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Anna Sofie Hvid @ Academy of Fine Arts Munich

Artist: Anna Sofie Hvid Exhibition title: “True Facts” Venue: Academy of Fine Arts Munich (Neubau) Dates: 2017-02-08 – 2017-02-14

Press release:

Focusing on a critical discourse on space, Anna Sofie Hvid’s practice includes cooperation with architects and art practitioners aiming at promoting an interdisciplinary spatial practice.

For the exhibition ‘True Facts’ she creates speculative spatial contexts for her last painting, a documentary of a non-existent art display. The exhibition is an amalgamation of art and spatial context in the documentary image.

Within the Coop Himmelb(l)au designed extension building of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, the exhibition plays off several layers of architecture against each other: the speculative and the present, the documentation and the constructed documentation.  

The in-between of speculation and documentation marks the launch of a found magazine turned artists’ publication which is a key object in the exhibition. It includes, among other embedded elements, a text by the curator Hasan Veseli (Fresh Art Bytes) whom she invited to contribute to that publication ('An Incomplete Introduction to Modeling'). Furthermore, she rewrote an essay of hers to a self-conducted interview ('Architecture is Not a Language'); the English version can be found below.

Architecture is Not a Language - “True Facts” 

DOMUS: Mrs. Hvid, is there a reality behind your activities?

ANNA SOFIE HVID: No.

DOMUS: So, how would you describe what you are doing?

ASH: Your question implies that reality is a reference point up front, in the rear, beside, and beneath what we are doing, but we don’t align ourselves with that type of reality. Following Bohr, I could say: We are suspended in reality in such a way that we cannot tell what is up and what is down…[1]

DOMUS: You’ve been at the helm of the architecture studio SDA (Society of Dialectic Architecture, editor’s note) for two years now, have you ever really built something?

ASH: For years now we have built in-between reality and fiction, in a very successful way. Realizing objects is not our benchmark. Many architects realize significant architectures, but we focus on the inter-space. If you want to highlight the actionist notion in that, you could say we work in the interface, in the dialectics of two or more entities. You probably know David Ruiz Muriel, the awardee of the 'cgarchitect Architectural 3D Award 2016'? We are, so to speak, between the pixels of his renderings and the hollow space of Gehry’s 'Walt Disney Concert Hall,' and we took part in the 'datascapes'; those computer generated shapes.

DOMUS: Meaning that you philosophize?

ASH: No. But, from time to time, in close collaboration with the 'Unemployed Academics Union,' we hire PhD-level philosophers temporary. It proves to have added value. We don’t consider the think-space between the pixels as a philosophical framework, but rather as aesthetical practice: Our approach is that the perspective of the inter-space of all entities shall be integrated with their individual and unreduced identity—a rather a materialized task than a way of thinking. For example, the black cloth between Kandinsky’s artworks (now exhibited in a historically informed way, at the Lenbachhaus) suggests a flat ontology between art and surface, between the dust particles that become invisible on the black background, and that turmoil in the top light. It is like in Jacob’s Room: “The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually...” [from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, editor’s note]. I don’t know how to think of that without wetting one’s pants to keep one warm, ethically speaking. Aesthetically speaking, the adventure is on the dice. We are sufficiently educated to realize that the artwork doesn’t represent anything, but when picking up this analogy, we could say that the inter-space doesn’t represent too; the same could be said about the dust particles or the skirting board. Architecture, especially the architecture of the industry of historical art, aims for the representative and the significant and places the symbolic beyond that which withholds from the significant. If architecture is art, then it is only art because it is not a signifying language. At this point, Mies would have lit a cigar (laughs).[2]

DOMUS: If you insist that you operate between the pixels and build in the 'datascapes,' then you also operate in a visual language?[3]

ASH: Well, the question is whether the inter-space is part of that visual language. In his memoirs, Sergei Eisenstein talks about a trip to the Chichén Itzá Museum, where the lights are switched off. The museum visit continued by torchlight and matches (it was 1931). Do the phases in the dark belong to an aesthetical experience of the museum pieces or just the 'illuminated' ones? The enlightened visual language to which art and architecture commit themselves to, under the pretense of documentation and communication of art, is qua their fluid technical quality a manifestation of biopower. Social platforms build the archive of our visual language based on “searchability,” and that in return determines our visual world of experience. The inter-space enables a biopower non-social dialectics between light and darkness, space and inter-space, etc.

