TOXI

2025

←

SETTING SUNS SEW TOGETHER AND APART, APART AND TOGETHER

-

Djellza Azemi & Sania Nascarella

10.07.2025 – 31.07.2025

At opposite ends of an abandoned highway tunnel

I found my parents lying at opposite ends of an abandoned highway tunnelⁱ

My father, on one end, is fiction, my mother, on the other, is dream

Fiction tends to cover up dream’s feats

Up until twenty-two I was convinced they hated each other so I slept in their bed until the shameful age of thirteen

There sure was never a lack of love for you fiction would insist

No, really, that one is true I would repeat looking to meet eyes with dream

I dreamt I was a person of many crimes. In my dream they were crimes only because I couldn’t lie

Waking up was a relief

But, fuck, did it fade fast

What can all this love do in a world that wants only murder?

Du bist die Liebe meines Lebens

But words act on us before we do

German policemen are sweeping snow from the crevices, congratulating each other with pads on their backs. I am humbled before these piles of dirtⁱⁱ

Pad, pad... Alice, is growing up a trap?

You asked me to seduce you

Narcissus fell in love with his image taking it to be anotherⁱⁱⁱ

Did you fall in love with my image of you taking it to be yourself?

I dreamt I found her at the entrance of a compartment store, sharing the same urge to meet, our love infinitely deferred by the steady turn of this revolving door

A trap door is a hidden door in the floor that opens downwards to a basement, a secret chambre, or a pit, but a more illuminating example would be the trap used to kill mice, in other words, cheese. An instrumentalization of desires against themselves

Like individualist allusions unmask as age-old (symbolic) illusions

Because the Other Mother offers exactly what the child dreams of (autonomy, attention, safety, and play), only then, to ensnare or consume her

Pad, pad... What the child dreams of is autonomy, attention, safety, and play

What the child dreams of is a Happy Meal: Six chicken nuggets, fries and a surprise toy

I dreamt I was jerking off my left big toe, it swelled up like a penis, how fucking fantastic to feel the pleasure of both. To be at once the fucker and the fucked

At opposite ends of an abandoned highway tunnel

I got pregnant with two girls, twins, perhaps, I wasn’t sure, I now don’t have time for daydreaming anymore

Where were her parents?! fiction might ask^iv

Well... everyone else was deep asleep

When an elongated figure, a ghost bowed down over me and snatched my beloved little plush sheep, neither dream nor fiction believed me here. You were angry, you threw it in the river is what they said

Ever since I moved out they seem to be getting along better

I now dream of fiction dancing, dream dancing opposite him, dream takes on the specificity of his movement, until she no longer has to watch him, dream mirrors fiction perfectly as they dance exactly in time^v

The other night, dear

As I lay sleeping

I dreamt I held you

In my arms^vi

And the night before, I dreamt of an elementary narrative

A déjà-vu

I found my parents lying at opposite ends of an abandoned highway tunnel

He affirmed that his sin was in wishing a place in the mother of the fathermother and bullshitting the holy ghost to render it favorable to his plans^vii

I woke and felt confined in language

Du bist die Liebe meines Lebens

German policemen watch the sun set. Pad, pad...

Voice of no origin creeps in between the reader and the text: in fiction, murder is the inverse of murder in life. In fiction, murder occurs with great regularity holding down a symbolic order known as plot^viii

Which is why you shall never keep souvenirs of murder fiction reminds dream

Since I moved out, my parents sometimes cuddle on the couch

There are no sunsets in my dreams, setting suns sew together and apart

There is only one sun. It is rising at the other end of an abandoned highway tunnel and it is much too strong in the desert of our minds^ix

Carla Harryman

JinJin Xu

R.D.Laign

Estelle Hoy

Sarah Kane

Jimmie Davis

Antonin Artaud

Carla Harryman

Diane Di Prima

Curated by Gaia Del Santo
Text by Antonia Rebekka Truninger

saaltext_At opposite ends of an abandoned highway tunnel.pdf
floorplan_setting_suns_sew_together_and_apart,_apart_and_together_final.pdf
flyer mockup.png

Exhibition view, SETTING THE SUN SEW TOGETHER AND APART, APART AND TOGETHER by Djellza Azemi & Sania Nascarella

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, SETTING THE SUN SEW TOGETHER AND APART, APART AND TOGETHER by Djellza Azemi & Sania Nascarella

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, SETTING THE SUN SEW TOGETHER AND APART, APART AND TOGETHER by Djellza Azemi & Sania Nascarella

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Sania Nascarella

Cliffhanger II: Suddenly, It,

2025

Velvet, thread, wood, wood stain
200 x 200 cm

Sania Nascarella

Cliffhanger III: It Seemed As If,

2025

Velvet, thread, wood, wood stain
200 x 200 cm

Sania Nascarella

Cliffhanger IV: But Then,

2025

Velvet, thread, wood, wood stain
200 x 200 cm

Exhibition view, SETTING THE SUN SEW TOGETHER AND APART, APART AND TOGETHER by Djellza Azemi & Sania Nascarella

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Djellza Azemi

each spell needs a particular object (fire red),

2025

Enamel paint on bronze
28 x 10 cm

Exhibition view, SETTING THE SUN SEW TOGETHER AND APART, APART AND TOGETHER by Djellza Azemi & Sania Nascarella

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, SETTING THE SUN SEW TOGETHER AND APART, APART AND TOGETHER by Djellza Azemi & Sania Nascarella

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Djellza Azemi

each spell needs a particular object (fire red),

2025

Enamel paint on bronze
28 x 10 cm

Djellza Azemi

backyard solitude (crisscrossed fence),

2024

Extruded polystyrene, plaster, wood stain
277 x 170 x 14cm

Djellza Azemi

backyard solitude (crisscrossed fence),

2024

Extruded polystyrene, plaster, wood stain
277 x 170 x 14cm

Exhibition view
SETTING THE SUN SEW TOGETHER AND APART, APART AND TOGETHER
by Djellza Azemi & Sania Nascarella

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

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COMMON GROUND II

-

Monika Schori, Talaya Schmid, Louisa Behr, Janet Müller, Gabi Deutsch, Rita Zurbrügg, Lisa Pohl, Thea Kuta, Benjmain Solt, Natascha Madeiski, Manutcher Milani, Nadine Reichmuth, Tanja Roscic & Georg Bringolf

common ground II mockup.jpg

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THE 20TH CENTURY

Lark Ring & Taiga Nakazaki -

15.05.2025 – 29.05.2025

Lark Ring and Taiga Nakazaki's ENTERPRISE

A warning sign greets us as we step into what resembles an industrial site. Guided along a fenced path, we move past strip curtains, sector markings, and a tangle of pipes, accompanied by a atmospheric soundtrack. When open to the public, performers in overalls mingle with visitors, carrying out a range of tasks—some suggesting maintenance work, others evoking roles more familiar from theme parks: greeting, animating, and directing.

What remains unclear is whether anything is actually being produced. The longer we wander, the more the illusion of an industrial site begins to unravel. It reveals itself as a collage—an imagined environment that fails to fully reflect its real-life counterparts. In these gaps, the installation emerges as a composition of fragments that together construct a nostalgic vision of “the industrial” as part of the 20th century. Drawn from a broad range of fleeting images hovering between techno-futurism and impending apocalypse, it does exert a strange, magnetic pull and points towards what is omitted in this exaggerated interplay of codes of the industrial imagery. The patchwork of aestheticized elements points at an absence at the heart of the stylized industrial imaginary. We do see neither workers nor their labor. While factories in the Global North may have largely given way to service and knowledge economies—and their sites often lie abandoned or have been repurposed—industrial production has not disappeared. It has merely shifted elsewhere. Outsourced to the Global South, where cheap workforce continues to sustain the ever growing demands of global consumption.

The installation reminds us how easily this knowledge fades in the face of stylized representations and discussions of labor in the postmodern age. Like a theme park offering a world of clarity and control, the industrial imaginary presents us with a sanitized version of the complex relations of dependence and power that are inextricably linked to “the industrial“. Yet there is no place for hardship or labour in the stereotypical staging of the industrial. Simulation overrides reality. Thus the immersive work seems to echoe a critique voiced Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle (1967).

Under capitalist modernity not only goods, but also experiences, desires, and perceptions are produced—ultimately turning life into representati- on. Direct experience gives way to images, consumed by spectators. The spectacle conceals, asks us to and makes us forget that things might no be as easily consumable as the images make us think they are.

By materializing the industrial fantasy once more—reinserting it into a for- mer site of production, still devoid of function but theatrically charged—the installations make us wonder what the spectacle conceals. What it asks us to forget. Industrial production has not vanished; it has been rendered invisible. The language around labor has changed; the structures of cont- rol, alienation, and exploitation persist—more subtly encoded, but no less powerful. We are "post-industrial" only by name.

Text by Elsa Himmer

Partners:
MPT Immobilien Gmbh
Männag AG
Hersperger AG

saaltext_enterprise.pdf
the 20th century flyer.jpg

Exhibition view, THE 20th CENTURY by Lark Ring & Taiga Nagazaki

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, THE 20th CENTURY by Lark Ring & Taiga Nagazaki

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, THE 20th CENTURY by Lark Ring & Taiga Nagazaki

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, THE 20th CENTURY by Lark Ring & Taiga Nagazaki

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, THE 20th CENTURY by Lark Ring & Taiga Nagazaki

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, THE 20th CENTURY by Lark Ring & Taiga Nagazaki

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, THE 20th CENTURY by Lark Ring & Taiga Nagazaki

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, THE 20th CENTURY by Lark Ring & Taiga Nagazaki

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, THE 20th CENTURY by Lark Ring & Taiga Nagazaki

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, THE 20th CENTURY by Lark Ring & Taiga Nagazaki

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, THE 20th CENTURY by Lark Ring & Taiga Nagazaki

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, THE 20th CENTURY by Lark Ring & Taiga Nagazaki

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, THE 20th CENTURY by Lark Ring & Taiga Nagazaki

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

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A R T I S T S S C R E E N A R T I S T S

09.04.2025 - 30.04.2025

This April, our yearly screening series is back with a new lineup. Across four Wednesdays, from the 9th to the 30th, four artists will transform the evening with their own selection of moving images. From long-form films to sharp experiments and unexpected fragments, each night offers a different lens on how video can be experienced. Doors open 7–10pm — come watch, unwind, or simply share a drink with us.
We hope to see you there.

FromHereTillNow 09.04
Miriam Laura Leonardi 16.04
Olive B. Godlee 23.04
Dominic Michel 30.04

flyer.jpg

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ON THE LENS AND REFRACT

-

Remy Ugarte Vallejos, Sveta Mordovskaya & Taleb Lachheb

06.03.2025 – 27.03.2025

A sunset is a trigger for all kinds of nostalgic and romantic emotions, but it is an optical illusion. At twilight, the solar disk has already disappeared beyond the horizon. From the vacuum of space, through the Earth’s atmosphere, the waves of sunlight are bent by refraction, for our eyes to see a sublimed and unreal appearance of the star around the curvature of our planet. The beauty of golden hour is actually a result of physics and perspective.

The human eye also redirects light through refraction, and everything we see is a result of the same phenomenon; waves are bent as they pass from a medium to another, from the atmosphere to a wet eyeball, with different speeds. Images are created by deviating the trajectory of lines, reshaping angles or redirecting signals, for our bodies to perceive something that may exist as pictured, may appear though unreal, like the precious few-second- long green ray some hope to see just after the sun vanishes.

The physics of perception also apply in the mechanisms of display, where the staging of an object affects how it will be read and valued. The wave shifts as it enters a new matter. Through an opening, the white light can be diffracted and scattered in spectral rainbow colors. Do we all see the same colors in a white cube? What would we see outside the frame of perspec- tive, before the refraction occurring in our eyes, in the atmosphere, in the inception and perception of any image? Stories, feelings, or projections are formed by perceptive angles, all following the same drifting wave that allows us to live the last golden seconds of every day.

In the exhibition On the Lens and Refract, three bodies of work comment on the prisms of perception. For Sveta Mordovskaya, teenage years become a space of nostalgic projection, which is perhaps always also a place of fiction. Moments of experimentation with the identity of a younger self are captured through unknown eyes as performances and defined by the camera frame and the picture frames, like a low-res window on uncanny personal archives. The author›s perspective is absent, leaving the stage to different layers of costume: the frame, the pose, the mimicry; all tools to confront the struggles of self-perception, self-definition and finding the right angle to fit in.

The bending and distortion of images and their signification is a key mecha- nism in any exhibition display; the choice of placement, order and medium forces a narrative, albeit an equivocal one. In Taleb Lachheb›s work, echoes of an obsession with the eye are found glued to the wall: in a portrait and its mirror, decipherable in transparency beneath the fiberglass, in the image of a “ghost” detached from its museal context, and in a picture showing that the violence read in a work can be manipulated by a more perfidious violence. Here, the image assumes the status of a unique object, questioning its role as an instrument in the invisible orchestra that defines our visual cultures.

There is a certain ideal in seeing without being seen that Remy Ugarte Vallejos sculptures evoke. The reflecting bodies cancel a unique perspective, eyes meet through and on the looking glass. On the surface of a flawed one-way mirror, reflection and transparency co-exist, unveiling the intimate and revealing the performative; the sculptures confront us with the failure to remain protected voyeurs. They may be awaiting activation by movement, a possibility to shift the angles, to bend the rays; a potential for diverting the blinding lights of the exhibition space, creating or diverting eye contact and triggering or defusing anxious thoughts. Between reflection and refraction, light waves spread through space and return to us, the performers and orchestrators of this gaze choreography.

Curated by Gaia Del Santo, Nemo Bleuer and Oz Oderbolz
Text by Monica Unser

On the Lens and Refract_floorplan_v2.pdf
on_the_lens_and_refract_flyer_mockup.png

Taleb Lachheb

Symptômes,

2025

Screen print on paper, adhesive foil and fiberglass
120 x 360 cm

Exhibition view, ON THE LENS AND REFRACT by Remy Ugarte Vallejos, Sveta Mordovskaya & Taleb Lachheb

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, ON THE LENS AND REFRACT by Remy Ugarte Vallejos, Sveta Mordovskaya & Taleb Lachheb

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, ON THE LENS AND REFRACT by Remy Ugarte Vallejos, Sveta Mordovskaya & Taleb Lachheb

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, ON THE LENS AND REFRACT by Remy Ugarte Vallejos, Sveta Mordovskaya & Taleb Lachheb

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, ON THE LENS AND REFRACT by Remy Ugarte Vallejos, Sveta Mordovskaya & Taleb Lachheb

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Exhibition view, ON THE LENS AND REFRACT by Remy Ugarte Vallejos, Sveta Mordovskaya & Taleb Lachheb

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Sveta Mordovskaya

Untitled,

2025

Chromogenic print, found object
51 x 61 x 5 cm

Sveta Mordovskaya

Untitled,

2025

Chromogenic print, found object
52 x 107 x 6 cm

Taleb Lachheb

Symptômes,

2025

Screen print on paper, adhesive foil and fiberglass
120 x 360 cm

Taleb Lachheb

Symptômes,

2025

Screen print on paper, adhesive foil and fiberglass
120 x 360 cm

Sveta Mordovskaya

Untitled,

2025

Chromogenic print, found object
52 x 107 x 6 cm

Sveta Mordovskaya

Untitled,

2025

Chromogenic print, found object
52 x 107 x 6 cm

Sveta Mordovskaya

Untitled,

2025

Chromogenic print, found object
51 x 61 x 5 cm

Exhibition view, ON THE LENS AND REFRACT by Remy Ugarte Vallejos, Sveta Mordovskaya & Taleb Lachheb

Toxi space, Zürich, 2025

Remy Ugarte Vallejos

Yours No1 - No2,

2025

Two-way mirror, chromed steel, wheels
200 cm x 100 cm x 75 cm

Remy Ugarte Vallejos

Yours No1 - No2,

2025

Two-way mirror, chromed steel, wheels
200 cm x 100 cm x 75 cm

Remy Ugarte Vallejos

Yours No1 - No2,

2025

Two-way mirror, chromed steel, wheels
200 cm x 100 cm x 75 cm

Remy Ugarte Vallejos

In Your Room II,

2025

Installation, mirrors on wheels, spotlights
Dimensions variable

Remy Ugarte Vallejos

In Your Room II,

2025

Detailed view, installation, mirrors on wheels, spotlights
Dimensions variable

Remy Ugarte Vallejos

In Your Room II,

2025

Detailed view, installation, mirrors on wheels, spotlights
Dimensions variable

Sveta Mordovskaya

Untitled,

2025

Detailed view, chromogenic print, found object
52 x 107 x 6 cm

Remy Ugarte Vallejos

Yours No1 - No2,

2025

Detailed view, two-way mirror, chromed steel, wheels
200 cm x 100 cm x 75 cm

Remy Ugarte Vallejos

Yours No1 - No2,

2025

Detailed view, two-way mirror, chromed steel, wheels
200 cm x 100 cm x 75 cm

Remy Ugarte Vallejos

In Your Room II,

2025

Detailed view, installation, mirrors on wheels, spotlights
Dimensions variable

Taleb Lachheb

Symptômes,

2025

Detailed view, screen print on paper, adhesive foil and fiberglass
120 x 360 cm

2024

←

IMAGE VOLUME

Lorenza Longhi & Thomas Julier -

07.11.2024 – 27.11.2024

Baffled as I am by the dark spectacle of the world, I start this text with a low confidence in my ability to be a good interpreter of the contemporary collective mind well. I’ll propose then a low-risk theory: at work, at home, in the street and on public transport, our perception is determined by the 16:9 format of flat screens, whether in vertical or horizontal position – con- ditions of perception that make us short-sighted, restless, sleepless and dissatisfied. And so we dream of more real experiences, or do we? But few of us venture into the real world, even if the resurgence of war, political violence and destruction – or the rise of trolling if you’re looking for a hybrid experience – might suggest otherwise. A less nihilistic approach, at least at first glance, would be to seek the real deep within the screen surface in a kind of Cronenbergian movement.

Is there a surplus of experience to be found in this flat space that could satisfy our senses and our desires? This is one way of approaching Image Volume, the oxymoronic title of Lorenza Longhi and Thomas Julier’s duo show. In this exhibition, the two artists explore a fantasy where the image gains depth. Not through the medium of performance, virtual reality or sound and light shows that promise a kitsch immersion in modern painting, but by “acknowledging”, to borrow a concept from Michael Fried, the literal conditions of the screen-mediated image; its format, flatness, composition and reflective black surface.

Visitors are welcomed into the exhibition with a charming gift box. Longhi has carefully, perhaps lovingly, customized it with polka-dot stickers and a lace strip. The box contains an iPhone playing an edit of footages of male tennis players practicing the traditional autograph on a Plexiglas plate after winning a match. They sign the glass with a marker, creating the illusion they are writing directly onto the eye of the camera. The video is reflected on a Fresnel lens leaning against the lid of the box. The lens enhances the phone screen like a prosthesis, also reinforcing the immediacy between the autograph scene and its broadcast. As the ink drips onto the lens-tur- ned-screen, we might imagine the players on the other side of the surface. The work deploys a mechanism that seemingly brings us closer, while simultaneously increasing our distance from the source – another screen where our gaze collides. This miniature dream machine encapsulates our desires, frustrations and well-paid heroes. The personalized display barely conceals the commercial relationships it encloses, between a multinatio- nal company product, the sport-business and the famous signature that instantly adds value to an artwork.

Two still videos taken on Thomas Julier’s phone invite us to dive deeper into these layers of visibility, accompanied by a cavernous soundtrack evocative of drone music. The musicologist Jonathan D. Kramer described this “music without phrases” as creating a vertical experience of time. The repetition of sounds without perceptible melodic progression disrupts linear time, opening the abyss of an immediate present looping endlessly. In his videos, Julier captures signals that make time perceptible. In the first video, a police siren. In the second, church chimes. These sounds punctuate the urban experience, the former as an adrenalin rush, the latter imparting a linear tempo. Slow-motion recording elongates and neutralizes them, inviting us into the vertical dimension of sound, its spatiality.

The visible space that this hanging time reveals is a proliferating field of screens on the wall, within which a fragmented image stands out. One video shows the grid-like pavement of a street with a strobe effect (likely the police car siren), the other an angel statue – two symbols of eternity; one materialistic, the other sacred. Modernism, which often mixed these polarities, seems to be referenced by the compositions on the wall to remind us that a screen is not just a shape but also a form. Within this field of screens, the image gains greater freedom of movement – it could be here or there –, yet remains a product of the shape that defines and controls it.

