The Ongoing Conversation #6

BIBA COLE

image: Venus’s Girdle (2019)

is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is located within in-between spaces. Those which are seemingly empty, but spilling over the edges. Timeless spaces: gatherings of momentum in which filtration systems have not-yet been applied. Swimming in pools of excess material – questions of productive action, consumption, language, disgust, and desire emerge.

Project description:

I have made this for you, I would like you to eat it.

A rhythmic scattering of hot, thick droplets that make their way down past her calves, splattering the pavement like yesterday’s vomit. Venus’s Girdle: leads with its mouth. Muscular contractions; beating comb rows. Shatters when striking a net. Wrapped around her waist, a hand-crafted pinkish glow that extends and surrounds the horizon; an ‘atmospheric phenomenon’, of love, of beauty; supposedly.

I am my own host. I am growing inside of me: myself: and will soon exceed my extremities. I lead with my mouth and eat my own skin. It tastes strikingly sweet and over-synthetic. I can feel it, heavy in my body for days after the act. It is dense and sits like a mound inside my stomach. I am reminded of Melanie, who ‘felt she was pregnant with herself’ and moved with caution, because ‘to climb a tree might provoke a miscarriage and she would remain forever stranded in childhood’.

With reference to Angela Carter, Lisa-Ann Gershwin, and “The Belt of Venus”.

ADELE DIPASQUALE

Image: Blossoms and fruits at once, sulfur, marble and basalts, 2019.

photo by Mattia Angelini

Adele Dipasquale is a visual researcher currently based in Den Haag. Her practice questions the limits of cultural binarism, from femininity to naturality, creating relations with local narratives, orality and private histories. She is currently exploring the myth of primitiveness working in the intersections between science and fiction, chemical reactions and cosmogonic tales, magic and oral storytelling. She works mainly with installations, publishing, photography and cinematic media.

Project description:

Inspired by the Winogradsky column, a late XIX century scientific experiment that recreates the first stages of bacterial life on earth, ‘Blossoms and fruits at once’ is a work that critically reflects on the human desire to go back to a primordial moment of existence, connecting local histories, geological temporalities, oral narratives and magical thought.

REBECCA DUNNE

IMAGE: Score card from previous conversations, 2019

Rebecca Dunne works with storytelling, text, and walking. Looking at our relationship to the land and myths & narratives surrounding it and how we relate to each other, she draws on concepts of non-event, place, accumulation, memory, and non-heroic interventions.

Project description:

Together we took ten steps; we might remember them.

Together we take ten steps; we might go now.

Together we will take ten steps; we will plan them.

Where does the work lie?

How long will it be?

DAVIDE GHELLI SANTULIANA

Image: DIY cinema for galleries and other things that curators with oversized jackets like, still from film, 2019

The research of Davide Ghelli Santuliana always stems from personal experiences, in their intersection with his situated socio-political position of a person living in a neoliberal, western-oriented culture. Due to this particular stance, his research is concerned with fragmentation, as not only a characteristic of neoliberalism, but also a method that informs my research and that can potentially lead to new perspectives. The possibility to create unexpected connections and find non-intuitive ways to deal with politics and representation is one of the core features of this methodology. This is formally and aesthetically achieved by using digital media such as photography and film/video, both originally produced and appropriated, in connection with performance and installation.

Project description:

This project is an attempt to deal with the troubled personal identity of the artist, in its connection with a bigger collective history, which entails touching things as diverse as stereotypes, totalitarianism, failure and (self) representation. He tries to achieve it by a mix of different genres, from noir film to instructional documentary, in order to constantly question the different perspectives represented.

DANIEL IGLESIAS GONZÁLEZ

Image: Daniel Iglesias González, Kijk, Video. 2019

Daniel’s interest in desire, took him into a journey around history, race, colonialism, gender, productivity and the Netherlands. He considers masculinity as an open playground where multiple elements can interact with different outcomes. In that sense, his work aims to open new paths to reflect upon sexuality and desire. His practice includes drawings, videos and texts. Daniel Iglesias González is a Colombian artist living Rotterdam, where he also works as a part time dishwasher.

Project description:

Kijk is a hypothetical scenario of a guy locked with a picture for many consecutive days.

ALEJANDRA LÓPEZ

Image: No title, colour pencil on paper, 70 × 100 cm

Alejandra López is an artist and novice kite maker. She works with drawing, poetry, installation and storytelling to allow passages into other possible realities. Her current research revolves around the themes of flying and the search for transcendence and joy. Before attending the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, she lived and worked in London where she studied drawing at Camberwell College of Art and was a founding member of The Nunhead Drawing Group.

Project description:

A large-scale drawing concerning the usually long path that connects the size of your antenna to some selected words of unspecified direction, to his intentions being squashed by a toe to the east of the sea, to a sneeze from last week, to being impeccably still, to a perfectly balanced sprouting potato, growing old, growing mouldy, growing strong, growing lonely.

