Artist: Julian-Jakob Kneer
Title: dance macabre (weiter! weiter ins verderben, wir müssen leben bis wir sterben)
Curated by: Christina Gigliotti
Screening: May 24 – June 13, 2019
Duration: 4’02”
Martini awoke up from a beautiful dream in a sleep of reason as perfect as the sonnet. All-fold brutal sonatas of the unearthly universe and seven heavens played by the dark ark himself in exchange for a mortal soul. Not his, this practitioner of mesmerism. Enraptured, transported, enchanted and awake without breathing, he drew another siren to the rocks. Calimari Wednesday, Arm aber Sexy: she washed up. They were all washed up. Love too wash them up. Young and dumb and full of glum. Elixir of quietude – just the right dose. Feeling so faithless. Lost under the surface. La voce to me!
His dream music haunted him deeper in still waters, cheeks grew gaunt, hair lank. Points emerged. Unable to work or sleep or go outside. Breathing with no air. At the time of initial evaluation, the patient was noted to have normal hygiene and grooming. He greeted the clinician and responded appropriately to questioning, but stated,
“I just don’t want to go outside”.
Barron’s IQ will make you shiver. First wives in cupboards start to stink.
Special and exceptional thanks to The very special Secret, but Mother’s love wears thin no matter how many cars get struck by lighting for you. Syncretic synergy. Another piece of the puzzle with none of the effect. All the junk DNA of the internet and it felt like a kiss: isle of stagnant apathetics, gums mashed with sugar leaves, avocado, your tears and tide pods. Three unclean spirits. Keket? Not even sure which team I genuinely belong to. Instigated madnesses. A royal flush. The lambs still screaming. Heh Heh Hecate. Different accounts. But still — no air.
Unbearable light in a Target ad. A uBahn prophecy: don’t take her, fella! This one got the shine. Something rotten buried in a desert bound in a bow. Took his shine too and licked chapped lips. Sublimated visions for sweety. Dude I’m so cancelled. Turned an ankle. Ourobourous. Scaled walls. Three unclean spirits and a dup root social matrix, so cute. They built one another in white cliffs and white houses. But she traveled #88. Flotsam, Jetsam, now I’ve got him, boys! No air, no air, no air.
>be me
>g0thic shut-in in a haunted haus
>now you’rE the 0nE iMAGining thIngs
…croak 😉
–Ella Plevin
Julian-Jakob Kneer (*1992 in Basel) lives and works in Berlin.
In his artistic practice Kneer investigates the contingency of inherited sociocultural symbol- and allocation-systems. Central to his work is the examination of the subconscious and ‘abnormal/ pathological’ deviances as judged from a bourgeois-normative perspective. This includes obscure bodily practices (paraphilia, fetishes) as well as artefacts and phenomena depicted from everyday- and popular culture, commonly situated beyond ‘good taste’ (kitsch/camp, Mannerism).
Ambivalence is an important keyword to his practice as it forms irritating syntheses of ‘high’- and subcultural references, tradition and presence, forming an unprejudiced juxtaposition of seemingly opposite aesthetics, evoking coincidental feelings of desire and repulsion.
Recent projects include: Cloak of Mercy at Horse & Pony (group, Berlin 2019); Gentle Heterodoxy – Social Body and its Enchantments at fffriedrich (group, Frankfurt am Main 2018); wicked games at ROOM E-10 27 @Center (solo, Berlin 2018); A night in Alexander (group, online, 2018); Jugend ist Trunkenheit ohne Wein at BIKINI (solo, Basel 2018); CRIB II at Galerie95 (group, in collab. w/ Yves Scherer, Biel 2017); sub rosa at 1.1 (solo, Basel 2017); GTdaHÖ at Ambassador****** (group, curated by Kneer, Vienna 2017); Ushirode at Geddert Hronjec Collection (solo, Berlin 2017); rule#34 as Oslo10’s fifth web-residency (solo in collab. w/ Blue Stork, Basel 2017); International blood drinker at Gärtnergasse (duo w/ Clémence de La Tour du Pin, Vienna 2016).
Upcoming projects include:
Gruppe Expo (ongoing online and offline curatorial program by Kneer); ornament sublime at Lucas Hirsch (solo, Düsseldorf 2019); a solo at Limbo (Berlin 2019); a collaborative solo at PS120 (Berlin 2019).
