Adrien Missika at Galeria Francisco Fino

Artist: Adrien Missika

Exhibition title: Demain, Stabilisation

Venue: Galeria Francisco Fino, Lisbon, Portugal

Date: November 11, 2017 – January 11, 2018

Photography: ©photodocumenta / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galeria Francisco Fino

Galeria Francisco Fino presents a new body of work by Adrien Missika that draws on the artist’s continuous reflections on ecology, metabolism and our relationship with the environment. This series of sculptural works operate as narrative structures, combining diverse artistic strategies that explore humour within conceptual art perimeters, the subtlety of existential poetics through a performative revision of archival practices as an open form. The very promise of the title, Demain, Stabilisation (tomorrow, stabilisation), announces a state of deferred accomplishment, implicating the present as an entropic zone where homeostasis is possible, yet always postponed, evoking the denialist responses to the current climate crisis.

Adrien Missika is an artist who we could call a contemporary neo-romantic for his ability to force the observer to take on a viewpoint that contains elements belonging to times and geographies near and far at once. Missika’s art comes out of a practice combining technological deftness and manual skill, often having the appeal of the past mixed with the contemporary era. The results may be vital or decadent, reassuring or disquieting, and they always have an element of melancholy. He uses low-resolution videos, pictures taken with very long exposure times, ever changing print processing methods, sculptures made with reused objects and new materials, images of desolate, and magnetic places paired with soundtracks from artificial ambient noise, specifically designed for each occasion. He never fails to create an effect of fascinating, hypnotic alienation in the observer. Though Missika’s works appear immediately interpretable, they are actually built on layers of multiple historical, anthropological, alchemical, scientific references, plus, and not least, cultural and experiential ones. Driven by his personal vocation for the exotic, he does his research on site, giving him opportunities to assimilate, demolish and reconstruct anew, including through the time factor, the clichés through which each of us unconsciously builds a certain image, often a stereotyped one, of things far from us.

Missika (Paris, 1981) lives and works in Berlin. Co-founder of the art space 1m3 in Lausanne in 2006, he graduated from ECAL (Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne) in 2007. He has had numerous personal exhibitions including 21er Haus in Vienna, Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Centre d’art contemporain Genève, Switzerland and Palais de Tokyo in Paris. His work has also been shown in many group exhibitions, among which at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Metro Pictures, New York; Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Montecarlo; Le Magasin, Grenoble; Fotomuseum Winterthur and Centre Pompidou Metz. In 2009 he was awarded the Swiss Art Award, in 2011 the Prize of the Fondation Ricard and the Kiefer Hablitzel Prize. Adrien Missika is represented by the galleries Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City and Francisco Fino, Lisbon.