DOMUS: Aesthetics as flash?

ASH: I am with Haraway here, who says: you have to learn to stay with the trouble. The flash doesn’t go past, and we have to learn to work with the twilight. Trump’s counselor, Kellyanne Conway, replied that she is talking about 'alternative facts' when being refuted by facts. Alternative facts can’t be strained off by confronting them with the truth (is that the opposite of alternative facts; something like 'true facts'? ... there, one can see that absurd regress). Alternative facts keep us in some inconvenient suspense, and in that state, we have to work in between the well-lit and unlit objects. It’s a memory game! With memory as architecture—that fancy bits architecture with empty attics and leaky joints—I’m referring to Bachelard, of course.

DOMUS: Bernett Newman said in the 1950’s: “Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.” When you renounced painting in 2017, marked by the True Facts-exhibition, you dissolved a picture in architectural interiors; and those in pixels... one doesn’t encounter architecture or sculpture...

ASH: ...you forget that this work was exhibited in the extension building of the Academy of the Fine Arts in Munich—designed by the 'Coop Himmelb(l)au'-studio—and that was a punch line. That architecture wants and wants and wants to be a sculpture—a typical reminiscence from the art-architecture complex of modernism and the post-modern. As a counter-concept to that, I came up with docile organic cream-tea architecture, specific for that last oil painting that I painted.[4] I had created the architectonic contexts for that picture which you would have never bumped into if you had not backed up to look at it. On the other hand, it is something from which you couldn’t have escaped. If you had tried that, you would have bumped into the 'Coop Himmelb(l)au' sculpture.

DOMUS: Picture and architecture merged...

ASH: ...in the inter-space in a seamless way and inseparable...

DOMUS: ...has this exhibition ever happened?

ASH: No.

The interview was conducted by Anna Sofie Hvid herself. Munich, February 2017. 

[1] Editor’s note: Bohr is misquoted here. The correct quote is as follows: “Traditionally philosophy has accustomed us to regard language as something secondary, and reality as something primary. Bohr considered this attitude toward the relation between language and reality inappropriate. When one said to him that it cannot be language which is fundamental, but that it must be reality which, so to speak, lies beneath language, and of which language is a picture, he would reply 'We are suspended in reality in such a way that we cannot tell what is up and what is down.'“(Petersen (1985), S. 302)

[2] “Architecture is a language ... We have to pull the whole thing together; we have to destroy the separation between painting and sculpture and architecture and design“ Mies van der Rohe. See video: https://vimeo.com/139258382

[3] From 2008 – 2017 painting was part of Hvid’s practice.

[4] "Lukke Gaarden“ (Hvid, 2015), oil on paper, 32,5 x 46,7 cm, is part of the dark oil-painting series; these motifs are only visible in a particular light perspective.

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Esther Zahel at AkademieGalerie

Artist: Esther Zahel Venue: AkademieGalerie, Munich Exhibition title: Gedankenpralinen (transl: pralines of thoughts) Date: 2016-12-15 – 2016-12-29 

Press release:

Ich weiß gar nicht mehr, wo mir der Kopf steht, klagt der Kopf Am Arsch, sagt die Liebe.

So schreibt es Robert Gernhardt in seinem Gedicht „Verdrehter Kopf“. In diesem unterhalten sich Kopf und Liebe: Der rational denkende, überlegte Kopf auf der einen und die großherzig und vertrauensselig liebende Liebe auf der anderen Seite. Dass sich die beiden nicht wirklich grün sind, wird schnell klar. Verstand und Intuition sind selten einer Meinung.

Esther Zahels Kunst richtet sich gemütlich in genau diesem Zwiespalt ein, der sich aus zu viel rationaler Grübelei und freier Unvernunft ergibt. Mal entstehen dabei Bilder, die sich vollkommen selbst genügen, mal welche, denen vom vielen Nachdenken ganz schwindelig ist. Aber es wäre nicht Zahels Kunst, wenn am Ende nicht die unbeschwerte Leichtigkeit, Blauäugigkeit - vor allem die Liebe gewinnen würden.

