Chiara Valci Mazzara

 

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.Henrik Strömberg ,Refraction of Lightness, Morra Foundation /Shozo Shimamoto Association, Naples, October 2019.

https://www.fondazionemorra.org/it/henrik-stroemberg-mostre-refraction-of-lightness

Curatorial note to the exhibition:

The work of Henrik Strömberg is the result of a creative process of investigation about form and content, volume and concept, multiplication and refraction of meaning.

Living and recovered materials such as paper, glass, burned newspapers and pigments contribute to the creation of works that allow the viewer to immerse in a landscape organised as a self-sufficient ecosystem that, by suggesting new forms, creates new contents. Where every element becomes part of a whole.

The assembled prints creating a new system of references relating to the meanings and aesthetics they originally had, are now enriched with additional semantics, while, at the same time, the glass volumes reflect the complexity of the creative gesture. In the glass works, a transformation and the alteration of content, occur simultaneously. 

Ultimately, the matter is shaped and transferred through different media, all the elements are commuting back and forth regularly concurring, and eventually, overlaying meanings. Nothing can be isolated, everything mutate as when volcanic magma erupts.

In the spaces dedicated to the master of the Gutai group (Morra Foundation/Shozo Shimamoto Association), the Northern European artist approach the exhibition space through the system of references linked to the creative gesture. At the same time, the references to Surrealism, to the re-evaluation of the object-trouvee and the use of the form to act on the content are perceived as a characterizing elements of Strömberg’s work.

In the printed pieces the roots of the past meanings, and -for the sculptural volumes- the references to biological forms are perceived diving into an alternate drift of perspective: Strömberg reduces the source to polarise the content at the very core of the image perception. He doesn’t settle down for clarity, rather he pursues the action of placing triggers to initiate a new existence of the subject. The clarity being left aside, it is consequential that the viewer is exposed to an unexpected outcome and to an ephemeral content.

While the installation of the volumes and the different components takes shape, a sub-ecosystem formed through the combination between seemingly disparate elements appears as a logical consequence. Photographic elements, negative cut outs, paper works and sculptural volumes are coexisting but their accumulation is not left to chance, rather to a multiplication of occasions. The various elements commit to deliver a wider perception of the different pieces, it’s like a dance where every single element concur to a higher harmony.

The sequence of reflections, the portions of images and the verticality of the installation take form as an immersive landscape through which the viewer is moving, absorbing the complexity of the elements, never redundant and always cohesive. There’s not a unique interpretation but rather a kaleidoscope given by the use of different media equally involved in the final result.

 

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.Morph-O : isolation of (portable) pressure ; Curatorial text to the catalogue for Daegu Photo Biennale Berlin, Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg Platz, Berlin, August 2019 

http://www.rosa-luxemburg-platz.net/daegu-photo-biennale-special-exhibition-berlin-with-works-by-ricarda-roggan-henrik-stroemberg-jung-sung-tae-woo-chang-won/

// MorphO //

Isolation of (portable) pressure

Morph (-O) -neither metamorphosis nor morphosis- stands for the root of the word. ‘Morph’ is meant as for its etymological meaning. It refers to the shape, the change, the form of the object and ultimately the content. It generates the friction created by the ever-changing shape and the ever-changing pieces in reference to each other.

By mutating to define a shape, Morph- narrows down the circularity of an ‘O’ (Morph- seeks for a destination and the O attempts to contain the ever changing matter). 

Morph- means shape and matter. It’s a movement from within. It responds to the idea of transition between material and un-material; when affecting the form, the content mutate.

Morph- is an inner change, it acts on other things and determines a shift from one thing to another: contorting the matter, affecting the form, mirroring an alternative meaning. 

Morph- is everything that happens during a transition: it’s process, it’s boundary, it’s on a threshold: hence it’s intermediate. Morph- is also the ambiguity and the disorientation that occurs in the middle. Can be distortion and a new beginning.

-O draws the outlines and the outlines attempt to contain the constituents, if and when this is somehow possible. The matter is the visible proof of the content. The things that are least important are removed.

-O tries to grasp the moment immediately after the in-between.

-O Is the moment in time, beyond the space in between and after the transitional. 

-O is close to a circle and contains phenomena inside its borders.

-O is the matter when rounds in a shape, is the last letter (Morph-O), is the final step towards the response to a visual stimuli. 

Morph- originally concerns letters, sounds and shapes. -O outlines form, defining the content. It is ever changing during each and every transitional moment of time, frame and context. It determines the form, leaves tangible the matter, resolves the subject.

Morph- makes the object visible and therefore tangible, isolating a variable pressure which becomes perceivable and figuratively portable; the pressure is transferable: from a context to another, from an object to the viewer: the pressure is given by the meaning.

