AFTERLIFE.FAIL

AFTERLIFE.FAIL 💧

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‘Awakening Destruction’ by BERGERNISSEN @ Gemeinde Köln, Cologne

25 Jan — 22 Feb 2019  Gemeinde Köln, Cologne

Artists  BERGERNISSEN

The Chinese Year of the Pig brings ozone and healing over the hare’s objects.

On 20.07.2017, 110 litres of rain per square meter fell in Cologne within 24 hours. The storage of the artist duo bergernissen was flooded completely. Many works were destroyed. On 14.07.2018, exactly one year later, in their new studio at Bonner Kunstverein, a condenser, overheated by the summer sun, exploded during the World Cup finals. Highly toxic and liquid PCB was spread out in the studio. All the artists and five firefighters in the studio at the time had to be decontaminated in a hospital in Bonn for six hours. Afterwards, it was forbidden to enter the studio for three months. Much of the inventory, including many works of art, film rolls and installation materials, had to be thrown out, decontaminated or destroyed.

The exhibition and the opening performance at GEMEINDE KÖLN, in a sense, is an allegorical healing procedure. The forbidden — contaminated by PCB — and destroyed objects from the studio and storage are presented here for the first and last time. Visitors can observe the performance during the opening evening from the outside space or enter the interior in small groups with the help of protective clothing and observe the process from close up.

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‘First blood’, a Group Show Curated by Plague @ Street Burg, Krasnodar

14 Dec 2018 Street Burg, Krasnodar   

Curated by Plague

With Artists Pasha Bezor, Vanya Venmer, Arthur Golyakov, Stas Tocka

We came to Burger King, made our orders, sat at the table and started discussing Trump and how come he won the elections.

Suddenly, I felt like i do want some Fanta. Not mirinda, but Fanta. I ordered some, took a sip and realized it for the umpteenth time: «that’s not the flavor I wanted»

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‘(Dis)connection’ group show @ Kunstvereniging Diepenheim

2 Feb – 5 May 2019 Kunstvereniging Diepenheim Curated by Karina Kottová and Alexandra Landré Organized by Jindřich Chalupecký Society and Kunstvereniging Diepenheim   

With Artists Adéla Babanová, Sybren de Boer, Lotte Geeven, Yeb Wiersma, Anna Hulačová, Valentýna Janů, Hannah Joka, Martin Kohout, Frank Mandersloot, Anetta Mona Chisa, Lucia Tkáčová, Maria Pask, Frédérique Bergholtz  

Jindřich Chalupecký Society and Kunstvereniging Diepenheim (The Netherlands) proudly present the group exhibition (Dis)connection, with installations, sculptures and video works by eleven international artists. The exhibition brings together various artistic positions that are connected by a shared concern: how can we live together in today’s uncertain times?

The question echoes a larger field of social, political and economic issues. It suggests possibilities for rethinking the ways in which we organize ourselves – both personally and collectively. In the midst of a global environmental, humanitarian and political crisis, we have to ask ourselves what we can do to avert catastrophic scenarios. What knowledge can we resort to and which assumptions and values ​​should we let go of? By disconnecting from modern concepts, such as the idea of ​​progress, the participating artists offer space for new imaginative narratives and visions. The most diverse artistic resources are covered: from fictional documentaries and system installations to works that offer reconsideration of the concept ​​of ‘time’. In a critical and intuitive way, alternative approaches of creating connections emerge. (Dis)connection invites the audience to explore these different perspectives and to collectively visualize unorthodox storylines for possible futures.

(Dis)connection is a beginning of a long-term collaborative research, exhibition and discursive project entitled Islands, initiated by the Jindřich Chalupecký Societyand realizedin collaboration with diverseinternationalpartner organizationsand personalities. The notion of an abandoned island serves as an imaginary platform for projecting both utopian and dystopian visions and scenarios for the future pictured by “escapists” from contemporary global crises. The island here needn’t be a physical (lost) paradise, and doesn’t even have to be far ashore. It is rather a metaphor for our exploration of the joint agendas and disparities of past, present and imagined communities, communal practices and forms of “togetherness” which might inspire actual action plans and alternative forms of sustainable collaboration and coexistence.