Longhi's last series of works lean towards the allegorical. It shows an enlarged facsimile of the packaging for a ream of paper from a brand cal- led Image Volume on which the artist has placed polarizing films peeled from screens. The films enable proper color display on screens; deprived of backlighting, they work in reverse, obscuring printed words and silk- screened motifs. However, as the surface fades, an imaginary depth or our reality may emerge from a shimmer.

Image Volume grew out of an extended dialogue between the two artists. Both reinvestigate the medium, its contingencies and the creative space it affords with an economy of means contrasting with the current volume of images, and with their own obsessions – Lorenza’s focus on display as a site of tension and Thomas’s on animation through image circulation. The image-screen is dismantled, enhanced, slowed, peeled, fragmented and repositioned – physical operations that symbolize a desire to tear break through and reach to whatever is beyond. Simultaneously, the screen gains vitality. Perhaps it thickens, loaded both by the image it projects and the projections of our mind. The exhibition acknowledges it as the double agent of our reality.

Curated by Nemo Bleuer
Text by Sylvain Menétrey

ImageVolume_saaltext.pdf
Image Volume Flyer.pdf

Thomas Julier

She only ever saw the world in Full HD,

2024

Secondhand TVs, slo-motion videos, media players, speakers, subwoofer

Audio mastering by Flavio Audino

Approx. 35 minutes

Exhibition view, IMAGE VOLUME by Lorenza Longhi & Thomas Julier

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Lorenza Longhi

Image Wolume III,

2024

Metal, polarizing films, adhesive vinyl, laser print on paper, mdf, screws
100 x 36 x 1 cm

Lorenza Longhi

Image Volume I,

2024

Metal, polarizing films, silkscreen ink, laser print on paper, mdf, screws
91,5 x 30 x 0,5 cm

Exhibition view, IMAGE VOLUME by Lorenza Longhi & Thomas Julier

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Lorenza Longhi

New Loop,

2024

Cardboard box, fresnel lens, adhesive tape, phone, video loop
17 x 19 x 21 cm

Lorenza Longhi

New Loop,

2024

Cardboard box, fresnel lens, adhesive tape, phone, video loop
17 x 19 x 21 cm

Exhibition view, IMAGE VOLUME by Lorenza Longhi & Thomas Julier

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Thomas Julier

She only ever saw the world in Full HD,

2024

Secondhand TVs, slo-motion videos, media players, speakers, subwoofer

Audio mastering by Flavio Audino

Approx. 35 minutes

Lorenza Longhi

Image Volume II,

2024

Metal, polarizing films, adhesive vinyl, laser print on paper, mdf, screws
100 x 36 x 1 cm

Exhibition view, IMAGE VOLUME by Lorenza Longhi & Thomas Julier

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

←

FEAR-VIRUS

Golnaz Hosseini -

03.10.2024 – 24.10.2024

01_FLYER_TOXI_GONAZHOSSEINI_2024.pdf

←

SEMI-LIVING ARTIFACTS

Isabell Sterner, Ricardo Meli, Hanna Köpfle -

05.09.2024 – 26.09.2024

For the longest he was just standing on the sidelines, looking in. He was a stranger, uninvolved, maybe even deliberately so. Felt haunted, by the spectre of a world that could’ve been. A free one. Now things are different, even though he’s unsure when they'd changed. Now he just sits there, too late to turn back now.

He sits reminiscent, hypnotized by this lil lava lamp in a corner of his room. He can see his blood bubbling and bumbling round and about, as he sits in a room of skin and muscle, but not on some Buffallo Billy, No, this a Bleeding Edge affair, a long, hard look at the fuzzy borders of what’s been persistent and what not. No, this a blank stare upon an unknowable state of balance, Oh No, No, No. No unordinary act of violence had layed the fundament for this lil State of Semi-Living materials, whose no longer distinguishable Axis between any kind of Opposition creates the very same foundation that destroys it. Talk about Costume Grown Living Surfaces, like —

He disappears in a tilt, crumpled white sheets of epidermia, greyed out by faint shadows, he sits in a deathbed of his own making, spilling over, hypnotized by the bloodbubbles, as his project expands with every moment that passes, with every blink of the eyes on the walls of skin, like some sort of productive cancer. He feels like that’s a redundant descriptor. He feels watched over, a chimera of loving grace, he’s his own personal Vacanti, just that he can’t locate his ears anymore.

First he was afraid, petrified, but it’s been growing on him, or out of him, with, or because — that he doesn’t know — this cultivation of bodyparts, multiplication of raw materials, this mathematical approach to cellular Life in vitro. Sometimes he still pulls back from the malaise that comes with disappearing as a singular body. Sometimes, he thinks, you need to pull back — perceive everything as a relatively large organism, harboring a thing called consciousness, anarchic communities of tissue, wet lumps and blobs of unknown descent, totems of flesh, fetishes of this dilapidation, all following some other order of uncertainty. He’s been exploring too, mi- xin’n’matchin, he isn’t labeling his bags, but — There’s some rabbit eyes in there, some mammalian skeletal muscle, eel & leech neuron cells, winged monkeys, maybe some fish, amphibians, everything that grows. It may not be pretty, but it sure as hell is Alive — or is it? It rang hollow before, but now "Is what it is is...is it is what it is." has started to make some sort of sense. Sometimes he still pulls back, neurotically likens himself a scientist, maybe a vet, or mechanic, a farmer of some kind, nurturer, constructor, on bad days an artist. On good ones he no longer perceives himself at all.

No more ‚I am‘ — these violent words — one should adress them as them, as they slide back, this arrogant ‚I’, never accurate, ‚them‘ it is now, back to them, no more “True Authentic Self”, they unmasked that scheme, back into this body, not a body, as in a source, location and medium for other bodies to pass through, or holes to go in and out of; No, they’ve been taking it serious. Flesh just as plastic, shapable, alterable, temporary. Egalitarian Xenotransplantations, like fuck it. Xeno-Something atleast. McKenzy might know more. They’ve just been manipulating their own wholeness, are they not? They thinks, they was. They no longer ‚is‘. They can live without themselves, they figured. It’s Scavenging, sure, desecration, maybe, but that’s better than what’s been going on before, that’s fo sho. They figure, might as well hang up a sign above every living cell dwelling on earth, spelling it out:

“UNDER CONSTRUCTION”

While sucking on bone marrow, a true act of Love, they suppose, while slurping it up, they wonder, what has happened since this symbiosis began? Is ‚he‘ dead? Have they become their own spectre? Some sort of murky mutation of an eukarytioc cell? Does it matter? They no longer think so. They no longer ‚think‘, so — The question may no longer be whether they can reason, nor whether they can talk, but whether they can suffer.

They’re not so different in the end, an assembly of living parts of one or more organisms — they may have thrown in some goldfish neurons here, some embryonic rat cortical neurons there, graft them together with some prenatal sheep cells to see what happens — an ongoing manufactured environment, a growing, moving, soft, moist, care-needing thing.

A window grew for the eyes to look out of. Infront of the burning sky they see gigantic towers of themself, their artificial capillary system covering the streets — thick, urban cell architecture, on some Blob type shit. They look back through the window, into the lil room, back to where it may have begun, still fascinated by the lil bubbles in the lava lamp, whose miracle has always been the appearance of a border, until they eventually pop.

Curated by Nemo Bleuer
Text by Fredi Thiele

semi-living artifacts saaltext.pdf
semi-living artifacts.pdf

Exhibition view, SEMI-LIVING ARTIFACTS by Isabell Sterner, Ricardo Meli, Hanna Köpfle

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Ricardo Meli,

Coast to Source,

2023

plaster, metal, dimension variable

Isabell Sterner,

I,

2024

wax, latex, paper, textile, wool yarn, wood, silicon, 50 x 60 cm

Isabell Sterner,

II,

2024

wax, latex, paper, textile, wool yarn, wood, silicon, 50 x 60 cm

Ricardo Meli,

Tribolite,

2024

metal, 150 x 23 x 28 cm

Exhibition view, SEMI-LIVING ARTIFACTS by Isabell Sterner, Ricardo Meli, Hanna Köpfle

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Ricardo Meli,

bodhi,

2024

plaster, metal, 150 x 23 x 28 cm

Isabell Sterner,

lebtji,

2023

silicon, epoxy resin, hair, 110 x 10cm

Isabell Sterner,

Wgamwke,

2024

wax, epoxy resin, silicon, textile, wire, 100 x 45cm

Hanna Köpfle,

Ein Dickes Fell Haben,

2024

glas, plastic, wax, my own pulverised blood, oil, ethanol, 32 x 63 x 30cm

Isabell Sterner,

Banmlam,

2023

silicon, aluminium, stainless steel, 125 x 28 cm

Ricardo Meli,

bodhi,

2024

plaster, metal, 150 x 23 x 28 cm

Isabell Sterner,

Banmlam,

2023

silicon, aluminium, stainless steel, 125 x 28 cm

Hanna Köpfle,

Ein Dickes Fell Haben,

2024

glas, plastic, wax, my own pulverised blood, oil, ethanol, 32 x 63 x 30 cm

Isabell Sterner,

I,

2024

wax, latex, paper, textile, wool yarn, wood, silicon, 50 x 60 cm

Isabell Sterner,

II,

2024

wax, latex, paper, textile, wool yarn, wood, silicon, 50 x 60 cm

Isabell Sterner,

I,

2024

detailed view, wax, latex, paper, textile, wool yarn, wood, silicon, 50 x 60 cm

Exhibition view, SEMI-LIVING ARTIFACTS by Isabell Sterner, Ricardo Meli, Hanna Köpfle

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Exhibition view, SEMI-LIVING ARTIFACTS by Isabell Sterner, Ricardo Meli, Hanna Köpfle

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Isabell Sterner,

Wgamwke,

2024

detailed view, wax, epoxy resin, silicon, textile, wire, 100 x 45 cm

Ricardo Meli,

Tribolite,

2024

metal, 150 x 23 x 28 cm

Isabell Sterner,

PIN,

2024

aluminium, wax, 19 x 19 cm

Isabell Sterner,

NIP I, NIP II,

2023

silicon, 45 x 37, 20 x 27 cm

Ricardo Meli,

Xantron,

2024

plaster, metal, 45 x 47 x 15 cm

←

QBD AFTER-HOUR

El Pelele, Tseng Chih Wei -

01.08.2024 – 31.08.2024

El Pelele (Argentinien) & Tseng Chih Wei (Taiwan)
In unserem diesjährigen Residency Programm durften wir gleich zwei Künstler:innen Raum bieten und eine zusammenarbeiten. Beide sind Performance Künstler:innen, die aktivistisch sowie auch tänzerisch arbeiten. El Pelele (ARG) ist vor allem durch sein expressives Maskenspiel und die Reflektion von politischen aktuellen Themen von Argentinien bekannt. Tseng Chih Wei, ist eine Performance Künstler:in, welche aktiv sich für HIV rechte in Taiwan einsetzt und tänzerisch über den Körper erforscht. Beide perfromten zum ersten mal in der Schweiz. In Zusammenarbeit mit der Shedhalle und dem QueerBayDay konnten beide Künstler:innen jeweils anfangs des Monats ihre Arbeit dem Publikum näher bringen und über den Monat weiter vertiefen, um abschliessend im Toxi ende August als Weiterführung und über Workshops nochmals zu zeigen.

El Pelele (*1993, Argentina) is an artist/character, a phantasmagorical entity that transcends dimensions. Their particular universe is developed and displayed on various materials and platforms, without disciplinary limitations, connecting online and offline life. Among their practices, performance, sound, poetry and video are spaces of projection this artist moves around, not only to explore physical impulses, but also to release the philosophical order that acts as the basis of their corpus of narratives.

Tseng Chih Wei (*1991, Taiwan) graduated from the Department of Theatre, Taipei National University of the Arts, now working as a performing artist in theatre, dance and immersive works. His practice raises public awareness on HIV/AIDS and explores queer culture. Through the performativity of body and the poetic imagination of language, he invites audience-members to create intimate experiences in unorthodox spaces with him, and to open up possibilities of conversations among people with a variety of beliefs and ideologies.

text.rtf

←

NOT TO HIDE THE HAND

Isabelle Morton & Eugène Kaïmanovitch -

05.07.2024 – 25.07.2024

I am writing this while walking. Checkered Vans carry my weight across the pavement. My neck is bent, I face my phone, I open the notes app. A list of yesterday’s regrets pops up: Airport buffet breakfast, Vodka shot, Juul, shrimp cocktail and kale salad for lunch (acceptable), coffee (instant anxiety), Juul, buying 2 Philipp Plein polos, bad date, spätzle with French dressing for dinner (acceptable). Juul. No big regrets though. Just tender ones. In the end, I am who I am so no reason to bother too much. But this is not important now. I have to put down my thoughts. I just finished installing my exhibition and something major happened: I washed my hands. Usually I never wash my hands. I let my Eevee-looking chihuahua lick them after chewing on unrecognisable street objects; I open the bathroom door of my favourite, grimy bar while fully gripping the door handle; I give my hand proudly and squeeze yours tightly when we say goodbye. Memories accumulate in layers of dirt, wrapping my hand in black grease. Turning my thumb, index, middle, ring and pinky to dark leather over time. The dirt’s warmth softens my skin wrinkled in frozen solitude. This is how I like it. This is how I want it. Then, most importantly, I use these hands to work and embrace the traces they leave. Dark smudges on cardboards which frame images of moving humans and condense life to a single moment. Fingerprints in the corners of graphic accumulations and superpositions; reminding me I’m human after episodically entering manic and obsessive encounters in which I swell to superhuman proportions. Dried blood hidden in shades of black; suggesting that I used my body beyond it’s limits again. Scratches in the glass enveloping my work; showing me that I can›t protect it to perfection. All of these marks are traces of me thinking with my hands. Working with my hands. Working but never talking. I am tongueless, I have nothing to say. I wouldn’t dare attach a single word to the work I do. Cancelling out every vector of reason, I form. Bleached of any original historic reference because I simply can’t think of any, I craft. Under the harsh conditions of (ir)rational reality, I construct. No dreams. No purpose. No company of Angels. What I do have is melancholy, which is more important than love, guiding my intuition. Guiding my hands. Composing the here and now into something of which I can say: >>This is me<<. I own my work. I am proud. I perform myself. I speak in the first person but I don’t talk about myself. And usually I don’t wash my hands but today I did it. I don’t have to carry the weight of my memories in my hands anymore. They are out there. Hanging on the walls of an exhibition where no hand was hidden.

Curated by Nemo Bleuer and Gaia Del Santo
Text by Frano Karlovic

Not to Hide the Hand_Saaltext_2.pdf
flyer.pdf

Eugène Kaïmanovitch,

Xakep scratch,

2024

engraved tetrapack printed on paper, wooden frame with museum glass

103 x 75 cm

Isabelle Morton,

Insider 5,

2024

PET-G, cardboard

34.5 x 25 x 4 cm

Eugène Kaïmanovitch,

To Wander, To Wonder,

2024

engraved tetrapack printed on cardboard, paper cut-out, aluminum frame with museum glass

56 x 62 cm

Eugène Kaïmanovitch,

Cardboard Steps,

2024

engraved tetrapack printed on cardboard, paper cut-out, aluminum frame with museum glass

56 x 62 cm

Eugène Kaïmanovitch,

Heritage on high: the Carpert Capers,

2023

painted relief plaster panel

80 x 48 cm

Isabelle Morton,

Public Note 2,

2024

PET-G, wood, pencil on cardboard

14.4 x 40.2 x 2.4 cm

Isabelle Morton,

Public Note 1,

2024

PET-G, wood, pencil on cardboard, masking tape

14.4 x 37.5 x 2.4 cm

Isabelle Morton,

Public Note 2,

2024

PET-G, wood, pencil on cardboard

14.4 x 40.2 x 2.4 cm

Isabelle Morton,

Insider 1,

2024

PET-G, cardboard, aluminum, nails

12 x 18 cm

Isabelle Morton,

Insider 2,

2024

PET-G, cardboard, masking tape

38 x 22 x 8 cm

Isabelle Morton,

Little Secret,

2024

Plaster, PET-G, cardboard box

16 x 27 x 16.4 cm

Exhibition view, NOT TO HIDE THE HAND by Isabelle Morton & Eugène Kaïmanovitch

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Isabelle Morton,

Insider 5,

2024

PET-G, cardboard

34.5 x 25 x 4 cm

Exhibition view, NOT TO HIDE THE HAND by Isabelle Morton & Eugène Kaïmanovitch

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Exhibition view, NOT TO HIDE THE HAND by Isabelle Morton & Eugène Kaïmanovitch

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Eugène Kaïmanovitch,

Heritage on high: the Carpert Capers,

2023

detailed view, painted relief plaster panel

80 x 48 cm

Isabelle Morton,

Insider 4,

2024

PET-G, acrylic paint and pencil on cardboard, screws

19.4 x 19.8 x 8cm

Isabelle Morton,

Insider 3,

2024

PET-G, acrylic paint and pencil on cardboard, screws

19.4 x 19.8 x 8cm

Eugène Kaïmanovitch,

Xakep scratch,

2024

detailed view, engraved tetrapack printed on paper, wooden frame with museum glass

103 x 75 cm

Isabelle Morton,

Untitled,

2024

detailed view, print on paper, museum glas

50 x 210 cm

←

CAST NOT A CLOUT TILL MAY IS OUT

-

Camille Lütjens, Lou-Anna Ulloa del Rio, Jordan Selophane, Etienne Eisele

16.05.2024 - 13.06.2024

Never Forever
( super mega top! )

At dinner, after a concert, an exhibition, a quiet day at work, friends laughing
A silly video on someone’s phone
you take a photo of a stray object on the table or lurking in the background, a ponytail or crumpled paper, a pizza stool in legs up the wall repose. That stray symbol becomes a forgotten photo; meanwhile, you make others:
photos, emails, notes. Then, at a nonspecific later date, in search of new material, a fresh referent that will serve to trace
a lingering concern
It resurfaces. Through a rhythm known to you, with whatever tools you have for mediation, the lost photo of the absent thing becomes a found painting
or perhaps not a painting at all but a drawing a cast a shelf full of sculpture
Copy, rinse, repeat and the ensuing artifact must become its own photo, and also a portfolio, an application; under the right sign, blessed by the correct gods, maybe even a show.
At the very least, it will figure in an installation shot, in a now of never-forever it will stand for something—applications and ID cards, a chapter in a life, train tickets in far-off cities,
real tears, thoughts over-thought, and other valences of home.

Like a favorite story, imbued with infinite potential for reinvention, for a neat riff (yours?), such a description of creative practice emerging from, and in response to, our image and information saturated media environment is familiar, even banal. Kind of obvious, very human. We understand it, too, as an explicit gesture toward the human, as modeling a practice of semiotic and processual intimacy within a circular apparatus, spooning out a soupçon of personal feeling from a pictographic perpetual stew. That soup has become ladle, that it is our phones that now tell us what we want to show, instantiates another phase of technological determinism pronounced enough to be put to use (Nam Jun Paik: “to hate it properly”). So trigger and method in artistic process are inseparable from their issuing mechanism…so what! Algorithms construct whole mnemosynes that we call our own, since it was ‘we’ (loose, complex ‘we’) who made the algorithms, as Michael Sanchez observed, writing about avatars as actors in an essay on Contemporary Art Daily syndrome some fifteen years ago. Hello dankness ‘Paul’ ‘Virilio’. Everything measured up against everything else. As in,

see something                                             say “it cute”
no, no, it about cute             wincing                 conspiratorial smiles
thought-bubble floating off above our heads                    skywrites

Sianne Ngai, Sanrio sponsorships, valleys canny but unhappy, so many gradations of gimmick

and the object of those connections, the locus of consideration that is the artwork, must pop those gummed up meanings and wear them like a Colen or wad them in the trash.

When pathways of association take center stage in a hyper-retinal experience, undergoing costume changes at rapid pace, what is staked, then, by slow, still, enduringly material, artworks? That question is older than its typically zillenial respondents, simultaneously too big and petit trope. Subject to all that (fast capital, soft power, LED light-bulbs), mindful of precedents (Majerus, Kelley) and scope (gahhhhh), young artists help our bodiless sociocultural consciousness keep score. Through a small-batch maker’s mark approach, they trade melancholic ‘contending’ for anxious nuance, a cohering of contradictions, a breaking up of cycles through dramaturgies of fraught enthusiasm—exultations of super, mega, top.