JAEHUN PARK

Image: Shower Room, 3D Animation, 04m 28s, 2019

Jaehun Park engages with ordinary objects and spaces and anatomises the ritual structure of capitalism and consumerism. He excavates dynamically the fabricated everyday living space and the shopping space that is saturated by sanitary tools, advertising apparatus, surveillance-security system, and collective unconsciousness.

Ritual is formal but also virtual, it is superficial but also idealistic and it repeats unconsciously. Eventually, it blinds people to desire. However, the ritual of capitalism doesn’t try to clear away its sins. Rather, it leads to endless desires again and again. Desire, vain, guilt, irrationality and indebtedness become a driving force of the ritual space of capitalism. The concept of hell doesn’t find itself after death, but it manifests itself in this reality. The greatest feature of hell would be the endless repetition of torture. Jaehun received his Master of Fine Arts degree at the Seoul National University. Now he is living and working in the Hague.

Project description

Shower Room, his recent 3D rendered animation, reveals how the personal place of cleaning oneself becomes a surrealistic space, using the metaphor of water and stone. Revolving Door presents a portrait of tortured mannequins inside the revolving door at the department store.

JAN TOMZA

Image: “Milky Way”, (2019) examines why Axis armies marched in uniforms made from cow’s milk.

Jan Tomza is a sculptor, researcher and composer currently working on a hyper-materialist inquiry into the immaterial. Although matter is usually a vessel for something else – a vision or idea- it also plays a crucial role in illustrating and achieving afterlife – whether it’s the rich decor of a catholic church or augmented reality.

In his current project, Jan explores milk plastics – an almost forgotten material that was highly favoured by the Axis countries. Why was milk considered suitable for this purpose? What ideas was it supposed to carry? If there’s a symbolic operation at work, does it relate to the politics of nurturing?

Project description:

For 1646, Jan presented a video essay that elaborates on the story’s details and critical significance, as well as sculptures made from milk plastic, used for experimental divination. Considering this plastic’s properties, like its resistance to staying in shape- how well does the material and semiotic match?

ELFI SEIDEL

Image: not one, but many silences, 2019

Elfi Seidel’s practice is concerned with the shifting space between image and language. Her work explores the relation between the materiality and immateriality of language, its poetic potential as visual material and the context-dependent meanings of words, letters and signs. She approaches linguistic fragments and abstract utterances as autonomous entities, working towards a plurality of possible readings. Seidel works with sound, installation, book and printmaking and self-publishes as part of her artistic practice.

Project description:

Not one, but many silences

A very long tone filled from one container into another with care, runs through the most disparate permutations while at the same time it remains the very same.

JESSE SIEGEL

Image: Jesse Siegel, Default Alpha 001, (video still) 2019

Jesse Siegel is an artist and technologist currently based in The Netherlands. His work is concerned with the global spread of the default, primarily in the architectural sense. He explores the erasure of culture and nature by economic forces.

Project description:

Default Alpha 001 is an abstract video road trip composed of found footage from car dash cams of new cities from around the world and 3D scenarios, merging the real and imagined.

ALCAEUS SPYROU

Image: Alcaeus Spyrou, Omonoia, Video Still, 2019

As an artist, Alcaeus Spyrou is interested in the syntax of the languages of Cinema. he constructs narrative devices aiming at new approaches to storytelling. The films unfold independently of the human voice. Montage and composition establishing the grammar of the narrative device. He believes in using the essayistic imperative through filmic form. The medium’s ability to render the subjectivity barrier inoperable, allows for the formation of complex narrative structures in generally comprehensive form.

Project description:

His primary mode of research for his first feature documentary is exploring the urban landscape through walking. In an environment where violence is omni-present, the political act of getting lost within one’s environment, becomes a process of existence.

ANNEMARIE WADLOW

Image: Now Dark, Now Luminous, a Shivering Premonition, video still, photographic exposure, text message

Annemarie Wadlow is an artist working with photography and video to investigate the beguiling space perched in the middle, between the image and the imagined. Stimulated by a ‘feminine’ pulse, this practice simultaneously worships and undermines representations of women, constructed truth, personal identity, desire and perceived beauty. The appropriation and re-contextualisation she employs questions visual stereotypes and moral intention, reinforcing the idea that one person’s reality is another’s fantasy.

Project description:

Situated amongst consciousness and dreamscape, current research investigates a lineage of representations of the woman in sleep – the reclining woman who dreams. By referring to images made by others and creating new ones of her own, the artist transports the sleeping woman between states of exhaustion, awareness and awake-ness. She is exposed, wilfully lost in a mirage of beauty and body, wearily accepting and rejecting confinement to a frozen place of eternal rest, eternally watched. It is in this space that we can render transparent her inner meditations, her creativity, her dreams; dreams that belong to a parallel world… We realise she is eternally aware and watching us too.”