The system of meanings to which the photos and pieces refer is symbolic but what is visible is the shape and weight of the subject. So the portable pressure is the one of the Object represented, the physical weight and -figuratively-  the one given by its past and new contents, its story and new life when translated in photographic works or in sculptural volumes.

Ricarda Roggan, 

Morph- is the in-between and belongs to different places and different moments in time.

-O is the intensity of the photographic investigation, is the stage, the object suspended in space and frame. Is the phenomenon detached and vibrating from an alternate perspective.

Sharp yet intimate and delicate photographs are organised sequentially. The serie of photographs unfolds in a liminal space, where what was is now the next. Where the transformation took place and the time stands still. The subjects of the works are located at a sensory threshold, endowed to elicit a response.

The matter is composed, the object comes from a past life, heir of its past owner’s use. The artefacts are the absolute subjects of each and every stage on which they’re adjusted, they seem to be suspended physically and in tempo. 

The delicacy of the photographic composition is articulated through the use of the light, so that the shadows are liminal. Each object stands on a physical and figurative brink, it keeps a boundary with the place it comes from but is now isolated in time and space. The meaning is changed: it absorbed a translation of its very core meaning and use. It’s a regression but moving forward.

The things, the objects re-arranged, staged poetically, become apocryphal, being removed from their past context and strayed from their use, they start to vibrate differently.

They’ve not being re-moved -and their meaning re-evaluate- aimlessly: they create a new intimacy, reveal their patterns, past use and new meaning. They are immutable and everlasting. They’re shimmering through the simplicity of the act of being placed on a meta-stage. Super-imposing over the past. Un-disclosing their entity and a myriad of signifiers.  

The pressure is the one of the object on the surface, the one of its past use and value, the new of an unexpected poetry of the photograph.

Each photographic piece is a journey about the past meanings: but only marginally, because now the object is only itself, placed there, under this light, alone, shimmering and enclosing a new meaning: the one of the viewer. 

Jung Sung Tae,

Morph- reveals itself through a closer look, it is there in the pattern, in the shapes of the non-subjects depicted. Normally, as long as it remains unnoticed, the shadow is guaranteed to remain insoluble. But here’s a closer look on its movements around the invisible turning into visible. 

Morph- is in the photographs completely revealed: the shapes, the shadows, the form can’t remain evasive any more. The artist moves quickly, catches the moment, takes an accurate look. He isolates elements inside a frame, at the spur of the moment revealing the shadow and an intimate pattern of meanings.

The inner forms of the objects are the elements displayed in his pictures. The rough matter determines his angle of observation: each image is linked to a memory and isolates the matter and details, their shadow, and its very own reflection.

Each picture feels like token in a millisecond. As Looking  through a lens, catching a detail, the light and the shadow and holding the images there, fixed in time. Frozen.

The reflection of the image in the eyes of the viewer is quick, at first not recognizable but slowly making sense. Branches, shadows, patterns, ripped baseball ball, rust and a skull: every element of every image is enlarged because is contained in the choice of the artist. He isolates the matter, re-evaluates the form of the shadow and twists the content into the very reflection of an inner state of perception.

-O is the composition of the pictures, is the attention to the very detail, the set apart a shape, a form, an essential feature from the whole.

The pressure is the meaning of the memory. The leftovers of a moment which the artist attempt to fix in time by isolating its very essence. The pressure takes form through something so ephemeral as a shadow determined by a brief time period: right there and right then.

The shadows and the subjects of the works are merged in a unique entity, invested with the task to be proof of the past moment and evidence of the present perception.

Henrik Strömberg,

Morph- is the change that occurs continuously as well as the shift of the form and the signifier is a condition always to be expected. Both, a transformation and a alteration of content, are occurring simultaneously. The matter is shaped and transferred through different media, all the elements are commuting back and forth regularly concurring, and eventually, overlaying meanings. Nothing can be isolated, everything mutate as when volcanic magma erupts.

In the photographic pieces the roots of the past meanings is perceived diving into an alternate drift of perspective, Strömberg reduces the source to polarise the content at the very core of the image. He doesn’t settle down for clarity, rather he pursues the action of placing triggers to initiate a new existence of the object. The clarity being left aside, it is consequential that the viewer is exposed to an unexpected outcome and to an ephemeral content.

Morph- acts on the in-between, while the installation of the volumes and the different components takes form. A sub ecosystem formed through the combination between seemingly disparate elements appears as a logical consequence. Photographic elements, negative cut outs, paper and sculptural volumes are coexisting but their accumulation is not left to chance but rather to a multiplication of occasions. The various elements commit to deliver a wider perception of the different pieces, it’s like a dance where every single element concur to a higher harmony.

The sequence of reflections, the portions of images and the verticality of the installation take form as an immersive landscape through which the viewer is moving, absorbing the complexity of the elements, never redundant and always cohesive.

There’s not a unique interpretation but rather a kaleidoscope given by the use of different media equally involved in the final result.

