With Denise Bertschi, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Jonas Etter, Henrik Hentschel, San Keller, Petra Elena Köhle & Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin, Julie Sas, Triin Tamm, Riikka Tauriainen, Alexander Tuchaček, Anne Käthi Wehrli, Martina-Sofie Wildberger, Sophie Yerly

Curated by Dimitrina Sevova in collaboration with Alan Roth

From 17.03.2016 to 17.04.2016.
Opening on 17 March 2016, 19:00h.
Performance {reclaim the twelfth camel} < code of practice at the opening, 21:00h, by Alexander Tuchaček.

Artist talks in three sessions on Sundays, 20 March, 3 April, and 17 April at 17:00h (for details follow the links).


Opening Hours during the exhibition / Öffnungszeiten während der Ausstellung

Wed 3pm - 6pm / Mi 15:00h - 18:00h
Thu 3pm - 7pm / Do 15:00h - 19:00h
Fri 3pm - 6pm / Fr 15:00h - 18:00h
Sat 2pm - 5pm / Sa 14:00h - 17:00h

An idea-driven group exhibition project about how and why an idea(l) book can be only a single page, which explores the strange connection between writing and biopower. Unfolding in two chapters (or two episodes) it searches for micro approaches to the paradox of practices that emerge as Art Writing and Anagrammatic Writing, between writing and life and between published/exhibition – both being forms of display (movable vs. durational). The exhibition/publishing project brings together artists who actively experiment with writing and text, whose practices are at the fringe of the visual and narrative or in-between, neither visual nor narrative, always constructed by collectively exhaustive events.

No-where? Now-here! The Molecular Books of Life – Colleges of Unreason displays art practices that rupture with representative and institutionalized forms of writing and open up to the heterogeneity of productive forces, diagrammatic dynamism and the virtual potentiality of the network of text-image-work-in-progress, to the performative relations producing this process. In a Deleuzian sense, “it is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived.”


Read here the expanded curatorial text and research by Dimitrina Sevova in collaboration with Alan Roth.


Der Empirismus ist der Mystizismus des Begriffs, sein Mathematismus. Aber er behandelt den Begriff eben als Gegenstand einer Begegnung, als ein Hier-und-Jetzt, oder eher noch als ein Erewhon, aus dem in unerschöpflicher Folge die immer neuen und anders verteilten „Hier und Jetzt“ ausfließen. Nur der Empirist kann sagen: Die Begriffe sind die Dinge selbst, aber in einem freien und wilden Zustand, jenseits der „anthropologischen Prädikate“. (Deleuze)

Dieses Projekt zeichnet einige Verbindungslinien, die, so scheint es, nicht oft gezogen werden, zwischen der Philosophie von Gilles Deleuze und Félix Guattari, und Deleuzes geliebtem Science-Fiction-Roman Erewhon von Samuel Butler, die wenig erforscht sind, sei es im akademischen Bereich oder in Feld der Kunst. Sowie die selten untersuchten Verbindungen zwischen Deleuze und Guattari und einem der häretischen Studenten Freuds, Otto Rank, der den sexuellen Trieb seines Meisters mit der unpersönlichen Individuation analytischer Praxen auf der Basis von Objektrelationen ersetzte, der über die Überwindung der Todesfurcht schrieb. Dies steht der Art und Weise nahe, wie Deleuze in seinem Aufsatz Immanenz: Ein Leben die vitalen Kräfte konzeptualisiert. Weiter folgt es der Verbindung zwischen Deleuze und Guattaris maschinischer Theorie und Samuel Butlers molekularem Gedanken in der Evolution des maschinischen Universums. Die Praxen des Schreibens setzen einen wilden Empirismus voraus, der von der „einstimmigen Ontologie“ herrührt, und dessen Raum ist „der Mystizismus des Begriffs, sein Mathematismus“. Sol LeWitt operiert ähnlich wie Deleuzes Programmierung, wenn er sagt: „Konzeptkünstler sind viel eher Mystiker als Rationalisten. Sie eilen zu Schlussfolgerungen, die der Logik nicht erschlossen sind.“



Denise Bertschi



“TRUST. Five extremely demanding letters.” I believe every word you say! Words construct ‘trust’ as well as disbelief. Denise Bertschi continuously engages with language, the social and political fabric of language and manipulation of information. For the work T.R.U.S.T. Denise Bertschi collects slogans from marketing representation of the biggest Swiss private bank Pictet based in Geneva – “collecting as forms of writing”. Selling words, language of radicality turned into a marketing spoof, pseudo-poetry and corporate rethorics. Contemporary advertising slang, calculated usage, market research, finding selling words – Rhetoric matters! But how are these words surrounding us just leave us empty? “Can I trust these words?”