The project begins in Kunstvereniging Diepenheim in order to highlight the specifics of this venue and similar arts organizations around the world – the kunstverein itself is an “island” of critical reflection and thought-provokingprogramming, situated in a rural environment remote from any larger cities, yet connected through the ideas and creative processes it shares with wide international (artistic) communities.

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'HANDS OF DOOM VI' – Group exhibition @ Storage Capacité, Berlin

11 Jan 2019 Storage  Capacité, Berlin

With artists Vitaly Bezpalov, Paul Barsch + Tilman Hornig, Nschotschi Haslinger, Bernhard Holaschke, Botond Keresztesi Text by Natalya Serkova Photos: by Alexander Butz

She erodes me. I can calmly admit to myself — she erodes me. She hosts herself in me. She lets me understand that what has been already achieved today, is not the limit at all, that she can do more, can move on, and anything can be done, she has strength and we both know it. She grows and develops slowly, becomes larger. It is difficult to say how long ago have I discovered her presence. I am sure that she was inside of me for quite a long time, remaining unknown. She worked, developed, grew inside me like a big complex machine, without being caught by my eyes. She worked in silence and in the dark, but I did not even suspect anything. I have no evidence that she was in me long before I discovered her. I’m afraid I will never have any clues for how long she was inside of me, for how long she had been building her machine. No one will ever be able to give me the exact day and hour when her very first cell appeared inside me and began to divide and grow. Probably at the very beginning she acted very carefully, perhaps she didn’t want me to find her. If she wants anything at all. It is possible that she does not want anything. Perhaps she can not even want. Strictly speaking, erodes is not the exact word. Eroding means destruction of something, some kind of fabric, flesh or soul, the transformation of this into muck, mass or dirt. She does not erode me — she divides me. She separates something that was me before, but no longer is me, from what remains to be me. What she separates, she turns into something completely different from me. I carry her part in me, I am her carrier. But I am afraid that when the part that is captured by her will become bigger than the part that will remain to be me, our roles will change, and she will become my carrier, while I will turn into something that she will carry. I will become a soft invertebrate slippery parasite in her body, which by then will become tough and strong, like the best machine in the world. I feel that every day she snaps off more and more parts of me and that some sort of her law unfolds inside of me, according to which she performs her work. I ask myself what is this law that makes my body work in the logic contrary to it. This law is inside of me, but at the same time it is somewhere outside of me, beyond my reach. But she, I know that, is completely inside of me, but if her law is outside of me — then where is it? Sometimes it seems to me that if I could find the center in which everything began (if such a center exists at all), then I could stop her, I would understand her law, would regain all what she had taken from me. But no matter how hard I try to look for it, I see nothing, I cannot find anything, and in the meantime she takes away parts of me, and less and less is left. I seem to be both diminishing and at the same time, being captured by her law, I begin to last somewhere where I had never been before. I cease to feel my body and because of this more and more often I stumble upon the surrounding objects. This is rather an annoying feeling — when you simultaneously feel your body extended for some inconceivable distance and at the same time painfully hurt yourself with the objects that are in close proximity to you. Recently, it seems to me that what she is doing is something for a reason very important and necessary. I begin to feel joy about the fact that it is me chosen by her as her carrier, and it was from me that she took the parts for her machine. And then I ask myself: can I help her in her work? And if so, how? Trying to answer these questions, I face a problem: I do not know anything about her, nor about her machine, nor about her law. I do not even know for what reason she chose me. It is possible that it was just an accident, and it is also possible that somehow I corresponded to what she was looking for. Sometimes it seems to me that we work together with her. That I help her, without knowing it. I can say that I am even pleased to think so. Thanks to this, I have a feeling that I myself am doing some important, necessary thing, that by my actions and by the fact that I just live and breathe, I help her to build a machine to create a law. It is possible that when I do not remain at all, when I turn into the whole machine built by her, and when I become no longer myself, then she will finally accomplish the important and necessary work that is not yet finished. I want to help her as much as I can — but I don’t know what exactly I need to do to help her. When I want to take a cup in my hand, I simply brush my hand and take it. But there is simply no place to brush my hands, because she lives inside of me, and all I can do is think about her more often. Perhaps I can help her, give her strength. Perhaps, if I think more about her and her work, she will work better, build her machine faster. But then, I know it, I myself will end. My hands will reach to my end. But my end, I know this as well, will become her beginning. The machine will start working in full force, and the law will extend in all directions, encountering no obstacles. Then, having ended, I shall go on to infinity.

