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micaramel · 4 years

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Artist: Liesl Raff

Venue: Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna

Exhibition Title: About Palms, Snakes And Tongues

Date: June 6 – August 28, 2020

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Video:

Liesl Raff, Shell, 2020, Video, 12 sec Loop

Images courtesy of Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna

Press Release:

Until I started the conversation with my dear friend Liesl Raff, I never really paid attention to the fact that the word “palm” means two things: a plant and the inner side of your hand.

The aesthetic resemblance of the plant to the body part has caused this name equation, the very occurence of which reveals the human impulse to anthropomorphise forms in nature. About Snakes, Palms, and Tongues is the second solo exhibition by the artist in the gallery and relies on this imaginative power.

Following this idea, the artist has installed a long roof made out of palm leaves above the benches on the window side of the gallery, turning its’ prominent feature into a designated area to sojourn and observe. Made out of a large number of narrow palm tree leaves soaked in yellow-coloured latex, the lower section of the roof is left unbound, so that the dried plants loom into the room. Like fingers, they tackle the bodies that arrive there to rest. The newly created area interrupts the usual way in which visitors approach the space and was conceived with memories of other architectures in mind. While reminiscent of provisional architecture from southern, mild-tempered hemispheres, such as street booths and kiosks, the piece is also influenced by Luis Barragán. During a stay in Mexico City, Raff visited the studio house of the famous architect and was deeply moved by the attention and detail given to the areas of transit, such as entrances, which are composed through natural light, soothing colours, and clear shapes, so that the visitor immediately feels removed from the outside world. Transition 3, as the work is called, is, like many of Raff’s works, given a certain agency and seeks to trigger and amplify a process of purification and renewal.

Observing the power as well as the fragility of such transitional spaces, the artist started to recognise that they are present not only in fixed structures, but also in the various things one encounters in everyday life. The series Pool on the opposite wall can be seen as a result of her attempt to create such objects using well-considered means and techniques, in which the very process of transition is not only physically and intellectually perceptible, but also made visible and performed in front of the viewer. At first glance they appear to be bathroom sinks, but due to their higher position on the wall they are immediately removed from any practical purpose. The epoxy resin in which the vessels are cast bears a translucent quality and warmth similar to that of amber. Hanging prominently off their edges are pieces of natural, milky latex that, in its original liquid state, was brushed along the forms and then peeled off again. Encountering these works as a visitor is like witnessing an animal shedding its skin. Like Transition 3, these objects pay tribute to the power of renewal, while simultaneously respecting the vulnerability and tenderness present within such a procedure.

Already visible from the entrance area, in the second room of the gallery the visitor encounters a large sculpture fixed between the floor and the ceiling. What at first glance looks like an opulent column reveals itself at a closer look to be a composition of separate elements. While experimenting with various palm tree leaves in her studio, Raff found that the leaf of the Phoenix dactylifera bends itself into a shape of a tongue when soaked in latex.

These multiple tongues tumble down from above onto the floor, evoking the images of trees and cascading waterfalls. While in this playfully emblematic piece these tongues remain silent, and the cascade is dry, the sprawling sound of water is heard from the lower room of the gallery, continuously reminding us that we are looking at pieces dealing with movement and metamorphosis. At the last station of the show downstairs, a video installation titled Shell shows a seashell installed as a water faucet, an object which Raff found in a hotel room during her travels in Mexico. The video stands out aesthetically from the rest of the works, yet highlights a specific understanding of nature prevalent throughout About Snakes, Palms, and Tongues. Abolishing a romantic idea of it, the exhibition instead understands how nature has been domesticated and eventually exhausted through the dogma of progression within recent history.

Raff’s practice creates a language through the semiotics of materials that tell a story about the inevitable and powerful process of change, a process which she not only makes visible but also tangible. One of the metaphors for change is subtly hidden and relies on a closer reading of Raff’s frequently used material: latex. The “tears and blood of the tree,” as the natural product is also called, are only set free after the tree has been cut open and “wounded.” It is through such considerate attention to the genesis of things that About Snakes, Palms, and Tongues becomes not only a tale about the relationship of nature and culture, but also one of the potential that lies within hurt, grief, and renewal.

