-between, a passage, a becoming, of events yet to come that have already happened. “Pure power and bliss” Deleuze writes. Just life, only life, a life.

In “The Brutality of Spring” Anna Łuczak and Sophia Schmidt collaborate together in homage to a recently deceased mutual friend to produce a multimedia installation, a vanitas-type project, founded equally in the transience of domestic sphere and the fragility of the human body.

VO Special: Carrying the Earth to the Sky

Hêlîn Alas,Pierre-Yves Delannoy, Lukas Hoffmann, Veronika Hilger, Ju Young Kim, Anna McCarthy, Jonathan Penca, Curtis Talwst Santiago, Valio Tchenkov, Ayaka Terajima, Gülbin Ünlü, Paul Valentin, Max Weisthoff

7.09 -28.09.2024

Temporary venue at Schillerstr. 38, Munich

Hêlîn Alas, Carrying the Earth to the Sky, 2024, installation view with “Up and Up and Up and Up,” 2024, trampolines, cable ties, speakers, sound, cables, 490 x 165 cm and “Still Faced,” 2024
framed photo print (part of a series) 100 x 70 cm. Photo: Produktion Pitz

Hêlîn Alas, “Traumhaus junior,” 2024, caramel, 118 x 90 x 8 cm. Photo: Produktion Pitz

Pierre-Yves Delannoy, “embroideries on cashier’s ticket,” 2019-24, cotton yarns, thermo paper, dimensions variable (8 x 16 cm (X10)). Photo: Thomas Splett

Veronika Hilger, Carrying the Earth to the Sky, 2024, installation view. Photo: Thomas Splett

Veronika Hilger, Untitled, 2024, ceramic, 27 × 24 × 3 cm. Photo: Thomas Splett

Lukas Hoffmann, “Figure,” 2020, MDF, oak, aluminum, acrylic glass, 50 x 45 x 8 cm. Photo: Lukas Hoffmann

Lukas Hoffmann, “Castle,” 2024, Spraypaint, plywood, screws, MDF dyed through, 100 x 100 x 200 cm. Photo: Lukas Hoffmann

Ju Young Kim, “Almost like Whale Watching,” 2024, a pair of aircraft fairings, stained glass, rivets, LED, 240 x 38 x 46 cm (X2). Photo: Younsik Kim

Anna McCarthy, Carrying the Earth to the Sky, 2024, installation view with “Car Crash b/w,” 2001, analogue photograph 230 x 160. Photo: Thomas Splett

Anna McCarthy, “Car crash installation,” 2024, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Thomas Splett

Jonathan Penca, “Synanthropop,” 2024, paper-maché, plaster, polymer clay, resin, cardboard, acrylic paint, wood, glass, digital print on paper, plinth, 120 x 60 x 60 cm. Photo: Thomas Splett

Jonathan Penca, “Mitten Crack,” 2024, paper-maché, plaster, polymer clay, resin, wooden bird whistle, lipstick, cardboard, acrylic paint, digital print on paper, plinth 120 x 60 x 60 cm. Photo: Thomas Splett

Curtis Talwst Santiago, “History of Touch” 2024, installation view detail. Photo: Thomas Splett

Curtis Talwst Santiago, “History of Touch” 2024, installation view. Photo: Thomas Splett

Valio Tchenkov, Carrying the Earth to the Sky, 2024, installation view. Photo: Thomas Splett

Ayaka Terajima, Carrying the Earth to the Sky, 2024, installation view. Photo: Thomas Splett

Ayaka Terajima, “Long legs doki,” 2023, Unglazed fired ceramic by recycled clay, 60 x 100 x 130 cm. Photo: Thomas Splett

Gülbin Ünlü, “Karanlik isik,” 2024, wood, printed fabric, dimensions variable (site specific installation). Photo: Thomas Splett

Gülbin Ünlü, “Karanlik isik,” 2024, wood, printed fabric, dimensions variable (site specific installation) detail. Photo: Thomas Splett

