Article by Elizabeth Schippers // June 12, 2020
The search for home is a physical as well as an emotional and mental endeavour. The concept combines psychological elements of belonging, familiarity and alienation with the physical aspects of embodiment and spatial inhabitation, or the absence thereof. As we are bound to our own homes, artists, too, refrain from travelling to residencies across the world. GlogauAIR announces its second Virtual Open Studio Exhibition, in which resident artists from all over the world come together virtually to present their creative projects, which they developed during their online residency. Their work points towards the development of home, both externally and internally.
Kovács/O’Doherty: ‘Other Trains’ // Courtesy of the artist
GlogauAIR, located in Kreuzberg, is an art space and artist residency focussed on the exploration and openness towards new ideas, interpretations of and approaches to contemporary art. At GlogauAIR, artists from various demographics and social circumstances are welcomed to develop their works in a dynamic environment that facilitates the exchange of ideas and experiences. Every three months, the public is invited to explore the site-specific projects and works-in-progress of the current residents during the Open Studios Exhibitions. Due to the COVID crisis, GlogauAIR keeps its physical doors shut, but starting June 19th at 7pm, they will present the works of their current residents via their website. The works exhibited online are the result of three-to-six months of the intensive production and creation of three artists that are currently on-site at GlogauAIR, as well as six artists who have their residence in various countries across the world and have participated in the residency virtually. In spite of their dispersion across the globe, the online Open Studio Exhibition provides a space for these artists to connect directly to an audience that is equally international. GlogauAIR invites you to experience an online multimedia presentation with contributions in the form of photo, video, and audio from each of the participating artists. Along with the artists that participated in the virtual residency format, GlogauAIR’s upcoming Open Studio Exhibition features Kovács/O’Doherty, a local collaborative duo who live and work in Berlin. During their residency, the duo has been researching and re-tracing abandoned train tracks in Berlin and Brandenburg in an exploration of absence, presence and memory. The project combines audio of non-existent trains with the physical locations of train tracks that are no longer present.
Elisa García de la Huerta, Josy and Rolly: ‘Thailand. Bio Resilience, India’, 2018, analog photography 35 mm
Also featured is the artist Elisa García de la Huerta who lives in Chile and participated in the residency virtually. Focussing on photography, performance art and sound, her work explores the various ways in which nature permeates the modern self. Looking at the intersection of capitalism, nature and affect, she raises attention to the ways in which our connection with nature is distorted and commodified, and examines possibilities for a restructuring of this relationship. Her work builds upon eco-feminist discourse and its attempts to find a softness between the body—repressed by the effects of late stage Capitalism—and the organic. Her analogue photography showcases exactly such a softness. With vibrant colours, tactile textures and poetic arrangements of bodies, organic matter and man-made objects, she opens up a conversation to reestablish a balance between our relationship to technological development, our environment and our consciousness.
The interests of Pamela Guest, based in New York, span a wide range of mediums. Working primarily with animation, but also delving into news journalism, editorial illustration and video, she is known for her use of vibrant colors, surprising compositions and experimentation with chaos and the ways it organises and disorganises itself. During her virtual residency at GlogauAIR, she has been working on a series that explore sequential art forms and a combination of animation, digital collage and illustration and object making, in order to create a narrative surrounding family archive, personal history and the idea of home as a non-site-specific space. Pulling from childhood memories, postcards, objects found on the street and retellings of childhood stories, she has developed a project that relates the sense of the familiar, the ordinary and the repetition and routine inherent in the creation of a home within oneself.
Eitan Ritz: ‘Peeling’, 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable
The artist, dancer and composer Eitan Ritz examines the body as a site of memory and congealment. Similarly to Guest’s focus on the routines inherent in home building, Ritz’s practice centres around the creation of home through daily rhythms and the conscious and subconscious embodiment of space. He sees the body as a site of these processes and looks at the way in which it explores and creates the spaces it inhabits. After studying various dance competitions, Ritz developed a fascination for the moving body and the role of language within. During his residency at GlogauAIR, the artist has combined these interests to create a visual- and soundscape to explore the creation and deconstruction of his sense of home.
Though spread around the globe, these artists’ sense of home in all of its complexities strike as very familiar. Whether it be a research-based project on the disappearance of train tracks as nature envelops this man-made space, analogue photographs of a tree trunk wrapping its roots around a stone bench, or various approaches to the physical and mental embodiment of home as it roots itself in the body, these artists all point towards our familiarisation and alienation with our environment. Their work, as well as those of GlogauAIR’s other current residents, will be presented in an non-physical environment we have, since its development, integrated in our understanding of space: the internet.
Exhibition Info
GLOGAUAIR
Group Show: ‘Virtual Open Studios’
Online Launch: Friday, June 19; 7pm
Online Exhibition: June 19–July 05, 2020