Text by Cathrin Mayer

Link: Liesl Raff at Sophie Tappeiner

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/314Zo3l

#micaramel

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robottoyszone-blog · 5 years

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Do you need smartest robot toy?

Boris Sofman taps his phone, and the robot on the conference room table in front of him wakes up. Not in that gadget-y way, like when a laptop screen turns on, though. The robot slowly raises its head and opens one eye, then the other, as if the light of the world is just too much. Sofman, CEO of robotics company Anki, chuckles as the it shakes off the rust of sleep and ambles off its charging cradle. After circling the table a moment, it drives quickly to the edge. It only pauses once it's driven halfway off. I instinctively put my hand out to catch it, but a split second later, the robot looks down, and its blue OLED eyes go wide. Sofman smiles. The robot yelps in a tiny robot voice, flails its single, u-shaped arm in terror, quickly reverses its bulldozer-style tracks, and backs away.

Three years ago, Sofman took the stage at Apple's WWDC keynote and demonstrated Anki Drive, a set of artificially-intelligent race cars. That was Anki's first product. Cozmo is its second—third if you count a major update to Drive—launching today after five years in development. It is a $180, coffee-mug-sized, vehicular robot—like a cross between a Furby and a Tonka Truck. Like Drive, Cozmo is a toy. It's meant largely for children, and it is adorable.

With most toys, Sofman says, it's up to the humans playing with them to provide creativity. Your C-3PO doesn't act like C-3PO unless you do all the work. "Here," Sofman says, "we can actually make him true to form." Thanks to a wholly unique combination of computer-vision science, advanced robotics, deep character development, and a set of machine-learning algorithms that Anki calls the "emotional engine," Cozmo is meant to be something very much like a real-life version of Wall-E or R2-D2. It's not human, but it feels real.

Ozobot Evo vs Bit https://www.robottoyonline.com/ozobot-evo-vs-bit-putting-fun-creativity-in-robotics/

If Anki can actually pull off this difficult mix of high-tech and kid-friendly, Cozmo could be much more than the next Tickle Me Elmo or Furby. Next time a Pixar movie comes out, the cute characters could feel as alive in your living room as they do on-screen. Sofman and his team are offering SDKs for nearly every part of Cozmo, and they imagine children learning to program by building fun new games and features for their adorable robots. "With enough attention and love to it," Sofman says, "this could be the most capable STEM platform that ever existed." They'll be updating the robot's software constantly with new games and capabilities. It may look and act like a toy, but Anki wants it to be the next big thing in hardware computing.

The hoped-for next big thing in hardware computing is currently staring at me, with two blue OLED eyes wide and unblinking. "Oh," Sofman says. "He wants to meet you."

Going Off-Road

The Anki crew has been thinking about Cozmo since well before Sofman's Drive demo at WWDC. From 2005-2010, Sofman was a PhD student in the well-regarded robotics program at Carnegie Mellon (which is now maybe most famous for being the place Uber raided for talent when it started developing self-driving cars). He, along with classmates Mark Palatucci and Hans Tappeiner, wanted to do something unique with their research.

"They came in," says stadium-filling venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, recalling his first meeting with the team in 2011, "and they basically said, 'We have these backgrounds in robotics, and we could spend our lives building these sort of AI robots that cost millions of dollars and work on assembly lines.'" That's what just about everyone with a robotics PhD does. "But they said, 'We really think that’s inadequate. This technology is ready to be shrunk down into products that cost hundreds of dollars, and are able to be in the home." They showed Andreessen a working version of Drive, plus renderings of what would become Cozmo. Andreessen led a huge funding round, and now sits on Anki's board. He calls Anki "the best robotics startup I have ever seen."

robot toys online https://www.robottoyonline.com

Once Drive launched in 2013, work on the little robot began in earnest. Anki's first Cozmo hire was Andrew Stein, another Carnegie Mellon PhD (this is a recurring theme), to work on computer vision. One nice thing about Drive was that cars were moving on a track, which Anki used to map their position. "We don't have that with Cozmo," Stein says. Anki did consider building the robot with a little play-mat, but Stein says "it takes away from the product. It feels less like a little creature if that little creature can only run around on the mat he comes with." Cozmo, then, had to be able to constantly map its surroundings and navigate through them. Cozmo is solving the same kinds of problems as Google's self-driving cars. They're hard problems: "The number one challenge" for a home robot, says Chelsea Finn, a PhD researcher at Berkeley, "is to see the unstructured environment, and make actions depending on the state of the environment." Luckily, researchers are coming up with answers. "There have been these huge leaps and bounds in computer vision with deep learning," Finn says, "and hopefully we can make real progress."