Delphine Chapuis Schmitz



Die Zumutung [L'affront]
Video, Projection, Loop. 2016.

Il s’agit d’écrire un texte qui ressemble à une page, c’est-à-dire qui ait autant de réalité qu’une page. Mais dans son genre.

Le genre de page sur lequel on écrit de nos jours, ni blanche, ni une, ni bi-, ni même tri-dimensionnelle. Une page à multiples layers, des possibles (fast) END-LOS.

Les textes de la vidéo / projection ici présentées sont issus de l’ensemble de textes généré lors de l’exposition www.corner-college.com, réalisée en 2014 sur le site internet de Corner College.


Die Zumutung
Video, Projektion, Loop. 2016.

Es geht darum, einen Text zu schreiben, der einer Seite ähnlich sieht, was bedeutet, dass er so wirklich sein soll wie eine Seite. Aber in seiner Art.

Die Art von Seite, auf der heutzutage geschrieben wird, weder weiss noch ein-, zwei- oder dreidimensional. Eine Seite mit vielfältigen Schichtungen, (fast) END-LOSE Mögliche.

Die Texte der Video / Projektion, die hier vorgestellt werden, entstammen der Menge von Texten, die während der Ausstellung www.corner-college.com generiert wurden, die 2014 auf der Webseite des Corner College realisiert wurde.



Jonas Etter

Untitled (Fountain II)
3D printer reduced to 1D, 2016



“You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition.” (Marcel Duchamp)

A 3D printer, an industrial object, is elevated to the dignity of art, not only because literally, Jonas Etter makes this claim by fixing the machine to one of the white walls of Corner College like An Oak Tree (one can refer here to Michael Craig-Martin’s eponymous conceptual work from 1973). On every working day of the exhibition, the 3D printer moves repetitively back and forth and prints material according to a predesigned code installed by the artist, as it melts a synthetic wire to a fine thread which after escaping from the nozzle cools down to room temperature and solidifies. The artist’s preoccupation is with how he can retranslate three-dimensional reality into a one-dimensional or multi-layer topographic landscape, or how the pixelated image can be written in vectorized line segments. He scanned a handwritten to-do-list. The image of this sheet, vectorized and encoded, after being printed out turns into both the paper and the imprinted writing, into lines of unconscious machinic scribbles which are a tabula rasa in which no text will ever be imprinted, but one can say that it becomes a growing text, or texture, by itself. Two of the three dimensions were taken away by the artist from a the 3D printer, assembled from commercially available components piece by piece by the artist as a Do-It-Yourself engineered small machine. The printing machine constructs a mere projection of an object onto a line, which again unfolds in the space, the uncanny and non-sense, or simply junk, of the growing waste of synthetic constructivism. Since the foundation or floor of the 3D printer was left out in the assemblage, the threads fall on the floor, constructing a drawing across the space or rather growing an n-dimensional object of multi-layered, tiny one-dimensional lines.

Text: Dimitrina Sevova




Henrik Hentschel



Untitled
2016

German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated “We will cope!” at the beginning of the refugee crisis. Since then, this sentence has been connected to her political position and future.

The work transforms this sentence into a picture and rephrases it to a singular person. Each letter is light-written into the air, graffiti-like, onto a single negative.

The second part of the work consists of three texts written by members of the literature association „Literatur für das was passiert“. (https://www.facebook.com/Literatur-f%C3%BCr-das-was-passiert-1698443547055500/timeline) The association sets up events, where different writers compose texts by request. The collected money goes to help people on the move.


Ohne Titel
2016

Die deutsche Kanzlerin Angela Merkel sagte zu Beginn der Flüchtlingskrise, „Wir schaffen das!“ Seither bleibt diese Aussage mit ihrer politischen Stellung und Zukunft verbunden.

Die Arbeit verwandelt diesen Satz in ein Bild und formuliert es in die erste Person Einzahl. Jeder Buchstabe ist, ähnlich einem Graffito, auf ein einziges Negativ in der Luft lichtgemalt.

