Event #5: 12 to 22 December 2019, Puck Schot, how many can kill your love
12 – 21 December 2019
Puck Schot | how many can kill your love
Vernissage: Thursday 12 Dec, 19.00
Artist: Puck Schot
Curated by: Anastasia Chaguidouline
PROGRAM:
Thursday 12 December: 19.00 | Vernissage and performance
Monday 16 December: 16.00 | Guided tour with the curator
Thursday 19 December: 16.00 | Guided tour with the curator
Sunday 22 December: 19.00 | Finissage and reading
Opening hours: Monday, Wednesday and Thursday 14.00 until 17.00 and Saturday and Sunday by appointment.
how many can kill your love is Puck Schot’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland. The presentation is part of the collaborative curated program Choreographing the Public at the OnCurating Project Space in Zurich. Puck Schot’s work profoundly questions the boundaries between private and public, and the ownership of stories and storytelling in the age of digital. Her playful yet at times boldly serious performative and visual language includes for example footage of furries, a group of people with the mutual interest of dressing up as anthropomorphic animals in their free time, creating childlike alter-egos for themselves. This multi-media installation mixes cardboard and deteriorating plants, curtains and pillows, while confronting the viewer textually and directly with wrestling, spamming and bullying in different paces of the two video works.
The works tip over the edge of being autobiographical, inspired by hardships, driven by own fascinations in the time of digital and existential confusion. However the poetry, the tactically orchestrated distance between the artist and the viewer, allows space for fantasy and longing. The curated solo exhibition is the result of a close hands-on collaboration between Puck Schot and Anastasia Chaguidouline. The questions that addressed by the two central video works are autobiographical for both the artist and the curator. This exhibition addresses questions of privacy in the age of digital judging, vulnerability and identification. The textual work presented is based on spam e-mails, cyber-mobbing and personal dialogues. The footage for both videos has been recorded by the artist during her research travel to the USA during the summer of 2019.
Puck Schot was born in 1994 in Rotterdam (NL). Schot explores different realities and mind-states. Defining a modern desire remains key to her poetic work. In art, but also in for example through any social media-profile, we, individuals, constantly search for a perfect representation of our thoughts. With that search for ideal positivity and acknowledgement, there comes a disacknowledgement of lack, boredom, violence: darker needs caused by dissatisfaction. Through impulsively writing thoughts fragmentarily and by visually reflecting on that, narratives of fictive characters and alter egos start existing. Her work results in confessional texts, essays, audio and video(-installations). Often she also runs self-written and found texts through an algorithm that mixes the text into a new one. In video work, she often pays actors from online gig websites for a few dollars. Thus, a stranger performs a quite violent, confessional and fragmented script
(sometimes run through an algorithm) on their webcams for her.
This exhibition is part of the Choreographing the Public program, a multi-formatted programme featuring exhibitions, performances, interventions and screenings taking place from October 2019 to June 2020 at the OnCurating Project Space and other collaborating venues in Zurich. By shaping a “choreography”, the exhibitions invite visitors to take experimental routes, navigate, move around, and engage with the works. Receding from the traditional and passive experience of art, Choreographing the Public sheds light on the virtues of participation in redefining our relationship to art and power structure.
Choreographing the Public has received support from: Stadt Zürich Kultur; Dr. Georg und Josi Guggenheim Stiftung; Migros Kulturprozent; Cassinelli-Vogel Stiftung.
Event #6: 13 December 2019, Dmitry Vilensky (Chto Delat), When emotions become form, lecture and screening, Cabaret Voltaire
13 December 2019, 17.30
Chto Delat | When Emotions become Form
Event #6 - Choreographing the Public
Talk and screening: Friday 13 December, 17.30
Artist: Chto Delat
Curated by: Anastasia Chaguidouline
Screening and participatory conversation [Screening starts at 17.45]
PROGRAM:
Friday 13 December: Curatorial Talks of the MAS in Curating at the ZHdK.
A screening of Chto Delat’s newest film production „One Night“ and a conversation with Dmitry Vilensky, a founding member of the St. Petersburg collective Chto Delat. „One Night“ deals with topics of emotionality, (mis-)judgement, saturation via social media and fake news. The conversation that will start between Dmitry Vilensky and Anastasia Chaguidouline will organically and directly address and involve the audience as it evolves. The conversation touches, among others, upon emotion, current political climate(s) and smileys.