Cozmo is fully based on computer vision and deep learning. The robot sees the world through a single camera in its face, hidden in a slot that's meant to look like a mouth. The camera runs at 15 frames per second, sending the footage to your phone, which does all the processing before sending instructions back to the robot. So Cozmo will always have as much processing power as that fancy new computer in your pocket. The downside, of course, is that you need a phone nearby when you're playing with the li'l bot. The phone trick didn't solve all of Anki's problems, either: Stein spent years working out how to compensate for the latency that comes with sending data back and forth.

programmable robot kits for beginners https://www.robottoyonline.com/choosing-the-best-programmable-robot-kit-for-beginners/

It would be impossible to hard-code every imaginable playplace into the system, which is why machine learning has become such a crucial part of Anki's efforts. "A lot of situations where you invoke machine learning," says Michael Wagner, a CMU robotics researcher who amazingly is not involved with Anki, "are because you don’t really understand what the system should do. How should it prefer to drive over rough terrain versus smooth terrain? You don't know. So you throw machine learning at it." Lots of testing, lots of training, and the system figures out how to react by itself. Many of what Anki's dealing with are standard robotics challenges, but no one's ever solved them for this kind of product. This robot doesn't have to be perfectly efficient, like an assembly-line worker. This robot has to be fun.

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technato · 6 years

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Video Friday: Drone Fireworks, Cozmo Rap, and Justin Timberlake

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

Image: YouTube

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

IEEE IRC 2018 – January 31-2, 2018 – Laguna Hills, Calif.

HRI 2018 – March 5-8, 2018 – Chicago, Ill.

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

You won’t want to miss the 2028 Pan-Asian Deep Learning Conference in Kuala Lumpur:

Call me a hater if you want, but at least for now, pretty sure that’s fake. What’s funny, though, is that those first five demos are straight out of the standardized humanoid robot demo handbook (which doesn’t exist). But seriously: Between ATLAS and ASIMO, walking down stairs, resisting a lateral shove, moving a box, opening a water bottle and pouring water, and kicking a soccer ball is very familiar stuff. In particular, the water bottle opening and soccer ball kicking have been ASIMO standards for years. Even the cart is similar:

[ YouTube ]

Formation-flying drones with fireworks? My New Year’s celebrations were nowhere near this cool.

[ Collmot ]

From Torc Robotics:

“Self-driving cars need to be able to handle the myriad complex driving scenarios that happen every day—many of which we cannot predict. Still, we “train” the system to react in a safe way to unpredictable events on the road. This video shows real-world scenarios that our self-driving car has encountered while driving, as captured by the roof-mounted cameras.”

“Person unsure of crosswalks.” I wonder how much of an edge case that actually is?

[ Torc Robotics ]

We featured one of David Schaefer’s Cozmo videos back in November, and we somehow missed the Christmas edition:

That rap song and dance represent 4,000 lines of code. Cozmo may be easier to program than most robots (check out our 2016 interview with Anki co-founder and president Hanns Tappeiner for more), but that’s still an enormous amount of work, so here’s another New Year’s themed video to appreciate:

And just one more, because it has Cinnamon the guinea pig in it:

[ Life with Cozmo ]

Thanks David!

In New Zealand, they’re letting the dogs sleep in and herding sheep with drones instead.

[ Man and Drone ]

TRI introduces Platform 3.0, the next-generation automated driving research vehicle. The new platform, which is built on a Lexus LS 600hL, combines greater technological capabilities with new harmonized styling that integrates the automated vehicle technology into the LS model’s design.