Der zweite Teil der Arbeit besteht in drei Texten, verfasst von Mitgliedern des Literaturvereins „Literatur für das, was passiert“. (https://www.facebook.com/Literatur-f%C3%BCr-das-was-passiert-1698443547055500/timeline) Der Verein veranstaltet Anlässe, bei denen Schriftsteller_innen an Schreibmaschinen Texte auf Wunsch verfassen. Das gesammelte Geld kommt Menschen auf der Flucht zugute.



San Keller



The Real On Kawara
2008
Liquitex auf Leinwand (ausgeführt von Manuel Krebs), 25.5 × 33 × 4 cm.

San Keller schenkte seinem Vater zur Pensionierung in Anlehnung an On Kawaras Today Series den gemalten Bindestrich zwischen seinem ersten (20. April 1965) und letzten (31. Oktober 2008) Arbeitstag beim Kantonalen Personalamt Bern.

Der Bindestrich ist weiss. Der Hintergrund ist die Mischfarbe aus sämtlichen Farben, welche On Kawara bisher in der Today Series verwendete. Ausstellungen: Weihnachtsausstellung 2008 / 2009, Kunsthalle Bern.
Besitzer: Museum San Keller, Sammlung Marianne u. Fritz Keller.


The Real On Kawara
2008
Liquitex on canvas (executed by Manuel Krebs), 25.5 × 33 × 4 cm.

San Keller gave as a gift to his father the painted hyphen between his first (20 April 1965) and last (31 October 2008) working day at the Cantonal Office of Personnel Bern, in reference to On Kawara’s Today Series.

The hyphen is white. The background is the mixed color from all colors used to date by On Kawara in the Today Series. Exhibitions: Christmas Exhibition 2008 / 2009, Kunsthalle Bern.
Owner: Museum San Keller, collection of Marianne and Fritz Keller.



Petra Elena Köhle & Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin



A kind of palimpsest
Print on flag

The artists produced two flags with to the same imprinted text fragment or traces of what remains of the two novels Don Quixote under the ultimate decay of time, those by Miguel de Cervantes and by Pierre Ménard. The two short phrases of text apparently coincide, yet we would be mistaken to assume that they are copies of each other. As the flags unfold they reveal what was hidden inside the space, a hand written phrase by a friend – the ideal book. The artist’s mysterious duty towards that friend manifests itself in a statement by the artists Petra Elena Köhle + Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin, who throughout their recent work have experimented intensively with the notion of repetition, to re-play and force the act of repetitiveness to its limit, to try over and over again, in order to displace the object, where an errant and random difference in itself can appear as a sign of immanent change, demonstrating how the meaning is performed by the specificity of the context.

Later, the two flags will be installed on the façade of Corner College to the accidental gaze of the pedestrians passing by. They confront the viewer with the impossibility to distinguish them, to remain indifferent to their sameness and ambiguous meaninglessness. And then suddenly it seems almost true that the printed text on one of the flags is a bit diminished. Or it is just an optical illusion? There might be some obstacle to really distinguish the two texts, which are indeed identical excerpts imprinted on the two flags as a matter of appropriation by the artists. One of them is from the “original” version of Don Quixote written by Miguel de Cervantes in 1703, while the other is from the more fragmentary Don Quixote written by Pierre Ménard, according to the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, 200 years later. Pierre Ménard wrote it at the beginning of the 20th century, confronting the impossibility of any reasonable argument why Don Quixote might be relevant today.

Ménard has the divine modesty of pursuing his peculiar idea to repeat “a pre-existing book in a foreign tongue.” The process implies an idiotic methodology of repeating the writing process of Cervantes by his own experience. “He did not want to compose another Don Quixote – which would be easy – but the Don Quixote.” He puts himself in the place of Don Quixote in so radical a manner that he rewrites the novel word for word and line for line. Ménard does not write about Don Quixote. He embodies and becomes himself Don Quixote through his rigorous writing. That makes the difference in the repetition. It is a micro composition of a molecular book, written in a foreign language. Ménard’s writing is no doubt metabolistic, a bodily function from which a contemporary Don Quixote appears in the play of the two flags, too – a “solitary game” in-between two poles of perpetual displacement or de-familiarization between I-Don Quixote and me-Don Quixote. Don Quixote remains the same Don Quixote. Only I is another in the interiority of an unwritten novel, through the infinity of combinations of the eternal return of the fiction, inorganic and extra-human, a “vast ocean of indifference.” It is an expression of life itself, whose value lies outside the closed system of the text.