The -O, here, narrows down the matter  and the matter is the subject of the onward multiplication in the volumes. The -O is the grid, the attempt, the part and the protagonist of the movement through something, creating something else. Is the glass expanding through the grid of his sculptural volumes, is the depiction of transitory atmospheres in his photographs.

The pressure, in Strömberg’s photographic works, is the one of the ephemeral objects, removed from their nature. It is the one of the pattern of the facade, revealing the texture of the engraved stone in his larger photographic piece, as well as when the pressure is the one given by the heritage of the object trouvee’ and re-assembled  in his intimate shots.

In the sculptures, the pressure is constantly the one of the glass volumes of the stacks, on the paper, on the fragments. The pressure gives verticality to the accumulation of media, elements, contents, new meanings, new paths.

Woo Chang Won

Morph- acts in the work of Woo Chang Won as the variable that acts on the physical property of the matter of the objects. 

Morph- stands between the usual perception of shapes and form and the action of the artist who deconstructs the substance to reach a different core, a different tangibility of the materials. An alternative perception and meaning. He reduces the object – together with the perception of the world around him – to the substance they’re made of.

The physical world of materials is not anymore the element which constructs the subject depicted in the pieces, but rather is the protagonist, disengaged from the context.

On the edge between consciousness and unconsciousness Woo Chang Won isolates the pure material, the matter, the morph-.

He blocks the matter right before it constitutes in a defined shape. He’s fascinated by the response to the materiality, the immaterial content.

 From a general perception of objects,  the artist recedes to the particular of their physical composition:  the rough matter. He untwines the matter and the subject resolves in the bare material.

The artist proceeds building a visual stage in which the substance floats, not permitting anything else but the matter to exist.

-O works as through a microscope: the subjects of the photographic works are standing still, showing traces of the transformation, of the movement of the material they’re made of.

The substance being revealed, the background being traced back to the essential, the consciousness of the viewer can relate only to the circumstances in which the subject is investigated. The artist recedes to the very core, building a system of objects contained into objects enclosed into other elements, reaching the molecules of the phenomena and re- placing the image in a new perspective.

The abstraction is the result of a backward process to the origin. Between abstraction and reality, the awareness is triggered and results in a deeper understanding which leaves open the interpretation but doesn’t allow any escape from the crucial and urgent view of something un-defined yet momentous.

 

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DSL Collection MANIFESTO; Written as fontaine b. artistic director and with Gabriela Anco, May 2019

This Manifesto for the dslcollection is a statement, a tool, a way to discover a new perspective.

This Manifesto is a body of content that will initiate a wider communication with the public : a communication that will take shape through the act of producing, sending and sharing different content each month in order to explain and deepen the mission of DSL Collection.

This Manifesto aims to flip the perception of art, deconstructing the old and inspiring a new vision and sensitivity. The act of collecting and the value of the collection, initiating an immediate transformation, are guiding the viewer to seeing new meanings. Intending to counter the public’s present short attention span, the Manifesto suggests a new approach/vision/inspiration conceived to direct this ephemeral moment to a profound understanding.

Using new tools and media as catalysts and above all, allowing accessibility to the collection and its meanings, the art works and its references, the Manifesto follows the Collection in valuing interactive and participatory approaches and refining the traditional and crystallized relationships between art and its audience.

THE MANIFESTO

dslcollection DECONSECRATES art

By deconsecrating the public’s approach to art, limiting the intimidation by art, countering art as an elitist, exclusive means and fostering invitation to see, feel, create, admire, collect.

By deconsecrating the collection: the act of collecting and its outcome. Instead, create a graspable, enjoyable, achievable heritage.

By deconsecrating the artwork from holy object to pure meaning: recognizing its value as a witness of an act, as a proof of the spirit of the times, as the manifestation of the collective aesthetics and sensitivities.

Art ceases to be a luxury item holding an outdated system of references, rather it shines as an incredible source of inspiration and intellectual wealth.

By observing a sense of passion, through sorrow and zeal, constructing a collection, which delivers a sense of new profane proximity with the viewer, the public, the community.

dslcollection believes in PROGRESS 

The innovation challenges the status quo. The Collection doesn’t intend to change but rather inspire a new logic, beyond the frame, investigating new parameters.

Progress serves art; technological advancement is a tool to perceive art in an easier, better and more thorough way. DSL collection draws the scenario of new meanings which will portray the future, starting from the present situation asset.

As the past tubular mail, Internet is now present everywhere, opening access and reaching once anonymous doors. Through new virtual media and methods of communication and diffusion, the collection strengthens the distribution of ideas, theories and inspiration to embrace a new approach.