Natalya Serkova

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‘Avoider of Disorder’ by Pakui Hardware @ Future Gallery Casita, Mexico City

5 Feb  —  31 Mar 2019  Future Gallery Casita, Mexico City

Avoider of Disorder is someone who looks for patterns in apparent chaos. Avoider of Disorder is someone who sings karaoke about immortal jellyfish. Is someone who hallucinates. Avoider of Disorder believes hydra is the key to longevity. Avoider of Disorder suspends her disbeliefs. Avoider of Disorder says: “what if DNA is two interweaved serpents seen under drug influence?”. Avoider of Disorder says: “plants communicate their knowledge to me”. Avoider of Disorder grows tissues outside of human body. Avoider of Disorder hides behind masks and smoke. Avoider of Disorder is feeling hopelessly uncertain. Avoider of Disorder avoids thinking about Frankenstein and economy, While looking at pulsating heart placed in a dish. Tacit knowledge of living things is what the avoider of disorder seeks to crack down.

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‘The Chronicles of Shpongle’ a film by Paul Gondry & Shelby Jackson

The Chronicles of Shpongle 

The Chronicles of Shpongle is a multi-narrative episodic ensemble film project. The film centers on a fantasy drug called “Shpongle” and the imagined urban subculture of its users. 

We follow various characters through present day New York City, to gradually discover a forgotten mythological underworld hidden behind closed doors, sidewalk grates, and atop a tower. The inhabitants of this archaic society are religious harvesters of the drug called “Shpongle”. Shpongle, which can be consumed through many forms and methods, connects its users to a fantastical world of which they are both the builders and hosts.     One of these characters is known as the Condo Leprechaun - once a real estate agent who mutated with a leprechaun - whose key ring can be heard jangling at night with his thousands of keys to doors throughout the city. Another is The Painter, a homeless all-seeing oracle who paints the prophesied transformations of other characters. We follow these and other wayward characters out of their respective “hives” and into this strange realm; a fantasy world disclosed in a series of elaborate (and increasingly horrifying) fairy-tale narratives. Between these two realms, we witness the recurrent seeding, harvesting, and extraction of Shpongle, which simultaneously powers and strangles the city in a creeping fungus. Each of these layers of Shpongle’s reality prescribes a unique mode of cinematography and story-telling. The contemporary world of the Shpongle user is surveyed in the style of a rough TV drug documentary (a la Drugs, Inc.)—a style that at times recalls films produced according the tenants of Dogma 95. The liminal world is approached by way of a combination of cinema-verite-style long shots and de-realized montage. First and third-personal perspectives are conflated by switching seamlessly between Go-Pro footage and orbital drone shots. The fantasy world is showcased in a series of high-production vignettes, shot both on a sound-stage and in a variety of majestic landscapes including the Hudson Valley, New York and the Basque country of France.

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‘Sphynx’ by Robertas Narkus @ Editorial, Vilnius

Editorial, Vilnius 3 Feb  —  3 Mar 2019

In the summer I spent a few months in Liverpool, such a strange city, searching for hope, having once seen its own golden age and been the richest harbour in the United Kingdom, and, by the way – the first and last registration point for the Titanic. Today, in Liverpool, the spirit of co-working and start-ups is strongly stimulated, however, most of these spaces are empty and the promise of a better future keeps getting delayed. I stayed in a skyscraper, twenty-first floor, the apartment of an American composer and his wife, an author, from which you could see a wonderful view, cruise ships passing by once in a while, and the city’s plans for the future.

I enjoyed walking around the district of former docks, but most of all I liked hanging around the parking lot of an abandoned shopping centre. On my first time there I was welcomed by savage street kids from the nearby trailer park community. After realizing that I am a foreigner, they prompted me to say in Liverpoolian – «I am a sausage» – pulling out a phone with the intention to film it. I felt alien and naive, and remembered my childhood in Justiniškės. We did not bond at all. Screw them. They don’t know yet that after I leave, bulldozers will not take long to come, destroy their sheds, and this will be a hub of creative industries.