Dmitry Vilensky (born 1964) is a Russian artist, writer and activist. He is a founding member of the platform Chto Delat / What is to be done. Chto Delat is a collective of philosophers, writers, curators, artists, critics, among others that merge art, activism and political theory. Vilensky is also an editor of the Chto Delat newspaper. The collective Chto Delat / What is to be done was founded in early 2003 in St. Petersburg, Russia. The members of the collective strongly position themselves as internationalists, demanding the recognition of equality of all people; and feminists, positioned against all forms of gender inequality, homophobia and patriarchy.
Event #7: 17 January to 15 February 2020, Hilla Toony Navok, Rolling Rooms
Vernissage: Thursday 16 January, at 18:00
Artist: Hilla Toony Navok
Curated by: Ronny Koren and Maya Bamberger
PROGRAM:
Artist talk and preview in collaboration with Omanut: 14 January, at 19:00 (open to all)
Vernissage: 16 January 2020, at 18:00
Opening hours: Fridays: 15:00-18:00, Saturdays: 12:00-15:00
„Choreographing the Public: Rolling Rooms“ is Hilla Toony Navok’s first solo show in Switzerland. It is the seventh in a series of a dozen of events and exhibitions that focus on creating a language of movement that connects various elements present in the gallery space: the objects, the artist’s presence, the text, the audience and its actions. Navok presents a new body of works, specifically designed to fit the OnCurating project space in Zurich.
Navok’s works begin with associative impressions she gathers as she roams the streets of Tel Aviv, as well as other towns in Israel’s peripheral areas. She peeps into residential spaces and commercial buildings, discovering moments of design that expose the gap between dreams and the longing for style and good taste, and their improvised, incomplete realization. Then she re-organizes those desires and gaps into abstract, strange-looking and timeless sculptural units.
In her work, Navok resonates canonical movements in art history and modern design, and embarks on an examination of Israeli Modernism in the genre’s original habitat. The visual similarity between her work and Concrete art, which took source in Zurich, is apparent to the local viewer. The influence of De Stijl is also recognizable. The colorfulness of iconic objects and the two-dimensionality of the compositions acquire volume and mass when the artist uses plain, Israeli-made utensils and materials to decode the visual reality in which she lives and works. Navok undermines the conventional perception of the materials and aesthetics she deploys, and re-exposes for our benefit qualities and traces of abstract modernism, so deeply embedded in our everyday environment that they had disappeared from view.
Navok’s tenderly presented sculptures and installations are positioned with precision, inviting the viewer to enter a poetic playground. However, their visual naiveté raises questions. Enclosed or not, all of the sculptures contain an opening into a small space, sometimes allowing one viewer to step in. The quasi-intimate encounter with familiar elements brings to the surface complexities regarding consumption, our attitude towards cleanliness and hygiene, and the politics behind the human desire for order and organization.
Hilla Toony Navok
Born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1974, where she currently lives and works.
Navok graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from Bezalel Academy in 2009. She had solo exhibitions at various venues, including the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Atelier Shemi, Kibbutz Cabri and KM gallery, Berlin. Her work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions in venues such as Neues Museum in Weimar, Ashdod Museum of Art, Bat Yam Museum of Modern Art, Herzliya Museum of Art, and Rockefeller Archaeological Museum, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
She received several awards, including the Beatrice Kolliner Prize for a Young Israeli Artist, Israel Museum (2018), and participated in several residencies including The Fountainhead in Miami, AIR Paradise in Matsudo, Japan, Meet Factory in Prague and Artport residency program in Tel Aviv.
Event #8: 17 January 2020, Out of Hands, screening program, Migros Museum für Gegenwartkunst
at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst
Screening (ca. 60.min) and Q&A
Curated by: Beatrice Fontana
Screening (ca 60 min.) and Q&A with the film director Claudius Gentinetta and the film scholar Laura Walde.
SHORT FILM PROGRAM:
Bab Sebta (Ceuta’s Gate), Randa Maroufi (France/Morocco, 2019, 19′ Arabic and Spanish with English subtitles)
In Ur Eye, Ayo Akingbade (UK, 2015, 1’30“, English)
Freedom & Independence, Bjørn Melhus (Germany, 2014, 15’, English)
Selfies, Claudius Gentinetta (CH, 2018, 3’44“)
The Swimming Club, Cecilia Golding, Nick Finegan (UK, 2016, 10’, English)
All Inclusive, Corina Schwingruber Ilić (CH, 2018, 10’)
Participation biases will be the subject of this screening, as they embody glimpses into imperfection, creative strategies of survival, to face the condition of „participating“ as new moral drive. For then, they carry lightness, irony, and a first-hand look at authentic humanity.
