Yearly Archives: 2022

General

atb#90 – String Figures

atb#90 – String Figures

Jamila Barakat, Mengna Tan, Eva Ďurovec and Nikita Kadan

Opening Friday, April 1, from 7 pm

Exhibition: April, 2 – May, 15 2022

Finissage: Sunday, May 15, from 3-6pm

Open by appointment: mailto@after-the-butcher.de or +49 178 3298 106 
30 April, 6pm: Book Launch „New Mind Mapping Forms“ by Eva Ďurovec

In the exhibition rooms, please keep your distance and wear mouth and nose masks.

After the Butcher, Showroom for Contemporary Art and Social Issues is happy to present its next exhibition “String Figures” with artists Jamila Barakat, Mengna Tan, Eva Ďurovec and Nikita Kadan.

In Donna Haraways “Staying With The Trouble“, one figure is omnipresent: SF. This figuration seems to be more than just an abbreviation. It seems to be a subject that opens up different opportunities and methods, thought experiments and common practices of exchange and interaction. Cross-species practices that sometimes work, sometimes fail, are active and sometimes stay still.
Like string figures, they propose and enact patterns for participants to inhabit, somehow, on a vulnerable and wounded earth. Haraway describes the figure with the letters SF that can be: Science Fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far…

“I think of sf and string figures in a triple sense of figuring. First, promiscuously plucking out fibers in clotted and dense events and practices, I try to follow the threads where they lead in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns crucial for staying with the trouble in real and particular places and times.”
D.H.

By playing string figures, new patterns or images are formed that reveal new entanglements and interconnections.

In the exhibition “String figures” the artists are tracing SF by working, failing and exploring themes and contexts of speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, science fiction and so far…  
A dialogue with each other begins, connections with each other emerge. While we prepare this exhibition the Russian regime under Putin launched its war against Ukraine. For this reason we decided to pick up another thread: we invited the Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan (he has to protect himself in Kiev against Russian bombing) to join the exhibition. We are happy to be able to show two of his wonderful charcoal drawings from the series „Minsk Masks“ in String Figures*). In this respect, SF may also be read as a sign against war: stay friends or seid friedlich (be peaceful) instead of Strike Forces.

*) Nikita Kadan writes: “I found these ‘masks’ in ornaments on the ceiling of the Minska station of the Kyiv Metro since I was six years old. They were really scary, and I felt that I could always find new ones. The ornamental composition “Tree of Life”, based on Belarusian folk ornaments, was created by the artists Stepan and Vasyl Khymochka in 1982, the year I was born. Much later I found out that Belarus was historically associated with a partisan movement – these associations can give new meaning to the camouflaged faces hidden among the floral motifs.” These drawings are very topical in that metro stations such as Minska station in Kiev at the moment serve as shelters from Russian shelling and bombardment….

http://www.mirmetro.net/kyiv/cruise/02/11_minska

Nicht kategorisiert

atb#89 | Quirin Bäumler, Isabelle Fein und Selou Sowe

atb#89 | Quirin Bäumler, Isabelle Fein und Selou Sowe

Opening: Friday, February 18, from 7pm

Exhibition: February 19 – March 27, 2022

Open by appointment: after the butcher or +49 (0)1783 298 106. Please wear a medical mouth and nose protection.

About the Exhibition:

Quirin Bäumler, Isabelle Fein and Selou Sowe 

18 February to 27 March 2022 at after the butcher, Berlin

Everything is connected with each other. Some time ago we might have rolled our eyes in exasperation at this sentence, inhaling and exhaling in a contorted yoga pose. In the past two years, however, this wisdom has been made bitterly clear to us. How do humans, nature and technology influence each other, and what are the consequences for the macro and microcosms of the world? In this group exhibition, we look at that triangle from various axes of vision, zooming in on small, fleeting relationships and using a wide angle to grasp the power of globalization. The question of how the individual subject influences these connections is made material in the three artistic positions presented, as an interplay of control and chance.  

Let’s start with the microcosm: Isabelle Fein’s paintings and sculptures examine brief moments and constellations that either come to her by chance from the outside, for instance found photographs, or that she draws from within herself. Sometimes symbolist in nature, sometimes surreally humorous, her figures and animals emerge from the thin layers of pastel hues before us, communicating with us. Still lifes with brush, newspaper and cups of paint trace her work as an artist: it is a solitary but also meditative activity in which digressions from everyday life are intentional.  

Fein’s compositions carry something secure in them, which we can also discover in Quirin Bäumler’s sculptures. His three reliefs on view are made of hard plaster, showing lonely dreamy figures, animals or even a firmament of stars. Like screen monitors, they reproduce an excerpt—a still image from life—which Bäumler has alienated and fixed. While here the material has been cast, shaped and removed through a long, laborious process, his drawings are created intuitively, a psychogram of the moment. Predominated by motifs of death and mourning, we see the traces of two tragic pandemic years. 

Away from man, now, and towards the machine. Selou Sowe’s sculptures shimmer in a place between technical progress and industrial decay. They are objects that can hardly be classified: are we dealing with something organic or inorganic here? Is this thing still of this world or has it fallen from outer space? With a view to global connections and informatic achievements, Sowe’s video work shows the similarities between man-made systems and natural structures which have become clearer with advances in worldwide networking. In found-footage images overlaid with his own 3-D animations, an artificial voice-over raises the question of whether the demise of destructive power structures in a supposedly decentralized world would mean our salvation.  

This group exhibition is the first part of a long-term cooperation between After the Butcher and the young artists’ group Interspace Collective. 

Interspace Collective includes: Isra Abdou, Jamila Barakat, Frank Jimin Hopp, Heiko Thandeka Ncube, Selou Sowe, Mengna Tan, Laura Suryani Thedja and Alungoo Xatan. 

Text: Nadja Abt 

Translation German/English: Michael Baers  

after the butcher explicitly is in support of the open letter 

Who Owns the Public? on the so-called “Kunsthalle Berlin”/Tempelhof 

that you can sign here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScODqiG38AtCQt3BhOJim7qVGzDNJyYmrXAvbGFktu5W7uCSA/viewform