Virtual and Augmented Reality grant an altered way to perceive art, fostering a new kind of proximity, granting the collection a strong sense of cohesiveness. The possibility to experience anything, anywhere and anytime, though a controlled curatorial insight on works collected and brought in common dialogue, going beyond our spacial dimensions and limitations. VR and AR offer not only a new way of exposing, but also of creating, of generating reality. A reality, which can also be attained by reliefography, giving a chance to masterpieces to travel and be seen in a cloned physicality. 

But overall, the Collection rouses the development of a new logic, a new way of acting, marching towards an improved and more advanced condition.

dslcollection INSPIRES: 

By activating curiosity, spreading ideas. Ergo primarily a collection of ideas, dslcollection delivers content through new media, expanding a collective vision.

It is the new media then, taking over, initiating a dialogue which comes before the objects.

By taking the lead in using innovative means to share the collection. Perceiving, adapting, aspiring towards new technologies, and inciting new progressive thinking.

Building upon established convictions of the 20th century, the Collection converts their essence to our days. Marcel Duchamp’s portable museum acquires a new meaning with a virtual reality set allowing to visit the DSL Collection, the Fluxus diffusion of material is being managed through skillful manipulation of virtual networks. 

By creating, adopting and cradling ideas, valuing and spreading them. 

As a windmill feeding on thoughts and concepts, existing or newly revealed, the collection embraces and transforms them into new matter and new ways to « consume » art.

By supporting disruptions, keeping a dynamic and flexible position. Understanding and adjusting to changes, learning from the past, working for the future, yet living in the present.

By favoring the art of the present, creating a vibrant collection, from works with alive, vivid spirit.

dslcollection believes in the FLUX 

Flux as an artistic movement and act of the past, but also as the re-evaluated action of dslcollection: it solidifies the flux action by publishing and spreading ideas, visions, content, and through the use of technology and the media of our times.

The idea of « flux »  suggesting a “flow” and an “effluent”: continual change. The « flux » is the origin of Fluxus movement of the 1960’s, which focused on the action, on the phenomenology of the act, and on the diffusion of information.

dslcollection is in a state of flux, flowing, sharing, enacting, committing to a group. Flowing – as adjusting; flowing – as disseminating; flowing – as free sharing of ideas. Flowing – as Fluxus, and Fluxus – as an attitude.

The works of art are a place of interaction between the artist and the viewer. The collection is therefore an organized gathering of constant exchange amongst the artists, the audience and the collector.

The works of art are a democratic form of creativity available to everyone. The collection is thus a playground for flourishing imagination.

The works of art are works of life. No walls should be placed between art and reality. The collection crosses art and life in a new kind of reality, the virtual reality. 

Art is meant to be consumed by all the people, without requiring particle accreditation.

Art infiltrates. 

Art is a complex organism in which ideas, behaviors, sensitivities and media blend together contributing to a new vision.

dslcollection is a COMMUNITY 

By creating a virtual common ground for individuals with common interests to interact and exchange.

In times where physical distances are not as restrictive, people display a need for attachment. dslcollection attracts like-minded individuals to circulate around one common fire. People bring ideas, and ideas create changes.

By collecting ideas before objects. Artworks are a cluster of choices made by an artist, and a collection is a cluster of choices of the collector. Adapting this conceptual perspective, dslcollection choses the collect choices, thoughts, impressions, ideas. 

By interacting with the audience, for all community is sharing, is giving and receiving. Emitting signals, and accepting the replies, the collection does not stay indifferent to suggestions. 

By adopting an evolving state of constant flux, the collection creates a flexible community of contributing individuals.

By being an active ecosystem of inspirational ideas, operating in hyper-communication and innovation to suggest and ultimately gain a higher level of access to art.

dslcollection lives in the ZEITGEIST

Zeit-geist is time. Zeit-geist is spirit. Zeit-geist is now. 

By collecting. By the act of gathering the samples of the present in order to create a portrait of the times. 

By collecting Chinese contemporary art, a country leading the XXI century economically, strategically. By registering the very change in collecting attitudes from the strong focus on the Western contemporary scene to the Eastern.

By limiting the collection to a set number of artworks finely tuned with the Zeitgeist.

By embracing the technology of now, translating its potential into a new form of diffusion to empower cultural exchange. 

By gathering a community of like minded individuals, that resonate on an invisible frequency, which depicts the spirit of our age. 

By adapting to the changes times, keeping flexible and trusting the future generations. 

By inspiring the history being formed now. 

 

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Author of the text to the exhibition of Ann Nöel Williams, Works 1964/2019, Free Home, Berlin, February 2019

i+you=us

Oh! Ann, i was on my way to YOU today and i couldn’t read what i wrote on my notepad.
The white pages were too bright with the sun, sitting on the train, going west.