[ TRI ]

In December, we posted a video from Vincent Berenz at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems showing an HRI demo with their robot Apollo. This follow-up video shows the demo from Apollo’s perspective, via its Asus Xtion.

More details are in the blog post linked below.

[ Vincent Berenz ]

Thanks Vincent!

The COBRA-Bee integrates TUI’s COBRA carpal-wrist gimbal into a payload for NASA’s Astrobee robot. The Astrobee is a free-flying robot that will assist astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The COBRA-Bee will provide the Astrobee with a means of orienting and actuating sensors, grippers, and other tools.

We’ve asked the folks over at NASA for an update on Astrobee, and we should have that for you in the next few weeks. And if you’ve never heard of Astrobee before, shame on you, read our article!

[ Tethers Unlimited ] via [ Astrobee ]

Drone-Box is a solution by Delft Dynamics for fast deployment of drones. Due to its automatic door and electric lift, it can be remotely operated. DroneCatcher is a multicopter that is armed with a netgun. It can safely remove unwanted drones from the air. After detection by, say, a radar, vision, or an acoustic system, DroneCatcher is able to quickly approach hovering or moving threats. With the use of multiple onboard sensors, the netgun can be locked on the target. Thanks to DroneCatcher’s track & trace capabilities, the drone will be caught by shooting a net. After the catch, DroneCatcher can transport the captured drone (which it hauls via an attached cable) to a harmless place. When the caught drone is too heavy to tow, the target can be dropped with a parachute to ensure low impact on the ground.

While the video seems to suggest that the quadcopter lands back in the box, I’m naturally suspicious, and I’m wondering if it didn’t just land behind it.

[ DroneCatcher ]

The TBS Caipirinha II can fly for up to two hours, but we only get four minutes of video to chill with:

[ Team BlackSheep ]

Robotec has a new version of its magnetic guide sensors for automated guided vehicles. Yeah, we know autonomous mobile robots that don’t require guides are all the rage, but magnetic tape is cheap, simple, and reliable, and if you don’t need versatility, it’s not something you need to be embarassed about.

The sensor is primarily used to steer Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs), moving material on factory floors. However, its unique sensitivity and accuracy opens a world of new applications such as automatic shelf replenishing in supermarkets, patient transport in hospitals, stage theater props, or rail-less tramways. Compared to other guiding techniques, magnetic guides are totally passive and therefore easy to lay and modify. The tape creates an invisible field that is immune to dirt and unaffected by lighting conditions. The magnetic track can be totally hidden under any non-ferrous flooring material, such as linoleum, tiles, or carpet.

[ Roboteq ]

Thanks Cosma!

A guy on YouTube named Linus reviews Jibo, and he’s not all that impressed. Except for the twerking. He’s impressed with that.

[ Jibo ] via [ YouTube ]

In this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, Per interviews Dan Kara, founder of Robotics Trends & RoboBusiness.

Dan Kara talks about how a trip to Japan made him start Robotics Trends & RoboBusiness. He also shares his views on what is going on in robotics. Like many others, Dan found robotics early in science fiction. We hear how the focus has shifted from military applications in the early 2000s to more and more consumer focused progress. Agility in production is also discussed as consumer demand pushes manufacturers to refocus from large scale production of similar items to more customer focused production.

[ Robots in Depth ]

Video Friday: Drone Fireworks, Cozmo Rap, and Justin Timberlake syndicated from http://ift.tt/2Bq2FuP

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uwhe-arts · 3 years

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catching the sun - alto adige . . . | uwhe-arts

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micaramel · 4 years

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Artist: Lewis Hammond

Venue: Lulu, Mexico City

Exhibition Title: Still life

Date: May 2 – 30, 2020

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Lulu, Mexico City

Press Release:

Lulu is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the British, London-based painter, Lewis Hammond.

It is quite frankly impossible to know how to respond to the emotional, intellectual and cultural needs of this moment. It is so easy to seem tone deaf, off key, or, simply beside the point. The scope of the unfolding catastrophe, which increases daily, is still way beyond our ken. Any potential response is continually faced with this relentlessly shifting scale, and as such, we are always losing any stable ground upon which to gather ourselves and address it. Nevertheless, the work of Lewis Hammond seems to embody if not the macro aspect of the moment, then the micro, the personal, private experience of what many of us may currently be experiencing. Indeed, if Hammond’s tenebrous pictures felt relevant in a pre-pandemic world, their portrayal of extreme states of mind, such as fear, anxiety, desire and claustrophobia, feels more pertinent than ever now.