The lot was cosy, surrounded by overgrown and jungle-like hedges, which protected it from the noise of a street stretching nearby. Scattered around were shopping trolleys, various appliances, a toilet bowl, a one-meter wide replica of a compass, sneakers. But the longest shadow was cast on the lot by an outdoor billboard growing out from the fence. For years, constantly changing advertising campaigns were layered on it, but sometimes those layers had to be peeled off and everything began anew. And the old banners, torn up like ill-meaning photographs, could be abandoned in the bushes, which is exactly where I found them. I piled them up in one of the trolleys, pushed it back home, called up a courier discovered through adverts, however, a bus with tinted windows rolled up, which, alongside with things, was taking home my exhausted countrymen. In Vilnius, I spread these shreds on the floor of my study and took a paper knife to them, cutting out figures possibly resembling drawings of Egyptian pyramids which I have not seen, since when I was in Egypt many years ago we were filming an advertisement and I spent almost all of my time in the hotel.

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‘who do i trust i trust ME and my donut-shaped brain’ by Deirdre Sargent @ Catbox Contemporary, New York

2 Feb  —  3 Mar 2019 Catbox Contemporary, New York 

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‘SKEE’ by Bora Akinciturk and Iain Ball @ narrative projects, London

2 Feb — 16 Feb 1019 narrative projects, London

The exhibition takes its name from a Lil Xan Song of the same name, “[Chorus] skee, skee, skee, skee, skee, skee, skee, skee”. In their work, Akinciturk and Ball delve into the collectivised phenomenon of what can be loosely defined as Cloud Rap (also termed as Soundcloud Rap, Internet Rap, Sad Rap and Sad Trap Music). The artists look at the influence the genre has had on popular culture in recent years, which came into focus after the deaths of rappers XXXtentacion and Lil Peep and the incarceration of rapper 6ix9ine.

Beyond the impact Cloud Rap has had on the public consciousness, the artists consider the genre’s interplay with internet subcultures and meme culture, mainstream RnB music, 90s Punk and 4th wave Emo. They examine its roots within niche internet microgenres such as Vaporwave and Witch House.

In SKEE, the artists are interested in the collective psyche of younger generations, and how their unique lived experience has the power to transform the way the world looks and feels. Working collaboratively, they have weaved together their own unique working processes, aesthetic interests and backgrounds combining their shared interest in fashion, internet culture and rap music.

This is the first project of ER, a new series that promote collaborative practices in contemporary moving image and installation. ER’s name is inspired by a tiny cellular structure, endoplasmic reticulum, which is a symbol of a fluid space that inspires for the generation and circulation of new ideas. It is an initiative to bring people together within and around its projects. ER is curated by Cem Hamlacıbaşı.

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‘Intro. The why of this site’ by Robin Mackay

Robin Mackay Urbanomic 

Source: http://readthis.wtf/intro/

2019

Intro

It’s almost three years now since I decided to rescue the many texts that for years had been written, sometimes appeared somewhere obscure, been forgotten, copied from one laptop to another, ignored, shuffled around, occasionally reread and then forgotten again.

The site contains all of my writings1 and translations,2 along with a few audio and videopieces. The full text is included wherever it was possible and was not legally dubious to do so.3I’ve tried to avoid too much overlap with my other home at Urbanomic.

Every time I’ve come back to edit the site I have remembered other items I hadn’t added yet, and this will probably continue for some time.

But why? In the aftermath of Mark Fisher’s death in 2017 and the remembering of earlier periods of life and self-reflection that had inevitably set off, I initially conceived of this archiving project as a response to my distress at the fact that dealing with other people’s words as editor, translator, and publisher, not to mention just dealing with life, existence, and money, seemed to have made it impossible for me to commit myself to any “serious” research that I could consider “mine”. That’s partly what you might call “facilitator’s syndrome”, and partly an excuse for my own somewhat unsystematic style of thinking (and maybe that seriousness is anyway just an outdated idea, a phantasm that no one can genuinely realize today). But at the same time, in the gaps in between all this other stuff, I had actually produced a substantial amount of writing, most of it as a result of external provocation, often commissioned, generally executed under pressure, and usually on subject matter that was at some tangent to my own interests (in so far as I had any idea what those were; and many times it was these tangents that reoriented and reenergised my own vector).