The actor employed by the artists for their performance at the finissage of the exhibition will read the Borges short story in the passage between the flags outside the exhibition space, his essential voice with his own specific accent carrying a “mournful” and “humid Echo.” He will deny to embody the autobiographical lines in the short story of Borges about Pierre Ménard, just as Pierre Ménard as Don Quixote refuses to re-write, and even forces himself to exclude the autobiographical prologue of Cervantes in the second part of the novel in order to arrive at the fictional personage of Don Quixote as Pierre Ménard and nobody else. If anything, it is the interjection of Edgar Allan Poe that intervenes in this process, not Cervantes’. Ménard’s Don Quixote is not however a copy but a work in its own right. Analyzing the two texts, Borges ascribes to Ménard’s version a greater subtlety and fragmentarity than to its predecessor. It is an open work that remains forever unfinished.

Through their work, Koehle + Vermot question the role of the author and the relation of the text/art work to the context, by means of repetition and the aesthetics of appropriation as an affirmative politics, and the meaninglessness of art as a gesture of perpetual justification of “absurdity” and inconclusiveness, where ambiguity is a richness, an ultimately useless intellectual exercise. It is a metaphysical demonstration, as the artists’ “ultimate goal” seems to be only chance and nothing else. They do not operate a mechanical transcription of the text to display it on the flags, but replay it over and over again and open it up to non-human forces to deploy or unfold the statement of a concept, which not only does not exclude, but actually carries within itself the action, i.e., the manifestation, like the performative unfolding of a private statement in a public space, as in the unfolding of a flag, which combines within itself as a performative opening both the action and the display of I-other.

Text: Dimitrina Sevova


The complete short story “Pierre Ménard – Author of Don Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges is available next to the flags.


Die Kurzgeschichte „Pierre Ménard – Autor des Don Quixote“ von Jorge Luis Borges liegt in voller Länge bei den Fahnen auf.


… la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, émula del tiempo, depósito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir …

… truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future …

… Wahrheit […], deren Mutter die Geschichte ist, die Nebenbuhlerin der Zeit, Aufbewahrerin der Taten, Zeugin der Vergangenheit, Vorbild und Belehrung der Gegenwart, Warnung der Zukunft …



Julie Sas



La vérité dans le texte (Je cherche un homme)
2015
video couleur, son, 3:36, en boucle

À l’image, un personnage hybride (composé des figures antagonistes de Diogène - philosophe antique - et Des Esseintes - esthète et dandy, personnage principal du roman A rebours de Joris-Karl Huysmans) tape en boucle, sur une machine à écrire, la phrase «Je cherche un homme». Cette phrase, directement empruntée au philosophe cynique Diogène, est une proposition ironique visant à réfuter la théorie platonicienne selon laquelle il existerait un «homme véritable», un «idéal humain». Trois plans se succèdent, rejouant le mouvement mécanique de la machine à écrire (frappe des barres à caractère), tandis qu’un décalage entre le son et l’image intervient dans le plan principal de la vidéo.


La vérité dans le texte (Je cherche un homme) [Die Wahrheit im Text (Ich suche einen Menschen)]
2015
Video, Farbe, Ton, 3:36, in Schleife

Auf dem Bild tippt eine hybride Person (zusammengesetzt aus den antagonistischen Figuren des Diogenes – des Philosophen der Antike – und Des Esseintes – dem Ästheten und Dandy, Hauptfigur von Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Roman Gegen den Strich) in Schleife auf einer Schreibmaschine den Satz „Ich suche einen Menschen“. Dieser Satz, unmittelbar dem zynischen Philosophen Diogenes entliehen, ist eine ironische Aussage, die darauf abzielt, die platonische Theorie zu widerlegen, laut der ein „wahrer Mensch“, ein „menschliches Ideal“ existieren soll. Drei Einstellungen folgen aufeinander und spielen immer aufs Neue die mechanische Bewegung der Schreibmaschine durch (den Anschlag der Typenhebel), während eine Phasenverschiebung zwischen dem Ton und dem Bild in die Haupteinstellung des Videos eingreift.


La vérité dans le texte (Je cherche un homme) [Truth in the Text (I am looking for a man)]
2015
Video, color, sound, 3:36, looped

On the picture a hybrid character (composed of the antagonistic figures of Diogenes – Ancient philosopher – and Des Esseintes – the aesthete and dandy, main character in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel Against Nature) types in a loop on a typewriter the sentence “I am looking for a man.” This sentence, borrowed directly from the cynic philosopher Diogenes, aims to refute the platonic theory claiming the existence of a “true human,” a “human ideal.” Three shots in sequence replay the mechanical movement of the typewriter (the keystrokes of the type bars), while a time lag between sound and image intervenes in the main shot of the video.