Paul Valentin, “Kasside,” 2024, site specific video installation. Photo: Thomas Splett

Max Weisthoff, “perpetuator,” 2024, sculptural sound installation, 5 objects, cable, dimensions variable (site specific installation). Photo: Thomas Splett

Max Weisthoff, “out of flesh,” 2024, mixed media installation, 2 channel video, x objects, dimensions variable (site specific installation). Photo: Thomas Splett

Carrying the earth into the sky – long text Download

“Carrying the Earth to the Sky” will present works by 13 artists who are currently active in the contemporary art scene in Munich. The artists were selected in a two-stage process. First each of the 37 participants of VARIOUS OTHERS nominated one artist currently living in Munich. From this group, an international jury consisting of four institutional curators selected 13 artists who will show their work as part of the VARIOUS OTHERS program in September. The jury acknowledged that the quality of the applications received made their task both exciting and challenging. The final selection of multi-generational artists reflects the desire to see art beyond fixed categories and clichés and to honour distinctive works.

The exhibition’s curator, Magdalena Wisniowska, has meticulously chosen the works in collaboration with the artists. These will be presented together in an overarching curatorial concept at Schillerstraße 38 under the title “Carrying the Earth to the Sky”.

“The earth is something human, something we keep under our feet. The sky high above is without air, where no living thing can breathe. Moving away from one to the other means letting go of the earth and constructions that belong to it – actions, bodies, objects, sensations and desires – until only the elements, disconnected molecules, remain.”

We would like to express our gratitude to all supporters of the exhibition, particularly the owners of the property at Schillerstraße 38, the Cultural Department of the City of Munich, the Edith-Haberland-Wagner Foundation and Serviceplan Group for their generous support.

Jury:
Rosa Ferré (TBA21, Madrid)
Luis Silva (Kunsthalle Lissabon)
Nicola Trezzi (CCA, Tel Aviv)
Vivien Trommer (K21, Düsseldorf)

Throw of the dice

Lukas Hoffmann, Sophia Mainka

29.06 – 3.08. 2024

Kindly invited by Sperling Munich, Regerplatz 9, 81541 München

Throw of the dice, 2024, installation view. Photo: Sebastian Kissel, courtesy Sperling, Munich.

Sophia Mainka, Oracle des Plantes series, 2024, silicone on cotton, 75 x 57 x 1 cm each. Photo: Sebastian Kissel, courtesy Sperling, Munich.

Sophia Mainka, Tarot (Wheel of Fortune), 2924, silicone on cotton, 190 x 121 x 1 cm. Photo: Sebastian Kissel, courtesy Sperling, Munich.

Sophia Mainka, Tarot (Wheel of Fortune), 2924, silicone on cotton, 190 x 121 x 1 cm (detail). Photo: Sebastian Kissel, courtesy Sperling, Munich.

Lukas Hoffmann, Pan, MDF, paper, wood, spray-paint, 41 x 22 x 19 cm. Photo: Sebastian Kissel, courtesy Sperling, Munich.

Throw off the dice, 2024, installation view. Photo: Sebastian Kissel, courtesy Sperling, Munich.

Lukas Hoffmann, Schloss, 2024, paper, wood, screws, spray-paint, 158 x 102 x 75 cm. Photo: Sebastian Kissel, courtesy Sperling, Munich.

Lukas Hoffmann, Schloss, 2024, paper, wood, screws, spray-paint, 158 x 102 x 75 cm (detail). Photo: Sebastian Kissel, courtesy Sperling, Munich.

Sophia Mainka, We used to be wild, 2024, video loop (full HD, stereo), 17 min & 17 sec. Photo: Sebastian Kissel, courtesy Sperling, Munich.