In Etienne Eisele’s sculptural practice, souvenirs of commercial rhetoric reappear as spatial saboteurs. Luschen I is a mirrored plaque installed at the gallery entrance, scrawled ‘Good Luck!’ in a bright, reflective orange. A crafty double fallacy, Eisele’s work is at once caustic and affecting, made deep by a claim to being not that deep at all. Luschen I strains our gaze upwards, introducing the exhibition through the prism of our own faces shining in its selfie-ready gloss, as cold words and warmly shaded content loom with no clear direction, nor director. Evasiveness—oblique displacement—proves hella helpful to asserting personal value at the fringes of identification. The more quotidian, the more discursive: Lou-Anna Ulloa del Rio’s Porcelaine comprises an enlarged silver clip propping up a tall scrim of tracing paper. A column of white lies, Porcelaine’s metal fastener is actually painted wood, its tissue skirt shaped to seem as sturdy as a curtain. These uncertain illusions, skeptical of their own sources, are guided by an impulse less to pull one over than to pull, to tug at a corner of private imagination, verifying that it holds, a careful test of depth perception.

That protective slyness is elaborated by Camille Lütjens in a painting idiom of mixed metaphors: her Clumsy Choreography suggests a map textured by a crinkly black river and sectioned with a shiny blue bow; in the more ominously titled Candy Coercion (2022), icons of digital engagement and physical fact are interjected for tension, in comparing how hard it is to make a ‘move,’ any move, on either turf. Analysis paralysis is on par with medium and moment; not even reversions to nature, with Choreography’s camouflage-style ground and a frosty cloud in Coercion, allow for breathing room between layers, pasteurized by screen-fleek-realness mode. Jordan Selophane’s drawings pursue a similar hall of mirrors effect in a more liberated tone, presenting axonometric views of categorically stuffy Wunderkammer gone sketchy, reclaimed as comic and playful—exaggerated, therefore ‘girl’. These works (Where are they?, Another room) are populated by lips and stars, keyholes and frames, motifs isolated for elusive flavor and a light chew. Deposited in a set of warped architectures, they evoke mobile cubicles imaged like cubicle decor, with the hot colors and confident strokes of Rachel Harrison’s Amy Winehouse multiples, minus any Picasso stencils. Online performance is so micro and refractive, it can’t be intertextual; the histories that fray at Lütjens’ canvases free Selophane to devise new worlds.

Folding inwards in spiraling out, artists might render unstable terrain semi-navigable by remaining half-glitched (Lütjens, Eisele) or proudly hermetic (Selophane, Ulloa del Rio). With wrinkles of affinity built into digital being adopted as artistic strategy, then as subject, then as point, perhaps we would wish for a bigger splash, for Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms,” the terrible things that happen between ages, to pass through our premises at the level of the visual. I guess that’s what NFTs were for. Instead, here we have a subtler proposal: borne from a culture stuck in traffic at whatever nebulous junction where ‘foreigners everywhere’ meets core-core and post-post, works that exude a sincere self-sufficiency, a mood of thick narration and also, ‘ain’t reading all that’, because well, you know the vibe, don’t you. Because who is not inclined to chic mythologizing when faced with tough scores. Like all of us, they take up refuge in annotation and encoding, awaiting a next chapter, a new wave of re-collection. To do it again, each time more mega, more super, more top, and in reverse.

Curated by Gaia Del Santo
Text by Moselle Kleiner

floorplan.pdf
FLYER_TOXI_GROUPSHOW_MAY2024

Exhibition view, CAST NOT A CLOUT TILL MAY IS OUT

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Exhibition view, CAST NOT A CLOUT TILL MAY IS OUT

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Exhibition view, CAST NOT A CLOUT TILL MAY IS OUT

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Jordan Selophane,

Ooutch!,

2022

pencils, felt pen, oil pastels (Neocolor), metal plates, magnets

35x48cm

Jordan Selophane,

The fear I desire,

2022

pencils, felt pen, oil pastels (Neocolor), metal plates, magnets

35x48cm

Jordan Selophane,

Another room,

2022

pencils, felt pen, oil pastels (Neocolor), metal plates, magnets

35x48cm

Camille Lütjens,

Clumsy Choreography,

2023

oil on canvas

100x75cm

Lou-Anna Ulloa del Rio,

Porcelaine,

2024

paper, wood, paint

223x110cm

Lou-Anna Ulloa del Rio,

Porcelaine,

2024

detailed view, paper, wood, paint

223x110cm

Etienne Eisele,

Weiss auf Grün (reverse engineering),

2024

green shelves from a former children’s bedroom, covered with white adhesive foil during puberty, drilling holes, wall plugs

dimensions variable

Exhibition view, CAST NOT A CLOUT TILL MAY IS OUT

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Exhibition view, CAST NOT A CLOUT TILL MAY IS OUT

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Exhibition view, CAST NOT A CLOUT TILL MAY IS OUT

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Etienne Eisele,

Luschen I,

2024

Arcade machine mirror, LEDs, coin cell batteries, shelf support

23x50cm

Etienne Eisele,

Weiss auf Grün (reverse engineering),

2024

detailed view, green shelves from a former children’s bedroom, covered with white adhesive foil during puberty, drilling holes, wall plugs

dimensions variable

Etienne Eisele,

Weiss auf Grün (reverse engineering),

2024

green shelves from a former children’s bedroom, covered with white adhesive foil during puberty, drilling holes, wall plugs

dimensions variable

Etienne Eisele,

Weiss auf Grün (reverse engineering),

2024

green shelves from a former children’s bedroom, covered with white adhesive foil during puberty, drilling holes, wall plugs

dimensions variable

Exhibition view, CAST NOT A CLOUT TILL MAY IS OUT

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Exhibition view, CAST NOT A CLOUT TILL MAY IS OUT

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Exhibition view, CAST NOT A CLOUT TILL MAY IS OUT

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Exhibition view, CAST NOT A CLOUT TILL MAY IS OUT

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

←

A R T I S T S S C R E E N A R T I S T S

21.03.2024 - 25.04.2024

We are happy to bring back our screening series this year. We invited 6 Artists and collectives to host an evening, exploring various video formats. You can expect feature-length movies, documentaries, and Instagram Story-esque clips. Every Thursday from 7-10pm our doors are open. We invite you to come by, watch with us, be cozy, or just have a drink. We hope to see you there.

Gaia Del Santo 21.03
Leevi Toija 28.03
Oz Oderbolz 04.04
Sweet Tooth 11.04
Salome Oggenfuss 18.04
Emonie Fay Chetwin 25.04

flyer.jpg

←

MONSTERS

Valerie Reding -

08.02.2024 – 29.02.2024

A dimly lit room filled with vibrant banners, revealing mysterious humanoid creatures, seemingly floating in space, gazing at you - sometimes. A colos- sal painting, inviting you into a dreamlike landscape with strange figures, lurking in the shades of a deep forest, standing close to one another - calm, powerful and proud. An eerie sound is haunting the air - if you listen closely, you can hear their voices. And if you are patient enough, you might catch a body moving through this strange universe - disturbing and freeing.

In collaboration with Lausanne-based painter David Weishaar, composer Tyler Holmes from Los Angeles and Berlin-based sound artist Lou Drago, the transdisciplinary artist and performer Valerie Reding creates with mons- ters an oneiric and compelling multi-sensorial space to share the powerful stories of those that have experienced abuse in interpersonal relationships - stories that are so often silenced in our society. Combining performance, photography, painting, sound and text in an immer- sive multi-media installation, monsters fiercely reclaims the monstrosity that is projected on those who speak up against abuse (of power) and systems of oppression. With an intersectional approach, Valerie Reding’s monsters is not only an empowering celebration of the liberating power of one›s voice, resilience, healing, community, collective care - and love. It is also a profound, sensitive and thought-provoking reflection on the complex interconnections between interpersonal and societal power relations.

THE HEART IS OURS
By David Weishaar

The Heart Is Ours is inspired by the series of paintings Nastagio degli Onesti, created by S. Botticelli during the 15th century.

The tale of Nastagio degli Onesti unveils the story of a young man rejected by the woman who was promised to marry him. While wandering through the forest, heartbroken and lost, he is startled by the appearance of a furi- ous horseman massacring a naked young woman. The horseman suddenly speaks to Nastagio: “As soon as we appear, I catch her, I stab her, open her chest, tear out her heart, and feed it to the dogs.”

The horseman and the young woman are actually revenants, cursed to re- appear every Friday in the forest, endlessly repeating the same gruesome scene. The curse was a punishment because both of them were doomed for their „unmoral“ behavior - the women, because she was damned for refusing the marriage because “her cold heart never opened to love or compassion” and the horseman, because he committed suicide due to the woman’s refusal of marrying him. This pagan story was very popular during the Italian Renaissance and served as warning tale to any woman refusing marriage.

In response to the warm invitation by Valerie Reding to collaborate for monsters, I wanted to revisit and reinterpret some of the thematic and iconographic elements of Botticelli›s series of paintings Nastagio degli Onesti, in order to bring a symbolic re-reading as well as a strong feeling of empowerment to the people represented, side by side: Aron, Bast, Pauline, Robyn, Salou and Will.

What could Nastagio have rediscovered, centuries later, during his stroll through the forest? The forest is as dense and all-enveloping as it used to be, but the sky is hellishly red, radiating. The twilight scene, perhaps “post-rave”, echoing a group ritual, now represents a frieze of united individuals, facing the viewer with sharp, luminescent eyes. The dogs are by their side, defiant, guarding the recovered heart. Several whispers can be heard, seemingly emanating from the swamp. They sing: The Heart is Ours!

artistic direction & concept Valerie Reding
performance, photography, costumes, make-up, scenography & text Valerie Reding
painting The Heart Is Ours David Weishaar
soundscape Lou Drago
music for performance Tyler Holmes
people portrayed & texts Aron Smith, Bast Hippocrate, Pauline Canavesio aka BORA, Robyn Cloé Iyongo, Salou Sadras, William Cardoso
lights Thomas Giger
costume assistance Nahuel Mendez
ceramic objects Kwadrat by Luka Stamenkovic
production assistance Nicolas Dubosson
communication & flyers Valerie Reding

Monsters_Saaltext Kopie.pdf
Valerie Reding.jpg

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Exhibition view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

David Weishaar

The Heart Is Ours,

2023

acrylic and oil paint on canvas
200 cm x 300 cm (triptych of 3 canvases of 100 cm x 100 cm each)

Valerie Reding

monsters (Aron & Salou),

2023

original print on tarp (recto verso), 120cmx180cm

David Weishaar

The Heart Is Ours,

2023

acrylic and oil paint on canvas
200 cm x 300 cm (triptych of 3 canvases of 100 cm x 100 cm each)

Valerie Reding,

monsters (Will & Aron),

2023

original print on tarp (recto verso) 120cmx180cm

Valerie Reding,

monsters (Robyn & Salou),

2023

original print on tarp (recto verso) 120cmx180cm

Valerie Reding,

monsters (Aron & Pauline),

2023

original print on tarp (recto verso) 120cmx180cm

Valerie Reding,

monsters (Pauline & Bast),

2023

original print on tarp (recto verso) 120cmx180cm

Exhibition view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Valerie Reding,

monsters (Salou & Will),

2023

original print on tarp (recto verso) 120cmx180cm

Valerie Reding,

monsters (Will & Aron),

2023

original print on tarp (recto verso) 120cmx180cm

Valerie Reding,

monsters (Robyn & Salou),

2023

original print on tarp (recto verso) 120cmx180cm

Valerie Reding,

monsters (Bast & Robyn),

2023

original print on tarp (recto verso) 120cmx180cm

Exhibition view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Exhibition view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Exhibition view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Performance view, MONSTERS by Valerie Reding

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Artist talk moderated by Oz Oderbolz with Valerie Reding, David Weishaar & Lou Drago

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Artist talk moderated by
Oz Oderbolz with Valerie Reding, David Weishaar & Lou Drago

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Artist talk moderated by Oz Oderbolz with Valerie Reding, David Weishaar & Lou Drago

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

Artist talk moderated by Oz Oderbolz with Valerie Reding, David Weishaar & Lou Drago

Toxi space, Zürich, 2024

2023

←

DESIRELESS

Nicola Genovese -

02.12.2023 – 11.12.2023

6.4311 Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

In a post-capitalist and perhaps post-war Europe, the CEO of an unnamed corporation presents a new product. It is called Warp, a digital service that enables manipulation of the space-time continuum and access to a new Lebensform. It promises to dissolve nostalgia and the ambiguous passions that tinge the future into the fold of an endless present.

Part speculative science-fiction and part Commedia dell'arte, Desireless takes the viewer into the depths of this temporal dimension. Through a blend of monologues, choreography, and live music, the performance by Nicola Genovese, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, exposes the masks, codes, and feelings of a semi-privileged humanity, torn between the remnants of a late-imperial world, the bondage of a technocratic hell, and the fantasy of a biomedical Nirvana.

The work itself is conceived as a machine of doubt and indistinction. In creating Desireless, Nicola Genovese has collaborated with artists Dustin Kenel, Patricia Meier, Dauen Park, Maria Sabato, Thembeka Sincuba, the goth rock band They Die, and various artificial intelligence apps. The stage/exhibition space thus coincides with the action field of a partially non-human collective mind that extends beyond the individual identity of the artist. Video installations and sculptures become props and vice versa, depending on how they are activated. They transcend the boundaries between theatre and visual arts.

A performance and solo exhibition by Nicola Genovese
Curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi
With: They Die
Dustin Kenel
Patricia Meier
Dauen Park
Maria Sabato
Thembeka Sincuba
Sculptures production assistant: Ricardo Meli
Light design: Imanol Egea
External eye: Ketty Ghnassia
Co-production: Fabriktheater Rote Fabrik
Funded by: Stadt Zürich Kultur, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Walter Haefner Stiftung

00a Press release.pdf
06a Desireless poster.jpg

←

STAG-NÁ – STACK

-

Leevi Toija, Eero Karjalainen, Jonne Väisänen, Dominic Michel, Paavo Kärki, Hynek Alt

13.11.2023 – 24.11.2023

Smash it

Kill it

[R]ea[d]t it

Digest it

[R]ea[d]t it again

Like a cow

For eternity¹

Stagh-ná – stack → to sweat, dig, grab, read, speak and repeat ⌧ to find and/or open up (on(/))to something.

Concealed under layers and layers and stacks – lays a stratum of (mis) usages. Locations, meanings, signs, and initial ideas blurr and shift back and forth between lexicons ⌧ eventually melting all back together into an (in)significant, altered entity. However, it all remains (un)clear in which realm they all belong to; the public and/or the private.

...and we will thread the needle and see which ones function in the public and which ones in the private realm.

⌧
⌧

Like the above written lyrics from a techno-ambient track suggests, Stagh- ná is meant to be ruminated perpetually ⌧ at least until the next exhibition in TOXI.

Once upon a time, a sauna was a space to give birth, heal, and to perhaps open up. Nowadays such concepts are often associated with consumer wellness ⌧ in TOXI these ideas are misused, turned upside down, and camouflaged into some sort of a metastructure ⌧ an accumulation made out of the past. In the context of art it is clear that the erected structure will not be there for long either, and should represent some kind of value. However, the sauna can function as a temporary limbo to rethink the surrounding scenery ⌧ as the central (and the only) (functional) (super)structure of the white cubical womb in the context of the affect.

A(n) (painted) emergency exit sign of Paavo Kärki is taken out from its basic position of a wider archival project and displayed on the floor of the gallery space in three opened-up archival cardboard boxes, in which it was also sent to Zürich. In the new environment the very public and standardized sign not only attempts to gain privacy, but simultaneously becomes misleading and obsolete ⌧ a representation of something very familiar to all of us, available in the closest Bauhaus. The painting does not show the way out, but perhaps invites to question the essence of the way itself. The work by Kärki is not actually a comment on a certain space - of this space, TOXI - but on the contrary it is rather a subtle shift from individual praxis to collective performativity. The gesture of taking one painting, shipping it to an exhibition is simultaneously a small alteration to a way of working for a short period of time and a significant blur between the public and the private.

Once upon a time landline phones were the main artifacts of intercommunication, keeping the world wired (very literally in(_)deed) ⌧ today they have reached a state of obsolescence in their purpose. Dominic Michel’s readymade sculptures transfer the absence of this mostly forgotten infra- structure into the semi-private art space ⌧ a formal signifier of (private?) communication that was once commonly accessible right under the gaze of others. Whereas the obviously dysfunctional objects function as relics of communication through time and space, the tales once told through the phones still creep the viewers via their recognizable formal qualities and popular culture.

The rotary off-set prints of Hynek Alt stacked on the floor offer the spec- tator a repetitive glimpse below everyday surfaces. The piles resemble of the usually overlooked (infra)structures, which supposedly keep the world running (forward) ⌧ the pictured sewers, pipes and wires remind the visitor of the absence of such hidden necessities in-and-out the superstructure. “As part of a series of infrascapes, the holey city of infrastructures opens up a way to understand what multiple realities hide inside surfaces we don’t immediately see through. As for the practice of opening up, it also has similar connotations.”²

Archive 2 “Dm Excerpts Between @skaeliptom & @chloewise_” Varg2TM Track 12 on Nordic Flora Series Pt.5: Crus

Parikka, Jussi, et al. Untitled (Infrastructures & The Beach). Artmap / Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, 2020. pp.153-154

Curated by Leevi Toija
Text by Leevi Toija & Jonne Väisänen

floorplan.pdf
flyer_mockup_copy.png

Leevi Toija, Eero Karjalaien & Jonne Vaisanen

X,

2023

Exhibition view, STAGH-NÁ – STACK

Toxi space, Zürich, 2023

Dominic Michel,

A jungle of presence, a Dickicht of foresight, full of snakes, futuristic shamans, incredible confusion, piss, ghosts, sunlight, drifts, birds' nests & - eggs - joyful aggression,

2023

PTT 9-39 (1984)

Dominic Michel,

Connected and bounded by that silver chain that outlines the terrain of sensuality, transgression and vision,

2023

FHF Safe Tel DSTI

Dominic Michel,

Mid-May in a state that begins with "I", so two-dimensional that it can hardly be said to have a geography at all - the rays so insistent and palpable that you have to seek the darkness to think in words,

2023

Nippon OKI ODA-1360 (1991)

Exhibition view, STAGH-NÁ – STACK

Toxi space, Zürich, 2023

Leevi Toija, Eero Karjalaien & Jonne Vaisanen

X,

2023

detail

Exhibition view, STAGH-NÁ – STACK

Toxi space, Zürich, 2023

Paavo Kärki

27,

2023

Dominic Michel,

Connected and bounded by that silver chain
that outlines the terrain of sensuality, transgression and vision,

2023

FHF Safe Tel DSTI

Dominic Michel,

Story and Emblem,

2023

Zellweger G.A. 24 (1932)

Dominic Michel,

Punks dreaming of piercing their ears,
animistic cyclists gliding in grinding dust through welfare streets of random
flowers, roving pickpockets, smilling robbers of totems and loose change,

2023

Telekom Clubtelefon 5 (1995)

Dominic Michel,

Punks dreaming of piercing their ears,
animistic cyclists gliding in grinding dust through welfare streets of random
flowers, roving pickpockets, smilling robbers of totems and loose change,

2023

detail, Telekom Clubtelefon 5 (1995)

Dominic Michel,

Story and Emblem,

2023

detail, Zellweger G.A. 24 (1932)

Hynek Alt,

Untitled (Today),

2018

Rotary offset press, 63x47 cm (Berliner format), 3000 pieces Print by MAFRA

Hynek Alt,

Untitled (Today),

2018

Rotary offset press, 63x47 cm (Berliner format), 3000 pieces Print by MAFRA

Leevi Toija, Eero Karjalaien & Jonne Vaisanen

X,

2023

detail

←

BITTER FACADE

Hannah Rose Stewart & Jordi Theler -

04.10.2023 – 26.10.2023

It wasn’t until the mid- or late 19th century that free wall space in London became privatized for commercial use. However, the present day sees much more accelerated financial shifts. Take the repeat emergence and bursting of speculative bubbles, where asset classes reach asymptotic valuations before becoming completely worthless. Meanwhile, advertisement narrative and subject matter proliferate and adapt in response to the cost of living, resulting in a usually discreet, yet striking parallel between visual space and a collective experience in flux. Bitter Facade offers a starting point to navigate such rapid change. Debuting at Toxi Space, Hannah Stewart’s ‘Citizen Coin’ series subverts the symbology behind modern currency, swapping historical icons with commonplace images and portraits. This direct association between raw materials, resources, individual experiences and money initiates a way to understand the successive financialization of everyday life — a catalyst for the disruption of urban visual space which Jordi Theler’s ‘Public Display’ in-part clarifies. Billboard and architectural facades appear disused, worn down from postering and perhaps structural intervention. There are messages ingrained within each layer, serving as ephemera of bygone periods that exist simultaneously to the present. The displays memorialize life cycles of visual space, oscillations between the death and birth of narratives that occur along a constant surface. In Bitter Facade, Theler provides both a context and response to transformations posed by Stewart. A dialogue emerges wherein the former anticipates a situation the latter attempts to trace; a period of hyper-financialization and what remains in its aftermath.

