Janina Frye at P/////AKT

Artist: Janina Frye

Exhibition title: Kiss off life

Venue: P/////AKT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Date: April 22 – May 20, 2018

Photography: Charlott Markus / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and P/////AKT, Amsterdam

Janina Frye’s evolves around the notion of a ‘new materiality’ and is related to theories such as Graham Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology (rejecting mankind as the centre of the world and emancipating objects as equals) as well as older or non-western paradigms like animism. Frye takes on this new materiality as a stage where the boundaries between body and object become diffuse and it’s no longer quite clear whether it’s the people designing the objects or that the objects are somehow designing us.

Her most recent research, leading up to the exhibition at P/////AKT, involves the materials that are performing as intermediators between the natural and the artifi-cial, moulded and used to closely collaborate, or even merge with the body. While some of these objects and contraptions are meant as actual replacements or exten-sions of body parts, others are designed to take over more immaterial functions such as movement and air being circulated. They both give freedom and take it away, growing more independent from us than we of them. It’s this ambivalent, in-between stage of affinity and alienation that Frye is addressing, creating a sculptural setting and atmosphere through which these ‘dead’ objects and materials are activated into leading a life of their own. Move back and forth, breath in and out. Do protheses also feel this phantom pain?

Extended Matter

Much like the previous years, Extended Matter is a series of connected solo exhibitions with additional output in the form of texts and events. It loosely deals with renegotiating or reconciling the boundaries between different domains and the possibilities of creating an alternative, morphed or in between reality, conceived by (slow) production processes, transformation, tactility and materiality.

Extended Matter features solo exhibitions by Wouter Venema, Rein Dufait, Janina Frye, Johann Arens, Laura Kaminskaitė & Antanas Gerlikas and Sarah Pichlkostner.

Thanks to: Mondriaan Fonds, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Ammodo.