Throw of the dice – down a slippery slope

A standard game of dice is not a game of chance. At stake is probability, the odds of throwing this or that number, easily calculable. This is why we often lose, as the fable famously forewarns.[1] The young man inherits an estate and quickly gambles it away. In one sweep an entire forest is laid low. Is bad luck to blame? No, replies Fortune to an angry Pan. Just the foolishness of man.

A game of chance takes place on a far more slippery slope, like the round of croquet played in Alice in Wonderland, a game of cards of sorts.[2] Flamingos are mallets and a hedgehog is a ball. Whenever Alice wants to hit the hedgehog with the flamingo’s head, the bird turns floppy and spins round to look at her so comically that she laughs. And when she finally gets the flamingo’s head down, the hedgehog crawls away. In this game, cards move away from us and the players play all at once, quarrelling and fighting while the queen screams, “Off with their heads! Off with their heads!” For in a real game of chance, anything can happen. This would be the challenge: throwing the dice without knowing the rules of the game. To continue throwing the dice while accepting that each time the rules of the game change.

This is Nietzsche’s divine game, played across two tables, the earth and the sky.[3] Each time the dice is thrown the earth trembles, because the dice returns to us as divine. At that moment when the dice hover briefly in the air, they belong to the gods and all is possible. Our task is to affirm the entirety of possibility, any fate the gods prepared for us, cooking all of chance in one pot.[4] In this forest, we must wander bewildered and wild.[5]

In the exhibition, Sophia Mainka shows a series of wall mounted works made from silicone paste. Heavy and solid, yet curiously slippery, they are based on a Tarot deck of cards. It is peculiarly appropriate that the largest is the wheel of fortune, usually interpreted as standing for change or becoming. Fortune can be good or bad depending on the game, the question asked of the cards, open to interpretation. In Tarot, one card can mean many things and then change meaning at different times. In contrast, destiny is the thread woven through the image and cut by the three mythological sisters. The turn of the card is always fateful. Whatever the outcome of the roll of dice, this outcome is necessarily so: sky back to earth, slide and snip.

Perhaps then, we wander not quite so bewildered in this forest, as we necessarily follow our fate. But we wander on a surface without ground or depth, because free of cause. Everything in Mainka’s work takes place on the surface, like the hybrid creature scuttering around the ornate interiors of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in her video. It imitates not animals, but depictions of them. The two talking dogs are not half-human but half-sculpture, their head and paws the same silicone as Mainka’s wall pieces. In Nazim Bakour’s music score, they do not bark, but whoop with the sound of the cuica drum.

Lukas Hoffmann too stages a fictional world that has something of Lewis Carroll’s unsettling absurdity about it. There is a wooden castle with ears, eyes, a wide open mouth and a nose, and it is both too big and too small. Drink me, eat this, nibble both sides of the mushroom circle. As Alice grows bigger, her initial self also becomes smaller, pulled in both directions at once. With components jutting out and sliding in, the body both outside and inside, the castle too grows small as it becomes big. “Becoming without measure, a veritable becoming-mad.”[6] Observing this madness is the upside down head of Pan, the mischievous god of the wild. A mascaron fallen from its pediment. Run away in panic, it urges us – run away in chaos, it smiles.

Magdalena Wisniowska

[1] John Gay, Pan and Fortune, Fable XII, ”Yo a young Heir” see https://kalliope.org/en/text/gay2005052971

[2] Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, for a replica of the original first edition see https://www.adobe.com/be_en/active-use/pdf/Alice_in_Wonderland.pdf

[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Book III, “Before Sunrise”, trans. Kaufmann, p.166cd and “The Seven Seals” 3, p. 258. See also Deleuze’s reading in Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, (London and New York: Continuum, 2002) p. 25–7.

[4] Zarathustra, Book III “The Bedwarfing Virtue” 3, p. 189.

[5] See blog by Corry Shores, https://piratesandrevolutionaries.blogspot.com/2009/05/dicethrow-11-in-deleuze-nietzsche.html

[6] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 3.