Commuting through city corridors, surrounded by a totalizing representation of our condition.

Erst ab Mitte -Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts wurden
freie Wandflächen in London für die kommerzielle Nutzung privatisiert. In der heutigen Zeit sind die Veränderungen im Finanzsektor jedoch wesentlich schneller. Man denke nur an das wiederholte Auftauchen und Platzen von Spekulationsblasen, bei denen Anlageklassen asymptotische Bewertungen erreichen, bevor sie völlig wertlos werden. In der Zwischenzeit vermehren sich die Werbetexte und -themen und passen sich den Lebenshaltungskosten an, was zu einer meist diskreten, aber auffälligen Parallele zwischen dem visuellen Raum und einer kollektiven Erfahrung im Wandel führt. Bitter Facade bietet einen Ausgangspunkt für die Navigation durch diesen schnellen Wandel. Hannah Stewarts Serie «Citizen Coin», die erstmals im Toxi Space zu sehen ist, untergräbt die Symbolik moderner Währungen, indem sie historische Ikonen mit alltäglichen Bildern und Porträts austauscht. Diese direkte Verbindung zwischen Rohstoffen, Ressourcen, individuellen Erfahrungen und Geld eröffnet einen Weg, die sukzessive Finanzialisierung des Alltags zu verstehen - ein Katalysator für die Störung des urbanen visuellen Raums, den Jordi Thelers «Public Display» zum Teil verdeutlicht. Plakatwände und architektonische Fassaden erscheinen unbenutzt, abgenutzt durch Plakatierung und vielleicht systematische Eingriffe. In jede Schicht sind Botschaften eingearbeitet, die als Ephemera vergangener Zeiten dienen und gleichzeitig in der Gegenwart existieren. Die Displays erinnern an die Lebenszyklen des visuellen Raums, an die Oszillationen zwischen dem Tod und der Geburt von Erzählungen, die entlang einer konstanten Oberfläche stattfinden. In Bitter Facade liefert Theler sowohl einen Kontext als auch eine Antwort auf die von Stewart aufgeworfenen Transformationen. Es entsteht ein Dialog, in dem Ersterer eine Situation vorwegnimmt, die Letzterer nachzuvollziehen versucht: eine Periode der Hyperfinanzialisierung und das, was nach ihr bleibt.

Wir pendeln durch die Korridore der Stadt, umgeben von einer totalisierenden Darstellung unseres Zustands.

Curated by Oz Oderbolz
Text by Matt Dell

Bitter Facade_Saaltext.pdf
flyer_Hannah&Jordi.jpg

Exhibition view, BITTER FACADE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2023

Hannah Rose Stewart

Citizen Coin 001,

2023

3D Printed Polyurethane Resin, Carlack Varnish, Aluminium mount, 50x50x10cm

Hannah Rose Stewart

Citizen Coin 002,

2023

3D Printed Polyurethane Resin, Carlack Varnish, Aluminium mount, 50x50x10cm

Hannah Rose Stewart

Citizen Coin 002,

2023

3D Printed Polyurethane Resin, Carlack Varnish, Aluminium mount, 50x50x10cm

Jordi Theler

PublicDisplay(UntouchedPersuasion),

2023

Aluminium Print, Plexiglass Print, Stainless steel Screws, 170x83x3cm

←

HEAVY BLOSSOM

Andrej Dubravsky & Tanja Roscic -

16.09.2023 – 30.09.2023

flyer_huvvzuofvuzovuzovouzvluglvhulvhu.jpg

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←

AESTHETICS AND SPA

Florencia Palacious -

OPEN STUDIO - 25.08.2023

flyer_aesthetics&spa.jpg

←

THE THIRD LANDSCAPE

-

Aline Witschi, Julius Bobke, Giselle Gorostiaga & Kristina Bekker

06.07.2023 – 27.07.2023

Hello [ LuvPunk12 ]
..
Three captivating landscapes lie before you, each with its own allure and mysteries waiting to be unraveled.

< select one >
...
Will you venture into the untouched beauty of the first landscape, where nature reigns supreme and wildlife thrives?
..
Will you embrace the cultural wonders and human technological achievements that shape the second landscape?
..
Will you dare to delve into the enigmatic depths of the third landscape, where nature and culture merge, where the boundaries between the organic and the technical have dissolved and we find hybrid conditions.

A man gazing into the distance. Standing alone, the wanderer, his gaze wanders over the sea of mist beneath him, from which isolated rocky peaks emerge. He is in the midst of nature, feeling in harmony with it, looking down upon it. We, the observers, meanwhile study his back.
Less eerie: Two activists of the Last Generation enter the Hamburg Kunst- halle and intend to overlay «The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog» with a LOVINGLY collaged version of the same painting. The new variant no longer shows a sea of fog above the forests, but smoke and flames.

POV: You fall in love with the beauty of nature.

The blind reverence for the divine, persistently continuing: «Forget about taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is that they do it, and we can measure it with unprecedented accuracy. When we have enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.»¹

This self-forgetfulness in the face of unlimited vastness. The mistake of the romanticist, thinking they are in harmony with nature, believing they are the center of the world.

The first-person shooter perspective displays the area lying before you on the monitor, the body serving as a means to an end, a tool. The perspective that makes the body invisible seeks to reward players with immersion. They are supposed to follow the narrative and create the narrative while being able to forget themselves.

The question aims at the positioning of the self: Is there a way to see, to play, and to decide without constantly considering the self?

1818: The idea of landscape is invented. Land-shaping.

How to contemplate desire, longing, the sublime, and beauty when one is their blind spot?

POV: If you truly love Nature, you will find Beauty everywhere.

«Vision is always a question of the ability to see – and perhaps a question of the implicit violence in our visualization practices. Whose blood was shed for my eyes to see?»² Being able to see everything from nowhere, a myth, or as Donna Haraway writes, - a divine trick.

The unbiased gaze of the wanderer, godlike, looking into nowhere. «This gaze is mythically inscribed on all marked bodies, giving the unmarked category the power to see without being seen, to represent and at the same time escape representation.»³ This gaze designates the unmarked position of humans in the Anthropocene.

The GLITCHY Sublime.

«I» gaze over the sea, I gaze toward the smoke. Eerie in a way, everything.

POV: Been there, done that.

Chris Anderson: The Wired, 2008

Donna Haraway: Situiertes Wissen. Die Wissenschaftsfrage im Feminismus und das Privileg einer partialen Perspektive. In: Ders.: Die Neuerfindung der Natur. Primaten, Cyborgs und Frauen. Frankfurt/New York 1995, S. 73-97, hier S. 85.

Ebd., S. 80

Curated by Nemo Bleuer
Text by Robyn Muffler

saaltext_de.pdf
saaltext_en.pdf
flyer_mockup.png

Kristina Bekker

Mother,

2018

unglazed earthenware, sterling silver, 30 x 30 x 30 cm

Exhibition view, THE THIRD LANDSCAPE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2023

Aline Witschi

Between Mud and Star,

2022

detail, burned clay, dimension variable

Julius Bobke

Lets fucking go,

2022

acrylic, digital print, oil, plasticine on sewn canvas, 60 x 80 cm

Julius Bobke

On the way up,

2022

acrylic, digital print, oil, plasticine on canvas, 60 x 80 cm

Aline Witschi

Bone with Hair,

2023

burned clay, 60 x 40 cm

Aline Witschi

Another Piece of Gaia,

2023

burned clay, 60 x 180 cm

Aline Witschi

Another Piece of Gaia,

2023

detail, burned clay, 60 x 180 cm

Julius Bobke

Blaze of Vesper,

2023

acrylic, digital print, glitter, oil, plasticine on canvas, 30 x 25 cm

Exhibition view, THE THIRD LANDSCAPE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2023

Julius Bobke

Happy Face,

2022

acrylic, digital print, oil on sewn canvas, 160 x 130 cm

Exhibition view, THE THIRD LANDSCAPE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2023

Exhibition view, THE THIRD LANDSCAPE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2023

Kristina Bekker

Mother,

2018

unglazed earthenware, sterling silver, 30 x 30 x 30 cm

Giselle Gorostiaga

For an,

2022

copper electroplate, varnish, steel chain, dimension variable

Giselle Gorostiaga

Lost connection,

2023

brass, router, cristals, silver wire, vegetal fibers, latex, sterling silver,
playmobil part, water, humidifier, led light, essential oil, power bank, pvc tube,
silicone, virgin wool, 8 x 25 x 12 cm

Giselle Gorostiaga

Lost connection,

2023

detail, brass, router, cristals, silver wire, vegetal fibers, latex, sterling silver,
playmobil part, water, humidifier, led light, essential oil, power bank, pvc tube,
silicone, virgin wool, 8 x 25 x 12 cm

Julius Bobke

at the top,

2022

acrylic, digital print,oil, plasticine on canvas, 65 x 60 cm

Giselle Gorostiaga

Seraphim,

2023

steel, burnt wood, burnt tire, burnt glass, burnt shopping bag,
burnt exhaust cannon, iron plate, water, vegetal fibers,sugar caramel, bioplastic,
latex, cristals, silver wire, dimension variable

Giselle Gorostiaga

Seraphim,

2023

detail, steel, burnt wood, burnt tire, burnt glass, burnt shopping bag,
burnt exhaust cannon, iron plate, water, vegetal fibers,sugar caramel, bioplastic,
latex, cristals, silver wire, dimension variable

Exhibition view, THE THIRD LANDSCAPE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2023

Kristina Bekker

(Mating) Predators,

2023

aluminum, sterling silver, tourmaline jade, tourmaline quarz, rose quarz, goat hair,
recycled fur, 100 x 100 x 210 cm

Giselle Gorostiaga & Kristina Bekker

The dilema of the heuristic and biases,

2023

aluminium steel, iron, copper, cristals, silver wire, broken caliber, rubis, glass,
water, essential oil, humidifier, led light, pvc tube, virgin wool, 15 x 35 x 15 cm

←

I’M YOUR SILHOUETTE

Valentina Stieger -

10.06.2023 – 29.06.2023

Paradoxically, a silhouette simultaneously unveils
and conceals. The silhouette disembodies physical form and lived experience into an emptied shape. To what extent is an outline nevertheless an unmistakable image, and when does it tip over into the stencil-like? Through norm measurements, an abstracted human form underlies numerous objects surrounding us in everyday life – especially the «serviceable» design objects – as an anthropomorphic borrowing.

The title of Valentina Stieger’s (Zurich, *1980) solo exhibition «I’M YOUR SILHOUETTE» resonates with the projection of a counterpart. Interpersonal relationships unfold not only physically and socially but spatially. What or whom we perceive in our environment and how depends on how we are oriented. At the same time, our togetherness is shaped by rituals and norms. Sociability influences, among other things, that we remember spaces as structural and temporal. They are thus not neutral containers that enclose us – they shape our behavior and orient our bodies. Comfort unfolds here only, theorist Sara Ahmed reminds us, if one is able to inhabit them by fitting in: «the effect of bodies being able to ‘sink’ into spaces that have already taken their shape.»

In her exhibition, Stieger cites the domestic setting with specific elements. She adopts and abstracts them, thus opening their form and intimacy to ambiguity. In A Unique Layout (DJERBA) (2022), for example, a piece of fitted carpet in the dimensions of her bedroom floor plan transfers the assumed seclusion and intimacy into the post-industrial, semi-public exhibition space. Stretch carpet has largely disappeared from contemporary domestic interiors. While the rich textile floor coverings were ubiquitous in the 1970s and 1980s, today, they often characterize office spaces needing renovation. Unlike the widely published photograph of Lina Loos’s bedroom, lush with furs and delicate curtains, Stieger’s conceptual rendering does not satisfy our «voyeurism.» We can form an idea but not a picture of the artist’s retreat, let alone draw conclusions about Stieger herself. The boundaries between private and public, places of recreation and work, as well as personal and standardized, become blurred.

Treats Infinity (What is love?) (2023) makes its appearance as a geometric «shaped canvas.» Found lace replaces the classic canvas over a small-format, triangular stretcher frame. With quiet irony, the decorative floral fabric, reminiscent of lingerie, comments on the abstract-minimalist painting discourse of the 20th century between gendered connotations and esoteric New Age symbolism. When Stieger covers pairs of rectangular frames with white-woven, immaculate cotton fabrics, her series White Linen (Streamlined for Dispatch) (2023) spreads across the walls of the exhibition space. It winkingly invokes memories of Robert Ryman’s monochrome-white paintings or the subtly conceptual works of Agnes Martin. Unlike Blinky Palermo’s «Rothkos aus dem Textilkaufhaus» – the Düsseldorf artist used commercially available fabrics in the late 1960s to paint them with industrial colors – the sets of pillowcases used here remain untreated. At the same time, they transport us through the figure of the two into the intimacy of the bedstead. The bed, in turn, appears elsewhere in Fade to Black (2023) in the form of a dysfunctionally attached, disused bed frame as a ready-made devoid of any sexualization.

Regarding the «political economy of intimacy,» sociologist Emma Dowling notes that the romantic ideal of love has historically been based on the domestic contract between two heterosexual partners. Stieger’s reflection, by contrast, does not remain fixed to this coupling. The work Untitled (Because you saw me when I was invisible) (2023), meanwhile, shrewdly makes us aware that couple relationships put a romantic ideal into the picture with which household decorations such as alternate frames are ultimately advertised to us.

The American activist bell hooks aptly describes how the idea of love as romance prescribes role models and thereby stands in the way of feeling love: «When romance is depicted as a project, or so the mass media, especially movies, would have us believe, women are the architects and planners. Everyone likes to imagine that women are romantics, sentimental about love, men follow where women lead. Even in non-heterosexual relationships, the paradigms of leader and follower often prevail, with one person assuming the role deemed feminine and another the designated masculine role.» When hooks speaks of mass media and movies, we can also think of fairy tales and popular narratives. From infancy, they dovetail role and relationship images with romantic love. Their reappraisal in Walt Disney films provides not only colorful sequences of pictures but a fitting soundtrack. The soundtrack to the Disneyfied search for «Prince Charming» is the starting point of the sound installation Someday I’ll be Part of Your World (2023). Here, however, the sound distorts in eerie dissonances to a cacophony or a ponderous piano exercise. Whether a corporation hides behind a door designated with the engraved sign NEW RIVER INC., (2023), what and how it produces remains open.

Thrown carelessly, as if to dry, over a radiator that belongs to the permanent infrastructure of the exhibition space, track pants and a shirt with label prints, including a used pair of socks, make up for DJ, (2023). The casualness of the installation sets social distinction via coded clothing at one with its uniformity. Finally, the artist complicates the question of who or what stands at the starting point of a projection. What impression and imprint replace the void when the counterpart disappears? How does the subject reconstitute itself? Does it make itself the measure of all things? The idealized couple relationship corresponds just as little as the neoliberal myth of the free, autonomous individual to the actual interdependence of social relationships. We process experiences not only with and for ourselves but through and with others. Valentina Stieger uses object installations and silhouettes in her exhibition to highlight the multi-layered entanglements between body, domestic space, and (romantic) projection in our society. Perhaps more than the economy of intimacy, she lets everyday images, desires, and afterimages resurface and hints at how romantic narratives commodify them.

Paradoxerweise ent- und verhüllt eine Silhouette zugleich. Als Schattenriss entkörperlicht sie physische Form und gelebte Erfahrung zur entleerten Gestalt. Inwiefern ist ein Umriss dennoch unverwechselbares Abbild, wann kippt er ins schablonenhafte? Mit Norm-Massen liegt eine abstrahierte menschliche Gestalt zahlreichen uns im Alltag umgebenden Gegenständen – insbesondere den «dienstbaren» Design-Objekten – als anthropomorphe Anleihe zugrunde.

Im Titel von Valentina Stiegers (Zürich, *1980) Einzelausstellung «I'M YOUR SILHOUETTE» schwingt die Projektion eines Gegenübers mit. Zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen entfalten sich nicht nur körperlich-sozial sondern räumlich. Was oder wen wir in unserer Umwelt wie wahrnehmen, hängt davon ab, wie wir orientiert sind. Unser Zusammensein ist zugleich von Ritualen und Normen geprägt. Die Sozialität beeinflusst dabei unter anderem, dass wir Räume nicht nur als baulich sondern auch als zeitlich begrenzt erinnern. Sie sind somit keine neutralen Behältnisse, die uns schlicht umfangen – sie formen unser Verhalten, richten unsere Körper zu. Komfort entfaltet sich darin nur, merkt die Theoretikerin Sara Ahmed überdies an, wenn Körper bereits die Form des Raumes um sie herum angenommen haben und sich ungehindert darin ausdehnen.

Mit spezifischen Anleihen zitiert Stieger in ihrer Ausstellung das häusliche Setting. Sie übernimmt Elemente, abstrahiert diese und öffnet so deren Form und Intimität zur Mehrdeutigkeit. In A personal layout (DJERBA), (2022) etwa überträgt ein Stück Spannteppich in den Abmessungen ihres Schlafzimmer-Grundrisses die angenommene Abgeschiedenheit und Intimität in den postindustriellen, halböffentlichen Ausstellungsraum. Spannteppich ist aus dem zeitgenössischen Interieur weitgehend verschwunden. Waren die satten, textilen Bodenbeläge in den 1970er- und 1980er-Jahren allgegenwärtig, charakterisieren sie heute oft renovationsbedürftige Büroräumlichkeiten. Im Unterschied zur vielfach publizierten Fotografie des üppig mit Fellen und zarten Gardinen bestückten Schlafzimmers von Lina Loos befriedigt Stiegers konzeptuelle übertragung unseren «Voyeuerismus» nicht. Wir können uns zwar eine Vorstellung, aber eben kein Bild vom Rückzugsort der Künstlerin machen – geschweige denn davon auf Stieger selbst Rückschlüsse ziehen. Dabei verschwimmt nicht nur die Grenze zwischen privat und öffentlich, Erholungs- und Arbeitsort, sondern auch zwischen persönlich und standardisiert.

Als geometrische «shaped canvas» tritt Treats Infinity (What is love?), (2023) in Erscheinung. Gefundener Spitzenstoff ersetzt die klassische Leinwand über einem kleinformatigen, dreieckigen Keilrahmen. Mit leiser Ironie kommentiert das an Dessous erinnernde, ornamental-florale Gewebe den abstrakt-minimalistischen Malereidiskurs des 20. Jahrhunderts zwischen geschlechtlich konnotierter und esoterischer New Age-Symbolik. Wenn Stieger jeweils zwei Rahmen mit weiss-gewebten, unbefleckten Baumwollstoffen bespannt, ruft sie mit ihrer über die Wände des Ausstellungsraumes verteilten Serie White Linen (Streamlined for Dispatch), (2023) augenzwinkernd Erinnerungen an Robert Rymans monochrom-weisse Malerei oder die subtil konzeptuellen Arbeiten von Agnes Martin auf. Anders als Blinky Palermos «Rothkos aus dem Textilkaufhaus» – der Düsseldorfer Künstler verwendete Ende der 1960er-Jahre handelsübliche Stoffe, um sie mit Industriefarben zu bemalen – bleiben die hier verwendeten Zweier-Sets von Kissenbezügen unbehandelt. Zugleich transportieren sie uns durch die Figur der Zwei in die Intimität der Bettstatt. Diese taucht wiederum an anderer Stelle als Fade to Black (2023) in Form eines dysfunktional angebrachten, ausgedienten Bettrahmens als Ready-Made bar jeglicher Sexualisierung auf.

