Transactions With Eternity
09 Jul - 20 Aug 2022
MANUEL ARTURO ABREU, DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY, JES FAN, YONG XIANG LI, DIANE SEVERIN NGUYEN, XIYADIE
The artists in Transactions With Eternity acknowledge that any subjectivity is affected by the violent regimes of modernity, but at the same time it is irreducible to such forces. There is always a hint of indeterminacy, of that which cannot be grasped and eludes the prevailing social order. Where there is a “supremacy of thought” (abreu), there is also the sensuous, not as its opposite, but as its deformed underside. The treatment of seemingly eternal categories such as history is constantly transacted, and if some things are indeed set in stone, aesthetics can contribute to their renegotiation.
In All Electrons Are (Not) Alike, a 2009 poem by German-American poet Rosmarie Waldrop, Waldrop talks of “transactions with eternity” as being less urgent than the power to name and record in the colonial quests. While Waldrop speaks of such a transaction within a religious context, the tenor of this term lends itself to cracking open ways to decipher artistic practices that broker seemingly enduring historical matters.
While first-person video games strive for technological perfection and an immersive experience, they almost never achieve them, despite their asymptotic promise of endless improvement. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley”s BEHIND THE SCENES (OFFICE VIDEOS SERIES 1) irreverently and humorously exploits the glitches, malfunctions, and gaps of video games, where–just like in “real” life–we always find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. A corporate, soulless non-place disorients the uncooperative subject that is never able to reach the level of full immersion. Flops and failures here are not a deviation from digital technology, but its structural features. In the films, MOISTURISING and BADCITYENDING, confrontational one-liners mix with audiovisual cacophony to offer an aesthetic model that counters the politics of liberal Humanism and easy legibility.
Yong Xiang Li’s chair-like objects are foldable, which gives them a utilitarian quality of modernist modulation, but they shamelessly transcend it by delighting in their superficiality, for it is surface, not depth, that is laden with meaning. With ambivalent feelings towards the appropriation of Oriental motifs by 19th-century arts and crafts and the so-called Anglo-Japanese style, the artist reflects on the history in which the aesthetics of the ‘vernacular other’ have been mis/translated as decoration. Echoing Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Hill House Chair and its ‘unapologetic impracticality,’ the frozen drama of a fleeting moment in Gustav Courbet's wave paintings and the illusionistic painting of Wang Youxue, a student of Giuseppe Castiglione, who was responsible for a particular vein of 'Western painting' that was translated in service of the Qing Dynasty court, Li's work emphasizes the style of transmutation within the asymmetries of historical and present-day cross-cultural exchange.
Rack II gives a nod to Jes Fan’s fascination with museological displays that are usually meant to be invisible and seamless as is the coloniality and logic of rationality embedded in such taxonomical institutional spaces. Fan finds moments of restraint and extravagance in these structures and molds them into non-subordinate forms that complicate a monolithic reading. Whereas the boundaries in conventional display systems are made to be distinct and fastened, the anatomy of Rack II appears porous and leaking. Leakage implies a breach between the inside and the outside, an opening where Fan navigates slippery issues of identity through a tactile, material approach. Here, the leakage forms its own exterior, like a pearl or resin that, against all odds, solidifies its being. Over these bulbous forms, Fan drapes pendulous casts of skin that approximate his own body, but with their enfolded forms, elude the privileged bodily hierarchy.
manuel arturo abreu is a writer, artist, and poet whose practice is rooted in collective learning and education, often taking the form of ephemeral sculptures and lecture performances. Their reading corner in the first gallery consists of a dried shrub branch system, a light fixture, and cascarilla, which is dried eggshell powder used ritualistically for metaphysical protection. In contrast to European modernism's classical notion of theoretical detachment and its denigration of the sensual or the non-cognitive, here senses co-produce theory, while objects are considered facilitators of a certain kind of temporary relation. Visitors are invited to sit down and browse through the zine, which includes the Berlin Ethnological Museum”s rejection letter from the gallery’s attempt to obtain some indigenous Ayiti Arawak artifacts on loan, as well as various recent analytical essays, poems, paintings, and Asemic writings that together address certain ‘cracks’ in modern (art) history and point to the space beyond the artwork as a self-contained entity.
Diane Severin Nguyen arranges and photographs tenuous set-ups where things are pulled apart, twisted, and burned, and the materiality itself becomes a decaying subject with open wounds. Nguyen brings matter like hair, latex, liquid, and notably, homemade napalm into abstracted terrain that embodies what she finds unstable about images in general, namely their power to disfigure and alienate the intractable forces embedded in our historical and collective memory. Harnessing the notion of punctum, that which disturbs and rises from the scene in photography, Nguyen’s images retain an aberrant quality that defies naming. By conceding with photograph’s constructedness, the artist distances her work from what she calls a “violent lineage of indexicality” that has been perpetuated in the medium of photography.
Naming himself after the “Siberian Butterfly,” a creature defined by tenacity against harsh realities, Xiyadie unfolds deeply personal narratives of queer intimacy and loss as he cuts and colors paper. Papercutting had originated as folk art in domestic spheres where papercuts would be hung to cast shad- ows through passages and windows. In keeping with the medium’s backdrop, Xiyadie explores the familial space and its thresholds, where safety and risk collide as he looks back on his previously closeted family life. Gates are recurring loci in his work, alluding to the duality that has always existed in his life, one that negotiates privacy within fraught social conditions and celebrates exuberance and harmony in life and nature.