Dabei erfindet die Künstlerin mal Gedankenpralinen, Liebeskummerautomaten oder knifflige Koffer-Zeitmaschinen. Ihre Kunst kann dabei ganz konkret, aber manchmal auch einfach Gedankenexperiment sein. Wie etwa die Idee einer Maschine, die Liebeskummer über einen komplizierten Verarbeitungsvorgang in positive Energie umwandelt. Es geht aber wie so oft auch hier nicht ums Verstehen - Kunst ist nicht zum Verstehen da, sonst brauchte es keine Kunst zu geben (Beuys) - viel wohltuender ist es, seinen eigenen Augen zu trauen und sich dabei auf das einzulassen, was man sieht. Es geht um das bewusste Erleben, also etwas tun, der Tätigkeit wegen. Es könnte so einfach sein:

Das muss ich erst hinterfragen, sagt der Kopf Ich glaube, sagt die Liebe.

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Leo & Björn at Heitsch Gallery

Artist(s): Leo & Björn Venue: Heitsch Gallery, Munich Exhibition title: Do I need to go there today? Date: 2016-04-14 – 2016-05-29

Press release: Muss ich da heute wirklich noch hin? Gibts das nicht auch online? Muss ich dafür tatsächlich vor Ort sein? 

Die Frage des Titels bildet die Grundlage für die Zeichnungen, Skulpturen und Installationen des Münchner Künstlerduos Leo & Björn. In den sieben gezeigten Arbeiten setzen sie sich mit der Koexistenz und Gleichzeitigkeit realer und virtueller Lebensbereiche auseinander. Sie werfen die Frage auf, inwiefern die heutigen technischen Möglichkeiten und die Selbstverständlichkeit ihrer Nutzung unseren Alltag, unser Wahrnehmen, unser Denken und Handeln beeinflussen.

Bereits der auf dem Boden aufgeschüttete Kies verändert die Art und Weise sich im Raum zu bewegen, bricht mit den routinierten Rezeptionsgewohnheiten von Gallerie- und Museumsbesuchen und unterstreicht die physische Erfahrbarkeit des Ausstellungsortes an sich. 

Auch bei den Exponaten, wie den ausgestellten Vasen, dem »archive in the digital age« und dem »digital divide«, handelt es sich nicht um Kunstobjekte, die im klassischen Sinne. Vielmehr ist jeder der Arbeiten inhärent, dass sie das Betrachten von Kunst per se zu thematisieren und dabei analoge Materialien und Arbeitsweisen mit digitalen Techniken und Displays zu verbinden. 

Leo & Björn fordern sich selbst und die Besucher zum Experiment auf, die Grenzen und Schnittmengen, Möglichkeiten so wie Unmöglichkeiten der beiden Sphären des Realen und des Virtuellen durchzuspielen. Die aus Keramik gegossenen icons »hard day at the office« fungieren als haptisches Ebenbild zu den unzähligen digitalen Ordnern und Dateien auf unseren Computern und werden zu determinierten, einzigartigen und unikalen Skulpturen, die nicht mehr verschoben, verändert oder gelöscht werden können. 

In der Hauptinstallation der Ausstellung, einer zweiteiligen Rückprojektion, werden Papier und Bleistiftzeichnung mit digitalen Bewegtbildern kombiniert – der Avatar, als virtueller Stellvertreter, besucht dabei eine Ausstellung, wie sie auch die Besucher von »do I really need to go there today?« erlebt. In dieser Korrelation von Materialien und Techniken wird zusätzlich eine weitere Ebene geschaffen, die die Arbeit in ihrer vollständigen Präsenz weder photographisch noch filmisch erfahrbar macht und somit auch nicht virtuell wahrnehm- oder reproduzierbar ist. 

Deshalb ist die Frage »do I need to go there today?« eine Aufforderung, denn »you need to go there.«

Image credits: Courtesy of Leo & Björn and Heitsch Gallery, Munich