Jahresgaben 2022

Cory Arcangel (*1978 Buffalo, New York, lives in Stavanger, Norway) is a central figure in a generation of artists responsive to recent technical developments in an increasingly information-saturated globalized culture. Arcangel’s post-conceptual practice has approached forms such as photoshopped color gradients, video game modifications and YouTube tutorials to produce works that deal with the inextricable link between digital technology and today’s popular culture. Part of Arcangel’s interest in these trends is their rapid obsolescence, structurally built into their material – their programming, codes, and hardware.

Following Arcangel’s exhibition Flying Foxes at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Arcangel has proposed a domestically proportioned version of his large aluminium wall works that derive their vectorized stripes from iPhone photos of Adidas tracksuits. Printed in-house on the office printer on sheets of A4 transparency foil, these editions speak to Arcangel’s use of pedestrian materials from zip-lock bags to Nintendo cartridges. On these reflective surfaces, Arcangel’s simple plastic sheets suggest the omnipresence of the screen, which has become our primary mode of viewing.

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Filip Berg (* 1992 Copenhagen, lives in Berlin ) is an artist, designer, and publisher of Viscose Journal, self-described as the “world’s most exciting journal for fashion criticism”. In his work, Berg playfully subverts the notions of good taste that continue to underpin prevailing trends in art and design. For example, with his work DOMINATRIX, Berg references the fashion of ornamental animal-like table feet, a phenomenon popularized in 17th century Europe, and converts it into the leg of a high heeled latex boot reminiscent of a dominatrix. While paw feet were originally deemed desirable for their elegant curvature, they also allowed furniture to assume the symbolic qualities vested in certain animals, such as lions (majesty, strength, courage, justice). Here, this symbolism is playfully conferred to the high-heel boot, an object not only associated with femininity but also with an assumption of power, the coding of drag and queer culture, as well as the fetishization of the foot, ultimately reinvesting the function of the table with a symbolism that belies its simple practicality.

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Trained as an architect, Dora Budor (*1984 Zagreb, lives in New York City) regards buildings and institutions as tectonic, infrastructural, and gendered systems. Against the aesthetic pursuit of making buildings, she commits to a politics of selectively taking them apart. For her exhibition Continent at Kunsthaus Bregenz (2022), Budor introduced a crisis to the iconic building designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, probing its physical intactness through a series of interventions that foregrounded the operational parts of the building concealed by the architect.

One meter from Kunsthaus Bregenz’s northeastern facade, a manhole leads to an underground collector duct that encircles the foundations of the entire building. Its so-called diaphragm walls extend vertically into the soil, mirroring the height of the above-ground structure. The function of this duct is to prevent the collapse of surrounding buildings and control the seepage of ground and melting water from the nearby Pfänder mountain as well as from Lake Constance. For her Bregenz exhibition, Budor made latex casts of these underground diaphragm walls, erecting them in the exhibition space as walls reinforced with shredded paper derived from office administration. Using conservation latex, a material used to clean public monuments, Budor skinned the subterranean surface, removing years of sediment to redeposit it in the pristine conditions of Zumthor’s galleries. As a unique edition, Budor has offered an excerpt of this expansive installation, to mount a section of this wall on a Plattenwagen, thus suggesting its functional reuse or immanent construction as a piece of architecture.

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GRAU is a collaborative project led by creative directors Timon & Melchior Grau (*1990, 1991 live and work in Hamburg) that works at the intersection of art and design. With this work they produce light installations and lighting products that confront the viewer with the relationship to their surroundings. In their words, the purpose is to “activate what makes us human”. One of the primary references of GRAU is the control of fire by humans, which unites cultures globally as a source not only of light, but also a central point of beliefs, stories, and communities. The corporation also links this to some of the earliest practical “designs”, which are the techniques of making fire and subsequently, of painting caves with its traces conducted by the human hand. With this special edition, GRAU translates such traces of the hand into a contemporary production process, as they show the traces of the manufacturer’s hand that has powder-coated their Salt & Pepper Lamp. Here, the raw material of the lamp is made visible, eliciting a human trace to a lamp that is controlled by touch.

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“This work refers to the Giovanni Bellini painting Pieta (1465-1470) and the ensemble of figures found centrally therein. I have moved the scene, however, in a bar, which is only suggestively readable through a wine glass. Otherwise, a geometric structured color space dominates the background and lends the scene a psychedelic atmosphere. The painting style is in some places detailed and shaded, otherwise it is color fields, which are rhythmically related to each other. The scene shows, in addition to gentle gestures of touch, a slightly tense conversation between two figures, while in the background a secondary figure urges them to leave. As in so many sacred paintings from the quattrocento, there is a sexual subtext, and the landscapes or interiors surrounding the figures are often extensions of the conflicts and interactions taking place between them.”