The work in this exhibition, which was made pre-and incipient crisis in Mexico and then completed en pleine crise in London, is liable to bring to mind many things. The artist’s dark and moody palette, not to mention phantasmagoric subject matter, deliberately evokes a whole host of old masters, particularly Goya, and The Black Paintings, as well as other examples of the Spanish baroque, like Ribera. It may seem curious and significant that a young artist of mixed, Afro-Caribbean heritage should directly engage, and therefore ratify the western, European canon while so much of contemporary discourse is in the process of rethinking and even disenfranchising that same canon. But this, one suspects, has a lot less to do with a willful dismissal of these issues than it does with an interest in fundamental human experience, which that same canon contains, such as dread, malevolence, fragility, and tenderness. The gothic quality of this work is undeniable, and is liable to summon up, what with its penchant for human drama, as well as a casual violence and understated eroticism, the southern gothic of William Faulkner, although the stark, penumbral, often chilly atmospheres might be better suited to the bleak and orphaned geography of a Samuel Beckett play. That said, Hammond’s intention with this particularly body of work, with its cramped and close-cropped spaces, is to create a feeling of being boxed in, aggravated by the compact-scale of the architectural space it finds itself in, Lulu. Probably the most salient, unifying quality of this body of work is its general adherence to the still life. There is a quality of stillness here, an observant and quiet immobility, which is particularly arresting and poignant. From a sleeping couple embracing to a wall of primitive looking knives (aptly entitled Talisman) to a diptych of framed, thorny branches, the work seems to dwell in a placeless interior of its own making. It does not gaze out at the world so much as it introspectively withdraws into its own private, if harried space of survival.

Lewis Hammond (b. 1987, UK) lives and works in London, UK. He received his post-graduate Diploma, Royal Academy Schools, London, UK, 2017. A selection of recent solo exhibitions includes: (2019) The Keep, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2018) Isle, Smart Objects Gallery, Los Angeles, US Room To Crawl, Becky’s, London, UK NADA Miami, Arcadia Missa, London, UK. Selected group exhibitions include: (2019) A House is Not a Home, Kunsthalle Fribourg, Fribourg, CH Marmory Show, Deborah Schamoni, Munich, DE; In my Room, Antenna Space, Shanghai, CN; Retrograde, Deli Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; US Nourishment, Guest Projects, London, UK (2018) Balice Hertling, Paris, France; Between Bodies, Assembly House, Leeds, UK; In the Flesh, Peles Empire, Berlin, DE; The Share of Opulence; Doubled, Fractional, Sophie Tappeiner Gallery, Vienna; Austria Monstrous/Ordinary, Lilac City, Sydney, AU; Condo Complex with Arcadia Missa and Lomex Gallery, New York, US; After Exit, Smart Objects, Los Angeles, USA.

Link: Lewis Hammond at Lulu

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/3b6KR8N

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micaramel · 4 years

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Artist: Anna Schachinger

Venue: Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna

Exhibition Title: Hitze

Date: March 12 – May 23, 2020

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna

Press Release:

It is the gap between the making of sexual difference, the signifying of sexual difference and identities construed across the process and the naming that gives us hope – for there it is that transformation and revolution are possible.

(Griselda Pollock, Painting, Feminism, History)

AVERAGE TEMPERATURE 80,01°C RELATIVE HUMIDITY 26,6%

We have to reschedule our visit to the sauna, but you know that. Because your solo exhibition at Sophie Tappeiner in Vienna is about, among other things, representation and space, it is important to me, to make our connection transparent. Therefore, this is in a letter format— since I am not only writing as a colleague but as a confidante, who over the past year, has gained personal insight into your practice.