The shorts explore stories of people and their grand design to fit in or to withdraw from this alternative hierarchy of needs. Their plots interlace with performative narration, sense of humor, and visual atmospheres, with the purpose of swiftly glancing at an exquisitely human way of dealing with belongingness.
Whether listening to Ayn Rand latest uncanny predictions, or challenging European border control at Ceuta, this short cinematic trip will unfold between a grotesque sequence of human features, and the deck of a cruise ship. Pleasantly floating along a stream of polonaise bangers or in the sacred space of a swimming hall. Through the richness of the novels and the lyric of the images, it serves as an attempt to oppose choral practices to the poignant and universal interrogative of how we cope.
Whilst the phenomenon of participation is not entirely new, two decades of neoliberalism fostered the need of reacting as a community and triggered the proliferation of new forms of collective behaviors. Participative policies being tested, brought forward, and experienced, call attention to participative democracy, participative management, urbanism, agriculture, or participatory art with its demand for public entanglement and viewer activation. This globalized scenario of commonality changes, in some measure, the set of rules and establishes a model, where the matrix of relationships and connections becomes crucial. Pursuing different forms of social engagement grows into a necessary practice in daily life, in order to confront and reject the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community (Nancy). Taken to the extreme, participation appears like the only expedient allowing individuals to converge into this newly shaped, democratic experience of existence. But under the pressure of such high expectations, also this cherished dictate gets sometimes out of hand.
Social gray areas emerge, in which participation becomes the final need for fulfilment. Staged comedies for social acceptance, loudly fought with weapons of hilarious mass consumerism or decadent cult of the image. But also, darker areas are revealed. Political borders, neutral zones of humans traffic, geographic obstacle to intimacy, where participation is unwanted, disapproved. Areas of exclusion or compelled inclusion, where curiously devoted behaviors or ancestral human fears, clash with the established routine of everyday acceptance. Queerness or disappearance, gentrification or mental illness, boosted identity or mainstream religiousness as borderline bugs cracking the surface of participation desire. In reality expanded social spaces where human interactions reach unexpected and inspirational forms. And of those spaces of interaction we would like to talk, as an inevitable presence. “About the real consequences, intervention, creative possibilities and responsibilities of intra-acting within and as part of the world “. (Barad)
Event #9: 22 to 23 February 2020, How the Wild Flowers Grow, Tobias Guttman
Artist: Tobias Gutmann
Curated by: Gözde Filinta
Friday, 21 February 2020, 19.00 | Vernissage
Saturday, 22 February 2020, 16.00 | Meditation & Drawing Session
(Flower Kombucha served by Sonmas)
Flowers are given to loved ones, in un-ordinary days carrying love, affection, sorrow, apology, and empathy. Associated with various emotions, alongside their constant use for human desires, flowers are turned into mere consumption objects, that conquered all homes, streets, parks and public spaces. Trapped into endless connotations, flowers are rarely considered beyond these aesthetical fictional meanings.
How the Wild Flowers Grow is a brief moment for pausing in an artist-made garden to think about flowers, their self-sufficient existence, and harmony. It wishes to remind the cycle of nature, by asking ‘how it grows’ that recalls the shared nature between all living beings. It tries to reflect the infinite forms of flowers in nature, as it takes shape in four million different species on earth. The imaginary drawings of wildflowers illustrate the untameable wilderness within each flower, with their crooked looks and unexpected twists. This totally imagined flower garden invites us to enter a meditative state where we, for a moment, open ourselves to the teaching of flowers; in their wise being, surrendered nature and harmony in plurality, as they cover all the mountains, hills and valleys.
Tobias Gutmann was born in Wewak, Papua New Guinea in 1987 and lives in Zürich, Switzerland. His MFA studies in Fine Arts at Zürich University of Arts broadened his interdisciplinary artistic practice. Gutmann enters playful spaces of flow, thinks with his hands and infinitely continues to draw repetitive variations of things to discover the beauty between normal. He uses his own visual language to give meaning, character, and atmosphere to a variety of formats such as installations, music-videos, publications, and workshops. Performing such formats both nationally and around the world, his art always hopes to affect people in a positive way and to communicate an incentive for participation.
YGRG16X: Death by Landscape is an ambitious and extended serial project that started in Autumn 2019. It stems from the ongoing YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (YGRG) research taking from it a serial and fragmented form and collective reading as narrative trigger. This new work is a sensual architecture of bodies, spaces, images, light, sound and objects that serves as a base structure for a poetic essay extended through time, location and media. YGRG16X: Death by Landscape will take many forms — from experimental video, to cinematographic performances; teleplay recorded in front of a live audience and within the exhibition setting; disparate sculptural objects, props and costume exhibited independently or in empty sets - all contributing to a fragmented and dispersed work that will be on display until Autumn 2020.
