Kairos Time
11 Jul - 17 Aug 2014
KAIROS TIME
11 July – 17 August 2014
Liz Allan, Maarten Bel, Sabrina Chou, Philip Ewe, Christian Hansen, Ann Maria Healy, Roos Wijma, Hannah James, Graham Kelly, Perri Mackenzie, Machteld Rullens, Micha Zweifel
Curated by Matteo Lucchetti
Kairos Time features twelve international artists based in Rotterdam whose works deploy a multiplicity of poetics and reflect diverse approaches to artistic practice today. The title refers to a possible common ground between the artists and the works, which may or may not be located in the spatio-temporal, social, and political contexts from which they have emerged. Along with Kronos, Kairos is an ancient Greek word for time, but while the former refers to chronological, sequential time, the latter alludes to the right or opportune moment when action must be taken, chances seized or conversely lost, inevitably affecting the course of things. Kairos represents a time lapse, an indeterminate moment when anything can happen and opportunities can be grasped, if and when they are perceived at all. Kairos Time is here understood as a space of potential, found in the daily situations or circumstances that an artist must assess and work with or against.
If we view an art practice as a series of seized favorable moments, it is worth asking: how much opportunism does it take to be an artist today? In A Grammar of the Multitude (2004), the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno analyzes post-Fordist conditions of labor and describes opportunists as “those who confront a flow of ever-interchangeable possibilities, making themselves available to the greater number of these, yielding to the nearest one, and then quickly swerving from one to another.” By depriving the term of its negative connotation Virno invents an extremely up to date rhetoric around the contemporary worker, which recalls the traits of openness, flexibility, and the unbiased attitude that are often associated with the figure of the artist.
The works in Kairos Time reflect the artist’s specific capacities to transform circumstances into meaningful visual systems, to turn specific material limits and restrictions into open-ended speculative journeys, and suggest that the opportune moment is a condition of the mind rather than a logically determined and immediately graspable point in time.
The heterogeneous work of Maarten Bel, Christian Hansen and Perri MacKenzie co-exists in the front space of the exhibition and invite the viewer to indulge in or reflect upon leisure activities. Café Bel is a real bar that “functions” at times and is open to events and happenings at others. Bel has shaped his work around the conviction that every social space is a potential space for art and vice-versa. Across the room, Mackenzie’s installation Publicness & Lightness with Motile Accessories departs from her observation of an outdoor smoking booth in which temporary, involuntary encounters define a claustrophobic social space via an addiction. Between these two works, Hansen’s three vinyl records each play a different recording of composite musical instruments (Architar or Keyboard-Skateboard, for example) that the artist created and played in the urban context that inspired their making. These interstitial sounds resonate with his awning installed at TENT, which evaluates urban re-development publicity images that preceded the gentrification process of Rotterdam Zuid.
Creating the opportunities in which their work will take shape is an attitude both Machteld Rullens and Philipp Ewe share in their own distinct ways. Rullens’ video Hardcore traverses the physical, immaterial and rhetorical security measures of the Nuclear Security Summit that took place in The Hague in March 2014— a record of when the artist crossed the demarcation lines of the hyper-protected city center. By contrast, Ewe navigates and transgresses inner boundaries, documenting his derive from one of the final stops on Rotterdam’s public transport lines to a hitchhiking experience on a freight truck.
Micha Zweifel’s work also draws from personal experience, namely the summer he shared a living and working space with a small group of artist friends in the Swiss countryside. How can a community work when its members become more and more incapacitated to perform social functions? Zweifel’s installation, which alludes to the name of the community’s local supermarket converses with the built forms evoked in Hannah James’ work. James’ The yellow and purple architecture has been dressed comprises videos that focus on performative aspects of interiors and other architectural spaces, shifting the routine through which we inhabit, perceive and remember them. Ann Maria Healy presents another kind of shift. Departing from the existence of an upside-down waterfall in her native Ireland, Healy stages a suspended environment made of waste materials, which is colonized by three ethereal and mythical figures that recite lyrics written by her.
The title of Roos Wijma’s sound installation Jacobson’s Organ refers to a patch of olfactory sensory cells present in reptiles. Her spoken word recording is activated by the presence of the audience, much like the animal’s chemical reaction to stimuli that excludes the use of sight. Sabrina Chou’s dispersed installation, Solid Ground, is designated by vinyl signage on the floor and revolves around an expanded notion of broadcasting. In the desert, at a gym, and amongst unoccupied frequencies, you may find that static transmits and inertia exerts, that interstices are inhabitable.
Graham Kelly offers another study on perception in figurehead, reflection, firework, fan, miracle, where objects and images collide as elements of found footage, filtered through a table fan and reframed by a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Acting as a mediation or edit between palpable and depicted contexts, the work aims to find a point of equivalence, a space in which producer, image and viewer can connect. Finally, Liz Allan’s The Stable Language accomplishes a digression through videos around desire and its political and economic interpretations, including Albert Heijn supermarket merchandising in First Contact, and the mass demonstration at Amsterdam’s gay pride parade in Pridest.
In collaboration with the Master of Fine Art Program of the Piet Zwart Institute, the post-graduate studies & research institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy. The accompanying publication Kairos Time is forthcoming in fall 2014.