EVERYONE NEEDS TO DISROBE ALCOHOLIC INFUSIONS ARE PROHIBITED WHEN THE DOOR’S LIGHT GLOWS RED, NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO ENTER OR EXIT OTHERWISE ONE RISKS DEATH-STARES AND LOUD INDIGNATION

It is hard to think about your work without thinking about your own body, the body of the painter. I imagine you at the public pool Amalienbad reclining between your models, thinking about how problematic it still is to paint female nudes on canvas.

AT LEAST 30 CM DISTANCE DON’T USE THE SAUNA ON AN EMPTY OR FULL STOMACH DRINK ENOUGH

For me, your womxn* are not so much exposed, rather side-by- side. Their representation is sensual but does not serve a hetereo- normative sexiness. They are not serial girls, propagating an illusion of perfection and willingness, they have their own conflicts. Your pictures are so to speak sketched social studies of Viennese womxn* who can afford to go to the sauna (most likely) in neo-liberal self-care manner to regenerate in order to be ready for their upcoming work or are already enjoying their pension.

You once told me, your paintings come into being in the following way: Sometimes you retrace experienced situations, however, primarily, you confront yourself with the canvas and the application of paint in the moment of action. “Compositions often emerge with the size of the paintbrush in relation to the canvas.” Sometimes you turn the canvas during the painting process and continue painting with a changed perspective. Through this, pictures in pictures or spaces in spaces appear. Womxn*-only spaces should protect from sexual violence, sexist objectification, and structural unequal power struggles, or rather, male dominance. However, these spaces are not free of conflict. Starting with the invitation policy—not all, for whom safe spaces are necessary—identify with the category womxn*. Being aware of this, the people and body parts in your pictures display hardly any sexual connotations while being explicitly naked. Some are cut off at the edge of the canvas—a “Painter’s trick”, you say smiling. “It suggests to the viewer that the scene extends beyond the canvas.” The selective view, indications, and distortions in your representations point to the limits of the canvas and further the general limitation of the ability of representation itself. The situations depicted are layered, like their intersectional, inherent feminist discourses; they are too complex for universally historic or theoretical narratives—nevertheless, the visibility of their questioning is essential.

2-3 SESSIONS IN THE SAUNA 8-15MIN EACH USE INFUSION ESSENCES MODERATELY

“Some things that stood at the beginning must be toppled to see what happens”.—As you say this, I think that this is the origin of the spectrum of your work: your personal approach and the power of expression act through gestures, patterns, and figuration. Abstract neo- expressionism gets hit by Ana Manso’s composition aesthetic and Therese Oulton’s refusal of representation, to then, finally stage— because non-representational unfortunately also tends to be non- political—images of womxn* from 1960-70s socialist realism doing genderless bodywork.

REMOVE YOUR JEWELLERY AS IT MAY BURN DON’T APPLY BODY OILS, THEY CAUSE SPOTS IF IT SHOULD COME TO UNCOMFORTABLE SITUATIONS REMAIN CALM AFTERWARDS, TAKE A COLD SHOWER

The bath attendant creates an infusion, and through different fanning techniques, she induces a wave of loud sighs breathing out. The heads bow, except for maybe yours, because you are looking around a little bit to see how the light reflects on the sweating bodies. The infusion increases the humidity that hinders the evaporation of sweat on skin and further heats the body. Steam sets over the contours. The flag is waved and with this revolutionary gesture, everyone begins to sweat mightily.

4.03.’20 Gianna Virginia Prein translated by: Nina Prader

Link: Anna Schachinger at Sophie Tappeiner

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/2Voi76U

#micaramel

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micaramel · 4 years

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Artist: Jala Wahid

Venue: Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna

Exhibition Title: Newroz

Date: November 15 – January 10, 2020

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release, and link available after the jump.

Images:

Video:

Jala Wahid, Fiery Father (excerpt), 2019, mp4, 00:37

Images courtesy of Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna

Press Release:

This is the sky, then, this huge suspension, presiding over these sulphurous landscapes we ponder upon. A high mountain; a burning flame; a smouldering sun. A liquid glance over our shoulder; only a moving picture of silk, not real but still substantial. Crushing and waxing makes the silk shimmer and dance in harmony with the alchemical Baba Gurgur; swirling in silk and fabric create shapes and patterns that defy the loose stones of the mountainside. Euphoria emerges out of darkness; orange light darkens and the outline of the world is obscured and fills with uncertainty.

