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

Animal Elegance

Jakob Gilg, Anka Helfertova, Julia Klemm and Jonathan Penca

9.10. – 7.11.2025

with Pracownia Portretu, Łódź, Poland

In the imaginary conversation with a fascist that I seem to almost daily conduct in my head, I like to present him (my fascist is always a man) the example of an animal, this time of a fish. Deleuze and Guattari describe this fish as being “criss-crossed by abstract lines” – I like to think of the Klunzinger’s Wrasse I saw on a recent trip to Egypt, criss-crossed by a rainbow of colour.

Here it is, I would say, look at this fish, look how beautiful it is, the colours, the design. The pattern doesn’t seem to follow the shape of the fish. There is an orange line across, stripes above, more pink wavy lines around its chubby face. Very bright. But in a certain trick of the light, the fish merges almost completely with its underwater environment. What is abstract, a matter of shape, line and colour, allows the fish to become rock, sand or a bit of coral. As Deleuze and Guattari write “this fish is criss-crossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing, that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible.”

The fish worlds and when it worlds it becomes imperceptible. It loses itself in the most vibrant way to become unnoticed and thus more firmly part of the world it belongs to. In losing itself it can become everything else.

W wyimaginowanej rozmowie z faszystą, którą — zdaje się — prowadzę w głowie niemal każdego dnia, lubię podawać mu (mój faszysta jest zawsze mężczyzną) przykład zwierzęcia. Tym razem — ryby. Deleuze i Guattari opisują tę rybę jako „poprzecinaną liniami abstrakcyjnymi”. Ja zaś wolę myśleć o rybie Klunzingera, którą widziałam niedawno w Egipcie, przeciętej jakby tęczową siatką barw.

„Oto ona” — powiedziałbym — „spójrz na tę rybę. Jakże piękna: kolory, rysunek! Wzór zdaje się wcale nie podążać za kształtem ciała. Pomarańczowa kreska w poprzek, nad nią pasy, różowe, falujące linie wokół pyzatego pyska. Wszystko jaskrawe. A jednak — przy pewnym układzie światła — ryba stapia się prawie zupełnie z podwodnym otoczeniem. To, co wydaje się czystą abstrakcją: kształt, linia i barwa — pozwala rybie stać się skałą, piaskiem albo odłamkiem koralu. Jak piszą Deleuze i Guattari: »ta ryba przecięta jest liniami abstrakcyjnymi, które niczego nie przypominają, nie podążają nawet za organicznymi podziałami jej ciała; lecz właśnie tak rozczłonkowana stapia się z liniami skały, piasku i roślin, stając się niedostrzegalną«.

Rybka tedy „światotworzy” — a kiedy „światotworzy”, staje się niewidoczna. Traci siebie w najżywszy ze sposobów, by nie być zauważoną, a tym samym jeszcze mocniej przynależeć do świata, w którym pływa. W owym zatraceniu może stać się wszystkim innym.”

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.

Notes on Roommates (a dog, a parrot, a whale and a canal)

Sophia Mainka

in collaboration with Fondation Fiminco, Paris

6.09 – 13.10.2023

Lothringer 13 Studio, Lothringer Str. 13, 81667 München

Sophia Mainka, *Notes on roommates (a dog, a parrot, a whale and a canal)*, 2024, installation view

Sophia Mainka, *Notes on roommates (a dog, a parrot, a whale and a canal)*, 2024, detail

Photos: Thomas Spelt

In the summer of 2022, a Beluga whale strayed into the river Seine and began swimming towards Paris. It was stopped by a lock, refused to eat and was subsequently euthanised. Nobody knows when parrots entered Parisian airspace, but they have been observed in the French capital since the 1970s. They can now be seen in most of Paris’s public parks, from the Bois de Boulogne in the west to the Bois de Vincennes in the east. And dogs – well, dogs have been roaming Parisian streets since forever. Terriers, Dachshunds, Spaniels, and of course, the French Bulldog.

These stories of animals adapting to urban environments lay at the heart of Sophia Mainka’s video and sculpture installation, “Notes on Roommates (a dog, a parrot, a whale and a canal)” produced and first shown during her residency at Fondation Fiminco in Paris. Amid the organic playful forms of the metal sculptures there are three videos, all filmed from the animal perspective. In the first two, Mainka paints her arms and hands to resemble a dog’s paws, and we see these on screen as the fictional dog walks, stops and occasionally runs around the cobblestones and concrete pavements, once even jumping from a wooden bench. In the third, she takes on the perspective of the whale, the camera capturing what the whale would have seen, providing it swam further, into the city canals. The image rises and dips to the rhythm of the whale’s breathing. Surrounding us are the sounds of birds singing, except this too is staged: these are not parrots, but a toy, a bird whistle device.