At a certain point—partly owing to the urging of others, partly as a result of attempts to climb out of depression—I decided that it would be a useful exercise, in fact I felt like it would be good for me in some way, to consolidate it all and allow it to exist—which also meant to assert a separate existence, for better or worse, from Urbanomic a.k.a. the monster that had taken over my life. I also wanted to convince myself of the possibility that someone might find this stuff useful and/or entertaining. And anyway, it was a waste for all these organised ciphers to be languishing in digital limbo, and it would surely require marginal effort to stick them all online.

On the contrary, I succeeded in making it instead into a painstaking and arduous process, especially since it was attended to only in rare moments between other project and duties and often put aside for months at a time. In the process I discovered a number of unexpectedly longstanding obsessions and references snaking their way through these occasional, inconclusive, apparently disparate texts, instructing me of my deep assignments. I discovered that whether I found revisiting them energy-sapping and excruciating or encouraging and enthusing depended far more on my mood at the time than on their actual content. Some I enjoyed—usually those I had enjoyed at the time of writing, especially those that made me laugh. Others I had to resist meddling with, all too aware of omissions, faults, and gaps. Whereupon, reminding myself of the original motive—that preemptively dismissing the value of what one has to give to others is both a symptom of and a recipe for protracted depressive disengagement—I renewed my resolve to put it out there anyway.

My other hope is to use this as a place for casual, unforced, exploratory writing that isn’t work of the type that blogging once invited me to—I have fond memories of the blogosphere before the reign of social media and have been encouraged to see signs of a renaissance. To this end I’m making a minimal commitment to at least write some regular weeknotes to document what I’m up to and what I’ve been thinking about. Essentially a minor high-frequency version of the major getting-over-it process described above.

My sincere thanks to Patricia Reed for her great perseverance and patience in building the site for me (any difficulty encountered in navigating the sprawl is entirely my fault).

Excluding the still uncollated material related to my [unfinished] PhD, texts that are just slight variants of another text, and scraps that resisted being pieced together in any coherent way.

Excluding those done anonymously for agencies.

I am of course happy to remove anything on request

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'Archaeology of Darkness' by Nicolás Lamas at Meessen De Clercq, Brussels