Now i got to know YOU. We share thoughts.

i walk through your street with the confidence one has arriving to a known place… still, the pages of my notepad are too bright to read them.
i did eleven steps as i turned the corner, the letter ‘ I ‘ is the eleventh of the alphabet. (Numbers can be tools to serve the words…)

i am trying to read again the questions i prepared…thinking about your work and your ideas as continuous flow, like a watermark in colours. …feels like i don’t really need notes now.
Maybe only words would be better: questions always point somewhere and we want to be free to roam around over here… even just around a word or a letter… like if we were pivotal little bodies?

In my notes each and every topic involves a word, which starts with the letter ‘ i ‘. I think there’s no better start…

The words are never shy, one only has to listen. And to treat them well.

Sometimes they can’t be found, but many times they’re merging together: and they make complete sense.

The words are formed by letters and the letters, well, they’ve got a strong character.

Do you remember how you told me about the ‘ i ‘ you choose for each of your friends? Each one had his or her ‘ i ‘ portrait.
Now i think about it all the time.
i dismantle the fonts of the advertising signs walking along the street.

i meet a person and i wonder which kind, shape, outline, colour and thickness could have his very own ‘ i ‘ (portrait).
But I think that not to every person suits an ‘ i ‘.
i is all of YOU. And all of YOU is me.

i am not sure if one should include all of the people in an ‘ i ‘. Maybe it is only relevant to include the brightest ‘YOU‘. The people one can share with. As YOU did, as in a state of flow, working, processing ideas, sharing, encountering artists who became friends.
‘YOUs’ are important as we said, they are the whole of each ‘ i ‘ and that is not ephemeral, it is crucial.

Somebody, then, can be an ‘H‘ (that comes before ‘ i ‘) and function as a bridge (like between two straight lines, between two persons). And somebody can be an ‘ L ‘, so only be there for himself (showing an angle, staying there in this corner, not really committing maybe? But is good as well, brings a frame – or an angle? – to the table, right next to the wine corks).

So –eventually – very few, but a beautiful bright group, can be ‘ i ‘ … : all ofYOU, is all of me comma ‘ i ‘.

Wasn’t it like that with your ‘YOUs’, in Berlin many years ago, sharing, inspiring, and flowing in a state of flux? That was real life, life together with a community of YOU(s).
Colours of flux.
Colours:
Blue for the day.
Red and orange to drink and eat.
Green for money.

i–1.(Works and words with ‘ i ‘):

Your fascination for the letters.
The semiotic, the semantic, the shape, the outline.
The Concrete Poetry.
The form, the content of ‘ i ‘: the most (apparently) insignificant letter, there’s a line and a dot.
‘ i ‘ seems to react to the seventies, when the ‘me generation’ was about self–absorption. People were concerned solely with themselves.
‘ i ‘ as a character, as graphic sign looking like a person, mirrors the artist. Mirrors the person.
‘ i ‘ is the good letter to start from. To turn the table upside down, revolving around a sense of ‘me’ as collectivism.
We were having coffee and we were speaking about the ‘me generation’ in desperate need of irony: an irony led by the urge to invent, with playfulness.
One had not to take one self so seriously, than each idea is lighter, comes across smoothly and takes shape vibrantly, goes directly where it should. From the hyperuranion of a merely intellectual thinking to a deeper understanding: while sharing.
Humour must be there, a visual one as well. As Emmett said: a ‘cosmological humour’, so a kind anybody can grasp and play with. Like an encounter between cultures and people, where the best things in life are still free.
Dieter Roth told you once that an artist should have 10 ideas a day. I believe you get much more than that, Ann?
Any image –to you– can be shaped by super–imposing words or your very self on pictures, in your works.
Further on, typography and calligraphy are drawing the outlines. The colours cyan, yellow, blue and magenta are blending while the thinking process organises them in a rainbow.
A system of meta–meanings is there, where the colours are the symptoms. And from the idea on, you embrace the unexpected, the intention is there, but the outcome is untamed.
The instructions, the process you have in mind, permit a trace to direct your ideas, recording the path.
So the flow is there, not hidden but unravelled through your diary: those 2 meters and 30 centimetres of colours hold within an entire world of references.

i–2.(More word with ‘ i ‘):

You write since a long, long time a diary each and every day. You write about yesterday, today.
The diary is a diary of names and encounters.
One after the other, after the other, times others, times colours.

The colours are occupying the different hours of the day: IN VINO VERITAS, interlacing inputs.
One is what one eats.
There’s identity and encounters of minds in your diary. Flowing as in a CONFLUX : when artists are living among others, a real life, reciprocity becomes a mutual duty, oscillating the basis, inspiring each other.

The colours of FLUXUS are colours as people.

i–3. ( ‘Incognito improvement, ‘ i ‘, ‘ i ‘, …performances as act of a reluctant you…):
Being Incognito aims to a hidden signifier, the wish in there, revolves around a self–effacing desire.

But the public is too important. It engages. The performance is the duration of an act and it extends to the viewer.
Many words can define us, many can describe an ‘ i ‘.
From the visual poetry, through the act of printing and following a constant progress of ideas, the words are formed.