Über die «politische Ökonomie der Intimität» bemerkt die Soziologin Emma Dowling, dass dem romantischen Ideal der Liebe historisch gesehen der häusliche Vertrag zwischen zwei heterosexuellen Partner:innen zugrunde lag. Stiegers Reflexion bleibt im Unterschied dazu nicht darauf fixiert. Dass Paarbeziehungen ein romantisches Ideal ins Bild setzen mit dem uns schliesslich Haushaltdekorationen wie Wechselrahmen angepriesen werden, macht derweil die Arbeit Untitled (Because you saw me when I was invisible), (2023) gewitzt bewusst.

Die amerikanische Aktivistin bell hooks beschreibt treffend, wie die Vorstellung von Liebe als Romanze Rollenbilder vorgibt und dabei dem Empfinden von Liebe im Weg steht: «When romance is depicted as a project, or so the mass media, especially movies, would have us believe, women are the architects and planners. Everyone likes to imagine that women are romantics, sentimental about love, that men follow where women lead. Even in non-heterosexual relationships, the paradigms of leader and follower often prevail, with one person assuming the role deemed feminine and another the designated masculine role». Wenn hooks von Massenmedien und Filmen spricht, können wir auch an Märchen und populäre Erzählungen denken. Bereits im Kindesalter verzahnen sie Rollen- und Beziehungsbilder mit der romantischen Liebe. Ihre Aufarbeitung in Walt Disney Filmen liefert neben bunten Bildfolgen auch eine passende Tonspur. Der Soundtrack zur disneyfizierten Suche nach «Prince Charming» steht denn auch am Ausgangspunkt der aus dem Nebenraum tönenden Soundinstallation Someday I’ll be Part of your World, (2023). Hier verzerrt sich der Klang allerdings in unheimlichen Dissonanzen zur Kakofonie oder zur schwerfälligen Klavier- übung. Ob sich hinter einer mit dem gravierten Schild NEW RIVER INC., (2023) designierten Tür tatsächlich eine Korporation verbirgt, was und wie diese produziert, bleibt dabei offen.

Über einen zur permanenten Infrastruktur des Ausstellungsraumes gehörigen Radiator achtlos wie zum Trocknen hingeworfen, finden sich in DJ, (2023) Trainerhose und Shirt mit Label-Aufdrucken, darunter ein gebrauchtes Paar Socken. Die Beiläufigkeit der Installation setzt hier soziale Abgrenzung über codierte Kleidung mit deren Uniformität in Eins. Die Künstlerin verkompliziert schliesslich die Frage, wer oder was am Ausgangspunkt einer Projektion steht. Welcher Eindruck und Abdruck tritt an die Leerstelle, wenn das Gegenüber verschwindet? Wie re-konstituiert sich das Subjekt? Macht es sich selbst zum Mass aller Dinge? Die idealisierte Zweierbeziehung entspricht ebenso wenig wie der neoliberale Mythos des freien, autonomen Individuums der realen Interdependenz sozialer Beziehungen. Erlebtes verarbeiten wir nicht nur mit und für uns allein, sondern durch und mit anderen. In ihrer Ausstellung fördert Valentina Stieger anhand von Objekt-Installationen und Silhouetten die vielschichtigen Verstrickungen zwischen Körper, Wohnraum und (romantischer) Projektion in unserer Gesellschaft zutage. Mehr vielleicht als die Ökonomie der Intimität selbst, zeichnen sich darin Alltags-, Wunsch- und Nachbilder ab; Und wie romantische Erzählungen diese verwertbar machen.

Curated by Oz Oderbolz
Text by Gabrielle Schaad

_Saaltext.pdf
flyer_ValentinaStieger_I'mYourSilhouette.pdf

Exhibition view, I'M YOUR SILHOUETTE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2023

Valentina Stieger

DJ,

2023

T-Shirt, Trainerhose, Socken

Valentina Stieger

Treats Infinity (What is love?),

2023

Textil, Keilrahmen, 20 x 17 cm

Valentina Stieger

Treats Infinity (What is love?),

2023

Textil, Keilrahmen, 20 x 17 cm

Valentina Stieger

Fade to Black,

2023

Bettgestell, Metall, lackiert, 200 x 160 cm

Valentina Stieger

NewRiverInc.

2023

Schild, Gravur, 2.5 x 10 cm

←

BRING YOUR MOST HATED ARTWORK

11.05.2023 – 25.05.2023

FlyerOpenCall2023.pdf

Finissage and GRAND AUCTION with Esther Eppstein

Toxi space, Zürich, 2023

←

LET THE WHOLE GODDAMN THING SHORT-CIRCUIT

-

Thalia Bassim, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Corentin Darré, FAFSWAG, Su Yang, Lucas LaRochelle, 4FSB

16.03.2023 – 25.04.2023

How does digitality affect queer art? Raising this question, the group show ‘Let the Whole Goddamn Thing Short-Circuit’ features works of queer artists who use digital tools and appropriate the aesthetics of the virtual world. Beyond highlighting the manifold forms of their plastic, digital, or hybrid pieces, this exhibition aims at finding possible thematic axes that lie at the heart of their creation. In fact, three distinct aspects that have shaped queer art history stand out as constitutive elements of the topics they reflect on; memory/ commemoration, stereotypes/clichés and the relationship to the body.

Initially, cyberspace was thought to offer a utopian field of endless possibilities, brandishing an emancipatory, liberal and horizontality-promising potential. These glorious perspectives now seem ridiculously far off from the reality we are experiencing. Not only are tech-giants gradually monopolising online-platforms, the World Wide Web also turned into a major stage for all kinds of violence that are boosted by the algorithmically generated echo chambers and filter bubbles. Cyber-bullying and hate speech have become a tragically common phenomenon, as they have systematically and efficiently benefitted from user-anonymity for years. Moreover, geolocating apps have made LGBTQIA+ easy targets for aggressors resulting in physical assault, as well as arrest in some states.

Lucas LaRochelle appropriates these very technological tools and functions, creating the interactive site called queeringthemap, through which queer experience of love, as well as traumas can be archived geographically. With an artificial intelligence that they endearingly call the QT.bot, working with Street View and text-data from the user’s pins on that map, LaRochelle created a fun and touching video-piece: an algorithmically constructed tale of queer fiction. Archiving experience is what Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley bases their work on as well. Their video game centers Black Trans people’s bodies and underlines the violence they endure, the battles they have fought and the resilience that they have proven to have. Players interact with Black Trans people who have been systematically marginalised and erased from documented history The artist Su Yang on the other hand chooses a geologically inspired approach to materialise the strata of his queer existence, the virtual part of which is especially doomed to stay hidden and invisible in his native China.

As the World Wide Web, through online forums, dating apps and video games has become a platform for LGBTQIA+-phobic stereotypes to flourish, transphobic and racist hate speech has also seen itself commonly spread inside some parts of the queer communities. Appropriating stereotypes to point at the problem they represent is a way for artist to fight against the global spread of violence and is part of many of the works presented here. In his work, 4FSB crosses post-internet-era references with archetypical elements from queer culture creating fascinating and ruthlessly grotesque photomontages highlighting the aesthetics of the deep meanders of the Web.

The era of digitality we are living in has resulted in users all over the world forming new relationships with their bodies, as the idea of a virtual self has emerged. Digital worlds like ‘Second Life’ made it possible for the generation of that time to shape their body as they wished, albeit a virtual one. Being able to create an avatar that is isolated from material reality is a form of agency that raises some questions. Does digitality generate increasing isolation of individuals or does it do the exact opposite and create new virtual community spaces? Does physicality even stand in opposition to virtuality or can they merge? Furthermore, would the fusion of both worlds - the material and the digital one - mean that we are imagining new forms of existing?

Thalia Bassim’s illusion-infused video-work sketches their personal quest of defining their hybrid presence in a physically and virtually shaped existence. Cibelle Cavalli Bastos’ approach on the other hand is very much questioning the medium itself and creating pieces that blur the lines between traditional art forms, blending virtual and physical components, thus inducing a reflection on gender and the broad spectrum of identities that should be explored. Breaking the seal separating the physical world from virtuality is what Corentin Darré does by making elements from his animations break into the exhibition space. His medieval-themed work addresses topics around queer love, sexuality and violence, with sculptural requisites of his virtual mythology at hand.

FAFSWAG offer an extensive confrontation with stereotypes and clichés, a spectacular mise- en-scène of bodies as well as a documentary collection of recorded queer experience. The art collective put forward an interactive video-installation, savvily demonstrating how the three thematic axes discussed in this exhibition are intertwined and form a common cause.

The artists honoured in this group show thus demonstrate how recurring topics of queer art history are being reflected on and reinterpreted in the age of digitality. Their works are the result of widely different led research, proposing ever so different kinds of reflexion and consequently contributing to contemporary queer history writing.

“It’s time for new mechanics
Let’s mutate please
Bye, binary! Buffer forever

Usurp the body. Become your avatar. Be the glitch.
Let the whole goddamn thing short-circuit.“

Legacy Russel, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, 2020

Wie wirkt sich das Digitale auf queere Kunst aus?
Von dieser Frage ausgehend präsentiert die Ausstellung „Let the Whole Goddamn Thing Short-Circuit“ Werke queerer Künstler*innen, die mit digitalen Mitteln arbeiten und sich der Ästhetik virtueller Universen bedienen. Über die Vielfalt der Formen ihrer plastischen, digitalen, oder hybrid-geschaffenen Werke hinaus, soll hier auf mögliche thematische Achsen, die den Arbeiten zugrunde liegen, hingewiesen werden. In ihnen zeichnen sich nämlich drei, der queeren Kunstgeschichte altbekannte Aspekte heraus: Erinnerung und Gedenken, Stereotypen und Klischees, und die Beziehung zum Körper.

Ursprünglich war der Cyberspace als utopisches Feld der unendlichen Möglichkeiten gedacht. Er versprach Emanzipation, Freiheit und Horizontalität. Heute scheinen diese Perspektiven jedoch weit entfernt von der Realität. Neben der Monopolisierung zahlreicher Plattformen durch Tech-Giganten ist das World Wide Web auch zum Schauplatz vielfältiger Formen von Gewalt geworden, die durch algorithmisch generierte Echokammern und Filterblasen gefördert wird. Cyber-Mobbing und hassschürende Parolen, denen systematisch und effizient durch die Anonymität der Nutzer*innen der Weg freigemacht wird, gehören leider der Normalität an. Geolokalisierungstools mancher Applikationen ermöglichen im äussersten Fall physische gewaltsame Angriffe auf LGBTQIA+-Personen, oder deren Festnahme in manchen Staaten.

Lucas LaRochelle eignet sich genau diese Tools an und hat die interaktive Seite queeringthemap kreiert, auf der queere Erfahrungen der Liebe, aber auch Traumata geographisch archiviert werden können. Mithilfe einer künstlichen Intelligenz, dem QT.bot schaffte LaRochelle im Video Sitting with you here in the future anhand von Street-View- und Text-Daten dieser Erzählungen ein amüsant-rührendes Werk queerer Fiktion. Der Aspekt der Archivierung der Erfahrungen erscheint auch im Werk von Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. Ihr Videospiel stellt die extreme Gewalt, die schwarze Trans-Menschen erfahren ins Zentrum, und ehrt deren Kampf und Resilienz. Spieler*innen interagieren dabei mit schwarzen Trans-Menschen, die in der Gesellschaft systematisch ausgegrenzt werden, und in der Geschichtsschreibung ausgelassen wurden. Der chinesische Künstler Su Yang materialisiert in seinen Skulpturen wiederum auf steinhart physische Weise seine queere Existenz, die in seinem Heimatland zur Unsichtbarkeit verdammt ist.

Im Web, auf Dating-Applikationen, sowie in Videospielen werden teilweise bestimmte LGBTQIA+-feindliche Stereotypen wiederbelebt, verbreitet wenn nicht sogar verstärkt. Dies äussert sich in ständig wieder auftretenden homo- und transphoben, sowie rassistischen Klischees, die auch innerhalb der Communitys selbst aufzufinden sind. In seinen faszinierenden und teils grotesken Fotomontagen kreuzt 4FSB visuelle Archetypen der Queer-Kultur mit mit Bildelementen der Post-Internet-Ära, die er in den Mäandern des Webs sammelt.

Mit dem digitalen Zeitalter geht zudem einher, dass allerseits von User*innen neuartige Beziehungen geschaffen werden zwischen ihrem physischen und ihrem virtuellen Körper. Digitale Universen wie Second Life haben es einer ganzen Generation ermöglicht, einen neuen, wenn auch virtuellen Körper nach ihrem Belieben zu erschaffen. Das Kreieren eines, von der materiellen Realität isolierten Avatar wirft eine Reihe von Fragen auf. Trägt das Digitale zur Isolation der Individuen bei, oder entstehen dabei neue, virtuelle Community- Spaces? Stehen das Physische und das Virtuelle im Widerspruch zueinander, oder können sie miteinander fusionieren? Würde die Verschmelzung beider Welten, der materiellen und der digitalen, bedeuten, dass wir eine neue Form des Daseins definieren können?

So skizziert das Werk von Thalia Bassim mittels eines Spiels von Projektionen und Illusionen eine persönliche Auseinandersetzung mit der hybriden, physisch-virtuellen Existenz und Präsenz. Cibelle Cavalli Bastos hingegen schlägt eine Kreuzung verschiedener traditioneller und digitaler Kunstmedien vor und ahmt dabei eine Form von Verwirrung nach, welche manche Leute bei Gender-Fragen vor den Kopf stossen. In ähnlicher Weise bricht das virtuelle Universum von Corentin Darré in die Welt des Physischen ein. Er schöpft aus seinen Animationen, in denen Avatare zu mittelalterlich anmutenden Protagonist*innen moderner Legenden über queere Liebe, Sexualität und Gewalt werden, und schafft plastische Requisiten seiner virtuellen Mythologie.

In einer umfangreichen Auseinandersetzung um Stereotypen und Klischees, einer spektakulären Inszenierung der Körper und einer dokumentarischen Sammlung von Schilderungen ihrer queeren Existenzen sieht man mit der interaktiven Video-Installation der Künstler*innen FAFSWAG vielleicht am anschaulichsten, dass die drei leitenden Themen- Felder in einem Kunstwerk eingebunden werden können.

Auf diese Weise zeigen die in dieser Ausstellung vorgestellten Künstler*innen auf, wie wiederkehrende Sujets der queeren Kunstgeschichte im Zeitalter des Digitalen neu aufgegriffen und interpretiert werden können und müssen. Ihre Werke sind das Ergebnis sehr unterschiedlich geführter Recherchen, die ebenso vielfältige Reflexionen vorschlagen und ungemein zur zeitgenössischen, queeren Geschichtsschreibung beitragen.

“It’s time for new mechanics
Let’s mutate please
Bye, binary! Buffer forever

Usurp the body. Become your avatar. Be the glitch.
Let the whole goddamn thing short-circuit.“

Legacy Russel, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, 2020

Curated by Quentin Emery

text_en.pdf
text_de.pdf
Let the whole damn thing.Flyer.pdf

2022

←

REVIVED CRUSH

Maya Hottarek, Orson Egloff, Emma Pidré, Gaspard Emma Hers -

01.12.2022 – 22.12.2022

it’s dripping, you said.
while i felt the warmth cringing in.
while i float away between the edges.
finding myself in between what i couldn’t tell you.
not because i didn’t want to because the language of words didn’t give me the right ones.
an empty frame but still erupting lava.
instead the lips formed, do you know that we would burn at the temperature clay hardens? do you know we would be dust in minutes when not seconds? disapear when one stays forever?

in der sprache, die mir entwischt, möchte ich dich umschliessen. dich einfangen, dich umrunden. umzingeln – festhalten für immer und ewig. entwischt steht dazwischen das verlangen, das dich sucht um aufzuleben, was zu verschwinden droht. ewige flammen die lodern.

metall melts at temperatures my body would burn into dust in minutes when not seconds, i said to you.
a heat so hot my heart feels in the longing for you. it drops. it melts. flows. and you said, it’s dripping again.

crush
crush and
crushes for it, when we
crush in it.
forms willing to form what we‘re longing. hearts burn up while clay becomes its shape. it hardens as it’s trying to hold what’s only felt in seconds.

für immer und ewig dem ewigen entgegen.
kanten umzingelnd öffnet sich eine landschaft. sie verbinden sich, wo ich mich in eine vergangene ferne wiege. für das immer suchend, dir nach.
knirscht das laub unter meinen füssen, der wind flüstert und die sonnen- strahlen warm auf meiner haut die kälte lügen. ich schwinde zwischen dem hier dahin, verblasst in dem damals das mich in dem verlangen der ewigkeit halten will. doch der fluss links neben mir fliesst.

it was dripping, you said.
(while i felt the cold cringing in.)
now you push it. squeeze it through my skin in my flesh. pointy edges. hard and cold.
yes, you smile, not that smile when our fluids exchanged. different. schämisch oder schelmisch. hidden in the frame or hold by it.
feel the coldness, icy. while some droplets fly away.

ich wirble durch die strömung. erfrischt, kleines kitzeln mich erweckt. nähre ich das wasser mit der sehnsucht die mich durchfliesst? knirscht das feuer im wald, wo wasser in dampf verschwindet. mein herz aufflammt, pocht. immer wieder, immer wieder, immer wieder. wartest du auf mich?

clay hardens while my heart would burn as it burns for you in search to speak to find what once was (or never?).

für immer in ewigem. in fires. in rivers, in clouds, in wood, in metall, in clay, in wait, i’m thirsty so lets have a lick at the melting edge. clinging into the freshness.
small hats kept forever.
yes, you smile but i don’t see it. lost in ways opening a landscape i’m lon- ging for too long.
dust liquefied and i’m oscillating between what your smile shows and showed.
let me have a sip by the fountain. transparent young blood. drop. drop. drops. and flows. drown in history by what so called nature.

Curated by Nemo Bleuer
Text by Margaretha Jüngling

e_floorplan_crush2222.pdf
flyer_mockup copy copy.jpg

Exhibition view, REVIVED CRUSH

Toxi space, Zürich, 2022

Orson Egloff

Lover's Lament / Fleshscape III,

2022

acrylics, oil on canvas, 160 x 160 cm

Orson Egloff

Behind the Veil of Mist,

2022

oil on canvas, 160 x 160 cm

Orson Egloff

A Place for Lost Songs,

2022

oil on canvas, 160 x 160 cm

Maya Hottarek

5G,

2019

ceramic, glaze, articifial hair, 45 x 30 x 4 cm

Gaspard Emma Hers

Untitled,

2022

graphite on paper, wood, 20 x 25 cm

Emma Pidré

For an instant your body and mine got into a dance with the forces
of two galaxies colliding,

2022

PLA, zink paint, graphite paint, copper electroplate, varnish, steel chain,
dimension variable

Maya Hottarek

Heavy Drip,

2021

glazed ceramic, water pump, water, beewax, 40 x 45 x 30 cm

Maya Hottarek

Gangnam Style,

2019

ceramic, glaze, 30 x 45 x 4 cm

Exhibition view, REVIVED CRUSH

Toxi space, Zürich, 2022

Emma Pidré

For an instant your body and mine got into a dance with the forces
of two galaxies colliding,

2022

PLA, zink paint, graphite paint, copper electroplate, varnish, steel chain,
dimension variable

Exhibition view, REVIVED CRUSH

Toxi space, Zürich, 2022

Maya Hottarek

Sextoy for alien,

2019

ceramic, sand, gelatine, meister proper, dimension variable

Exhibition view, REVIVED CRUSH

Toxi space, Zürich, 2022

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TANGIBLE DREAMING

Nadia Hauri & Una Szeemann -

04.11.2022 – 24.11.2022

‘A very sad, gray valley. Stony slopes. Cement roads below, built on the slope, like the greenhouses of a plant nursery. From them, like flowers, sprout dried skeletal hands.’¹
– Meret Oppenheim, Dec. 15, 1935
What remains of a dream? Sometimes it’s only moments of memory, so-called dream fragments, that vaguely recall what has been dreamt, othertimes it’s rather clear images that will be remembered for long. Instead of keeping a diary, the Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913 – 1985) journaled her dreams throughout the course of her life. The fragments of the night, which she meticulously noted down in a little book, each with their belonging dates, often seem both grotesque and disruptive. At times Meret Oppenheim turned these fragments of dreams and memories into works of art.