Transactions With Eternity is curated by Sebastjan Brank and Catherine Wang.
The artists in Transactions With Eternity acknowledge that any subjectivity is affected by the violent regimes of modernity, but at the same time it is irreducible to such forces. There is always a hint of indeterminacy, of that which cannot be grasped and eludes the prevailing social order. Where there is a “supremacy of thought” (abreu), there is also the sensuous, not as its opposite, but as its deformed underside. The treatment of seemingly eternal categories such as history is constantly transacted, and if some things are indeed set in stone, aesthetics can contribute to their renegotiation.
In All Electrons Are (Not) Alike, a 2009 poem by German-American poet Rosmarie Waldrop, Waldrop talks of “transactions with eternity” as being less urgent than the power to name and record in the colonial quests. While Waldrop speaks of such a transaction within a religious context, the tenor of this term lends itself to cracking open ways to decipher artistic practices that broker seemingly enduring historical matters.
While first-person video games strive for technological perfection and an immersive experience, they almost never achieve them, despite their asymptotic promise of endless improvement. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley”s BEHIND THE SCENES (OFFICE VIDEOS SERIES 1) irreverently and humorously exploits the glitches, malfunctions, and gaps of video games, where–just like in “real” life–we always find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. A corporate, soulless non-place disorients the uncooperative subject that is never able to reach the level of full immersion. Flops and failures here are not a deviation from digital technology, but its structural features. In the films, MOISTURISING and BADCITYENDING, confrontational one-liners mix with audiovisual cacophony to offer an aesthetic model that counters the politics of liberal Humanism and easy legibility.
Yong Xiang Li’s chair-like objects are foldable, which gives them a utilitarian quality of modernist modulation, but they shamelessly transcend it by delighting in their superficiality, for it is surface, not depth, that is laden with meaning. With ambivalent feelings towards the appropriation of Oriental motifs by 19th-century arts and crafts and the so-called Anglo-Japanese style, the artist reflects on the history in which the aesthetics of the ‘vernacular other’ have been mis/translated as decoration. Echoing Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Hill House Chair and its ‘unapologetic impracticality,’ the frozen drama of a fleeting moment in Gustav Courbet's wave paintings and the illusionistic painting of Wang Youxue, a student of Giuseppe Castiglione, who was responsible for a particular vein of 'Western painting' that was translated in service of the Qing Dynasty court, Li's work emphasizes the style of transmutation within the asymmetries of historical and present-day cross-cultural exchange.
Rack II gives a nod to Jes Fan’s fascination with museological displays that are usually meant to be invisible and seamless as is the coloniality and logic of rationality embedded in such taxonomical institutional spaces. Fan finds moments of restraint and extravagance in these structures and molds them into non-subordinate forms that complicate a monolithic reading. Whereas the boundaries in conventional display systems are made to be distinct and fastened, the anatomy of Rack II appears porous and leaking. Leakage implies a breach between the inside and the outside, an opening where Fan navigates slippery issues of identity through a tactile, material approach. Here, the leakage forms its own exterior, like a pearl or resin that, against all odds, solidifies its being. Over these bulbous forms, Fan drapes pendulous casts of skin that approximate his own body, but with their enfolded forms, elude the privileged bodily hierarchy.
manuel arturo abreu is a writer, artist, and poet whose practice is rooted in collective learning and education, often taking the form of ephemeral sculptures and lecture performances. Their reading corner in the first gallery consists of a dried shrub branch system, a light fixture, and cascarilla, which is dried eggshell powder used ritualistically for metaphysical protection. In contrast to European modernism's classical notion of theoretical detachment and its denigration of the sensual or the non-cognitive, here senses co-produce theory, while objects are considered facilitators of a certain kind of temporary relation. Visitors are invited to sit down and browse through the zine, which includes the Berlin Ethnological Museum”s rejection letter from the gallery’s attempt to obtain some indigenous Ayiti Arawak artifacts on loan, as well as various recent analytical essays, poems, paintings, and Asemic writings that together address certain ‘cracks’ in modern (art) history and point to the space beyond the artwork as a self-contained entity.
Diane Severin Nguyen arranges and photographs tenuous set-ups where things are pulled apart, twisted, and burned, and the materiality itself becomes a decaying subject with open wounds. Nguyen brings matter like hair, latex, liquid, and notably, homemade napalm into abstracted terrain that embodies what she finds unstable about images in general, namely their power to disfigure and alienate the intractable forces embedded in our historical and collective memory. Harnessing the notion of punctum, that which disturbs and rises from the scene in photography, Nguyen’s images retain an aberrant quality that defies naming. By conceding with photograph’s constructedness, the artist distances her work from what she calls a “violent lineage of indexicality” that has been perpetuated in the medium of photography.
Naming himself after the “Siberian Butterfly,” a creature defined by tenacity against harsh realities, Xiyadie unfolds deeply personal narratives of queer intimacy and loss as he cuts and colors paper. Papercutting had originated as folk art in domestic spheres where papercuts would be hung to cast shad- ows through passages and windows. In keeping with the medium’s backdrop, Xiyadie explores the familial space and its thresholds, where safety and risk collide as he looks back on his previously closeted family life. Gates are recurring loci in his work, alluding to the duality that has always existed in his life, one that negotiates privacy within fraught social conditions and celebrates exuberance and harmony in life and nature.
Transactions With Eternity is curated by Sebastjan Brank and Catherine Wang.