Triin Tamm



i'm late…

Text on doormat, 2016.



Riikka Tauriainen

Ignore All Signs



Consider a system in a state A, which is the quantum state of some measurement operator. Say the system under free time evolution will decay with a certain probability into state B. If measurements are made periodically, with some finite interval between each one, at each measurement, the wave function collapses to an eigenstate of the measurement operator. Between the measurements, the system evolves away from this eigenstate into a superposition state of the states A and B. When the superposition state is measured, it will again collapse, either back into state A as in the first measurement, or away into state B. However, its probability of collapsing into state B, after a very short amount of time t, is proportional to t², since probabilities are proportional to squared amplitudes, and amplitudes behave linearly. Thus, in the limit of a large number of short intervals, with a measurement at the end of every interval, the probability of making the transition to B goes to zero.



Alexander Tuchaček



{reclaim the twelfth camel} < code of practice

In der Arbeit {reclaim the twelfth camel} < code of practice geht es um den Versuch einer Sprachgenerierung für eine Wiederaneignung des algorithmischen Raums, eines Raums, der uns abhanden gekommen ist, verlorengegangen oder schlichtweg geraubt wurde.

Dafür wird ein spezielles Tier in den Raum geführt, ein Kamel, das zugleich Text, Bild, Programm, Erzählung und Aufführung ist. In der Arbeit geht es um einen Verteilungskonflikt, der scheinbar gut gelöst wird und alles wieder ins Lot bringt. Bei dieser scheinbar guten Lösung gerät aber das Verhältnis von Text und Aufführung aus den Fugen. Eine dritte Figur, das sich selbst aufführende Shell-Programm, das sich aus dem Kamelbild entschlüsselt, fordert seine Mitsprache ein. Dabei schreibt es die Geschichte vom zwölften Kamel (vor). Aber wer spricht hier den Text der Geschichte und aus welcher Position? Vielleicht geht es um einen ganz anderen Verteilungskonflikt, um die Zeit und den Raum der Erzählung, und um die Frage, wer und wie die Neuverteilung dieses Raums zurückfordern kann?

Eine Mehrzahl von Performer_innen in Form von bots, scripts und Figuren treten in Erscheinung. Das Projekt startet zur Eröffnung am 17. März mit einer Performance um 21 Uhr und wird im Laufe der Ausstellung weitere Protagonist_innen und Aufführungen folgen lassen.


{reclaim the twelfth camel} < code of practice

The work {reclaim the twelfth camel} < code of practice is about an attempt to generate language to reappropriate algorithmic space, a space that has gone amiss, got lost or was just plain stolen from us.

To this end, a special animal is led into the room, a camel that is simultaneously text, image, program, narrative and enactment. The work is about a conflict over distribution that ostensibly is resolved well, balancing everything out again. This apparently good solution however throws the relation between text and enactment out of joint. A third figure, the self-executing shell program that decodes itself from the image of the camel, demands to have its say, all the while writing, or prescribing, the story of the twelfth camel. But who is it that speaks the text of the story, and from what position? Might it not be about an utterly different conflict over distribution, about time and space of the narrative, and about the question of who and how can reclaim the redistribution of this space?

A multiplicity of performers in the form of bots, scripts and figures make their appearance. The project starts out on the opening date on 17 March at 21:00h and will be followed during the exhibition by further protagonists and enactments.



Anne Käthi Wehrli



Die Frau als Einstiegsloch
Ist es ein Krimi? Forschung? Expedition?
Ein Abenteuer mit Fragen.

Die Frau, das Einstiegsloch für die Infra-Quark Entität im Film In Search of UIQ* ist tot, das merkte ich sofort. Wieso und warum? Stimmt es wirklich oder ist es nur meine Einbildung, mein Gefühl, ausgelöst durch die Art und Weise, wie diese Videoaufzeichnungen, die im Film vorkommen, von dieser Frau, die man da noch sprechen sieht, und später nicht mehr vorkommt, gemacht wurden?