Prior to the exhibition, Nadia Hauri and Una Szeemann together visited ‘Casa Costanza’, the Oppenheim familys residence, which was redesigned by the artist herself. There, Hauri and Szeemann came across a variety of traces from the artist, may it be in the different rooms, in the furniture, in notes or photographs. These impressions stuck in their minds ever since.

In the duo exhibition ‘Tangible Dreaming’, Una Szeemann and Nadia Hauri explore the phenomenon of dreaming through a combined perspective. Exhibited together for the first time, the two artists are primarily concerned with exploring the complex relationship of the body and mind during the process of dreaming. In the work of both artists, dreams appear as fragmentary, processual, yet in their material form they become tangible as works of art, and through their interplay in space, their reciprocity opens up new references to the theme.

Nadia Hauri’s work examines primarily the psychological and physical experiences of the dreaming body – with the process of remembering and sensing. Thereby, the chosen materials and forms play an essential role. In Eye movements transitioning in soft radiance (2022), a crystal stick made of lavender quartz is being attributed with a calming and relaxing effect. Contrasting with this are the sculpture’s tapered ends, which point into three different directions, inviting the viewer to look around. Here, Hauri draws analogies to the state of REM (rapid eye movement), a phase of sleep in which the eyes move rapidly while the body appears to be at rest. A similar relation emerges with the sculpture Echo (2022), suggesting the idea of a bowl. A hypnotic swaying might come to mind, capable of evoking a dreamy state. In Neighboring states (2022), silver stains run through three black concrete panels, referencing the moments when states begin to intermingle, reality merging into dreams, or dreams into reality.

The unique textures of the three panels are the result of a physical reaction during the casting process, in which the pigment-colored concrete reacts with the liquid tin. Tin is also used in Hold it to your ear and bend it back and forth (2022). The work resembles a stuck out tongue, which at first glance appears both grotesque and provocative. If pure tin is squashed or bent when being worked, the so-called ‘tin scream’ occurs, a sound that refers to the limits of the material. How much can it withstand before it breaks? At the same time, Hauri thus shows the limits of the psyche’s ability to process during sleep and demystifies dreaming as a healing process, for example in the case of recurring individual traumas.

Una Szeemann is primarily concerned with the seeming separation of body and mind during dreaming, which she explores through folkloric fertility rites and symbolisms. For her leather sculpture Inapt to move, so out they went (2022), Szeemann drew inspiration from the legends surrounding the northern Italian benandanti (‘good walkers’), who were born with an intact membrane and were therefore attributed with supernatural powers and good fortune.² As defenders of the fertility of the fields, in the 16th and 17th centuries they would step out of their bodies during sleep to fight against evil witches and demons (malandanti) to ensure good harvests for the coming season. Szeemann gives form to this transitional moment and makes it tangible by covering copper struts, with a skin of leather. She thereby creates a being that is simultaneously present and absent, and refers to the ambivalence of body and mind whilst dreaming. Organic materials such as leather and hair play a recurring role in Szeemann’s work, questioning dualities of vitality and death, reality and dream. This is also the central theme of E sono cento (2021), an installation of three long blond horse tails hanging from the ceiling. These heads without bodies continue the narrative of the nocturnal excursions of the benandanti. For the horsehair, now dead matter, evokes in its new form memories of its sensory effect on living bodies. The four split open figs, preserved for eternity only by its bronze casting, stand in reference to the benandanti for a symbol of fertility and its significance for the harvest. Meanwhile, the reminiscence of the formerly red flesh, brought to light by the artist herself when breaking the ripe fruit, provokes an erotic evocation - which, in the context of dreaming, unites disgust and shame, but also lust.

So, what will remain of a dream? In Hauri and Szeemann’s work, it is above all the ambivalence of the dreaming body that they make tangible through their sculptures.

„Ein sehr trauriges, graues Tal. Steinige Abhänge. Unten Zementstrassen, am Hang angelegt, wie die Treibhäuser einer Gärtnerei. Daraus spriessen wie Blumen ausgetrocknete Skeletthände.“¹
- Meret Oppenheim, 15. Dez. 1935
Was bleibt übrig von einem Traum? Manchmal sind es Momente der Erinnerung, sogenannte Traumfragmente, die nach dem Aufwachen vage an das Geträumte erinnern, aber auch klare Bilder, die noch lange im Sinn bleiben. Statt Tagebuch zu führen protokollierte die Schweizer Künstlerin Meret Oppenheim (1913 – 1985) zeitlebens ihre Träume. Fragmente der Nacht, die sie akribisch mit Daten versehen in ein Büchlein notierte und die manchmal sowohl grotesk wie auch verstörend anmuten. Mehrmals liess sie sich von diesen Traumfetzen und Erinnerungen zu Werken inspirieren.

Im Vorfeld der Ausstellung besuchten Nadia Hauri und Una Szeemann zusammen die „Casa Costanza“, den von Oppenheim gestalteten Familiensitz im Tessin. Dort fanden sie Spuren der Künstlerin in allen Räumen, in Möbeln, Notizen und Fotografien, die sie seither nicht mehr loslassen.

In der Zweierausstellung „Tangible Dreaming“ widmen sich Una Szeemann und Nadia Hauri dem Thema des Träumens aus einer gemeinsamen Perspektive. Erstmals zusammen zu sehen, geht es den beiden Künstlerinnen vor allem darum, die komplexe Beziehung des Körpers und Geistes während dem Prozess des Träumens zu erforschen. Bei beiden Künstlerinnen erscheinen Träume als fragmentarisch, prozesshaft, werden jedoch in ihrer materiellen Form als Kunstwerk greifbar und eröffnen durch ihr Zusammenspiel im Raum in ihrer Wechselseitigkeit neue Bezüge auf das Thema.

Nadia Hauri setzt sich in ihren Werken vor allem mit den psychischen und physischen Erfahrungen des träumenden Körpers auseinander – mit dem Prozess des Erinnerns und Empfindens. Dabei spielt immer wieder die Wirkung der gewählten Materialien und Formen eine wichtige Rolle. Eye movements transitioning in soft radiance (2022), einem aus Lavendelquarz gefertigten Kristallstab, wird zum Beispiel eine beruhigende und entspannende Wirkung zugeschrieben. Im Kontrast dazu stehen die spitz zulaufenden Enden der Skulptur, die in drei verschiedenen Richtungen in den Raum weisen und zum Umhersehen auffordern. Hauri zieht hier Analogien zum Zustand des REM (Rapid-Eye-Movements), einer Phase des Schlafes, in welchem die Augen sich schnell bewegen, während der Körper scheinbar ruht.

Ähnlich verhält es sich bei der aus Beton gegossenen Skulptur Echo (2022), die an eine Schale erinnert. Dabei wird ein hypnotisches Schwingen imaginiert, das einen träumerischen Zustand hervorzurufen vermag. In Neighboring states (2022) durchziehen silberne Einschüsse aus Zinn drei tiefschwarz eingefärbten Betonplatten und verweisen auf die Momente, in welchen die Zustände beginnen sich zu vermischen, die Realität in den Traum übergeht, oder der Traum in die Realität. Die einzigartigen Maserungen der drei Platten sind auf eine physikalischen Reaktion während des Gussprozesses zurückzuführen, bei welcher der pigmentgefärbte Beton mit dem flüssigen Zinn reagiert. Auch in Hold it to your ear and bend it back and forth (2022) kommt Zinn zum Einsatz. Die Arbeit erinnert an eine herausgestreckte Zunge, die im ersten Augenblick sowohl grotesk wie provokant wirkt. Wird purer Zinn bei der Bearbeitung gequetscht oder gebogen, kommt es zum sogenannten „Zinn-Schrei“, ein Geräusch das auf die Grenzen des Materials verweist. Wie viel hält es aus, bevor es bricht? Gleichzeitig zeigt Hauri damit die Grenzen der Verarbeitungsfähigkeit der Psyche während des Schlafens auf und entzaubert das Träumen als heilenden Prozess, zum Beispiel bei wiederkehrenden individuellen Traumata.

Una Szeemann beschäftigt sich vor allem mit der scheinbaren Trennung von Körper und Geist während des Träumens, die sie anhand von folkloristischen Fruchtbarkeitsriten und -symbolen untersucht. Für ihre Lederskulptur Inapt to move, so out they went (2022), liess sich Szeemann von den Erzählungen um die norditalienischen benandanti („Gute Wander:innen”) inspirieren, die mit einer intakten Fruchtblase geboren und daher übersinnliche Kräfte und Glück zugeschrieben wurden.² Als Verteidiger:innen der Fruchtbarkeit der Felder traten sie im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert im Schlaf aus ihrem Körper heraus, um gegen bösartige Hexen und Dämonen (malandanti) zu kämpfen und so für die kommende Saison gute Ernten zu sichern. Szeemann verleiht diesem transitorischen Moment eine Form und macht ihn greifbar, indem sie Kupferstreben mit einer Haut aus Leder bedeckt. Sie erschafft dadurch ein Wesen, das gleichzeitig an-, aber auch abwesend ist und verweist auf die Ambivalenz von Körper und Geist beim Träumen. Organische Materialien wie Leder und Haar spielen in Szeemanns Werk eine wiederkehrende Rolle und stellen Dualitäten von Lebendigkeit und Tot sowie Realität und Traum in Frage. Zum Thema wird das auch in E sono cento (2021), einer Installation aus drei langen blonden Pferdeschweifen, die von der Decke herabhängen. Diese Köpfe ohne Körper spinnen die Erzählung der nächtlichen Ausflüge der benandanti weiter. Denn das Rosshaar, mittlerweile tote Materie, evoziert in seiner neuen Form Erinnerungen an seine sensorische Wirkung bei lebendigen Körpern. Die vier aufgestülpten Feigen, die nur durch ihren Bronzeabguss für die Ewigkeit haltbar gemacht wurden, stehen in Anlehnung an die benandanti für ein Symbol der Fruchtbarkeit und deren Bedeutung für die Ernte. Gleichzeitig ruft die Erinnerung an das ehemals rote Fleisch, das beim Brechen der reifen Früchte von der Künstlerin selbst zum Vorschein gebracht wurde, eine erotische Evokation hervor – die im Kontext des Träumens Ekel, Scham, aber auch Lust verbindet.

Was bleibt also übrig von einem Traum? Bei Hauri und Szeemann ist es vor allem die Ambivalenz des träumenden Körpers, die sie durch ihre Skulpturen greifbar machen.

Auszug aus Meret Oppenheim, Träume, Aufzeichnungen, 1928-1985, Hrsg. von Christiane Meyer-Thoss, Berlin 2010, S. 19.

Vgl. hierzu: Carlo Ginzburg, I benandanti. Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento, Turin 1966.

Curated by Nemo Bleuer
Text by Kristin Brüggemann

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Exhibition view, TANGIBLE DREAMING

Toxi space, Zürich, 2022

Exhibition view, TANGIBLE DREAMING

Toxi space, Zürich, 2022

Exhibition view, TANGIBLE DREAMING

Toxi space, Zürich, 2022

Una Szeemann

Le Benandanti (Diana, Rossa, Anna, Lucina),

2022

bronze, 8 x 8 x 8 cm each

Una Szeemann

Inapt to move, so out they went,

2022

copper, leather, polyurethane, polyamid, 427 x 197 x 85 cm

Nadia Hauri

Eye movements transitioning in soft radiance,

2022

steel, resin, lavender quartz, tin, 233 x 21 x 6 cm

Exhibition view, TANGIBLE DREAMING

Toxi space, Zürich, 2022

Nadia Hauri

Echo,

2022

concrete, 80 x 48 x 4 cm

Nadia Hauri

Neighboring states,

2022

concrete, tin, 91 x 11 x 3.5 cm

Una Szeemann

E sono cento,

2021

horse hair, stainless steel, 140 x 45cm, dimensions variable

Nadia Hauri

Eye movements transitioning in soft radiance,

2022

detail, steel, resin, lavender quartz, tin, 233 x 21 x 6 cm

Nadia Hauri

Hold it to your ear and bend it back and forth,

2022

tin, steel, 6 x 6 x 4 cm

Una Szeemann

Le Benandanti (Diana, Rossa, Anna, Lucina),

2022

bronze, 8 x 8 x 8 cm each

Nadia Hauri

Eye movements transitioning in soft radiance,

2022

steel, resin, lavender quartz, tin, 233 x 21 x 6 cm

Exhibition view, TANGIBLE DREAMING

Toxi space, Zürich, 2022

Una Szeemann

Le Benandanti (Diana, Rossa, Anna, Lucina),

2022

detail, bronze, 8 x 8 x 8 cm each

Nadia Hauri

Neighboring states,

2022

concrete, tin, 91 x 11 x 3.5 cm

Una Szeemann

Inapt to move, so out they went,

2022

copper, leather, polyurethane, polyamid, 427 x 197 x 85 cm

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CROSS PLAY: EXPANSION III

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Thilda Bourqui, Fabiola Nongla Siegfried, GERXHALITA, Yadin Bernauer, Emma Bertuchoz, Giuliana Gjorgjevski, XV06-Y

14.10.2022 – 29.10.2022

Embracet^[1]

Performance
30min
2021/22

«Embracet» is a performance that seeks stability in great heights. On our feet: sharp and dangerous shoes. As in de-skilling, we create impracticality which oblige us to find new ways of moving. Merging into each other, going through evolutions. And in the end, what does it take to move along?
The performance collective from Zurich / Jura / Lucerne consisting of Yadin Akira Bernauer (all pron), Emma Bertuchoz (she/her), Giuliana Gjorgjevski (she/her). They explore aspects of collaboration, their individual positions as well as the relationships to each other. With body, text and sound they work on performances, video works and installations, which are influenced by internet and pop cultural elements. A tension between questions of authorship, claims to space (material/immaterial) and the exploration of intimacy and privacy are core themes of their work.

«embracet» winter/fall edition
seasons change. originally in «embracet» the performers were set into soil, beneathe loving trees. It was always performed outside. Through time and different locations site specific notions change. «Embracet» at Toxi is a different piece as it was. The summer was with love to the soil-ground, in the wilds. now they find themselves within neonlights and vehicle garbage. dystopian furry fairy cosplay zootopia embracet. still figuring out the same struggles of gravital attraction.

Credits:
Performers: Emma Bertuchoz, Giuliana Gjorgjevski und Yadin
Choreography and Concept: Emma Bertuchoz
*in co:work with Giuliana Gjorgjevski and Yadin

Costumes: Sven Gex and Emma Bertuchoz
“impossible shoe” concept and design: Emma Bertuchoz

untitled^[2]

Performance
30min
2022

«My engine is roaring for your smile, therefore unknown drives push me further the off grid road where I may find the last sip of seminal fossil flesh»

The piece follows performers GERXHALITA, Fabiola Siegfried & Thilda Bourqui, exploring the relations between bodies, machines and the engine mechanisms that drives it. The «work in progress» performance tells the story of an immergent disaster and the aftermath of it.
The performance is underlined by a sound piece from XV06-Y with colla- boration from Blood of Aza.

Credits:
Performers: GERXHALITA, Fabiola Siegfried, Thilda Bourqui
Choreography, Concept, Costumes: GERXHALITA, Fabiola Siegfried, Thilda Bourqui
Sound: XV06-Y, Blood of Aza

Soundpiece/Liveset^[3]

Performance
8min
2022

Calling upon sentient relics, transmitting sourceless prophecies, awakening ancient data.
XV06-Y is a multidisciplinary artist based in Zürich. Their practice engineers modes of radical participation between terrestrial entities and the outside, embracing tool organisms of post-industrial force and transfigurative sound design. Their goal is to give rise to convective helical turbulent motions through mutated sound and pave a way for impossible but dreamed of realities.

Credits:
Set-design/Installation: Oz Oderbolz

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VISION AND MISSION STATEMENT

Simon Risi -

15.09.2022 – 29.09.2022

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INVERNADERO

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Fernanda Laguna, Dafna Maimon & Sol Calero, Monica Heller, Biquini Wax, Luiz Roque, Valentín Demarco, Básica TV, Mauro Guzmán, Sofia Córdova, Wisrah Villefort, Radamés Juni Figueroa

15.07.2022 – 01.08.2022

Fernanda Laguna / Argentina^[1]

@fernanda_laguna55

Video Presentation N1
Single Channel Video
9.04 min
2015

In Video Presentation No1 artist Fernanda Laguna, speaking Spanglish, affirms: «I want to be an international artist» while giving a guided tour of a selection of her works to an unknown international curator. The presentations ironically externalize a critique of the visibility regimes established by the artistic circuits where artists from New York or London, due to their cultural hegemony and privileged geographical location, have more opportunities to become established in the world ́s artistic elite than others who produce their works in more peripheral places, such as Latin America. The handcrafted nature of the video is in line with the trash and precarious aesthetics to which Laguna has resorted since the beginning of her career to question, in her own way, the essence of the work of art with its reified attributes of beauty and originality and thus open the senses to experimentation and spontaneous expression.

Sol Calero & Dafna Maimon / Venezuela & Finland^[2]

@solcalero_ @dafnamaimon

Desde el Jardín
Single Channel HD-Video
28.25 min
2016

Desde el Jardín is a collaboration between Sol Calero and Dafna Maimon. Imitating the structure of telenovelas, Desde el Jardín recreates an opulent hacienda that evokes the illusion of luxury, wealth and glamour that this genre often represents. Working with cultural codes, Maimon and Calro underline the normalized social dynamics that are portrayed in telenovelas, such as gender roles, socioeconomic positionality and class aspiration. They use the basis of this discourse, developed in plots of greed, envy, infidelities, family drama and tragic twists, to create their own abstraction, taking extravagance to all levels of the assemblage.

Monica Heller / Argentina^[3]

@hellermoon

The Piccone Parlante
3D Animation video
12.56 min
2022

The Piccone Parlante is part of Heller’s actual presentation at the Argentinian Pavilion, 59th Biennale di Venezia — a video installation conformed by several 3D animated videos. The Piccone Parlante presents a soliloquio, a script made by the interaction between an AI web text generator and the artist›s inputs. The result is this insistent pigeon who talks non-stop and leaves no issue untouched in a paradoxical and absurd statement in which the humor, the abject, social satire and metaphysical spatiality come together. The characters created by Heller in each of the exhibited pieces come from a deeply personal, handcrafted matrix with which she addresses the symbolic world around her.

Biquini Wax EPS / México^[4]

@biquiniwax_tv

Sa La Na, A Yuum, Iasis/Laissez Faire-Laissez Passer.
Single Channel Video
10.48 min
2020

The video is part of Sa La Na, A Yuum, Iasis/Laissez Faire-Laissez Passer, a multimedia installation conceived as a parodic allegory of Mexico›s economic liberalization between 1986 and 1996. It consists of a pseudo-documentary video about the story of Keiko—the first superstar killer whale who became famous for playing the role of Willy in the eponymous movie. With means of a virtual mask designed on Snapchat, the video shows the orca conducting an interview with himself, vocalized in the language of cetaceans, narrating the neoliberal failure of Mexico, as well as his experience as a national icon while held in captivity in a Mexican amusement park during these key years in the country’s economic history.

Luiz Roque / Brazil^[5]

@luiz_roque

ZERO
Single Channel HD-Video
5.30 min
2019

In Luiz Roque’s short film ZERO we follow a dog moving alone onboard an aircraft that flies over a vast desert. The dog seems tranquil as if keeping up with its daily routine in an environment in which the human presence is completely absent. The disturbing image of the animal left adrift — perhaps the only remaining living being in existence — is interspersed with the shiny mirrored surface of high-tech skyscrapers emerging out of the sand, in what might have once been an oasis. The continuum is only interrupted by the word ZERO. In times in which emerging technology points to the overcoming of the very concept of the human, the contrast between the desert’s dust, the futuristic skyline, and the lone creature seems like a timely alert to the environmental and social consequences of much of the political and economic choices of the 20th century. The film suggests an inevitable return to a sort of ground zero of the species, whatever this might be. The inconclusiveness of its plot makes us wonder about extinction, whether it concerns either the disappearance of the human race itself or perhaps of the cultural construct that we call “human civilization.”