— Matthias Noggler

Matthias Noggler’s (*1990 Innsbruck, lives and works in Berlin and Vienna) paintings refer to the cultural-historical function and symbolic content of the painted image through annotations of painterly styles, techniques, and subjects. These references are as wide reaching as Folk Art aesthetics, the Italian Renaissance compositions of Giovanni Bellini (as pictured in this edition), and contemporary visual media such as first-person shooter video games. Staging relationships between seemingly disparate sources, Noggler’s work enables these references to perform in a way that shows how modes of seeing and perception can be both related and at odds with each another.

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Vera Palme’s (*1983 Frankfurt am Main, lives in Frankfurt) painting deals with a series of material and formal tensions, reflecting a play between content and an immanent evacuation of the painted surface. Palme’s materials are clearly rooted in the academic tradition of European oil painting. With this, she negotiates the weight of painting’s cultural specificity, a medium that may be over-valued as a form and that is even defined by its anachronism: firstly, painting’s original function has been outstripped by photography; and secondly, it has become a site of modernist purification and idolization claims. Palme’s work continues, not with idolatry, but with a contemporary prudence that situates paintings themselves amongst other objects and the bodies that relate to them. As a Jahresgabe, Palme has offered Politics (2017), a painting which in many ways encapsulates the turbulence of the medium and stages it as a sight of contestation.

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Paul Spengemann’s (*1987 Henstedt-Ulzburg, lives in Hamburg) edition began as a challenge to produce a piece of functional furniture, a table, for Hamburg gallery 14a. We have extended this commission, asking Spengemann to produce a matching chair as its counterpart. These two pieces of furniture resonate with themes of Spengemann’s artistic practice, where animals and technologies are brought repeatedly into humorous associations. For instance, in his work Flea with horse shoes (2021), he has 3d-printed fleas at 1:1 scale to add tinyly painted horseshoes on them. Like his flea, this chair was produced on a computer, drawn as a vector file, and matched to fit standard industrial sheets of aluminum. Transforming cold aluminum into animal feet, Spengemann brings the 17^th century European tradition of paw footed furnitures into a stylistic dialogue with a minimalism that is almost over sterilized.

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Andrzej Steinbach’s (*1983 Czarnkow, lives in Berlin) edition forms part of his series Auto Erotic, first shown at his exhibition Modelle und Verfahren at the Kunstverein Hamburg. This series continues Steinbach’s interest in deconstructing language, materials, and learned codes of photography, in this case, by taking the techniques of macrophotography as his subject. In this image, Steinbach has closely photographed the cover of a VHS tape of John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live which has had a large hole drilled into it. Not only does this elicit the fetishistic connotations of macrophotogaphy enthusiasts, but the penetrative destruction of the tape also alludes to the subject of the film where the main character George Nada finds a pair of glasses that enables him to see through the messages of mass media to see their real meaning underneath. Naturally, in Steinbach’s photo, what we see is not another message spelled out in words, but the raw material of the tape and its plastic cassette brought into tension with its photographic cover.

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Sung Tieu (*1987, Hai Duong, lives in Berlin) works in a diverse set of artistic mediums ranging from installation, sound, video, to sculpture and staged interventions in which she evokes transnational history, traditions of dematerialized art, and the broader structures that act in determining identity, culture and meaning. Tieu’s practice draws on her own experience of cultural collision and displacement, while calling into question universal structures of power that regulate movements of both information and bodies/people. For her Jahresgabe, Tieu continues a series of framed floral arrangements set against a background of plaid fabrics sourced from Southeast Asia. These works put the artistry of plastic flowers at the center of attention, highlighting their equally valued nature alongside real flowers by a generation of Asian immigrants, of which her mother is a part of. Not only are these flowers made of plastic, they are also included in the botanical imaginary—they are hybrids which appear uncanny on close inspection. For example, these flowers have blossoms that outsize their leaves, or their colours don't match their appearance in nature. As art, they propose an aesthetic value that outstrips their cultural position while emphasizing them as an object of beauty.

