KUBAPARIS ATELIER Lena Valenzuela de la Hoz
Groupshow
High Weirdness
Project Info
- đ Solaris Space, Berlin
- đ Gosia Lehmann
- đ€ Groupshow
- đ Gosia Lehmann
- đ Rosanna Graf
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When we consider something to be weird itâs usually a thing we canât explain, a thing we donât understand. Weird is unsettling, can be horrifying, but also fascinating. âHigh Weirdnessâ deals with the feeling of âweirdâ interpreted by three different artistic perspectives.
Antonia Freisburgerâs paintings remind me of the tempting smoothness and pastel colours of impossibly chewy candies. At the same time Iâm terrified of being submerged in their sticky surface which seems to exist in a dimension incomprehensible to human minds. Antoniaâs paintings make you loose the sense of time and scale, they conjure feelings like those of cosmic horror- a slip of the mind and suddenly youâre aware and terrified of things that are way beyond your understanding and control. Standing in front of her vast canvases you might get the feeling of being sucked into a strange universe of pulsating colours, of glowing and expanding shapes that are difficult to define with words, as though they donât belong to earthly vocabulary. They have a sort of viscosity that makes makes you feel like you stuck in there and similarly to escaping the quicksandâthe more you try to move the more you become trapped. Antoniaâs work makes me think of the idea of âHyperobjectsâ- a term coined by Timothy Morton to describe entities such as environmental threats (for example radioactivity, global warming, styrofoam but also capitalism) with the impact so massively expanded in time or space, that it canât be fully grasped by an individual.
The vastness and incomprehensibility of things has been known to instill in us humans the deep desire to domesticate and control.
Emily Huntâs miniatures of familiar objects, architectural elements, repeated in different scales trigger in me a vertigo of the mind. As with Antonia Freisburgerâs work, questions about the relation between scale and an individualâs control, seem to be at the core. In Nota Flashback Tableau Vivant (2022) small figurines, each with their role and character, are part of a mise-en-scĂšne, where theyâre sitting in a circle and I wonder if theyâre discussing the matters of the universe? Or casting spells? Or maybe theyâre just lifeless corpses, waiting to be resurrected? The notion of an eerie animation appears throughout the whole workâ intricate ornaments slither on the drippy table, the crooked miniature displays look as though they could start to dance at any moment and the figurines, like puppets embodied with animist life, seem to live in a world that is not part of death or life, but somewhere in-between. For Emily the act of creating is the practice of understanding. Her interest in books, reading and writing manifests itself in complex nested stories, translated into ceramic protagonists and the scenes she stages.
Rosanna Graf also works with characters but in a different manner. The characters created by Rosanna are explorers of states of mindâ they are unorthodox psychologists of sorts, wandering through the weirdness of the human psyche. In âHigh Weirdnessâ we see the bodiless costumes of Sabina and Toni - protagonists of Rosannaâs video work âCellar Door â(2022), that are directly linked to the founding mothers of modern psychoanalysis, Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff. The hanging vests Psychoactive Ghost Hunting Attire (Sabina + Toni) (2022) are equipped with a variety of tools, magical objects and keys to non-existing doors. Ghosts in Rosanna Grafâs work stand for things that haunt our presence, repressed parts of our collective unconscious. Toni and Sabina, who (in real life) became ghosts of the past themselves, as they were eclipsed by the male psychoanalysis canon*, reappear in âHigh Weirdnessâ as voices in the audio piece Schizo Baby Babble (in collaboration with Paulina Nolte, 2022). As psychoanalysts-adventurers, they conduct research on the inside of a patientâs brain. Haunted by the patientâs ego, neuroses and other oddities of the mind they enter a realm of psychedelic ecstasy. The magic blends into realism with the presence of a psychoanalyst's couch; in âHigh Weirdnessâ this is a gigantic velvet mandrake (Exercising Restraint, 2020) â a figure reoccurring in Rosannaâs work. When ingested, this plant served as a gateway to other worlds whilst its supernatural scream was considered deadly. As a gatekeeper and protector, it wraps the listener in a warm and softly enveloping shell to create the perfect base for a deep psychological journey.
The encounter with weirdness can be uneasy but in this unease lies the possibility of hightened experience. From things beyond our understanding to those nestled deep in our consciousness, weirdness is constantly lurking, waiting to cross the thin threshold between the eerie and the familiar.
Gosia Lehmann