It’s in the darkest of times that the cause for celebration seems greatest. In the face of death and struggle, dancing becomes a political act. “A spirit dancing up, a thigh pulled taut, singeing the silty air, bending its knee, sighing low, crushing rock weighing heavy. We enact that kind of love that comes from facing danger together – the legs of the living dancing with billowing thighs of the dead.

“Right foot forward, rock pushing down, step the foot back, crushing silt, foot to the right, rock gives way, left foot follows, core melts silt, puff of shoulders bouncing upward, syncopated in halparkeh, turn hip sideways with rising heat, thigh relaxes but rock insists.

“Right foot forward, repeat the footwork, resigned to the duelling rock and core, dancing in defiance of death and gravity, born from and buried in Baba Gurgur. To be Kurdish, is to be made of oil and mountains: singing and dancing to the thrum of a rock or bullet.”1

The friction: cold, hard rocks underfoot; muscles contort; blood flows furnace-like through your veins. This is not death. Lip gloss and eyeshadow gleam as though crystallised in the moment you bite into a ripe fig; a heady mix of oranges and pinks revealed in the inwardly-turned flower.

Music is the most seductive of all drugs; the tendrils of the fiery father like shadows pursuing you through the city. Pervasive unease; constant thrum; out of the shadows comes light; we halt and glow. An acerbic vapour; subtly repeating on these fallible bodies, weightier than chiseled marble; aware of time passing, of people moving.

Thea Smith

1 Jala Wahid, Baba Gurgur, 2018

Link: Jala Wahid at Sophie Tappeiner

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2PAIxPS

#micaramel

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micaramel · 5 years

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Artist: Sophie Thun

Venue: Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna

Exhibition Title: After Hours

Date: March 30 – May 25, 2019

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release, and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of the artist and Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna

Press Release:

In the ongoing series After Hours, Sophie Thun uses her body again as a tool to examine and question established concepts. The artist photographs herself in various hotel rooms, which she occupies while doing production work for (mostly male) colleagues realising their own projects. In doing so, she draws attention to a circumstance that is rarely mentioned in discussions on contemporary art: many established artists have their work produced by workshops and various assistants or specialists, either in part or entirely. These workers are often artists themselves who are dependent on additional jobs to support their own artistic practices. Dependency relations like these consolidate hierarchical structures, not least because at the end of the day they determine who can literally afford to dedicate more time to their own artistic work.

The hotel also represents a venue for erotic fantasies, a place where lovers meet to indulge in their passions and to live out affairs. Here, Thun points to a gender-specific phenomenon: it is almost exclusively women (especially in the art world) who are faced with the deeply derogatory and heteronormative accusation of “sleeping their way to the top” and such a location lends itself to scenes of imagination. Thun fuels this idea by capturing herself naked and in explicitly sexual poses, either with a shutter release cable in her hand or in front of a mirror. She never seems to be alone. Analogue montage techniques allow her to create the illusion that she is interacting with herself, pleasing herself. In the hotel room, paid for by a third party, this masturbatory act represents a reclaim of control over one’s own body.

Thun’s self-portraiture is only a means to an end. Her self- representation is not entirely a characterizing portrait in the art historical sense, which interfaces between self-staging and a curious self-observation. Instead, the artist consistently encounters her audience with a steady and rigid gaze that is as alienating as it is challenging. The appeal is to our thoughtless consumption of photographs, a medium whose manipulative possibilities are still shrouded in dense veils, especially with regard to the depiction of women. In contrast, Thun emphasizes the presence of the camera. She exposes the photographic process by exposing the entire negative as a contact print and exposing the parts where it has been cut. Around it, the outlines of her hands – characteristic white spaces that appear when Thun holds the negative on photo-sensitive paper and shines light on it – clearly indicate the artist’s authorship. Like a common thread, the deconstruction of the medium runs through the artist’s young oeuvre, enabling her to repeatedly address new questions.

Magdalena Vuković

Link: Sophie Thun at Sophie Tappeiner

from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2M2ut1D

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