From Animal to Mineral

Judith Adelmann, Rachel Fäth, Sophia Mainka, Hannah Mitterwallner, Jonathan Penca, Maria VMier

15.12. 2023 – 18.02.2024

Lothringer Halle, Lothringer Str. 13, 81667 München

From Animal to Mineral, 2023, installation view. Photo: Thomas Splett

Maria VMier, Noch o.T. [ZINNOBER-SCHWEFEL],2023, Ink, pigment, tempera, pencil, chalk and charcoal on perforated paper. Photo: Thomas Splett.

Maria VMier, Noch o.T. [ZINNOBER-SCHWEFEL],2023, Ink, pigment, tempera, pencil, chalk and charcoal on perforated paper (detail) Photo: Thomas Splett

Hannah Mitterwallner, Mis-play, 2023, plaster, wood, sugar, installation view. Photo: Thomas Splett

Hannah Mitterwallner, Mis-play, 2023, plaster, wood, sugar, detail. Photo: Thomas Splett

Hannah Mitterwallner, Mis-play, 2023, plaster, wood, sugar (detail). Photo: Hannah Mitterwallner

Judith Adelmann, I like your curvy waves, 2023, glazed ceramic, steel, plastic, installation view. Photo: Thomas Splett

Judith Adelmann, I like your curvy waves, 2023, glazed ceramic, steel, installation view. Photo: Thomas Splett

Judith Adelmann, I like your curvy waves, 2023, glazed ceramic, steel (detail). Photo: Thomas Splett

Hannah Mitterwallner, Mis-play, 2023, plaster, wood, sugar (detail).

Judith Adelmann, I like your curvy waves, 2023, glazed ceramic, metal, readymades (detail). Photo: Thomas Splett

From Animal to Mineral, 2023, installation view

Sophia Mainka, Habit Loss, 2023, Metal, fabric, wood, leather imitate, plastics, glazed ceramics, video. Photo: Thomas Splett

Sophia Mainka, Habit Loss, 2023, Metal, fabric, wood, leather imitate, plastics, glazed ceramics, video (detail).

Jonathan Penca with Jakob Penca, Field Plots, 2023, animation film, 14 min, installation view. Photo: Thomas Splett.

Rachel Fäth, Passage, 2022, Glass, steel, screws and nuts. Photo: Thomas Splett.

Texts included in the exhibition:

the-sorcerers-explanation Download

mineral-bound-Download

what-happened Download

From Animal to Mineral – World Objects

Talk with Prof. Tim Barker

7.01.2024, 3 pm

Lothringer 13 Lokal

Screenshot 2024-01-06 at 09.14.49

Hey, make sure you do not miss Tim Barker talking with me tomorrow, Sunday the 7th at 3 pm at Lothringer 13 Lokal! Really interesting way of looking at now technology affects our experiences of time! Part of the current “From Animal to Mineral Exhibition”.

Tim Barker is Professor of Media Technology and Aesthetics at the School of Culture & Creative Arts, University of Glasgow. Tim’s research interests include digital technology and new media, aesthetics and the philosophy of time. He is the author of Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time (2012) and Against Transmission: Media Philosophy and the Engineering of Time (2018) and numerous articles including the most recent “Unplayable games: time and digital culture” Kunsttexte (2023); “Michel Serres and the philosophy of technology” Theory, Culture and Society (2023), “Michel Serres’ messengers” Media Theory (2021) and “Between emergence and emergencies: an introduction to the special issue ‘Media, Materiality, and Emergency’” MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory (2020).

One of the concepts of the exhibition From Animal to Mineral is the radical openness of Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming “tout le mode,” like everybody, like the whole world. In his short talk Tim Barker will introduce the concept of “totipotence” as discussed in the philosophy of Michel Serres, biologically defining the ability of a cell to give rise to unlike cells and so to develop a new organism. Serres uses this idea to discuss technological and cultural developments in evolutionary terms.