Her work then, could be described as ethological in spirit. Sophia Mainka does not imitate animals, but rather behaves like them. She scratches, she sniffs, she swims, she trills and peeps. She acts the way an animal would act, if she were a animal in this situation and in this sense, we can think of her work in terms of what the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze would call becoming.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the process of becoming-animal is best described by Vladimir Slepian in his short text, “Fils de Chien.” Written in the first person, Slepian confesses how, despite being a man, his hunger leads him to behave like a dog, putting shoes on his hands and tying them using his mouth. It is a reversal of the evolutionary process described by anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, in which humans, through their adoption of an upright posture, free their mouths from the task of grasping and develop speech. Slepian recomposes himself, so that his mouth instead of speaking, grasps like a dog’s. And it is irrelevant how this dog looks like, whether this is the short snout of a bulldog or longer nose of a dachshund.

Similarly, Mainka makes us rethink our relation to nature, which is redrawn along affective lines as a participatory process. Animals are not considered as distinct molar entities, standing alongside the human. All entities are defined by their capacity to act, which changes depending on how they affect and how they are affected by others. There is a sensing of utopia in the environs of the Canal Saint-Martin that Mainka would walk along so happily – a secluded, sheltered place of inter-species co-existence. Or rather, it is a place where different populations, human, mammal and bird, continually compose and re-compose together.

Im Sommer 2022 verirrte sich ein Belugawal in die Seine und begann, in Richtung Paris zu schwimmen. Er geriet in eine Schleuse, fraß nicht mehr und wurde daraufhin eingeschläfert. Seit wann genau Papageien sich im Pariser Luftraum angesiedelt haben, ist unklar, aber sie werden seit den 1970ern in der französischen Hauptstadt beobachtet. Heute kann man sie in den meisten öffentlichen Parks der Stadt entdecken, vom Bois de Boulogne im Westen bis zum Bois de Vincennes im Osten. Und Hunde – nun ja, Hunde streifen seit jeher durch die Pariser Straßen, ob Terrier, Dackel, Spaniel und natürlich die französische Bulldogge.

Diese Erzählungen von Tieren, welche sich an urbane Lebensräume anpassen, stehen im Zentrum von Sophia Mainkas Installation “Notes on Roommates (a dog, a parrot, a whale and a canal)“ aus Videos und Skulpturen, die während ihres Residenzaufenthalts in der Fondation Fiminco in Paris produziert und dort auch zum ersten Mal gezeigt wurde. In die organischen und spielerischen Formen der Metallskulpturen sind drei Videos integriert, alle aufgenommen aus der Tierperspektive. Im ersten und zweiten Video sind Mainkas Arme und Hände wie Hundepfoten bemalt. Wir nehmen den Blickwinkel jenes fiktiven Hundes ein, laufen mit ihm über Kopfsteinpflaster und Bürgersteige, halten plötzlich an, rennen hin und her und springen einmal sogar von einer Holzbank. Im dritten Video nimmt Mainka die Perspektive des Wals ein, wobei die Kamera das wiedergibt, was jener wohl gesehen hätte, wenn er weiter in die Stadt hinein geschwommen wäre. Das Bild bewegt sich im Rhythmus der Atmung des Wals. Um uns herum erklingt Vogelgezwitscher, aber auch das ist eine Inszenierung: Es sind keine Papageien, sondern ein Spielzeug, eine Vogelpfeife.

