COLLECTION n°5 at Interior and The Collectors

Artists: Lothar Hempel, Alicja Kwade, Ella Mievovsky, Anne Neukamp, Marnie Weber

Exhibition title: COLLECTION n°5

Venue: Interior and The Collectors, Lyon, France

Date: September 10, 2015 – January 2, 2016

Photography: Christel Montury, images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Interior and The Collectors

Interior and The Collectors is an artist-run space founded in 2011 in Lyon. It takes place in an apartment and recently in a XIXth house, both opened to the public each saturday 2-4pm. The two spaces are available for short-term renting to make an intimate experience of art.

COLLECTION n°5 with Lothar Hempel, Alicja Kwade, Ella Mievovsky, Anne Neukamp, Marnie Weber

According to Gaston Bachelard, the house has a strong symbolic in its verticality. It is occured by a duality in its very structure and a delimitation between interiority and exteriority. Guest artists inaugurate each part of a nineteenth house, from basement to attic, making the visit an intimate and almost initiatory path.

The artworks were chosen with the artists to reveal the house as an entity. Anne Neukamp takes over the living room with exploded and recomposed images. Strange sounds escaping from the basement. Marnie Weber probe the depths of the cellar and our unconscious through a history of wandering girls and their puppet doubles. Alicja Kwade presents a new sculpture in the courtyard echoing the facades of Renaissance buildings. On the first floor, the room is intimate and even erotic soliciting the visitor in a game of glances between a voyeur on internet framing the body parts of young girls (Ella Mievovsky) and the presence of an hermaphrodite sculpture (Lothar Hempel).

Without answering a particular topic, the works maintain a form of reconciliation. A reconciliation between genres and eras, a guarantee of an evolution that wouldn’t be only progessive but rather intuitive.

Anne Neukamp (born in 1976) presents a new series acetone transfers on paper.
Each piece refers to one motive of her image archive, elements from a functional visual language like logos, symbols or icons. The motive runs through a process of transformation during the act of photocopying, they get enlarged and fragmented and outgrow their original significance. Arranged in a grid of nine A4 copies, they form a sort of image structure or mental imprint of the image, that highlights and questions certain mechanisms of representation.

Alicja Kwade (born in 1979) presents a new sculpture related to time zones and our perception of time. The two stainless steel rings correspond to European borders meridian lines from Greenwich time, UTC +1. It is also an image of time that refers to a game for children, the hoop. Placed in the space of the courtyard, the work resonates with the buildings of the Renaissance by its lightness, brightness and balance.

Ella Mievovsky (born in 1990) is a young franco-russian artist. Her work questions our perception of images through new technologies. Fayetteville de 5 à 7 is the result of a surveillance camera viewing of a university in Arkansas. An unidentified person was always looking at girls as close as possible to their bodies. This obsessive quest has been observed remotely for a year and recorded by the artist every day from 5 to 7 hours. The extracted images with an omnipotent point of view are transformed by their media change.

Lothar Hempel (born in 1966) showcases Zwitter gruen (2009), a sculpture made from the photography of a bust in a museum and a green picture of a norwegian royal guard. Printed on forex, the venus takes shape in the space to become a posture game with the soldier.

Marnie Weber (born in 1959) is a multi-media artist known for her rich and personal mythology full of creatures, animals and mysterious female characters. Sea of Silence (2009) tells the story of the spirit girls, wandering young masked women with their puppet doubles. They perform their act in a nightclub full of crude and unruly animal patrons, then seek emancipation in the open sea.

Anne Neukamp, Untitled (Transfer), 2015

Marnie Weber, (detail), masked and costumed mannekin from Sea of silence, 2009
HD video, color, TRT – 16:12, courtesy of the artist and gallery Simon Lee, London UK