Sie muss nun ermitteln. Sich auch mit der Frage befassen: Was ist eigentlich der Unterschied zwischen Trieb und Todestrieb? Nachforschungen anstellen über die Schwangerschaft, diese spezielle Art des Zusammenlebens, und ältestes Grundthema von Science Fiction Romanen. Und vieles noch ungewisses mehr.

Ich werde mich diesem Text zuhause aber auch vor Ort in der Ausstellung widmen, die aktuellen Fassungen werden als Fanzine jeweils ausgedruckt und aufgelegt.

Es lohnt sich also vorbeizuschauen, um die neuen Entwicklungen zu erfahren, aber auch, um das, was später rausfliegen wird, vorher noch zu lesen.

*Im Film In Search of UIQ von Graeme Thomson und Silvia Maglioni aus dem Jahr 2013 geht es um das damals unveröffentlichte Science-Fiction Drehbuch Un amour d'UIQ von Félix Guattari.


Die Frau als Einstiegsloch [The Woman as Entry Hole]
Is it a detective story? Research? An expedition?
An Adventure with Questions.

The woman, the entry hole fort he infra-quark entity in the film In Search of UIQ,* is dead, I realized that at once. Why? What for? Is it actually true, or is it just my imagination, my feeling triggered by the way these video recordings that occur in the film, of this woman whom one can still hear speaking then, and who later is no longer there, were made?

Now she has to investigate. She will also be faced with the question: What is in fact the difference between life drive and death drive? Inquire about pregnancy, that special kind of co-existence, one of the oldest topics of science fiction novels. And other things uncertain.

I shall dedicate myself to this text at home, but also on the spot in the exhibition. The respective current version will be available printed out as a fanzine.

It is worth dropping by to find out about the latest developments, but also to read, before it is no longer there, what will later be ditched.

*The film In Search of UIQ by Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni, from 2013, is about the then still unpublished science fiction movie script Un amour d'UIQ by Félix Guattari.



Martina-Sofie Wildberger



Dream comes true #1
I want to stand up, in a city that never leaps.

Performative installation, slideshow, video projection, duration 20s – 10min40s, 2016.

This work is an excerpt of the ongoing learning process of the artist. Having recently moved to New York for an artist residency, she is writing a poem every day in order to find out how the city influences language – her language. Arriving with fairly limited knowledge of English, it expands over time and becomes vital through the duration leaving its imprints. New influences, ways of thinking and very common encounters mark her architectural writing. The unknown is appropriated and becomes known in language and the city. The artist wants to know how and when this transformation happens.

Every day the poem she writes is added simultaneously to this slideshow starting with the first day. Her piece is installed in the space in Zurich. The slideshow gets longer and longer as the exhibition goes on. Through this cumulative writing we follow her in an abstract and distant yet personal way through the city, her life and the appropriation of a language.


Dream comes true #2
I want to wake up, in a city that never sleeps.



Text animation, iPad, 2016.

In this work, possibilities of translation are explored through the medieval form of labyrinth poems. How can one thing be two things at the same time? Where and when does one become another, how is transformation and transposition embodied.

In Baroque cubes, a specific form of Carmen Figuratum, a small text substrate offers many different ways of reading. This maze reflects also the artist's experience arriving in unknown New York for a residency, through which she has to find her way. As in the poems, there is no right or wrong way, but it is the didactic experience that counts. The artist changes slightly the structure of these poems. She extends the small text substrate by its translation in German or English. Starting from the same point, one translation runs horizontally and one appears vertically through the shift of one letter at a time. Throughout the exhibition more and more animated poems are added.



Sophie Yerly



Too expensive and not enough to eat
2016
http://www.eineseite.ch

Attention artists! Perhaps you employ language in your work. You may be highly literate. But you don’t have to say what your art means or even is about. Furthermore, don’t do that. It’s my job. You make the stuff. Let critics talk about it. Making is superior to talking, so you have the better end of the deal. I try to be big about that. For your part, keep your eye on the ball, which is not a ball of talk.

I’m thinking of those of you who are on the young side. The future is yours. I’m on the old side and running out of future. This slackens my interest in what’s new. When I go to look at art for pleasure now, it’s to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Frick Collection. My ‘we’ is yellowing around the edges. Any ‘we’ that has nearterm potential must be one that tastes right in your mouths, when you say the word.
Peter Schjeldahl, Frieze magazine Issue 137, March 2011
http://frieze.com/article/ourselvesandouroriginssubjectsart

[English see below]

Corner College führt seine Veranstaltungsreihe The Artist as The Curator as The Artist (The Art of Curating or How about a Paracuratorial Turn?) fort.