They punctuate your performing act.
Reluctant to perform, but there by choice, you are moving and speaking in front of you(s). The nuances of the words are activating your ideas. You do something that is you.
Animating contents, you create recipients of your perception among the people in the public. The flux involves the person, relying on the element of constant change to meet an unexpected outcome. The improvement happens through a process and there… following the score, there you are. 

Overall, I asked you questions in this letter of mine. Some ‘ i ‘s are there, but as often happens, there are more ‘ ? ‘ s.
But if you think about – i know you know better than me– the question mark isn’t an upside-down ‘ i ‘ ? Only a little more curved.
(i saw it in your works as well. i like its shape)

Maybe is just that the ‘ ? ‘ was up until late last night. So it feels a little upside down, and stands loosely. Like me today. Like when one asks oneself questions at night.
At night.

Blue.

 

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Author of the interview Stage and Meta-Stage: the superimposed subject matter, Interview and curation for the section Contra DOC! and DOC! talks , presenting works of Shozo Shimamoto and Zhang Huan , with the interview to Prof. Hans Peter Kuhn, October 2018

Interview:

Chiara Valci Mazzara: Hans Peter, during your career as artist and composer, producing a vast body of works consisting in sound and light installation, radio plays, composed film music, music and environments for theatre and dance, you had the chance to collaborate and create settings in the frame of performing art as well. Moreover, given your early start as composer and performer, you surely must have kept and projected this experience and heritage onto the process of creation of performing art environments and music. Would you tell me about your role and about the production during the performance art happenings? (experience with Junko Wada for example.)

Hans Peter Kuhn: Performances appear already pretty early in my life, during my time at school but, surely, at least since 1975 when I joined the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer in Berlin. Of course this was a playhouse, not so much Performance Art – at least until Robert Wilson came and did his first European production of Death, Destruction & Detroit in 1979. In my eyes this piece belonged more into the realm of Performance Art, than to traditional theatre, with all its abstract use of language and the presentation of images, rather than narratives.

In all the years I worked with Wilson (until 1998) and, as of 1989, I also worked with dancers, it was always my main role to create the sound environment and music for the pieces. But through my experiences as an installation artist, I also have a strong visual aspect in all my works, and for that reason, I also often create the set design and the lighting for the pieces.

When working with my wife – the painter and dancer Junko Wada – we create the pieces sort of together, simultaneously, by rehearsing and creating at the same time in the same room. This allows the productions to appear as one thing, although the ideas come from 2 people. The content of these dance pieces is mainly abstract and non-narrative about movement and sound.

CVM: What, in your eyes, are the media that are documenting and, more precisely – representing, the eligible form in which performance art develops into a progression where photography (for

instance) is not anymore only documentation but, instead, is the actual – or one of the main – form to deliver the content and the concept of a performance act/work?

HPK: The difficulty of documenting a process in space is obvious, same is true for my installations, where the site itself has a huge influence. In performance work, as in installations, the documentation – no matter what media you use, it is true for video too – are very limited in what can be shown. Even in the best photos or videos you only get a section of the whole. As one cannot tell somebody how a performance was – or at least only in a very reduced way, there is no real way to document these kind of productions. But what photography can do, is to highlight a situation, to give an impression of the intent or the quality of the work. The best photographers manage to get just that moment of a performance where all tension is presented. That is when photography makes sense in my eyes. So not so much as a documentation (although we all also use it like this) but as an art form itself, creating something beyond the straight concept of documentation. That is something that is very valuable for the performer as an outside look, but with an artistic intention, creating an artwork on the artwork, so to say.

CVM: The series Foam by Zhang Huan is one of the works of the artist, which is conceived only and exclusively as photographic. Huan’s production includes, together with performance, photographic works, installations, sculptural works and paintings. In this series, consisting of close-ups of the face of the artist covered with foam, he is holding in his open mouth photographs, old portraits of his wife’s family. He is using his very own face as a frame to hold memories and history. A picture within a picture. What looks like a performance documentation – even if the close-ups suggest us that a specific visual rendering has been planned and structured – is in fact staged for the series of photo.

I wanted to ask you, in which moment do you think the ‘stage’ as we all refer to in Performance Art, becomes the body of the artist, and, in which – as in this case – his own face?
Which ones are the characteristics of the stage located above architectural and/or spatial measurements?

What are the features standing beyond the stage per se’, which Huan translated while deciding to use his face as a stage?