11 Jan  —  16 Feb 2019  Meessen De Clercq, Brussels

Archaeology of Darkness, the third solo exhibition by Nicolás LAMAS is probably the one which demonstrates the greatest maturity yet. Relentlessly linking elements and objects drawn from disparate fields, Lamas explores concepts drawn from biosphere and from archaeology, or the evolution of techniques for analyzing and grasping the phenomena that govern our way of life. This exhibition shows the total involvement of technical know-how in our existence and the historical evolution of our dependence on manufacturing processes. The visitor is greeted by Dark Times, a work which stands at the entrance to the gallery consisting of two blocks of black marble squeezing a book with a symbolic title L’Homme et le Temps (Man and Time). Not without a number of references (the black obelisk at the British Museum, the monolith in 2001, a Space Odyssey, kaaba, …) this stele which is at the same time dense and enigmatic, raises one of the recurring questions in all artistic activity in general, and specifically that of Nicolás Lamas. In the left-hand room, several works address the notion of time via the transmission of information and its control, which at any time, has been of paramount importance in human societies. Controlling information means possessing power. For example, Lamas compares a Sumerian tablet, symbolizing the birth of writing in Mesopotamia about 6000 years ago, with a fragment of computer components illustrating our modern era. This work opens up avenues of reflection about the process of communication over several thousand years, the storage of information, learning methods, the omnipotence of technology as well as the obsolescence of machines. In this respect, La Société du Spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) is an iconic work. Borrowing the title of the book by Guy Debord, the work consists of a video camera filming its own constituent parts which have been completely dismantled down to the tiniest piece before it could be observed that it was malfunctioning. The parts removed in this way are filmed and displayed on a screen in real time. With this modern-day still life, Lamas shows us a world potentially alienated from the image, recording its own disintegration. This heap of wires and cables is echoed in a drawing taking as its source the observation of cave art. The graphical expressions that Paleolithic man produced sometimes took the form of outlines of fingers or tools left in wet clay. These allegories of the creation of the living world are reinterpreted here by Nicolás Lamas to outline the similarities that can constantly be established between yesterday and today. The genesis of shapes in the work of Lamas is also born out of observation and use of the ordinary or even the trivial. Thus many everyday objects punctuate the evolution of his work and open up interpretations with multiple ramifications. His works sometimes place the viewer in a confrontational posture in as far as the codes of a pre-scripted life are constantly shaken up. Chaos appears to be controlled, and control appears chaotic. Just as two atoms can collide and create a new alloy, the creative process that drives Lamas is guided by chance encounter, assembly and annexation. That can be seen in his work Posthuman flows laid out on a large pedestal in the right-hand room. The work unfolds as a hybrid synthesis between an exhumed human skeleton and mineral concretions, molten metal, tubes and cables, 3D reproductions, electrical wiring and light bulbs, … These are revealed with regard to the traces of complexity of life, the power of tools and the era of the future. Can we not perceive an analogy between the nervous system of a living organism and the worldwide network transmitting incessant flows of data? The fragility of memories is highlighted in the rear room, where there is an encounter between recent yet already obsolete photocopiers and copies of statues from Antiquity. On the one hand, the reproduction of the written document and, on the other, the wish to disseminate an idea for posterity via an image, a sculpted object. There, we find the philosopher, the athlete, the politician (Brutus the Elder), the archetype of Venus (head of Venus de Milo), the priest (Laocoön), and the architectural element (Atlas). This group emphasizes that our epoch is paradoxical, and sees the accumulation of information, which is no longer legible or consultable within a few years. «After a few centuries, the majority of the information concerning contemporary civilization may have disappeared (…). The immensity of the volume of documents generated by modern activity not only poses a storage problem, but first and foremost the problem of their exploitation, for which technology has failed to keep pace with production». 1 This group shows the innards of these machines, dissected like bodies; they reveal transmission belts that become tendons, wires as thin as blood vessels, and cables as thick as arteries. These disemboweled machines resemble mutilated bodies. Lamas is showing us that the human being is ultra-connected and dependent on nature, but also of the advance of technology and knowledge of the subject. To consider the future of humanity, it would perhaps be useful to comprehend the emergence of technology as an inevitable stage in natural evolution, with all the potential wayward developments that it entails.

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‘Pulse’ by Rafani @ HotDock project space, Bratislava

12 Dec 2018  —  31 Jan 2019 HotDock project space, Bratislava

photos by Leontina Berkova

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Painting Clubb in collaboration with Chaos Magic, Nottingham

12 Dec 2018   —  19 Jan 2019 Chaos Magic, Nottingham PAINTING CLUBB in collaboration with Chaos Magic and artists Jack Cooper, Georgia O'Reilly, Leon Sadler, Jeffrey Alan Scudder +++

​Photos by Julian Zizko

Painting Clubb is an inclusive and nomadic platform which practices collaborative painting and drawing sessions with its participants. It holds an unfixed, shifting approach to its sessions, welcoming new participants and scenarios at each painting and drawing event. This allows for a particularly experimental and open environment that actively evolves during the sessions. The sessions hold no rules for leading the paintings or drawings in a particular direction, fostering an environment of fluidity and spontaneity.

Painting Clubb was founded by Bora Akinciturk, Canan Batur, Jennifer Ipekel, Merve Iseri, Asli Ozdemir and Tabitha Steinberg.

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‘There Is Nothing Left But You’ online show curated by Hyperlink, Athens

4 Jan 2019 Hyperlink

Dimitris Gketsis, Alexandra Koumantaki, Yannis Voulgaris

Sound by Shattered Form

‘There Is Nothing Left But You’

‘He woke to dim red light and the mingled noise of pumps and fans near and far. The air was hot and stank of ozone and disinfectant. He was weightless, zipped naked and cathetered into a cocoon hung in a small cubicle hard against an angled bulkhead painted black and curtained on three sides with stiffly pleated grey cloth. His mouth was dry and his tongue swollen with thirst. His shoulder throbbed steadily but not unpleasantly under a halflife bandage that clung to it like a leech. He’d been rescued… The war was over. His mission was over… Fragments of memory came back. ‘’ The Quiet War – Paul McAuley