From Outside Or From Within But From Another Angle at JOEY RAMONE

Artists: Fito Conesa, Ilke Gers, Josie Perry, Víctor Santamarina, Ian Waelder

Exhibition title: From Outside Or From Within But From Another Angle

Venue: JOEY RAMONE, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Date: September 15 – November 9, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and JOEY RAMONE, Rotterdam

JOEY RAMONE is proud to mark the opening season with the group exhibition From Outside Or From Within But From Another Angle with work by Fito Conesa (1980 ES), Ilke Gers (1981 NZ), Josie Perry (1996 UK), Víctor Santamarina (1990 ES) and Ian Waelder (1993 USA). The exhibition opens on Sunday 15 September 14.00 – 18.00hrs and runs till 9 November 2019.

“And so, from feuille en aiguille, I think of those exceptional states in which for an instant I guess the leaves and the invisible lamps, I feel them in an air that is out of space.
It is very simple, all exaltation or depression pushes me to a propitious state
I’ll call it paravisions
that is to say (the bad thing is that, to say something)
an instantaneous capacity to get out of myself, to suddenly apprehend me, from outside or from within but from another angle,
as if I were someone who is watching me
(Better still – because I do not really see myself: – like someone who is living me)”[1]

The works that come together in this exhibition deal with different aspects of losing control of the body at a given moment, discussing what this entails, not seen as a moment of weakness but as a stage of almost extrasensory experimentation; losing control of the body, suspended at the intermediate stage, in that moment of impasse in which one loses all sense of it; the physical body dematerializes, loses its limits and subsequently its parts are replaced by abstract forms or complex phonemes. This deprivation of the body, either linked to natural hormonal changes, induced by external agents, or by the abuse of the organism itself alludes to its fluidity and the utopia of an incorporeal body.[2]

Touching upon queer concepts, Fito Conesa in his video work Non Unisono focuses on the intermediate moment in which the formation of the ‘organism’ allows a stage of experimentation and exploration of the body’s own development, bringing to light questions related to gender. This deadlock creates a field in which hybrid bodies are visualized, formless forms that give rise to new corporealities outside the heteronormativity. The work is carried out by a masculine youthful choir that interprets a piece in the crudest moment of a singer’s life, the puberty, where the change of voice isolates him from the rest to the hope of an uncertain future. The choir interprets compositions based on chords and sounds, without words, recreated in the language and training of the phonetic device.

Josie Perry presents a series of drawings entitled Cradle Drawings that feedback on their written and performative practice, a vision of the world linked to dystopian and science fiction universes where humanity is questioned and with it the function of its members. These act as a theatrical platform in a (psychedelic) iteration of fluids in which we see, resurfacing and returning to engulf, a game of ups and downs, of folds; objects that are bodies and bodies that are objects, that object and contradict. The drawings relate to her more sculptural works that are also activated within her performances in which prose and body are the protagonists.

The work of Víctor Santamarina takes the idea of fluidity to an extreme and in this case the deprivation of control becomes the objective. The resulting works may be reminding us of… but are not. The solidity and heaviness of the material contrast with its soft, delicate appearance, a little atrocious even, as if it escapes out of the hands. Following this malformation, as it were, we are confronted by human bodies by definition but that contrast with the image we have of them; The gesture points to the effect of lights and music that causes one element to be detached from another, one elbow thrown in front and our legs in a transformative accumulation one time, two times, tree times…

Ian Waelder negotiates the inability to giving orders to the body; making it respond, creating tension, forcing it to do something for which it is not designed. What remains of this experimentation is only a trail, in the objects that are witnesses of this failure, in the structures that condition the action and also precipitate it. Media such as photography, audio or sculpture carry out this experimentation. We take notice when he stops responding, when he collides, complains, he gets up again in an infinite loop. We tune in at the moment in which the movements are replicated until he has control over them.

Ilke Gers is interested in the dialogue generated through creating interactions between others and their social context. Her work can be seen as experimentation that questions the norms of behaviour implemented in the urban environment. It is carried out through minimal gestures that play with the rules of public coexistence. Marcel is an installation of prints that break down unscripted, self-taught, ‘techniques of the body’ from existing and non-existing games.

And so, the works within this exhibition shed a series of questions with the same epicentre but with a different objective that only serve to highlight how the body may constitute a field of exploration and broad reflection, whether dealing with aspects of gender, either dystopian or with more playful practices.

[1] Cortázar, Julio. Rayuela. Editorial Anagrama p. 568, Translation from the original
[2] “..and it is very likely that the first utopia, the one that is more difficult to uproot from the hearts of men, is precisely the utopia of an incorporeal body.”Foucault, Michel. Topologies.