In der zweiten Veranstaltung lädt Corner College die Künstlerinnen Margit Säde und Denise Bertschi ein, ihre kuratorische Praktiken vorzustellen und untereinander und mit dem Publikum zu diskutieren. Stefan Wagner ist von Corner College eingeladen, die Diskussion zu moderieren.

Das kuratorische Konzept der Veranstaltungsreihe von Dimitrina Sevova in Zusammenarbeit mit Alan Roth (auf Englisch): http://materials.corner-college.com/2016/201602/201502-the-artist-as-the-curator-new-series.html




[Deutscher Text siehe oben]

Corner College is continuing its series of events The Artist as The Curator as The Artist (The Art of Curating or How about a Paracuratorial Turn?).

In the second event, artists Margit Säde and Denise Bertschi are invited to present their curatorial practices and discuss them between themselves and with the audience. Stefan Wagner is invited by Corner College to moderate the discussion.



Margit Säde

… Steve’s appearance didn’t give away any hints of his rebellious nature, which existed alongside his feelings of ambivalence and loss. This project had indeed challenged the way he looked at things and the part that he played in them. The process of this project had taught Steve that it’s impossible to follow somebody else’s instructions – it was simply impossible for him to follow a given formula. He was fed up, for real this time, he was fed up of doing things in the way that they were expected to be done and most of all he was fed up with taking himself so seriously. “How is it,” Steve wondered, that there’s hardly anything that can make us feel better about the way we do things?” One does what one is; one becomes what one does...

Excerpt from short story Steve.skp by Margit Säde, 2015

Taking her last exhibition project DOings & kNOTs as an example, Margit Säde will talk how she is performing and switching between the roles of a curator, a narrator, a DJ, an artist or an assistant/intern.
DOings & kNOTs ( I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong) taking place in Tallinn Art Hall, was an exhibition about the impossibility of following instructions, rules or given formula. The exhibition tried to look into what lies between a refusal and doing, a script and a live moment, a self-organisation and an institution — imagined ideas and actual situations.

Margit Säde is an independent curator and an artist based in Tallinn and Zurich. Her practice emphasises the self-initiated, collaborative and ongoing nature of art practice. Her curated projects include group DOings & kNOTs at Tallinn Art Hall, SOURCE AMNESIA at Oslo10, While Walking on the Secret Paths but also While Walking on Salads, And So On & So Forth (at CAME in Tallinn and kim? in Riga), If It’s Half Broke, Part Fix It (CAC, Vilnius) and listening sessions A Selfless Self in the Nightless Night; Disembodied Voices & Imaginary Friends (BAR, Barcelona and Corner College in Zurich) and Hear Me With Your Eyes (Castrum Peregrini, Amsterdam).



Denise Bertschi

PROTECTION ROOM – an exhibition project unexpectedly happening during the Brussels lockdown

PROTECTION ROOM is an exhibition wherein five artists inhabit « ROSA BRUX », an independent art space in Brussels, which originally functioned as a flat. By chance this week fell together with the #brusselslockdown beginning on the 21 November 2015 due to information about possible terrorist attacks in the wake of the series of terrorist attacks in Paris just two weeks before.

PROTECTION ROOM explores nuances of transparency and opacity and the thin line between the private and the public – question if this line still exists. During a week, five artists respond to different aspects and tactics of ‚hiding‘ and ‚covering over‘ („Protection“) – making reference to hyper-visible control of public spaces and the relationship between the body and architecture. PROTECTION ROOM asks how to claim our „right to opacity“ (Edouard Glissant) and in what way opacity can function as protection in a world of super-exposure. It detects the obscure and confinement of transparency and will function as a opaque view on the subject matter that can be linked to the public-space, private-self and over-exposed world.
Today, ‚public space‘ is democratized, we accept and submit permission for use of our private-selves without a second thought. One can question of movement between a ‚public‘ and a ‚public‘ is all that is left and how the feeling of security can be guarded, without giving in to systems of hyper-control.

Under the circumstances of the #brusselslockdown the exhibition project’s title PROTECTION ROOM got into new spheres of relevance and the question around the ‚public‘ and the ‚private‘ carried a new heaviness, also questioning the role of a ‚flat‘ as a safe place? The gallery space, which was our private living space for a week allowed subtle touching points between the working process of the artists – intertwining proximity and distance and eventually ending in a public moment, the opening which also stood under the shadow of this special political moment in time.