According to Donna Haraway, embodiment is not about fixed location in a reified body, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning. YGRG16X: Death by Landscape will be looking deeply into embodiment, place, sexuality, temporality, integrity and breakdown - the topics that are continuously explore by YGRG. This project contextualises the instability of boundaries that renders the reading and performing body and its surroundings as the site of an active and ongoing set of relations, positing the interdependence of the text, the body, the movement, the environment and the technology.
Fragmented in its form, YGRG16X: Death by Landscape is a hybrid project resisting an integrity expected of an artwork, striving for a fragmentariness rather than holism. Aesthetically, it is rooted in the low budget b-horror and experimental film from Eastern Europe, and explores the format of a teleplay horror-mocumentary superimposed onto the gallery space. Conceptually the project explores the horror that is attributed to being outside (of norm, society, etc.), which is inherently part of queer experience. Beginning with the Gothic novel, horror allowed the writer to express her desires under the guise of fiction, yet riddled with anxiety of being separated from society. Developing the ideas for this project the artists have been influenced by such writers as U. K. Le Guin, A. Richter, D. Haraway, O. Tokarczuk, O.Butler, J. Kristeva, M. Mendes and T. Morton, and their non-binary understanding of the world. In view of the contemporary ecological anxiety, Gaweda and Kulbokaitė strongly believe that thinking through the queer experience can offer ways to renegotiate our complex relationshipto ‘Nature’, which has historically been defined as separate to ourselves - as outside.
With YGRG16X: Death by Landscape the artists are interested in evoking the eerie which itself is a haunting presence of a monstrosity that doesn’t amount to a single identifiable moment of fear or source of horror, but rather is a prolonged experience of dread.
The production of the film was initiated in January 2019 during a residency at NKDale in Norway, including the preliminary writing of the script and planning of the storyboard. A significant portion of the video material was also collected there - including shots of the winter landscape, forrest scenes, both shots of detail and atmospheric scenes - all using a 360° camera.
In its presentation at the OnCurating project space in Zurich in May and June 2020, YGRG16X: Death by Landscape will take shape of a choreographic performance and a four week exhibition. The performance will be executed by dancers and will be created in collaboration with a choreographer. This will add yet another layer to the multi-facetted work of YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP emphasising movement of the mind and the body and facilitating the idea of reding through movement and dance. This opening performance will take place in an installation of probs and costumes previously used for the videos of YGRG16X: Death by Landscape. The performance will be filmed and the performance video will be on display over the course of the exhibition. This way the artists emphasise the dichotomy between presence and absence.
Ein mehrteiliges kuratorisches Projekt, das mit Öffentlichkeit agiert.
Veranstaltung #1: Samstag, 19. Oktober 2019, CHI AVRÀ PIÙ FILO TESSERÀ,
in der ZHdK (Kunstraum 5.K12)
Beteiligte Künstler*innen: Ekin Bernay, Filippo Berta, Depart (Leonhard Lass und Gregor Ladenhauf), Dorota Gawęda und Eglé Kulbokaité (YGRG), Tobias Gutmann, Maria Lai, Nico Sebastian Meyer, Hilla Toony Navok, Angi Nend, Yoshinori Niwa, Cesare Pietroiusti, Puck Schot, Dmitry Vilensky (Chto Delat), Virginia Zanetti und andere.
Kuratorische Arbeit von: Maya Bamberger, Anastasia Chaguidouline, Francesca Ceccherini, Gözde Filinta, Beatrice Fontana, Ronald Kolb, Ronny Koren, Eveline Mathis, Courtney Meier, Camille Regli, Domenico Ermanno Roberti und Noriko Yamakoshi.
PROGRAMM:
Event #1: Samstag, 19. Oktober 2019, Virginia Zanetti, Filippo Berta mit einer Videoprojektion von Maria Lai
Event #2: 8.–9. November 2019, Ekin Bernay
Event #3: 21.–23. November 2019, VR Projekt von Depart
Event #4: 22.–23. November 2019 (Performance), Cesare Pietroiusti
Event #5: 12.–22. Dezember 2019, Puck Schot
Event #6: 13. December 2019, Konversation mit Dmitry Vilensky (Chto Delat)
Event #7: 15. Januar –15. Februar 2020, Hilla Toony Navok
Event #8: 17. Januar 2020, Out of Hands, screening program
Event #9: 21.–22. February 2020, Tobias Gutmann
Event #10: 15. Mai –12. Juni 2020, Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė (YGRG)
Für weitere Infos können Sie @choreo.the.public auf Instagram, OnCurating.org auf Facebook folgen
Das kuratorische Projekt Choreographing the Public ist ein vielseitiges Programm mit Ausstellungen, Performances, Interventionen und Screenings, das von Oktober 2019 bis Juni 2020 im OnCurating Project Space und anderen kooperierenden Orten in Zürich stattfindet.