Valentin Demarco / Argentina^[6]

@valentindemarco

Cebame
Single Channel HD-Video
8.32 min
2019

Demarco’s video Cebame revisits the Argentinian daily ritual of drinking mate as a way to reflect on tradition, sexuality, and social conventions. The work belongs to a wider research the artist has been developing regarding the silversmiths of his hometown, attempting to update their traditional craftwork to today’s imagery. A collection of ornamented silver mate cups designed to work simultaneously as anal sextoys are the leading characters of the video that features a number of people in colloquial scenes sharing the popular infusion served directly from a subject’s rectum. In the video, the silver mates thus leave their patrimonial status to become part of everyday consumption; they are removed from their showcase and returned to the community. Using a humorous and at the same time naive tone, the video advocates for an unapologetic inclusion of sexual pleasure an practice into daily life while simultaneously subverting cultural folklore by affording this symbolic object a new bodily dimension. It ultimately questions established social norms and the shaping of traditions.

Básica TV / Uruguay^[7]

@basicatv

Hemorrhoids: The Movie
Single Channel HD-Video
42.32 min
2018

A perfect example of Basica TV’s playful appropriation of media formats, Hemorrhoids combines aesthetic tropes from documentaries, art films, reality television, commercials, and music videos, seamlessly, yet overwhelmingly, weaving a multi-layered, multi-channeled visual narrative. The majority of the footage comprises interviews with subjects — most of whom are shot from within their private bathrooms — including artists, activists, doctors, collectors, and a survivor of colon cancer, among other personalities. If through the 2010s, hip hop and videoclips centered the ass, in 2018 Hemorrhoids wonders why is the ass the furthest we have gone, re-activating one of Queer Studies legendary questions: Is the rectum a grave? Well, discussing hemorrhoids publicly for sure equals social death. Taking this taboo topic as a point of departure, Basica TV forces us to face our discomfort, while interrogating contemporary ideas on inhibition, privacy, corporeality, and sexuality.

Mauro Guzmán / Argentina^[8]

@mmmauroguzmannn

La guzmania y el amante de las hiedras hermafroditas
Single Channel Video
6.24 min
2014-2017

La Guzmania is a project that resorts to a chimeric iconography of exaggeration to embody a trash sensibility out of the aesthetic and political dimension of metamorphosis. It departs from research conducted in Spain and during which Guzmán discovered in a Chinese supermarket a hermaphroditic plant called Guzmania belonging to the family of Bromeliaceas — a kind of plant native to South America and the Antilles. After blooming during the summer Guzmanias die, yet not without allowing new seeds to sprout out of the dying mother-plant. In the video, Guzmán dresses up and personifies different varieties of Guzmanias in the form of eccentric and surreal drag muses in lush tropical settings of fruits, cloths, bags and stuff bought at the flea market.

Xuxa Santamaría (Sofia Cordova & Matthew Gonzalez Kirkland) Puerto Rico & USA.^[9]

@yagrumo_yal

BILLIONAIR RAINBOW
Mixtape & videos
2015

BILLIONAIR RAINBOW a 6 track mixtape by XUXA SANTAMARIA (Córdova's collaborative experimental music project with partner and musician, Matthew Gonzalez Kirkland) and takes as its concept our relationship to money: labor, debt, desire, power, revulsion, mixed-feelings at wanting it. Each song on the album features a video piece ranging from durational performance to appropriation. The mixtape was released as a limited edition cassette with original artwork.

Wisrah Villefort / Brazil^[10]

@wisrahvillefort

IMAGEM MILAGRE
Adhesive vinyl
2021

IMAGEM MILAGRE is an installation that proposes the approximation of the two words that make up the title — IMAGE MIRACLE in English. Each word is duplicated in the composition, written above in a serif font and below in an iconographic one in each section. The words emerge from studies on the concept of animal colonialism, especially considering the Catholic Church›s use of the symbolism of the non-human figure. The floral font, illegible, appears as a commentary on the precarious relationship between speech, reading, and writing, based on what philosopher Jacques Derrida discusses in Grammatology, a 1967 book. Despite the theoretical elaboration, by presenting two words of abstract definition, the work can also be seen as an open invitation to the potential audience to elaborate their own associations in the possible relations the work gives.

Radamés “Juni” Figueroa / Puerto Rico^[11]

@radamesjuni

Neverending Tropical Fountains
Alcohol, tropical fruits, water pump
2022

Radamés «Juni» Figueroa creates social environments intended to evoke the experience of living in a Caribbean tropical context. Never Ending Tropical Fountains is a series of ephemeral sculptures that the artist places in his openings and invites spectators to celebration and leisure.
Thanks to ChertLuedde, Herlitzka + Faria, Isla Flotante, Nora Fisch, Piedras Galeria, Proyectos Ultravioleta & Oz Oderbolz.

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HOWLING PAGES

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Marco Belfiore, Armen Eloyan, Nare Eloyan, Tatjana Gerhard, Davor Gromilovic ,Sande Kosz, Maria Pomiansky, Emil Rüesch Und Taro Tega

09.06.2022 – 01.07.2022

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PURGATORY

hongsue, Alyssa Berrez, Dara Maillard -

15.05.2022 – 02.06.2022

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S(K)INS

Manon Wertenbroek -

19.03.2022 – 27.04.2022

In English, the expression ‘to get under one’s skin’ carries a puzzling polyse- my. It can be said of something or someone that irritates – sometimes until obsession – and, at the same time, it can also refer to the fact of gaining a deeper understanding of something or, even, to manage to fill someone’s mind to the point of gaining control over them. In any case, it describes a feeling that is all at once visceral and overwhelming. This is most notable when, like in Cole Porter’s song, the expression is used in reference to someone one is not able to forget or ignore.¹ There, love and pain become intrinsically enmeshed, and the skin turns into the symbolical site of this emotional entanglement.

With S(k)ins, Manon Wertenbroek tackles precisely the interrelationship between these two feelings. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from a text by Jay Prosser in which the scholar reflects on skin as a memory surface. In particular, Prosser’s essay uses psychoanalysis to assert that our ‘skin’s memory is burdened with the unconscious’.² Discussing psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s book The Skin-Ego as well as a number of what he calls ‘skin autobiographies’, Prosser argues that traumatic (family) memories, including unconscious ones, can re-emerge, sometimes generations later, in the form of a psychosomatic skin condition such as psoriasis or eczema.³ There lies the constitutive connection between ‘sin’ and ‘skin’, as highlighted by Manon Wertenbroek in the title of her exhibition: the skin ‘re-members’.⁴ We carry, not only under, but also on our skin, the traces of our emotional life, and even our most guilty secrets and best repressed thoughts can suddenly burst out in the form of a relentless, itchy rash.

In her practice, Manon Wertenbroek has been exploring the duality of skin as something that singularises us and, at the same time, puts us in relation to others, a containing yet revealing organ – like a curtain providing privacy while letting the light through. Whether shaping it directly as leather or creating works that evoke it more poetically or metaphorically, she uses the image of skin as both a boundary and a point of contact, a fleshy layer that simultaneously protects and connects, to reflect on the traces left by our experiences and interactions. Though fleshy, Manon Wertenbroek’s works are usually disembodied: they are reminiscent of bodies without taking a body’s shape or volume. For it is not so much the physical being as it is the spiritual essence hidden under the surface that she seeks to uncover.

Entering this exhibition, you may have had the feeling of crossing a threshold, of penetrating a deeper layer, of going, in some way, under the skin. This immersive space within the space is an invitation to scratch the surface, to peel off the cutaneous layers and to reveal, perhaps, a concealed emotional truth. The walls of the room are wrapped in brushed cotton covered with salt stains, as if the fabric were perspiring. Out of this greyish membrane, enigmatic objects emerge, both evocative and suggestively organic, like memories, nightmares and fantasies resurfacing from the depths of the unconscious, clawing their way out of oblivion and repression. There, in the back, opposite the door through which you entered, a recess in the wall accommodates two items, hung there like pieces of clothing forgotten in a wardrobe or a hide ready to be tanned. Three open drawers pierce through the room’s walls. One contains a zipper – a signature element in Manon Wertenbroek’s works – that incites you to look behind the surface. Similarly, in a second drawer, a hatch hints at a false bottom and truths deeper than what may seem. The third one encloses a bizarre, fleshy clump, materially similar to the objects hanging in the niche and echoing the colour of the walls; an organic protuberance already too swollen for the drawer to be pushed in again. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard described a house’s furniture and, in particular, its storage units with their doors, shelves, double bottoms, and locks, as ‘veritable organs of the secret psychological life’.⁵ Chests and cabinets are necessary not only because they hold our belongings and help us organise our material life, but also because they safeguard our privacy. Pulling a drawer open or peeking inside a wardrobe also means penetrating someone’s intimacy. It amounts to sounding the depths of a soul.

In this room that is also a body, every object exudes double entendres, seems to conceal and reveal in equal measure and to epitomise a secret chamber that has begun to overflow, to leak through the cracks and interstices in the walls. The drawers and alcove puncturing the wall’s surface suggest furniture but they are also orifices gaping on our most repressed desires and traumas. Though intimate, this space is anything but cosy. The cushions, promise of comfort, are rendered unusable, caked with latex and fused old rags. The room’s colours are not those of a healthy, rosy flesh but, rather, of a deteriorating skin, stained with sweat and oozing fluids. It is a skin made sick by fears and secrets. Yet in its illness, the space also conceals beauty and care, apparent in the meticulousness with which Manon Wertenbroek has executed her pieces, of which she often says that she simultaneously scars and nurture them. In this room that is also a body, love and hatred are put face to face. There is pain, but there is also a promise of care.

For the artist and feminist psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger, the aesthetic experience entails a therapeutic potential. She considers artists as healers who desire ‘to transform death, nonlife, not-yet-life, and no-more-life into art’.⁶ For S(k)ins, Manon Wertenbroek created a space in which death drive and life force, decay and eroticism go hand in hand. It is an exhibition that conveys us to an experience that is simultaneously uncanny and gestational, in which fears and pain begin to surface to be confronted rather than remaining buried and infectious. While sick, the body is still displayed here as a home to inhabit. And inhabiting one’s own body, embodying it, also means making it comfortable, homely, despite the mess that sometimes overwhelms it, spilling out of its drawers and cabinets. We are never as aware of our body as when we experience pain, when it suddenly doesn’t feel like it should. It is in these moments of alienation when our own body becomes estranged from the idea or image we have of it, that we start to acknowledge it, to be ‘in touch’ with our own self. Out of alienation emerges a possibility for connection, and for healing.

Cole Porter, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, 1936

Jay Prosser, ‘Skin Memories’ in S. Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (eds.), Thinking Through the Skin, Routledge, 2001 p. 52

See Didier Anzieu, The Skin-Ego trans. Naomi Segal Routledge, 2016

Prosser p. 52

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, 1994 p. 78

Bracha L. Ettinger, ‘Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event’ in The Matrixial Borderspace, The University of Minnesota Press, 2006, p. 197 Thanks to Nicole Schweizer for pointing out this reference

Curated by Oz Oderbolz
Text by Simon Würsten Marin

S(k)ins_ManonWertenbroek_Saaltext.pdf
flyer_mockup_manon.png

Exhibition view, S(K)INS

Toxi space, Zürich, 2022

Exhibition view, S(K)INS

Toxi space, Zürich, 2022

Exhibition view, S(K)INS

Toxi space, Zürich, 2022

Manon Wertenbroek

The cycle of repressing and articulating guilt,

2022

textile, latex, acrylic, pigments, varnish

Exhibition view, S(K)INS

Toxi space, Zürich, 2022

Manon Wertenbroek

Shivers down my spine,

2022

textile, latex, acrylic, pigments

Manon Wertenbroek

Vulnerability, tired

2022

textile, latex, acrylic, pigments

Manon Wertenbroek

Shivers down my spine,

2022

textile, latex, acrylic, pigments

Manon Wertenbroek

Vulnerability, tired

2022

textile, latex, acrylic, pigments

Manon Wertenbroek

The cycle of repressing and articulating guilt,

2022

detail, textile, latex, acrylic, pigments, varnish

Manon Wertenbroek

The cycle of repressing and articulating guilt,

2022

detail, textile, latex, acrylic, pigments, varnish

Manon Wertenbroek

The cycle of repressing and articulating guilt,

2022

detail, textile, latex, acrylic, pigments, varnish

Manon Wertenbroek

Claw,

2021

detail, silver, gemstones

Manon Wertenbroek

Claw,

2021

silver, gemstones

Manon Wertenbroek

The cycle of repressing and articulating guilt,

2022

textile, latex, acrylic, pigments, varnish

Manon Wertenbroek

Vulnerability, mouth,

2022

textile, latex, acrylic, pigments

Manon Wertenbroek

Hatch,

2022

wood, brass, varnish

Manon Wertenbroek

Zipper H30,

2020

embedded into drawer

2021

←

EVERYTHING / ANYTHING

Özlem Ünlü -

flyer_7346218046900158529_n.jpg

←

ALLTAG UND WIRREN

i-vye, VIZ, Bit-Tuner, Elischa Heller, Hora Lunga -

flyer_alltagundwirren-1.jpg

←

C O M M O N G R O U N D

-

Benjamin Solt, Monika Schori, Tanja Roscic, Janet Mueller, Mark Inderbitzin, Eva Gadient, Gabi Deutsch, Rita Zubrügg, Selina Zürrer

flyer_unnamed(2).jpg

←

HERZLICHE GRÜSSE AN ALLE

Oz Oderbolz & Nemo Bleuer -

17.09.2021 – 25.09.2021

An artificial tunnel is entered hunched over.
One’s own body is thereby moved and exposed to a sought-after experience; be it of a transcendent-spiritual or immanent-realistic nature. An experience that is supposed to make one forget worries and crises - no matter the cost. The human desire to experience an experience has provoked a culture of consumption that tries to deal with its natural resources by supplementing them with technical means. I speak here in particular of tourism and excessive parties in nature. Nature becomes the world of experience of a consumer culture¹, whose society indulges in the lifestyle of closeness to nature and writes this on its forehead. Countless tourist selfies of nature made accessible on social media platforms bear witness to this. But also the spiritual journeys into nature supported by music, of the drug-savvy visitors of forest raves and festivals in the countryside. Both phenomena reveal one’s relationship to the environment and unconsciously show the interrelation with our world. The vibrations and sound waves of the music and the dancing at night during the forest parties influence the soundscape of the forest and shift the sleep-wake rhythm of the animals. On the other hand, they also illustrate the spiritual and sustainable connection with our world and enable the awareness that human is not the only decisive actor of our planet. Tourist sites such as ski resorts, hiking routes or grottos appropriate the characteristics of nature in order to turn them into a sensational experience with technical means such as lifts, lights or electronic information boards. In the example of the grotto, the illumination with artificial light triggers a growth of plants untypical for caves and thus changes their vegetation². Accordingly, the natural merges with the artificial. In a paradoxical way, the natural environment is appropriated by us humans and transformed into a world of experience in which we can find our freedom. A freedom that creates interfaces between the artificial and the real, with the shift of the relationship of the world with human as a consequence.

The exhibition Herzliche Grüsse an alle ³ by Oz Oderbolz and Nemo Bleuer revolves around the concepts of consumer culture, sensationalism, transformation, and appropriation, and focuses on the experience of an experiential world that here becomes a lens through which contemporary life and interaction with nature are captured. Their works consequently appropriate sign languages from the intersections between the artificial and the natural. The extensive installation opens with the recording of two situations: The artificial alteration of a grotto and the entrance to a forest rave. In addition, the world of experience is expanded by a video work. Leaving the tunnel, one encounters a sculpture that again combines natural and at the same time artificial elements in a playful and parodic way. Once through the installation, a sausage and merchandise stand awaits to satisfy our inherent greed for consumption. The sausage sculpture at the stand, however, does not embody an invigorating effect - in defiance, it leaves the visible end hanging limply downward, symbolizing a flaccid consumer society.

Are the works to be read as a critique of the consumer culture of experiencing nature? The exhibition deliberately does not provide us with a direct answer to this question, but it does allow us to reflect on our relationship to nature through the experiences we gain.

The collaborative works of Oz Oderbolz, who’s art practice investigates craftmentship through the performative aspect of objects by recontextualizing habits of sexist or intersectional, patriotic attitudes and Nemo Bleuer, whose work deals with the connection between human/non-human and the artificial and the natural, have the potential of critical commentary through artistic approaches. Through the staging in the White Cube as well as the abstraction of the works shown, they maintain a distance from clear critical statements and act as aesthetic objects, which is why the answer remains open.

I am speaking here from my westernized point of view with the awareness that this does not have universal validity. In this exhibition, only cultures from Switzerland are at the center of the questioning, but this can also be transferred into a global context

The two artists* told me about this phenomenon in conversation.

The greeting: „Herzliche Grüsse an alle.“, is a message that was launched into space in 1977 as a data disk with image and audio information with the interstellar space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. The so-called Voyager Golden Records should be a message to extraterrestrial life forms and clarifies the human effort to explore everything with the technical possibilities.

Curated by Oz Oderbolz
Text by Simon Würsten Marin

Gebückt wird ein künstlicher Tunnel betreten. Der eigene Körper wird dadurch bewegt und ist einer ersuchten Erfahrung ausgesetzt; sei diese von transzendent-spiritueller oder immanent realistischer Art. Ein Erlebnis, das Sorgen und Krisen vergessen lassen soll – koste es, was es wolle. Die Lust des Menschen ein Erlebnis zu erfahren, hat eine Kultur des Konsums provoziert, die versucht mit ihren natürlichen Ressourcen umzugehen und jene durch technische Mittel zu ergänzen. Ich spreche hier im Speziellen von Tourismus und exzessreichen Partywelten in der Natur. Die Natur wird zur Erlebniswelt einer Konsumkultur¹, deren Gesellschaft dem Lifestyle der Naturverbundenheit frönt und sich diesen auf die Stirn schreibt. Unmengen an Touri-Selfies aus der zugänglich gemachten Natur auf den Plattformen der sozialen Medien zeugen davon. Aber auch die durch Musik unterstützten, spirituellen Reisen in die Natur der drogenaffinen Besucher*innen von Waldparties und Festivals auf dem Land. Beide Phänomene lassen die Beziehung des Menschen zu seiner Umgebung deutlich werden und zeigen unbewusst die Wechselbeziehung zu unserer Welt auf. Die Vibrationen und Schallwellen der Musik und dem Tanzen in der Nacht während den Waldparties, beeinflussen die Geräuschkulisse des Waldes und verschieben den Schlaf-Wach-Rythmus der Tiere, andererseits verdeutlichen sie auch die spirituelle und nachhaltige Verbundenheit mit unserer Welt und ermöglichen das Bewusstsein, dass der Mensch nicht der/die einzige entscheidende Akteur*in unseres Planeten ist. Touristische Orte wie Skigebiete, Wanderrouten oder Grotten eignen sich die Eigenschaften der Natur an, um sie mit technischen Mitteln, wie Lifte, Lichter oder elektronischen Infotafeln zum sensationellen Erlebnis werden zu lassen. Beim Beispiel der Grotte löst das Ausleuchten mit künstlichem Licht ein Wachsen von für Höhlen untypischen Pflanzen aus und verändert dadurch deren Vegetation². Das Natürliche verschmilzt dementsprechend mit dem Artifiziellem. Auf paradoxe Weise wird die natürliche Umwelt von uns Menschen appropriiert und zur Erlebniswelt transformiert, in der wir unsere Freiheit finden und konsumieren können. Eine Freiheit, die Schnittstellen zwischen Künstlichem und Realem kreiert, mit der Verschiebung des Verhältnisses der Welt mit dem Menschen als Folge.

Die Ausstellung Herzliche Grüsse an alle ³ von Oz Oderbolz und Nemo Bleuer kreist um die Begriffe Konsumkultur, Sensationslust, Transformation und Appropriation und stellt die Erfahrung einer Erlebniswelt in den Mittelpunkt, die hier zu einem Objektiv wird, durch das zeitgenössisches Leben und der Umgang mit der Natur erfasst werden. Ihre Arbeiten im Raum appropriieren infolgedessen Zeichensprachen aus den Schnittstellen zwischen dem Artifiziellen und dem Natürlichen. Die raumfüllende Installation eröffnet mit der Aufnahme zweier Situationen: Die künstliche Veränderung einer Grotte und den Eingang zu einer Waldparty. Zusätzlich wird die Erlebniswelt durch eine filmische Arbeit erweitert. Verlässt man den Tunnel, trifft man auf eine Skulptur, die wiederum natürliche und gleichzeitig artifizielle Elemente auf spielerische und parodistische Weise verbindet. Ist die Installation durchschritten, wartet ein Wurst- und Merchandise-Stand, der unsere innewohnende Gier nach Konsum stillen kann. Die Wurstplastik am Stand verkörpert jedoch nicht eine stärkende Wirkung – zum Trotz lässt sie das sichtbare Ende schlapp nach unten hängen und ist damit Sinnbild einer erschlafften Konsumgesellschaft.

