Visual Essay

SPECIAL FEATURE: Klára Hosnedlová

The proscenium is on one side made up of a photo archive showing one of the most characteristic feats of modern architecture, Tugendhat House (Vila Tugendhat), built in the city of Brno in 1928-1930, designed by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and, on the other side, bathroom interiors of the Volman House (Volmanova vila) in Čelákovice, built in 1938-1939, both in the Czech Republic. The outer edge of the proscenium accommodates a pit for the prompter, a young artist and fashion designer Klára Hosnedlová. And the actors? They express themselves in unison, dialoguing with the scenography composed of an articulate series of elements and careful chromatic variations that offer a look at possible relationship dynamics aimed to explore the body-thing relation. The body rediscovers itself and its parts become an integral part of the entire scenic handwriting.

Klára Hosnedlová aims to make the purely gestural central position of corporality more intensive, emphasizing the communicative power of the images that transform into portraits, which in turn talk to things, all adorned by painterly-scenographic realization, which makes the separation between various participants of the game even more uncertain. Who is the protagonist?

Domenico de Chirico
Milan, July 2017

SPECIAL FEATURE: Namsal Siedlecki

Limes by Namsal Siedlecki

The wolf has been worshiped and feared since antiquity by countless people. He is a recurring character in popular narrative and especially in infantile fairy tales where he represents the wild and uncontrolled aspect of nature. In general, nomadic populations and hunter-gatherers have admired him for his predatory ability and loyalty to the pack and have made it a symbol of loyality and courage, invoked in hunting and in war; Instead sedentary and shepherd populations have always slandered, hated and persecuted him for being a menace to sheeps, the difficulty in hunting him, and the ancestral fear its howl instills. The fear of the wolf also resides in the fact that it performs periodic incursions in well-ordered human landscapes, reminding us of how fragile the dominion of man over nature is, and how nature can overwhelmingly manifest its most hostile and frightening appearance. The wolf crosses the boundaries between the two natural worlds, from the woods to the cultivated fields.

Hunted for centuries to protect the flocks, it risked extinction until in the 1950s when pastoral and rural activities declined, there was no longer the need to hunt them. Since 1976, when it was protected in Italy, the wolf has been able to reproduce freely, reaching today a population of about 2,000 animals, in numerical growth and in geographic expansion.

The coexistence between man and wolf has always been problematic and continues to be a real economic problem in many isolated areas where wolves regularly attack cattle.

When a wolf’s lifeless body is found according to the Italian law it must be cremated at specialized centers.

In Limes, the ashes of a wolf, dead by the hand of poachers, were scattered inside the molten glass, which was subsequently cast into molds, creating glass plates.

For the ancient Romans, descendants of Romulus and Remus nursed by the famous she-wolf, the Limes was the boundary of their empire, the limit beyond which they did not venture. They were the first to create glass windows to protect their homes, allowing light to penetrate inside them.

Since ancient times, man has distinguished himself from the animal world through his inventions, which have allowed him to evolve and improve his conditions.

A glass window that usually separates the animal world from the human world, in this case, reunites them. The transparent frontier between two universes.

SPECIAL FEATURE: Sandra Mujinga

Missing Light
Sandra Mujinga

In Sandra Mujinga’s “ Every Shadow is the Shadow of Something ”, an avatar is shown being multiplied into a myriad versions that fade in and out of sight and appear to morph into each other and disseminate. The multiple bodies form a pulsing, but also fragile mass, that feels like it could break apart at any moment, but at the same time we are repeatedly confronted with the direct gaze of the avatar’s eyes, breaking with the objecthood of the infinitely multiplied body in flashes of lucid subjectivity. Meanwhile 4 video loops are showing different ways of being in transit, states of indeterminacy. Taking the airport as an image of the ultimate site of indeterminacy, where one at the same time can go anywhere, and also be practically imprisoned, the double exposure of entrapments into never-ending loops disguising as infinite possibilities. Coming from an overarching theme of shadows, as that which is neither light nor dark but the product of both, attaining a substance, however ephemeral, of its own, the body multiple, the poly-body, that both in the physical and digital world is multiplied, displaced, moved, and as an answer multiplies itself, moves itself, displaces itself. Like sitting in an airplane is both the ultimate freedom, and at the same time the least free one can be. On an airplane one is no-where, the body is suspended, not only between the sites of departure and arrival, but also suspended between the source of light and the surface of projection.

Sandra Mujinga, born in 1989, Goma DR Congo, is a Norwegian artist who, while having been mostly active in Malmö and Oslo, is currently based in Berlin. Recent exhibitions include: Lovely Hosts, Mavra in Berlin, Real Friends at Oslo Kunstforening and group shows ‘Missed Connections’ at Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf,Norwegian Sculpture Biennale, APPARAT – Technologies of Persuasion, Kunstverein Braunschweig and Subject, Malmö Konsthall