The project is initiated by artist Denise Bertschi. It wanted to test the slippery state between curatorial practice, artistic collaborative production and the role of friendship.

Participating artists:
Denise Bertschi
Doris Boerman
Gitte Hendrikxs
Sophie Reble &
Martina-Sofie Wildberger

http://www.rosabrux.org



Curatorial concept of the series of events by Dimitrina Sevova in collaboration with Alan Roth: http://materials.corner-college.com/2016/201602/201502-the-artist-as-the-curator-new-series.html

The Artist as The Curator as The Artist (The Art of Curating or How about a Paracuratorial Turn?) is a series of presentation and conversation-driven irregular events critically interrogating the curatorial turn, exhibition-making practices that sometimes go beyond the notion of the exhibition, the practices of curating performed by the artist, and the performative potentialities of the curatorial without a clear programming policy and museological framing. It questions how the political and aesthetic potentiality of the discourse can be made practical, searching for a new vocabulary reflecting on the idea of what an exhibition could be from the point of view of the artists and their current exhibition practices and curatorial endeavors.

Throughout the event, performance Too expensive and not enough to eat by Sophie Yerly.

Modern science makes us understand the true character of the machine, of rationalization and of standardisation. All of that leads to one thing only: the economy. Economy attempts (is) the symmetricalisation of forces.
Art is to create inequalities.
from Yiannis Isidorou: What Asger Jorn (un)/taught me - a text of 11 positions regarding the movements and tropes of the artist in the symmetrical(ized) world of economy


17:00h Performance The Real On Kawara by San Keller in conversation with his father about his 43 years at the Cantonal Office of Personnel Bern.

San Keller schenkte seinem Vater zur Pensionierung in Anlehnung an On Kawaras «Today Series» den gemalten Bindestrich zwischen seinem ersten (20. April 1965) und letzten (31. Oktober 2008) Arbeitstag beim Kantonalen Personalamt Bern.

San Keller gave as a gift to his father the painted hyphen between his first (20 April 1965) and last (31 October 2008) working day at the Cantonal Office of Personnel Bern, in reference to On Kawara’s “Today Series.”


18:00h Performance A kind of palimpsest by Petra Elena Köhle & Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin, „Pierre Ménard – Autor des Don Quixote“ by Jorge Luis Borges, read by Andreas Storm.


18:45h Performance Dreams come true by Martina-Sofia Wildberger.


19:15h Artist talks by Riikka Tauriainen, Alexander Tuchaček.


Discussion with the artists and the curators. Bar, party.

Just Add Water: A score, a set of instructions. Do this and you'll get that, guaranteed. Fill in the blank and it's done, easy! It's already been prethought for you, precomposed, predetermined. There's a cost of course; it's straightforward, but always the same. Reliable yet totally uninteresting. We need to experiment, see how we can shake things up. Maybe: It's never the same water that gets added in, always slightly different. Alpine water, or imported from China, we've already found some wiggle room. We wiggle some more, stay within our structure, our enabling constraints, but never seem to stop discovering. We begin to tell stories, abstract ones, using our tactics to fashion props, switching between Alpine and Chinese, creating a rhythm, building and breaking expectation. A makeshift stage. Then the illusion collapses; what are we talking about anyway? Who knows, but we felt something, that's the most important. We begin again…
Text: Brandon Farnsworth

A composer, choreographer, dancer, and singer in a performance exhibition at Corner College. Over a two-week period, this interdisciplinary ensemble will perform and experiment, developing an immaterial milieu of feeling and potentiality that will fill the space with its traces.

Curated by Brandon Farnsworth.

Benjamin Ryser, Composer
Brandon Farnsworth, Music Curator
Carla Doorn, Dancer
Eva Lin Yingchi, Choreographer

Vernissage: Sunday, 24 April 2016, starting at 18:00h


Opening Hours
Wednesday, 27 April – Friday, 29 April, 15:00h – 18:00h
Saturday, 30 April + Sunday, 1 May, 17:00h - 20:00h
Wednesday, 4 May – Friday, 6 May, 15:00h – 18:00h
Further performances during opening hours TBA.


Finissage: Saturday, 7 May. Doors open at 17:00h, performance begins at 18:00h.


The project is part of the Corner College platform Transferences: The Function of the Exhibition and Performative Processes in the Practices of Art – Questions of Participation, initiated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.