Sind die Arbeiten als eine Kritik an der Konsumkultur der Erlebniswelten in der Natur zu lesen? Die Ausstellung liefert uns bewusst keine direkte Antwort auf diese Frage, doch ermöglicht sie mit den gewonnenen Erfahrungen eine Reflektion über unser Verhältnis zur Natur.

Die in Kollaboration entstandenen Arbeiten von Oz Oderbolz, der in seiner Kunstpraxis das Handwerk durch den performativen Aspekt von Objekten untersucht, indem er Gewohnheiten sexistischer oder intersektioneller, patriotischer Haltungen rekontextualisiert und Nemo Bleuer, dessen Arbeiten die Verbindung des Menschlich/Nichtmenschlichen, Artifiziellen/ Fleischlichen thematisiert, besitzen durch die künstlerische Herangehensweisen das Potential eines kritischen Kommentars. Durch die Inszenierung im White Cube sowie die Abstraktion der gezeigten Arbeiten, erhalten sie eine Distanz zu klaren kritischen Äusserungen und wirken als ästhetische Objekte, weshalb die Antwort offen bleibt.

Ich spreche hier aus meiner westlich geprägten Sicht mit dem Bewusstsein, dass diese keine universelle Gültigkeit besitzt. Bei dieser Ausstellung stehen ausschliesslich Kulturen aus der Schweiz im Zentrum der Befragung, doch kann dies auch in einen globalen Kontext transferiert werden

Die beiden Künstler* erzählten mir im Gespräch von diesem Phänomen

Der Gruss: «Herzliche Grüsse an alle!», ist eine Botschaft, die 1977 als Datenplatte mit Bild- und Audio- Informationen mit den interstellaren Raumsonden Voyager 1 und Voyager 2 ins Weltall gestartet sind. Die sogenannten Voyager Golden Records sollten eine Botschaft an Ausserirdische Lebensformen sein und verdeutlicht das menschliche Bemühen alles mit den technischen Möglichkeiten zu erkunden

Curated by Oz Oderbolz
Text by Simon Würsten Marin

saaltext_Hgal.pdf
flyer_mockup_Hgal.png

Exhibition view, HERZLICHE GRÜSSE AN ALLE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2021

Exhibition view, HERZLICHE GRÜSSE AN ALLE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2021

Exhibition view, HERZLICHE GRÜSSE AN ALLE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2021

Exhibition view, HERZLICHE GRÜSSE AN ALLE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2021

Exhibition view, HERZLICHE GRÜSSE AN ALLE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2021

Exhibition view, HERZLICHE GRÜSSE AN ALLE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2021

Exhibition view, HERZLICHE GRÜSSE AN ALLE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2021

Exhibition view, HERZLICHE GRÜSSE AN ALLE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2021

Exhibition view, HERZLICHE GRÜSSE AN ALLE

Toxi space, Zürich, 2021

←

MOCKINGBIRD

-

MYXA collective, Gaia Del Santo, Salvador Marino, Anais Orr, Andri Schatz, Demian Jakob, org

19.08.2021 – 03.09.2021

Imitation is a way of approximating the other, of adapting to ones surroundings - it is a learning process requiring attention and precision. Due to its structural principle, but also perceivably beyond its breaking point, imitation is generative.

The mockingbird not only imitates but also interprets what it hears, creating new patterns and melodies so convincing that other birds fall for its mockery. Through its song, it reframes, transports, restructures and so opens up room for speculation.

The exhibition resonates with themes of cyber-animism, technomateriality, networks and fabrics, interaction and interaffection, relational, fluid and layered net-culture, memetic processes, the profane and the sacred, the hyper-present, the extreme self, and the post-ironic – in a heartfelt, school of jellyfish vibing, genuine way ... it is the ordinary commenting on something out of the ordinary - a crypto-ceremony for a hypertentacular now.

In the time leading up to this show, we encountered oversaturated, sparkly, high-definition cottagecore, enchanted geology, animated matter, neurogamy, the longing for idyllic lives, the vacuum of the sublime. In hearing the mockingbirds song echo through liminal backrooms and nonspaces, we found ourselves like bird chirps emanating from alarm clocks, buzzing asynchronously like memes on a timeline with soft angel-wings.

myxa: animal slime or the distal end of bird mandibles

MYXA is a transnational collective of artists that explores techno-critical post-digital practices. Many-tongued like the mockingbird, MYXA embraces the post-truths of our time and attempts, while mapping it seems impossible, to find vantage points of orientation and nodes of connection in this ever-complexifying realityscape.

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gUUUgUuugUuuugUuuUgUUuu.
tzoUitzOuitzOuitzOui.
tschirptschirptschirptschirp. türulu, piep, peck, lülülü.

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Frilöölliiiii Friiiirrl frzzziiiiiptschips ptschips. Tschirppp tschrirrp.

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piep.

MOCKINGBIRD_E.pdf
MOCKINGBIRD_D.pdf
flyer_MOCKINGBIRD

Exhibition view, MOCKINGBIRD

Toxi space, Zürich, 2021

Gaia Del Santo

not doing so great tbh,

2021

Transfer print and embroidery on cotton, latex, rhinestones, glitter, 21 x 29.7 cm

Gaia Del Santo

the master key is causing you pain according to some angels,

2021

Mixed media key holder, 44.4 x 29.5 cm

Salvador Marino

1CU,

2021

Plastic, electronics, 8 x 34 x 6 cm

Demian Jakob

Buried under a pile of decorative stones, the Elves,

2021

Solenoids, granit, dimensions variable

Gaia Del Santo

not doing so great tbh,

2021

Transfer print and embroidery on cotton, latex, rhinestones, glitter, 21 x 29.7 cm

Gaia Del Santo

the master key is causing you pain according to some angels,

2021

Mixed media key holder, 44.4 x 29.5 cm

org

soz,

2020

Acrylic and varnish on canvas, 200 x 200 cm

Anais Orr

Softly, Hardly,

2021

Porcelain, razor wire, mixed media on paper, solder wire, epoxy, 46,5 x 37 x 3 cm

Anais Orr

Softly, Hardly,

2021

Porcelain, razor wire, mixed media on paper, solder wire, epoxy, 46,5 x 37 x 3 cm

Anais Orr

Softly, Hardly,

2021

Porcelain, razor wire, mixed media on paper, solder wire, epoxy, 46,5 x 37 x 3 cm

Anais Orr

Softly, Hardly,

2021

Porcelain, razor wire, mixed media on paper, solder wire, epoxy, 46,5 x 37 x 3 cm

Andri Schatz

ghouls of data past,

2021

Andri Schatz

電相,

2020

Demian Jakob

Buried under a pile of decorative stones, the Elves,

2021

Solenoids, granit, dimensions variable

Gaia Del Santo

not doing so great tbh,

2021

Transfer print and embroidery on cotton, latex, rhinestones, glitter, 21 x 29.7 cm

←

HUND UND AMEISE

-

Wanda Nay, Steffen Kuhn, Monika Stalder, Muriel Gutherz, Christan Eberhard, Konstantinos Manolakis, Magdalena Baranya, Nusser Glazova, Roland Bösiger, Gabi Deutsch, Val Minnig

Hund&ameise_flyer.jpg

←

SHOW MUST GO ON

Marianne Mueller -

04.06.2021 – 17.06.2021

„Show Must Go On“ im Toxi entführt in eine Welt, die man sich als Besucher:in mit grossen Phantomen und kleinen Geistern teilt. Schwarz lasierte Tonskulpturen, die auf Rollbrettern und Hockern ihre Sockel gleich selbst mitbringen, wagen sich in den Raum vor, stellen sich den Betrachter:innen gegenüber, während nicht näher zu definierende Geräusche gleich einem Murmeln durch den Raum hallen. Offen bleibt, ob die Figuren im Moment der Bewegung erstarrt sind oder sich zu bewegen beginnen, sobald man ihnen erneut den Rücken zukehrt und sie sich unbeobachtet wähnen. Marianne Muellers Ausstellungsparcours verführt durch die taktile Qualität der verschiedenen Materialien, die hier zusammenkommen und eine Anordnung der verschiedenen Objekte, welche die Besucher:innen in ein grösser angelegtes Tableau integriert.

Kennzeichnend für die künstlerische Praxis von Marianne Mueller ist ein Bezug zur jeweiligen Umgebung. Ausgehend von den lokalen Begebenheiten agieren ihre Fotografien, Videos sowie Soundinstallationen und (gefundenen) Objekte als Eingriffe und Verschiebungen oder fügen sich als Fragmente in bestehende Kontexte ein. Es sind zeitliche, akustische und optische Interventionen, die zum neugierigen Hinsehen einladen und sich im Sinne der Camouflage gleichzeitig auch den Blicken entziehen. Mit der jüngsten Werkserie wuchtiger Skulpturen aus Ton — genannt PHANTOMS (2020/2021) — geht die Künstlerin von den Eigenheiten des Materials, seinem Verhalten und seinen Voraussetzungen aus. Ihre schiere Grösse verleiht den Arbeiten eine körperliche Präsenz, mit der sie den jeweiligen Innenraum bewohnen. Offen bleibt, ob sie schon immer zum Inventar gehört haben, als Geister hier dauerhaft Zuflucht suchen oder sich bloss für einen flüchtigen Moment betrachten lassen. In der Ausstellung muss man zunächst CROOKED (2020) passieren, der gleich einem alten Hauswart den Eingang bewacht. Das sich in der Folge präsentierende Arrangement von Arbeiten bietet verschiedene Fährten des Entdeckens an, wobei ungewiss ist, wohin die wie Brotkrummen ausgelegten Werke führen. Es lässt sich kein fixes System mit normativer Ordnung erkennen, sodass sich die Arbeiten in ihrer spezifischen Art der Präsentation der Tendenz einer für den White Cube typischen Stillstellung entziehen. Stets bleibt der Eindruck, dass die Skulpturen lediglich für einen kurzen Moment innehalten und so scheint es wenig überraschend, wenn sich RAPUNZEL’S REVENGE (EXTENDED) (2021) immer wieder nahezu lautlos in Bewegung setzt. Lange, goldene Fäden ziehen über den Betonboden, schwingen leicht, während hinter ihnen ein Teil des Ausstellungsraum verschwindet. Ein leises Surren und Ticken des Motors begleitet die Choreographie, unter die sich die Geräusche der Soundinstallation CRISIS PREVENTION (2021) mischen. Gemeinsam bilden sie eine auditive Kulisse, zu der auch allfällige Schritte und das Rascheln der Kleidung von Besuchenden gehören, die so in den Ausstellungsraum „eingewoben“ werden. Umfangen von seltsamen Geräuschen bieten sich so eine Vielzahl an Anknüpfungspunkten für ein sich entspinnendes Netz an Beziehungen zwischen den verschiedenen Arbeiten, zwischen den Arbeiten und dem Raum sowie zwischen den Arbeiten und den Betrachtenden.

Curated by Oz Oderbolz
Text by Elsa Himmer

ShowMustGoOn_MarianneMueller.pdf
flyer_ShowMustGoOn_MarianneMueller.png

Exhibition view, SHOW MUST GO ON

Toxi space, Zürich, 2021

Exhibition view, SHOW MUST GO ON

Toxi space, Zürich, 2021

Exhibition view, SHOW MUST GO ON

Toxi space, Zürich, 2021

Exhibition view, SHOW MUST GO ON

Toxi space, Zürich, 2021

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DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

Electric Art Collective -

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D E E P D E C O R

Roman Gysin -

06.05.2021 – 16.05.2021

When queers use spaces,
spaces might become queer.

¹Sara Ahmed

Function gives birth to the sign,
but this sign is reconverted into
the spectacle of a function.

²Roland Barthes

Whether it‘s a gay sex club, a nail salon, or a pizzeria, the interior and décor define the space and determine its function. In the case of the three examples mentioned, this often happens in an almost stereotypical way: The use of certain materials, colors, motifs, furniture and other furnishings, aim at a context-bound recognition effect, appealing to the taste of the masses. Interior design designates and norms spaces for specific experiences, the consumption of goods and services, for the indulgence of a lifestyle. Beyond its function, the interior thus becomes a sign. The décor, a metaphor. In his exhibition Deep Decor, Roman Gysin negotiates the use and sign value of objects and their „depth dimension,“ which, according to Roland Barthes, results from the fact that the superficial forms of everyday objects stimulate a multifaceted imagination. Things are thus simultaneously charged with symbolic meanings that need not have anything to do with their primary function.³ In this context,the works presented in the exhibition appear as quasi-abstract ambiguous figures that on the one hand are declared as works of art, fundamentally deprived of a practical purpose, and on the other hand partly distinguish themselves in their form precisely by fulfilling a function.

By means of the format of the exhibition as installation or the installation as exhibition, Gysin arranges elements of his characteristic formal language, such as disguising, scattering, veneering, sanding, hanging, and networking, in a constellation that occupies, furnishes, and structures the space in equal measure. This creates a scenographic dynamism that directs the viewer‘s lines of sight and movement into two diagonals running in opposite directions.Taking up the premises of Minimal Art, in which the work appears reduced to its pure objecthood and unfolds its effect primarily in relation to its placement in space and the perception of the viewer, Gysin‘s wall-works and sculptures also allow for an interpretation of content. While one side of Trennwand [Divider] gives the impression that its components are industrially manufactured, the other side ostentatiously displays the traces of its creation and the nature of the materials, wood and canvas, Gysin works with. Contrary to a renunciation of the artistic gesture celebrated by Minimal Art, Gysin rather makes his creative process the subject, as well as the meaning of art as a carrier of discourse and its use as functional decor: Trennwand [Divider] can thus be seen symbolically as a caesura or a conundrum. However, the sculpture functions equally as a barrier and a system of guiding people. Rampe [Ramp], in turn, epitomizes a device that serves to transform power in order to use it as expediently as possible. Gysin undermines the hierarchy between art and décor by emphasizing the symbolic content of both, or what Barthes calls „the spectacle of a function.“⁴ In the course of this, he creates, so to speak, a reordering of things that does not shy away from the grotesque in the sense of its original meaning according to Horace: the non-observance of orders or formal principles, the deviation from the norm.

In this sense, his examination of use and sign value, of the depth dimension of material and objects, can also be considered a form of perversion of „queer use.“ According to Sara Ahmed, „queer use“ is about releasing potential that is already inherent in things and how they have taken shape: „Queer use could be what we are doing when we release that potential.“⁵ Gysin‘s works simultaneously embody and launch queer modes of use by testing out new fields of meaning in the metaphorics of the everyday, beyond categorical fixations and attributions.

Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use
Durham/London, 2019, p. 200

Roland Barthes, Semantics of the Object, in: ibid. The Semiotic Challenge
New York, 1988, p.190

Roland Barthes, The Imagination of the Sign, in: A Barthes Reader edit. by Susan Sontag
New York, 1982 p.216

Roland Barthes, Semantics of the Object, in: ibid. The Semiotic Challenge
New York, 1988, p.190

Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use
Durham/London, 2019, p. 200

Curated by Oz Oderbolz
Text by Daniel Berndt

When queers use spaces,
spaces might become queer.

¹Sara Ahmed

Die Funktion bringt das Zeichen hervor,
aber das Zeichen wird in das Schauspiel
einer Funktion zurückverwandelt.

²Roland Barthes

Ob schwuler Sexclub, Nagelstudio oder Pizzeria, Interieur und Dekor zeichnen den Raum aus, bestimmen seine Funktion. Im Fall der drei genannten Beispiele geschieht dies oftmals auf nahezu stereotype Art und Weise: Die Verwendung von bestimmten Materialien, Farben, Motiven, Möbeln und anderen Ausstattungsgegenständen zielen kontextgebunden auf einen Wiedererkennungseffekt, appellieren an den Geschmack der Masse. Die Innenausstattung und gestalterische Konventionen designieren und normieren Räume für spezifische Erfahrungen, den Ausstauch von Dienstleistungen, dem Konsum von Waren, dem Frönen eines Lifestyles. Über seine Funktion hinaus wird das Interieur damit einhergehend zum Zeichen, das Dekor zur Metapher.

In seiner Ausstellung Deep Decor verhandelt Roman Gysin Gebrauchs- und Zeichenwert von Objekten und deren «Tiefendimension», die sich nach Roland Barthes daraus ergibt, dass die vordergründigen Formen von Alltagsgegenständen zugleich eine vielgestaltige Imagination anregen. Dinge sind somit mit symbolischen Bedeutungen aufgeladen, die nicht in erster Linie etwas mit ihrer Funktion zu tun haben müssen.³ DieinderAusstellung präsentierten Arbeiten erscheinen in diesem Zusammenhang als quasi-abstrakte Kippfiguren, die einerseits als Kunstwerke deklariert, grundsätzlich einer praktischen Zweckbestimmung enthoben sind und sich andererseits teils in ihrer Form gerade durch die Erfüllung einer Funktion auszeichnen. Mittels des Formats der Ausstellung als Installation bzw. der Installation als Ausstellung arrangiert Gysin Elemente seiner charakteristischen Formensprache wie das Verstellen, Streuen, Verkleiden, Verblenden, Verschleifen, Behängen und Vernetzen in einer Konstellation, die den Raum gleichermassen besetzt, ausstaffiert und strukturiert. Es wird dadurch eine szenografische Dynamisierung erzeugt, welche die Blick- und Bewegungsrichtungen der Betrachter*innen in zwei entgegengesetzt verlaufende Diagonalen lenken.

Prämissen der Minimal Art aufgreifend, in der das Werk auf seine reine Objekthaftigkeit reduziert erscheint und seine Wirkung primär in Relation zu seiner Platzierung im Raum und der Wahrnehmung der Betrachter*innen entfaltet, lassen Gysins Wandarbeiten und Skulpturen stets jedoch auch eine inhaltliche Deutung zu. Während eine Seite von Trennwand den Anschein erweckt, als wären ihre Bestandteile industriell gefertigt, stellt die andere Seite die Spuren ihrer Entstehung und die Beschaffenheit der von Gysin bearbeiteten Materialien Holz und Leinwand ostentativ zur Schau. Entgegen einer von der Minimal Art zelebrierten Abkehr von der künstlerischen Geste macht Gysin seinen Schaffensprozess vielmehr zum Thema, ebenso wie die Bedeutung von Kunst als Träger von Diskursen und ihrem Gebrauch als funktionales Dekor: Trennwand kann somit sinnbildlich als Zäsur oder als Vexierbild betrachtet werden. Die Skulptur fungiert jedoch gleichermassen als Barriere und Personenleitsystem. Rampe wiederrum steht als Inbegriff für eine Vorrichtung, die der Umwandlung von Kraft dient, um diese möglichst zweckmässig einzusetzen.

Gysin unterminiert die Hierarchie zwischen Kunst und Dekor, indem er den symbolischen Gehalt von beiden bzw. das, was Barthes «das Schauspiel einer Funktion»⁴ nennt, herausstellt. Er schafft im Zuge dessen gewissermassen eine Neuordnung der Dinge, die auch nicht vor dem Grotesken im Sinne seiner ursprünglichen Bedeutung nach Horaz zurückscheut: dem Nichteinhalten von Ordnungen oder Gestaltungsprinzipien, der Abweichung von der Norm.

Seine Auseinandersetzung mit Gebrauchs- und Zeichenwert, mit der Tiefendimension von Material und Objekten kann in diesem Sinne auch als eine Form der Pervertierung, des «queer use» erachtet werden. Bei diesen «queeren Verwendungsformen», geht es Sara Ahmed zufolge darum, Potential freizusetzen, das bereits in den Dingen und darin begründet liegt, wie sie Gestalt angenommen haben: «Queer use could be what we are doing when we release that potential.»⁵ Gysins Werke verkörpern und lancieren zugleich queere Verwendungsweisen, indem sie in der Metaphorik des Alltäglichen neue Bedeutungsfelder, jenseits kategorischer Fest- und Zuschreibungen austesten.