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Buck up, Phoenix! Starting from 24 digitalised drawings of a chain carousel, Ellen Möckel has created a construction kit from which she translates individual forms back into material using laser cutting and engraving machines. In dialogue with the machine, her works develop from deconstruction to a variable recombination of fragments removed from the grid.
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Fisketorv, 295x320cm, cork, acrylic glass, PE film, 2021 by Ellen Möckel
Entering these passages is like opening a diary or a sketchbook. The embroideries carry the rhythm of the narrative and stretch like tanned skins on which one can follow stitch after stitch of an intimate story. Several of these stitches spin the phrase You can stay here and be pretty.
With the repetitive action of lowering and raising the needle, the artist slowly revisits his personal experiences, his deepest feelings: the desire to attack, to seek revenge, to reverse moments of vulnerability, to satisfy himself by guarding violent memories. By connecting sentences and images, Nicolás Astorga's narrative contextualises and bluntly exposes the management of desire, i.e. «productions of consumption, lust, fear and pain», an actual desire mediated by body stereotypes, cameras, mobile phones and apps. Following Deleuze and Guattari, a desire is constructed under certain political parameters and ends up as a consumable cultural product.
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My husband's tattoos, embroidery on hand dyed cotton, 3x2m, 2020 by Nicolás Astorga
Visual structures, seeing and especially blindness are themes that Juana Anzellini have been dealing with in her artistic work for years. Blindness is a multifaceted phenomenon that cannot be reduced solely to the absence of biological vision. Anzellini is also concerned with what we do not see when we are sighted. About what is hidden and concealed.
In the realm of the visual, the pornographic image is usually only superficial and readable through intentions that are one-sidedly focused on the urges. The pornographic image wants to show directly everything that is otherwise hidden. In return, essential elements such as eroticism, feelings, mood, lust and the art of seduction through concealment are often lost or only treated in passing. Painting, in contrast, is more of an inaccessible image, an already digested image, the result of an often long process of image-making. But there are also very many complex overlaps. Sensuality, desire, power, touch: painting and eroticism raise similar questions, which for me have a connection to my particular interest in the subject of blindness.
Juana Anzellini would like to break the usual immediacy of the pornographic image, lead it back to an erotic level and, through playfulness, remove the superficial fixation on drive and sex. The phonetic writing contained in the comics with possible sexual connotations served as a starting point for her to create a series of objects with an obvious haptic quality, which, however, must not be touched, which in turn can make the theme of desire tangible. Through contact with the Berlin workshop for the blind, DIM (Die Imaginäre Manufaktur), the idea for the objects with brush surfaces emerged. "MMM", "SLAPP", "OH!!" can set the intimate act to music - but they can also be used in completely different contexts. It is a question of emphasis and context. The inaudible joins the invisible here.
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PSSST..! by Juana Anzellini
Fungi are transboundary organisms, of which one usually only sees the fruiting body that shows itself on the surface. Hidden in the soil lies a complex network of threads, the mycelium, which transports information and nutrients. The mycelium surrounds the roots of the trees, penetrates them and supplies them with nitrogen and phosphorus. The fungus receives sugar in return.
The group of slime moulds, the Mycetozoa, grow slowly and pulsatingly towards their food. In the process, they form a network, a cartography that is constantly in motion and constantly reforming. The slime mould is constantly looking for new solutions to reach food. Each strand and node can detach and reconnect with others.
For Petermann, the natural phenomena of mushroom mycelium and slime mould are images of constantly changing networks of knowledge, communication and power in a post-structuralist, globalised world. These networks have a resemblance to pulsating slime moulds. In human networks, too, heterogeneous elements are constantly being related and negotiated anew.
In the installation, Petermann orients herself on this model of thinking of the network. To Petermann, form is a growing process, an intermediate state in a development. A concrete materialised form, for example a sculpture, is a still image of constantly changing processes. Lea Petermann is interested in forms that are always in motion: Forms of the human body, organic forms, fungal structures. They have the aesthetic potential for growth or shrinkage, for change within themselves.
Lea Petermann works continuously in different media such as drawing, sculpture and video. Her ideas develop through "technical" drawings that visualise her thoughts on networks, flows and processes.
The installation was supported by the Freundeskreis der HGB Leipzig.
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Breathing net by Lea Petermann
When ruins, mountains and art galleries meet.
This film goes through 3 years of the personal and professional life of the artist Fell, who represents himself and a few other selves in 7 chapters, where he opens up doubts and hopes for a world at an increasing pace, eats his friends, documents joy and loneliness and revisits his own artistic production.
Uncomfortably philosophical, Ensaio Sobre a Besteira is inspired by José Saramago’s novel with similar name, and has been recorded as a post-graduation project for the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, under the tutoring of Alba D’Urbano.
Born in São Paulo - Brazil, Fell's artistic expression developed after he was serendipitously drawn to the locally vibrant punk scene. From then on, things followed a sailing course. Trained both professionally and informally in photography and music, visual art was added to escape life's conservative options. As a master student at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, his previously nomadic art-making is now accompanied by a theoretical and intellectual education. His works have been shown in public spaces, non-commercial galleries, abandoned factories, cultural centres and other spaces that focus on art and ethical purposes. They revolve around themes such as belief systems, national misidentifications or social aberrations and are motivated by the need to want to expose contradictions.
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Ensaio Sobre a Besteira
An essay film on leavings, ambivalence, mountains, and entertainment (LAME)
Credits by the artist
