ZU DEN SACHEN SELBST – TO THE THINGS THEMSELVES

JUNE 24 - 26 2016

Elspeth Diederix (NL), Ana Genovés (ES), Mark Hosking (GB), Kirsten Hutsch (NL)

Essay: The hidden life of things (Laurens Landeweerd – NL)
Guest curator: Kirsten Hutsch

….the constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men. They are deeply immersed in illusions and dream images; their eye glides only over the surface of things and sees „forms“; their feeling nowhere lead into truth, but contents itself with the reception of stimuli, playing, as it were, a game of blindman’s buff on the backs of things. (Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense)

This exhibition lends its name from a phrase of the philosopher Edmund Husserl (Husserliana vol. XIX/1, 10-1): He claims we need to turn back to the things in themselves. Our awareness has become lulled to sleep. We have become overly used to the moulds in which our perceptions are poured. Our sleeping awareness, our automatic perception of the world, is determined by the way in which our senses have become ‚mediated‘. They are always pre-replete with the codes of perception that lie hidden in our society’s conventions. But sometimes the veil of conventions is lifted and everyday objects lose their sense of familiarity, break down these automatic structures; sometimes they can no longer be approached as passive objects with externally loaded meanings, but have their own agency.
The works selected in this project all attempt to show the everyday object in another context in such a way that the public is invited to consciously see what is there. They deal with the relationship between real life/ life-object and art-object / art-space; works that simultaneously embrace as denial the artistic context. What these artists have in common is that they break through the flow of the mediated consciousness, the mediated perception. Instead they attempt to awaken our awareness over these conventions. As such, they try to reveal the void behind the perceived and the void behind the codified perceptions of the world around us.

 

Elspeth Diederix was born in 1971 in Nairobi, Kenya, lives and works in Amsterdam.
She studied at the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam and at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.
She won the first prize of the Prix de Rome photography in 2002.
Her work has been shown at the Stedelijk Museum, Huis Marseille, FOAM, in Amsterdam and The Art Institute of Chicago, The institut Neerlandais, Paris and is part of many collections such as The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, La Salle Bank Chicago, MEP Paris, Mario Testino and Rabobank the Netherlands.
There are moments that everyday objects suddenly loose their intimate recognizability. At those moments, they become abstract. The usual meaning that one attributes to these objects is altered and for a split second you are able to see them in a different light. This moment in time I use as a starting point for my images.’
www.elspethdiederix.com

Ana Genovés was born in Madrid in 1969. She received a BA from Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, in 1993 and a Postgraduate from Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, in 1995. She lives and works in London.
Ana Genovés‘ work spans different media: sculpture, painting and photography. In recent years she has developed an interest in objects that explore how our rational thinking coexists with other ungraspable aspects of our consciousness. Genovés believes that the shape we give to these objects, particularly when they interface with architecture or the other ways that we arrange social and civil space, frequently defaults to the clarity of logic of geometry to signify and contain the irrational.
Solo exhibitions include AMBIANTA at MOCA London, 2016, Window space, 2014; Standpoint Gallery, London, 2014, BLOCK at Vitrine Gallery, London, 2011; Ana Genovés, The Russian Club, London, 2009; Ana Genovés, The Drawing Room/Tannery Arts, London, 2008 and Ana Genovés, The Approach, London, 1999.
Recent group exhibitions include Westminster Waste, London 2016; perFORMa, Fold Gallery, London 2015; The Uplamoor Show, Glasgow International Festival 2014; The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery 2012, SV12 Members‘ Show, Studio Voltaire, London, 2012; Hiroshima Art Document, Former Bank of Japan, Hiroshima, (residency and exhibition), 2010 and The Square Show, Bloomberg SPACE, London, 2003.
She was a finalist for the last Max Mara Prize for Women and was shortlisted for the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award in 2014, the Paul Hamlyn Award in 1999 and 2010 and the Jerwood Sculpture Prize in 2001.
www.anagenoves.co.uk/cv.html

Mark Hosking (born Plymouth, England. 1971), lives and works in Amsterdam.
He studied at Chelsea College of Art and TheSlade School, London and at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.
His work has been exhibited widely throughout Europe and in America, including The Lisson Gallery and The Saatchi Gallery in London and The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, USA. His most recent solo exhibition, “Equilibrio”, was earlier this year at Galleria Art Nueve, Spain.
www.artnueve.com/artistas.php?id=1&o=bio

Kirsten Hutsch was born in 1974 in the Netherlands. She received a BA in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design ABKM in Maastricht in 1996, and a Postgraduate from Rijksakademie Amsterdam in 1998. She lives and works in Amsterdam.
Work of her has been shown in Museum van Bommel van Dam (Venlo), Archipel (Apeldoorn), HEDAH (Maastricht), De Fabriek (Eindhoven), Gallery Valeur (Japan) and Schau Fenster (Berlin).
Work of Kirsten Hutsch is part of the art collection of Océ N.V. Eindhoven
Kirsten Hutsch investigates the relation between the real and the image. Her current work represents an ontological move away from postmodernism, embracing a new form of materialism. In this new materialistic approach the status of the object in its actual, material and sensory ambiguity is acknowledged.
Hutsch applies simple, anti-heroic gesture to the canvas, the sort left by a janitor’s mop, or a window cleaner’s squeegee. She uses these daily, common or even mundane gestures inherent in humble workmanlike duties to occupy an area normally reserved for artistic sensibility. In her quest for catching the Real, the conventional methodologies of depiction are subverted to bring about the true nature of the real.
www.kirstenhutsch.com/?page_id=29

Laurens Landeweerd (1976) is a philosopher. He studied epistemology and metaphysics in Amsterdam and philosophy of art and culture in Maastricht. From 2000 to 2002, Landeweerd worked on the revision of a Dutch history of philosophy (25 Eeuwen (Westerse) Filosofie). Between 2002 and 2008 he wrote his thesis ‘Reconstructing the Self’. He currently works as a researcher at the Science faculty of Radboud University Nijmegen as well as Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences. Seen his focus on the material, the immediate and the sensible, his approach can be termed an ‘applied metaphysics’. His main focus is the study of what counts as ‘thing’, what counts as ‘representation’ thereof and what counts as ‘instrumentalisation’ thereof. In this sense, he focuses on questions such as ‘what is life’, ‘what is the status of our senses’ and ‘what is knowledge’. He does so through study of practices of arts, design, science and technology as expressions of implicit ontologies. Landeweerd wrote some 40 publications, including 2 book publications and numerous contributions to books.