Isabelle Andriessen at Berthold Pott

Artist: Isabelle Andriessen

Exhibition title: ABYSS

Venue: Berthold Pott, Cologne, Germany

Date: May 20 – July 5, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Berthold Pott, Cologne

ABYSS offers a window into a speculative world in which Isabelle Andriessen explores the agency of clusters of interlacing materials, parsing queer materialism and probing plastics, crystals, and coolant for latent dark intent.

Isabelles first solo exhibition at Berthold Pott presents a body of work that remind of re-animated automata or relics, revealing unreliable characteristics within materials that otherwise seem dormant or passive. Andriessen continuously pushes her work to inhabit a liminal space between sculpture and performance in order to address a world attuned to death but thriving with new organs and sex, as if to suggest how new entanglements might flourish in a non-human world.

As uncanny amalgamations of mechanical remnants, extraterrestrial formations, and chemical

waste, these performing sculptures obscure the interface between the animate and inanimate, while offering a glimpse into a grim future reality. A reality in which materials have agency, enabling them to control certain entities and bodies, transgressing them into resilient species withstanding violent environments. The ABYSS alludes to loss, grief and horror, and redefines what an apocalypse can be, understanding it as not necessarily (or only) a space for destruction but rather a continuum state in which there is apocalypse upon apocalypse, or catastrophe upon catastrophe—an inhospitable darkness that is also a fertile source.

All together, these sculptures become a cast of characters in a sticky landscape members of a semi-choreographed orchestra, an exhibition chorus. Their eerie material realities form alien or grotesque anatomies inspired by ‘weird’ and ‘fluid’ life forms; they creep, crawl, ooze, penetrate, cling to, and react with one another as if their metabolism is infected. They physically respond to the surrounding atmosphere while triggering chemical processes within each other, thus manifesting their agency through continuous interaction and change. These processes unfold in phases choreographed over one or several exhibitions; Some of these slow material performances last a few months, while others continue to develop over years. They showcase the passage of time, disturbing notions of permanence, posterity, and the primacies afforded the restoration and collection of art.

Isabelle Andriessen lives and works in Amsterdam. She investigates ways to physically animate inanimate synthetic materials in order to provide them with their own metabolism, behavior, and agency, in this way creating sculptures that perform over the course of one or several exhibitions, seemingly beyond control.

Andriessen has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including, De Pont Museum, Tilburg (NL) and CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel (CH) (both 2021). Group exhibitions include Moderna Museet, Malmö (SE) (2022); GAMeC, Bergamot (IT); Modern Museum of Art, Warsaw (PL) (both 2020); 15th Lyon Biennial, Lyon (FR) (2019); Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (FR) (both 2018).

EXHIBITION TEXT:

Tuning into ABYSS
by Giovanna Manzotti

Note to the reader: the time-based script performed by the sculptures in this text is entirely fictional.

“You’ve applied the pressure to have me crystalised.”^[1]

These words are floating around. Can you hear them too?

They come from Necrotic Core.^[2] It is performing a score punctuated by the temporality intrinsic to the vitality of its very matter, which reacts and responds to the surrounding atmosphere, provoking a state of co-dependence, one of chemical processes in perpetual transformation, triggered by each other.

Necrotic Core is physically, affectively and relationally in symbiosis with the architecture that houses it. A number of conduits bind it like tentacles wrapped around the building structure it inhabits. This pipe network is the only apparatus capable of feeding its vital functions and monitoring its metabolism. The process of crystallisation, condensation, decomposition and mutation is ongoing.

“Go slow, go slow, woah-oh. Go slow, go slow, woah-oh,” the more intimate and textural nooks of Necrotic Core continue.

Its body is poised between attraction and contraction, inhalation and exhalation. It takes on a soul, animated yet alienated from itself. Or rather, it is this alienation that animates it, although it is destined to remain synthetic and eternally mutating, in a cold shape that responds to a desire, a need, an expectation yet to be discovered.

With a degree of faith in evolution and the unfolding of sci-fi ecologies, we might look upon it like a futuristic fossil, making us wonder: what is to come and what will remain of its subjectivity and corporeality between now and then? Its habitat is likely to change, and we cannot be sure its body will adapt to survive. But its C-shape is an “embrace” leaning towards the future, crystallised in a gesture of faith and hope, as long as it can make it. Because life can be so unkind sometimes. Only then will we, the faithful, find fragments of its skeleton along our path and make a relic of it, preserving the traces of its passage on this earth.

“I’ll forgive and forget before I’m paralysed
Do I have to keep up the pace to keep you satisfied?”

Can you still hear these words? The song goes on.

Tidal Spill is performing.^[3] One of its elements perches precariously on a slender two-legged metal structure. It reminds us of mutated muscle tissue with an uncanny shape to it. It seems to be crawling or emerging from the surrounding toxicity of polluted soil. For years it has been paralysed in this ceramic state, while the abyss beneath it has continued to both absorb and reject its body.

The ceramic sculpture continues at its own pace against a hostile landscape. Call it resilience. Embodying resistance, its surface is alive, breathing and vibrating. In a position suspended between a dangerous terrain and a state of endurance, this body is infected by a toxin that seems to make it sprout, which only exposes it, hollowing it out, angering it, exacerbating the need to embrace it, yet to let it escape.

Nakedness and immunisation. Desire and contamination.

Necrotic Core and Tidal Spill melt, ooze, drip, leak, sprout, sweat, perspire, sigh and seep, as if parasitically intertwined with their surroundings. It is a rhythm of actions, relationships and reactions, in a subtle yet profound time. It is this rhythm that links them to the “world”, that unites their bodies and keeps them beating and pulsating. Necrotic Core and Tidal Spill embarked on a common journey, a symbiotic dance between them and their habitat, in an autonomous closed-loop system in constant evolution, always the same and yet always different. Call it prosperity. Call it life.

A cluster of four elements start to perform together, again. The words continue:

“Things have gotten closer to the sun, and I’ve done things in small doses.”

These words are issued by a group of ceramic objects rhythmically hung on the wall. They are similar in shape and texture: conceptual bones like remnants of twisted marine skeletons. They are smooth, like biomorphic shells moulded by a fluid tide, or organs in a state of hibernation. The little spheres in their holes emerge fearfully. They wonder what the outside looks like.

A cryptic and unsettling aura pervades the air around them.

Wild, uncontrollable forms, constantly contracting and trying to break out of their shape. I stare at one of them and then I scan the others, one by one. It’s only then that I realise how each of these bodies invents itself, recomposes itself, replicates itself and complicates itself in a geology of forms. They re-form, ex-form and even de-form. It is nothing but the self-expression of a body, the modulation of a posture that always sets out from the body’s own limits.

A multitude of voices unfurl now. It may be hard to tell one from the other, but suddenly there is silence. The script has come to an end. Like ghosts in the dark, the words appear and disappear in the beat of a wing.

Wait a while. Necrotic Core, Tidal Spill and the four wall elements are taking their breath only to resume this fictitious story all over again.

^[1] All the quotes are from The xx, “Crystalised”, 2009, unless otherwise specified.

^[2] Necrotic Core (2021) is made of aluminium, epoxy resin, stainless steel, nickel sulphate, a water chiller and a pump.

^[3] Tidal Spill (2018) is made of ceramic, metal container, potassium permanganate, silicone rubber, vitryl tubes, scent and compressed air.