Seit Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts liegt ein ständiger Fokus darauf, die traditionelle Beziehung zwischen Kunst und ihrem Publikum zu überdenken und sich von der statischen und passiven Kontemplation der Kunst zu einer engagierteren und sozialeren Erfahrung zu bewegen. Bereits in den 1920er Jahren sprachen die Futuristen und Dadaisten ihr Publikum an, indem sie performative Techniken einsetzten, um die bürgerliche Selbstgefälligkeit zu erschüttern. Im weiteren Verlauf des Jahrhunderts nutzten die Happenings der 1950er und 60er Jahre auch das Publikum als integralen Bestandteil ihrer Veranstaltungen, indem sie die Autorschaft und andere Paradigmen in Frage stellten und versuchten, das ästhetische Feld zu radikalisieren und zu demokratisieren. Seit den 90er Jahren sind eine Reihe neuer Praktiken entstanden, die größtenteils unter dem Sammelbegriff von partizipativer Kunst zusammengefasst sind. Diese performativen, integrativen und gemeinschafts-basierten Praktiken, die auf eine aktivere Zuschauerschaft abzielen, ermöglichen es dem Publikum, intellektuell, emotional und physisch mit dem Raum und der Arbeit zu interagieren und gleichzeitig Fragen nach der Souveränität zu stellen, die durch Machtstrukturen im Kunstbereich hervorgerufen wird.
Vor dem Hintergrund dieses kunsthistorischen Kontextes recherchiert das kuratorische Kollektiv aus 12 Mitgliedern unterschiedlicher Herkunft und Praxis seit über einem Jahr Strategien zur gemeinsamen Auseinandersetzung mit der Öffentlichkeit, um eine „Choreographie“ zu gestalten. Ausgehend von den griechischen Wörtern khoreia (Kreistanz) und γράψιμο (Schreiben) definiert das Wort „Choreographie“ die Praxis der Gestaltung von Bewegungsabläufen. Mit anderen Worten, eine Choreographie orchestriert Bewegungen und leitet Bewegungen, um eine fließende Beziehung zwischen den Elementen – in diesem Fall zwischen dem Publikum und der Arbeit – herzustellen, die Austausch und Reaktionen sowie eine potentielle Kollektivität hervorruft. Wie die britische Forscherin Claire Bishop feststellte, geht es in der Kunst heute nicht mehr darum, das Werk auf eine persönliche Beziehung zu beschränken, sondern viele Menschen einzubeziehen und kollektives Denken zu schaffen, bei dem „der Mensch das zentrale künstlerische Medium und Material“ darstellt (Artificial Hells; 2018). Genau dann findet eine Choreographie zwischen dem Werk und dem Publikum statt, wenn die Besucher*innen zu Protagonist*innen des künstlerischen Prozesses werden.
Ausgehend von dieser Idee von Impuls und Bewegung, die im Ausstellungsraum stattfindet, versuchen alle Interventionen des Gesamtprojekts Choreographing the Public die Rollen der/des Künstler*s und des Publikums neu zu gestalten und neue Formen des Geschichtenerzählens zu schaffen. Ausgehend von traditionellen Erfahrungen der Kunst beleuchtet das kuratorische Projekt die Tugenden der Partizipation durch dier Erzeugung neuer und facettenreicher Narrative. Mit metaphorischen und unsichtbaren Pfeilen werden die Besucher*innen eingeladen, experimentelle Wege zu gehen, sich zu bewegen, zu interagieren und sich frei mit der Umgebung auseinanderzusetzen und gleichzeitig Choreographen der Werke zu werden.
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Das kuratorische Projekt wurde mit Unterstützung des Kurators Sergio Edelsztein und des OnCurating Project Space unter der Leitung von Dorothee Richter und Ronald Kolb entwickelt.
ENFILADE
2019
2-Kanal-HD-Video-Installation, 26:00 Min. Loop (Farbe, Ton), 2 Projektoren, 2 Lautsprecher, Holz, Hartfaserplatte, L x B x H: 573 x 325 x 300 cm