Man könnte Sophia Mainkas Arbeit durchaus als ethologisch bezeichnen. Die Künstlerin imitiert keine Tiere, sondern verhält sich wie sie. Sie kratzt, schnüffelt, schwimmt, trällert und piepst. Sie verhält sich so, wie ein Tier sich verhalten würde, wenn sie ein Tier in dieser Situation wäre, und wir können ihre Arbeit im Sinne dessen betrachten, was der französische Philosoph Gilles Deleuze als Werden bezeichnen würde. Am besten wird der Prozess der Tierwerdung für Deleuze und Guattari von Vladimir Slepian in seinem kurzen Text “Fils de Chien“ beschrieben. In der ersten Person verfasst, bekennt Slepian, dass er sich, obwohl er ein Mann sei, aus Hunger wie ein Hund benehme, indem er sich Schuhe an die Hände binde und sie mit dem Maul zubinde. Dies ist eine Umkehrung des vom Anthropologen André Leroi-Gourhan beschriebenen evolutionären Prozesses, bei dem der Mensch durch die Entwicklung einer aufrechten Körperhaltung seinen Mund von der Aufgabe des Greifens befreit und Sprache entwickelt. Slepian setzt sich neu zusammen, so dass sein Mund nicht mehr spricht, sondern wie der eines Hundes zupackt. Dabei ist es unerheblich, wie dieser Hund aussieht, ob er die kurze Schnauze einer Bulldogge oder die längere Nase eines Dackels hat.

In ähnlicher Weise regt Mainka uns dazu an, unsere Beziehung zur Natur zu überdenken, wobei dieses Verhältnis entlang affektiver Linien zu einem partizipatorischen Prozess umgestaltet wird. Tiere werden nicht als getrennte molare Einheiten neben dem Menschen betrachtet, sondern alle Lebewesen werden durch ihre Handlungsfähigkeit definiert, die sich verändert, je nachdem, wie sie auf andere einwirken und wie sie von anderen beeinflusst werden. In der Umgebung des Canal Saint-Martin, an dem Mainka so gerne spazieren geht, ist ein Hauch von Utopie zu spüren – ein beschützter, ruhiger Ort, an dem verschiedene Arten koexistieren. Oder genauer gesagt: Es ist ein Ort, an dem sich verschiedene Spezien, ob Menschen, Säugetiere oder Vögel, immer wieder neu zusammensetzen.

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

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

Filmstill_Mainka_HabitLoss(1)

“Animals” are wolves mainly, rats and the wasp. “Mineral” is everything imperceptible: elements, particles and molecules. To go from animal to mineral is to experience becoming, to step across a threshold and change.

I began my reading of A Thousand Plateaus, specifically the chapter “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming- Imperceptible …” 1 during the corona pandemic, when environmental concerns were at the forefront of almost every media discussion. Defining humanity’s role in nature seemed like an important task and Deleuze and Guattari’s work was useful in addressing the too easy distinction between nature and culture. I liked how Deleuze and Guattari saw the dominance of our species over others as a philosophical problem of autonomy where Man as a thinking being is subject only to the laws of his own construction. For them, the capacity for conscious thought conferred upon Man a dignity denied to other creatures, making their voices unheard.

Whereas, in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari present nature as an endless variability, the “whole thousand-voiced multiple” of Difference and Repetition 2. Here, nature is a multi-voiced body, where the voices constituting this body resound in each other in a “clamor of Being.” In this din, my voice is one of many and many voices resonate in mine 3. For Deleuze and Guattari, to change the human collective relation, not just to animals, but to earth itself, would demand that we stop hearing just our own voice and become aware of the noise of others. This is the experience of becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible. It is to shed Man’s mantle and learn how to listen, becoming the voice of many.

Since 2021 I have realised a series of exhibitions at various locations in responses to different aspects of this chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, whether to its ideas of nature, technology or memory. This exhibition at Lothringer 13 Halle confronts the idea of becoming, specifically in our relation to nature, more directly. In different ways all the artists participating in this exhibition share these concerns, many acutely aware of working in the era of the Anthropocene, where the human impact on the planet can no longer be denied.

To their cluster of voices I add my own, belonging to the writer. The texts I have written over the past few years in response to Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter on becoming are on display throughout the room. The texts resonate with the artwork, and the art inhabits the text. The exhibition is an experiment in the construction of a multi-voiced population, a pack of wolves, a people of rats.

Magdalena Wisniowska, November 2023

1) Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis, London: University of Minesota Press, 2005).
2) Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 304.
3) Ibid.

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

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

Zuza Piekoszewska, Superrock, 2022, mixed media

Zuza Piekoszewska, Serene morning on the cornfied, 2022, mixed
media

Zuza Piekoszewska, The angular dog, 2022, mixed media

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

Animals on my mind

Julia Klemm, Zuza Piekoszewska

21.10 – 6.11.2022

Lothringer 13 Studio, Lothringer Str. 13, 81667 München

Julia Klemm, o. T., 2022, ceramics, pigment, 16 x 17 x 35 cm

When I try to recall something or other, I do not immediately think of animals, though perhaps I should. I think of things that happened and other things that happened before that: points on an ever distant timeline. A line of evolution, of successful pairings, of inherited traits. But what about all those other things I don’t remember? Unclear, awkward pairings, stolen encounters in the night? Different species, no offspring, yet also a closeness and an intimacy.