HPK: Well a stage is an elevated space where one can present something, a space separated from the other people – the audience – who have the possibility to listen to and watch this presentation. The stage lifts the performer above the rest, there is a very clear distinction between auditorium and stage, not only in classical theatre settings, also in simple black box or white cube situations where one person presents something. The stage allows to show an alter ego or any other possible character, and that is not only true for actors, in a classical sense. This is true for anybody on a stage, be it a musician, performer, scientist, lecturing teacher or a businessman presenting sales numbers. A stage gives the person on stage an authority, simply through the command over the time spending. The performer makes the people stay until the show is over (at least he/she hopes that it will happen so). It is the performer that sets the rules: come in at 8, have a pause and a drink at 9, come back in at 9:30, applaud and leave at 10:30. Completely set. But of course this is true also in less rigid schemes. Any performance has this kind of agenda. And being on stage everyone is a performer ruling in people’s life.

So using one’s body parts as a stage, creates another layer to this. On the one hand the performer creates his own support but, more important, her/his body becomes an authority that sets a distance with the others, the body is no longer the actual object to perceive but the carrier of an object or a message. And by this the superimposed object or message gets elevated into another layer.

But besides all this, the use of foam reminds of course of the myth of Aphrodite, who supposedly was born from foam of the sea, while here his family appears out of it.

CVM: In the series Foam, what looks like close-ups on core moments of the performance, are in reality staged moments during production, anticipating the creation of the sequence. Huan set up a ‘meta-stage’ for his work and created a meta-performance to realize a photographic series. His mouth becomes the frame of family photographs. Shimamoto’s photographs, on the other hand, create a new, under-laying basis – a new canvas(?) – for his splashes. How do you thing a work of art changes when the original support changes, especially if the new support is a photograph?

HPK: I think – as I just said – that the meta-stage is already there through the usage of the body as a stage for the work. To perform this – not “live” in front of an audience, but rather “staged” – to have it photographed, lifts this to another level, because it is no longer the performance itself, it is the concept of the performance that is presented. But since it is a series of photographs, it gets a performance style character, in which time obviously passes by.

CVM: The images of Zhang Huan, as an expression of the self and staged on his own ancestry are visually meeting the series of photographic works of Shozo Shimamoto. The two artists are encountering each other in the use and development of the shapes of their heads: front close-up for Huan, back silhouette for Shimamoto. Both artists are conceiving an encounter between their performative act and the use of photography. In the series of Shimamoto, as well, the stage becomes the silhouette of his very own head and the splashes of colours – the witnesses of his practice – are now being developed in a photographic act. The stage – his cranium – and the light are masterfully used to realize this exclusively photographic works. What do you think about the evolution of the stage and the light used by Shimamoto? What are the specificities of both artists’ re-invention of the stage that are, in your eyes similar or different?

HPK: I think Shimamoto uses his head rather as a projection screen, while Huan changes his face physically. And the splashes of colour also hint towards a screen rather than a stage. Huan uses the face, and although these are photographs, it is a much more three-dimensional impression than the photographs of Shimamoto, which are clearly two-dimensional. Specifically, the photograph showing onto a background of buildings seems to be a straight projection, and, although it shows a bit of the curved skull, it looks mostly flat. So in my eyes Shimamoto does not make his head a stage, but rather a screen but I guess it is pretty understandable, since he did all these performances and the photographs are rather a different layer in a different media. Also, in contrary to Huan’s photographs, there is not really a performative aspect. They are stills, that get even more still by the color splashes, that obviously are done onto the existing image. They are not part of the image of his head, while Huan’s pictures in his mouth are directly integrated into the landscape of his face and the different small pictures give a timeline, with slightly changing content, as in performances. Shimamoto’s stills are pictures that remind me more of Gerhard Richter’s overpainted photographs. They stay pictures.

CVM: In your perception, having worked with your wife Junko Wada, artist and performer, realizing together performative happenings and you realizing the landscape and the sound, which one is the role of the body when it comes to be, as for Huan and Shimamoto, the stage of an act, functioning as landscape for the photographic works?

HPK: I think only in Huan’s work I directly see this landscape character. Also the fact that his face is covered with foam creates a hybrid landscape of his natural features and the random and artificial distribution of the foam. Shimamoto’s photographs are rather like a map of a landscape.

CVM: Which one is the importance of photography, when it comes to be not anymore a development of the performative documentation but is rather conceived as an actual art piece meant as a photographic work?

HPK: Shimamoto’s pictures are certainly further away from a documentation than Huan’s, they left the stage completely and don’t even try to be one. It is a distinct different level or layer than the performances that probably were the base for these photographs. Although the paint on these images come from his performance process, they still are part of a projection and not a direct documentation.
With Huan’s photographs it is different, they show much more the sequence of images of his performance, but due to the large number of similar pictures with only small differences (different photos in mouth/foam structures) They create a meta-structure and by that a new image that is not itself performative anymore nor a documentation but adds by multiplication a greater distance to the original performance and become a photographic artwork.

CVM: Thank you, dear Hans Peter!