11 July – 17 August 2014
Liz Allan, Maarten Bel, Sabrina Chou, Philip Ewe, Christian Hansen, Ann Maria Healy, Roos Wijma, Hannah James, Graham Kelly, Perri Mackenzie, Machteld Rullens, Micha Zweifel
Curated by Matteo Lucchetti
Kairos Time features twelve international artists based in Rotterdam whose works deploy a multiplicity of poetics and reflect diverse approaches to artistic practice today. The title refers to a possible common ground between the artists and the works, which may or may not be located in the spatio-temporal, social, and political contexts from which they have emerged. Along with Kronos, Kairos is an ancient Greek word for time, but while the former refers to chronological, sequential time, the latter alludes to the right or opportune moment when action must be taken, chances seized or conversely lost, inevitably affecting the course of things. Kairos represents a time lapse, an indeterminate moment when anything can happen and opportunities can be grasped, if and when they are perceived at all. Kairos Time is here understood as a space of potential, found in the daily situations or circumstances that an artist must assess and work with or against.
If we view an art practice as a series of seized favorable moments, it is worth asking: how much opportunism does it take to be an artist today? In A Grammar of the Multitude (2004), the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno analyzes post-Fordist conditions of labor and describes opportunists as “those who confront a flow of ever-interchangeable possibilities, making themselves available to the greater number of these, yielding to the nearest one, and then quickly swerving from one to another.” By depriving the term of its negative connotation Virno invents an extremely up to date rhetoric around the contemporary worker, which recalls the traits of openness, flexibility, and the unbiased attitude that are often associated with the figure of the artist.
The works in Kairos Time reflect the artist’s specific capacities to transform circumstances into meaningful visual systems, to turn specific material limits and restrictions into open-ended speculative journeys, and suggest that the opportune moment is a condition of the mind rather than a logically determined and immediately graspable point in time.
The heterogeneous work of Maarten Bel, Christian Hansen and Perri MacKenzie co-exists in the front space of the exhibition and invite the viewer to indulge in or reflect upon leisure activities. Café Bel is a real bar that “functions” at times and is open to events and happenings at others. Bel has shaped his work around the conviction that every social space is a potential space for art and vice-versa. Across the room, Mackenzie’s installation Publicness & Lightness with Motile Accessories departs from her observation of an outdoor smoking booth in which temporary, involuntary encounters define a claustrophobic social space via an addiction. Between these two works, Hansen’s three vinyl records each play a different recording of composite musical instruments (Architar or Keyboard-Skateboard, for example) that the artist created and played in the urban context that inspired their making. These interstitial sounds resonate with his awning installed at TENT, which evaluates urban re-development publicity images that preceded the gentrification process of Rotterdam Zuid.
Creating the opportunities in which their work will take shape is an attitude both Machteld Rullens and Philipp Ewe share in their own distinct ways. Rullens’ video Hardcore traverses the physical, immaterial and rhetorical security measures of the Nuclear Security Summit that took place in The Hague in March 2014— a record of when the artist crossed the demarcation lines of the hyper-protected city center. By contrast, Ewe navigates and transgresses inner boundaries, documenting his derive from one of the final stops on Rotterdam’s public transport lines to a hitchhiking experience on a freight truck.
Micha Zweifel’s work also draws from personal experience, namely the summer he shared a living and working space with a small group of artist friends in the Swiss countryside. How can a community work when its members become more and more incapacitated to perform social functions? Zweifel’s installation, which alludes to the name of the community’s local supermarket converses with the built forms evoked in Hannah James’ work. James’ The yellow and purple architecture has been dressed comprises videos that focus on performative aspects of interiors and other architectural spaces, shifting the routine through which we inhabit, perceive and remember them. Ann Maria Healy presents another kind of shift. Departing from the existence of an upside-down waterfall in her native Ireland, Healy stages a suspended environment made of waste materials, which is colonized by three ethereal and mythical figures that recite lyrics written by her.
The title of Roos Wijma’s sound installation Jacobson’s Organ refers to a patch of olfactory sensory cells present in reptiles. Her spoken word recording is activated by the presence of the audience, much like the animal’s chemical reaction to stimuli that excludes the use of sight. Sabrina Chou’s dispersed installation, Solid Ground, is designated by vinyl signage on the floor and revolves around an expanded notion of broadcasting. In the desert, at a gym, and amongst unoccupied frequencies, you may find that static transmits and inertia exerts, that interstices are inhabitable.
Graham Kelly offers another study on perception in figurehead, reflection, firework, fan, miracle, where objects and images collide as elements of found footage, filtered through a table fan and reframed by a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Acting as a mediation or edit between palpable and depicted contexts, the work aims to find a point of equivalence, a space in which producer, image and viewer can connect. Finally, Liz Allan’s The Stable Language accomplishes a digression through videos around desire and its political and economic interpretations, including Albert Heijn supermarket merchandising in First Contact, and the mass demonstration at Amsterdam’s gay pride parade in Pridest.
In collaboration with the Master of Fine Art Program of the Piet Zwart Institute, the post-graduate studies & research institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy. The accompanying publication Kairos Time is forthcoming in fall 2014.