Animals on my mind is the second of GiG Munich’s ‘Re-collection’ series of exhibitions at Lothringer 13 Studio, featuring the work of Julia Klemm and Zuza Piekoszewska, in collaboration with Lectwo, Poland.

Julia Klemm (*1983 in Backnang) lives and works in Munich. 2010 she began her art studies at the AdBK Munich with Prof. Norbert Prangenberg and graduated 2017 as a master student with Markus Karstieß. In 2018 she received a scholarship from the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture, Science and Art for a six-month stay at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. She has exhibited in Munich, Cologne, Düsseldorf and internationally, in New Jersey, Rome and Beirut. Klemm is represented in the collection of contemporary art of the Federal Republic of Germany and is currently participating in a group exhibition in the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn in 2022.

Zuza Piekoszewska (*1996) completed an BFA in Photography at the University of the Arts Poznan and a MFA in Fine Art Media in the Szczecin Art Academy. At Łęctwo Poznań she had solo exhibitions ‘You are a little soul carrying about a corpse’ in 2020, and ‘Ready to hatch’ in 2019. Her recent group exhibitions include ‘The Discomfort of Evening’, Zachęta, Warsaw, 2022, ‘Material fatigue’ at the 17th International Triennial of Tapestry in Łódź, 2022, ‘We breathe the remains of everything that was’ organised by GiG Munich and Łęctwo at Lothringer 13 Studio, Munich, 2022, ’The earth is flat again’ at the Museum of Art in Łódź, 2021 and ‘Lebenswelt’ at the Bovisamare Via Mercantini, Milan, 2021.

Animals on my mind

Wenn ich versuche, mich an etwas zu erinnern, denke ich nicht sofort an Tiere, obwohl ich das vielleicht sollte. Ich denke an Dinge, die passiert sind, und andere Dinge, die davor passiert sind: Punkte auf einer immer weiter entfernten Zeitlinie. Eine Linie der Evolution, der erfolgreichen Paarungen, der vererbten Eigenschaften. Aber was ist mit all den anderen Dingen, an die ich mich nicht erinnere? Unklare, ungeschickte Paarungen, gestohlene Begegnungen in der Nacht? Verschiedene Spezies, keine Nachkommen, aber auch eine Nähe und Intimität.

Animals on my mind ist die zweite Ausstellung der Reihe “Re-collection” von GiG Munich im Lothringer 13 Studio, in der die Arbeiten von Julia Klemm und Zuza Piekoszewska gezeigt werden.

Julia Klemm (*1983 in Backnang) lebt und arbeitet in München. Sie beginnt 2010 ihr Kunststudium an der AdBK München bei Prof. Norbert Prangenberg und macht 2017 als Meisterschülerin bei Markus Karstieß ihren Abschluss. 2018 erhält sie ein Stipendium des Bayerischen Staatsministeriums für Bildung und Kultur, Wissenschaft und Kunst für einen sechsmonatigen Aufenthalt an der Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. Sie stellte bisher in München, Köln, Düsseldorf sowie international u. a. in New Jersey, Rom und Beirut aus.Klemm ist in der Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschlandvertreten und 2022 an einer Gruppenausstellung in der Bundeskunsthalle Bonn beteiligt.

Zuza Piekoszewska (*1996) absolvierte einen BFA in Fotografie an der Universität der Künste Poznan und einen MFA in Fine Art Media an der Kunstakademie Szczecin. Im Łęctwo Poznań hatte sie die Einzelausstellungen “You are a little soul carrying about a corpse” im Jahr 2020 und “Ready to hatch” im Jahr 2019. Zu ihren jüngsten Gruppenausstellungen gehören “The Discomfort of Evening”, Zachęta, Warschau, 2022, “Material fatigue” auf der 17. Internationalen Triennale der Tapisserie in Łódź, 2022, “Wir atmen die Reste von allem, was war”, organisiert von GiG Munich und Łęctwo im Studio Lothringer 13, München, 2022, “Die Erde ist wieder flach” im Kunstmuseum in Łódź, 2021 und “Lebenswelt” im Bovisamare Via Mercantini, Mailand, 2021.