 

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Author of the text: The state of flux of the movable content: Henrik Strömberg in reference to Man Ray, text for DOC! Photo Magazine, section contra DOC!, March 2018

Henrik Strömberg’s work starts with the quest for a new signifier: interlacing sources, re-assembling and re-evaluating objects (trouvé)he acts on the form while changing the content.

The medium of photography and the system of connections between the represented subject and the final result is only the beginning of a journey.

By performing his usual ritual, opening and closing, the shutter reveals a new artifact in which new semantic cross-references appear to the eye. Strömberg initiates a thought, an idea, as a possible dialogue: by adding new allusions he questions the medium and challenges the content.

Within the process, the subject – outcome of a re-assemblage of elements or cut-outs – as a pivotal body, reflects different nuances of various signifiers, therefore contorting the habitual coordinates. The meanings are, then, acquiring new values through a drift and, as a result, the object is dislocated from within.

This leads to the perception of the viewer to be altered, prompting the pursuit of many graspable interpretations, each one equally possible.

It is impossible to calculate the result of the content’s reconstruction, sinceit presents itself as the heritage of the objects’ past life, joined with their new manifestation – all given by the process to which Strömberg commits consistently.

Ultimately, his photographic works, as well as with his collages, are picturing, at the same time, the evolution and the outcome of an action, while other signifiers are now challenging the viewer to a new dialogue. The strength of the result appears in each piece, where receding to the new forms, the works are delivering a poetic yet sharp innuendo.

In Strömberg’s pieces, the pictured subjects are not the only foreground protagonists, but also the different levels of space and depth, which are suggesting a wider interpretation and create a surreal landscape.

The evidence of the “re-assembled” object/s (trouvé/s) materializes as vibrant and forceful, subordinating to no obvious reference, placing the ‘trigger’ of an idea.

The evidence of Man Ray’s objets trouvésleans to the use and re-evaluation of everyday objectsas the subjectsof his photographic works. Natural or man-reassembled pieces, they are kept, bought or found thanks to their intrinsic value – with none or minimal alteration – therefore seen and celebrated by the artist.

The signifier being steady, the intervention consists in the action of choosing the object and relocating it as the protagonist of the photograph. Frequently the title of the work itself, as for Tête trouvée sous le lit,allows to recognise a move, a discovery, a choice taken by the artist. The process is, therefore, the act of choosing, to which the outcome of the depiction commits. While the original content persists, the vibration of the meaning is enhanced by the medium.

Furthermore, the final rendering acquires an additional system of references through the gelatin silver print, the chromogenic materials and the process, out of which the black and white photograph earns its strength.

Enigma II – which refers to The enigma of Isidore Ducasse assembled in New York in 1920 – is the evolution of a choice, the outcome of an action. Its roots can be found in Man Ray’s Dada objects related to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades. Duchamp had, for instance, wrapped a sewing machine in an army blanket and tied it up with a string. As most of the pieces produced by Man Ray in the late 40’s, the process was meant to produce an unusual artifact, subject to an open interpretation.

This photograph of what appears as a mysterious entity, relates to the surrealist vision of what lays beyond the curtain of a rational system of references.

The action is vivid in this work and the content is questioned. Hiding the object, the protagonist becomes the artifact produced by the addition of fabric and string.

Early works by Man Ray (e.g. the collage series Revolving Doors(1916-1917)) present themselves as the proof of the multifaceted oeuvreof the artist. He challenges an alternative perspective, given by the use of a two-dimensional rendering. Moreover, Man Ray explores the mechanical means of the creative process by assembling other figurative collages as, for instance, Dance(1915) which “showed what seem to be two mechanical-looking figures, evoking tailors’ dummies, performing stiff-legged dance movements.” *

Man Ray states: “The concern of a period of time often leads to the disappearance of material space. That is what the images in two dimensions shown here tend to prove; by a mutual action, they give birth to a series of events escaping from the control of all diversion. ‘

New York, 1916–17

The two artists connect on the level of creating by mutual action, enhancing the two-dimensionality by -as Strömberg- using the relicts of cut-out negatives and intuitively assembling them within the creative process in his collages and his Compost(ed) landscapes.

With the project The Compost, Strömberg refers to a wider angle, where the symbolic meaning is not graspable anymore by the acceptance of the role of the objects themselves.

The quest for an unexpected outcome, realized by overlapping layers of cut photographs, polaroids, negatives, photocopies and objects is vivid and encouraged by placing them together as a surreal watermark. Together with Jens Soneryd, the artist broadens the edges of the works. Working on written words, Soneryd pictures a beginning and and end, the inner content and a poetic response.

As for Lacan – quoted in The Compost Manifesto- the real concerns the need whereas the imaginary concerns the demand.

The symbolic, then, is all about desire. The question remains open.Interpretation awakens the dialogue between the two artists.

* Grace Glueck, “ART REVIEW; Emmanuel Radnitzky, Before He Was Man Ray”, New York Times, March 7th, 2003.

 

 

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