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It was in 1997 when these tables first made their appearance at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. They were part of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s intervention for the program of events titled Pool Room curated by Stefan Schmidt-Wulffen. These tables formed, together with other objects, the functional scenography for the exhibition and provided a central place for viewers to read books, magazines, and information on participating artists. Since then, these tables have been a constant of the Kunstverein, they’ve been used for board meetings and team lunches, seen envelopes packed with invitation cards and years of exhibition planning. They came in before we had the internet or a single computer, yet haven’t lost their style nor purpose. In dedication to their practicality and the memories they bear, we are making them publicly available.

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Mathias Toubro (* 1986 Copenhagen) approaches the site of the bar or restaurant as intersecting the social constellations that embody artists and art. Toubro represents these settings in works—for instance in his series of restaurant portraits—and also produces theatrical stagings to excite these social situations, such as his edition Pasta Lamp which he began developing on invitation for artist and patron dinners since 2018. Drawing on his career in the restaurant business, Toubro is inspired by its programmatic refuse, its overproduction, and waste. Taking simple materials that are at hand, he crafts installations and handmade sculptures which reflect the cyclical relationship at the center of gastronomy.

Previously, Toubro worked in partnership with Mathias Dyhr to produce theatrical installation works. He runs the exhibition space Cucina (Copenhagen) with Sigurd Kjeldgaard since 2020, and has runned Éclair (Berlin) together with Sigurd Kjeldgaard and Milan Ther from 2017-2020.

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Raphaela Vogel’s (*1988 Nürnberg, lives and works in Berlin) artistic practice combines different, and often contradictory media and genres in a virtuosic manner. In her work the mediums of sculpture, painting, video and installation are conflated and subsumed into theatrical and often immersive installations. These draw from a range of materials—including ready-made objects, theatre props, animal skins, and technical apparatuses—to produce imaginative scenes that underscore the hybridity of both Vogel’s practice, contemporary notions of the self, animal, and machine. Often centering on Vogel herself as a subject, these works can be read as reflecting upon the site of subjectivity, the ego, and position of a Woman artist.

With Mary’s Contraception, Vogel uses a technique that has become central to her sculpture in the past years. In this process, the artist takes a pre-existing found sculpture—in this case, a Bozner Angel candle stick holder—and covers it with a white epoxy plastic, producing a form that appears to smother its now absent original. This plastic, reminiscent of both milk and semen, has in this case provided the shape for a bronze cast, an idea which Vogel had by misrecognising “Bozner” as an anagram for “Bronze”. While this is the first time the artist has produced these in this material, the spiral shape held by the angels suggests the copper coil of Intrauterine Devices (IUD), a women’s contraceptive device commonly referred to as a “coil” in English.

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Leyla Yenirce’s (*1992 Qubîn, Kurdistan, lives in Hamburg) Jahresgabe samples an archive of still and moving images predominantly picturing Kurdistan and the Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (YPJ). They have been collected by the artist from social media, image searches, and from a variety of websites. Yenirce’s process of collecting these images attests to the sheer proliferation of pictures, which both show the women of the Protection Unit, and at the same time infer Yenirce’s own mediated relationship to her country of birth. As itinerant and generally low-quality images, their degradation is noticeably a result of their reproduction and circulation. This loss of fidelity classifies them as what German artist and media-theorist Hito Steyerl diagnoses as “poor images”—images whose quality has been transformed by their accessibility. By reproducing them once again, this time on sheets of mirrored stainless steel, a high-quality material, Yenirce attributes a notion of permanence to images that are almost certain to disappear faster than a work of art, while placing the viewer within their reflection.

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Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s (*1949, San Jose, lives in Los Angeles / *1946-2014, USA) highly stylized, ironic, and camp films deconstruct the visual language of advertising and the tropes of Hollywood cinema. Their work draws from genres like the melodrama or the soap opera to simultaneously exaggerate and deflate narrative structures, cultural mythologies, and psychoanalytic norms.

For this edition, Bruce Yonemoto has proposed a diptych made from a still from the film Made in Hollywood and one photograph produced on set. Each pictures the Hollywood actress Patricia Arquette who plays Tammy, a small-town ingenue gone West to find her dream and ultimately, loses her innocence. Made in Hollywood depicts the powerful mediation of reality and fantasy, desire and identity, by the myths of television and cinema. Quoting from a catalogue of popular styles and sources, from TV commercials, via The Wizard of Oz to the melodramatic lighting of Douglas Sirk, the Yonemotos enhance a parable of the Hollywood image-making industry from a pastiche of narrative clichés. With these two images from the climactic end of the film, we see the gaze of Arquette locked in her own reflection, her own staging.

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