Artist: Yuji Agematsu, Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow, Eva Barto, Patricia L. Boyd, Moyra Davey, Marc De Blieck, Gust Duchateau, Jan Paul Evers , Terry Fox, Heike Geissler, David Horvitz, Flint Jamison, Yuki Okumura, Sarah Ortmeyer, Phung Tien Phan, Oksana Pasaiko, Jean -Marie Perdrix, Michail Pirgelis, Shimabuku, Michael E. Smith, Ko Sin Tung
Exhibition title: July, August, September
Organized by: Carla Donauer and Martin Germann
Venue: Hospitality, Cologne, Germany
Date: July 23 – September 24, 2021
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Hospitality, Cologne
While climbing up a malfunctioning escalator one feels swindled. One might even feel some insecurity or irritation while striving to do what the machine unexpectedly won’t. Legs get heavy, and time as well. There is great effort with a broken escalator, an effort that stairs don’t ever seem to require, however ridiculous the admission may be. Within the last one and a half years, time has undoubtedly changed from being a dragging vacuum to a thick, almost physical mass of obstacles, thresholds, and delays, through which our lives seem to be squeezed – surprising epiphanies included.
To remark upon this and more, we are subletting a former tailoring store in the process of its redesign to a handicraft shop in St. Apernstraße Nr. 13 in Cologne. We also created a website. At both of these venues, the exhibition period serves as incubator and hatching time for further contributions – performances and actions might appear as well. July, August, September is an exhibition about failed transmissions, crumbling identities and other half-states within a slowed down automatized world. From here it gains its productive potentials to ask, amongst other things: what is an exhibition, what is place, and how we might work together in a future.
It takes its title from a project of the same name, conducted during the summer of 1969 by Seth Siegelaub, who invited 10 artists and one group to produce work on 11 different sites in the world, wherever the invited artists were at that moment.
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
EVERYWHERE
Latecomer’s-Overtimes (2019/21) by Eva Barto extends the opening times of the exhibition for one minute per day. It consists of a wristwatch, borrowed from goldsmith Rudolf Klein, whose store is opposite the space, and adapted by Atelier Suché in Köln Buchforst, for the duration of the exhibition period. After its presentation at Max Mayer Gallery in Dusseldorf last year, this is the second iteration of the work. Another project on the local real-estate market went into production and might be ready for the end of the exhibition period. For Minor Touch (2021), Ko
Sin Tung has asked the exhibition makers, or the respective person present in the room, to drill one hole per day in the spaces, in an area decided by the artist herself. The diameters of the holes will be between 1-16mm.
GROUND FLOOR AND OUTSIDE
David Horvitz has shifted his garden from his LA home to the zone in front of the shop. It will grow slowly within the next coming weeks, in and between the cobblestones, flowerpots and cracks in the street. Shimabuku presents July, August, September 1969 (2021), a new piece consisting of both local and international newspaper front pages from 1969 on the storefront window. Also, Onion Orion (2008) is on display, a representation of the Orion constellation made of onions. Yuki Okumura visited Cologne between 5-7 July, where he took the 22 photographs shown on the first floor. They were taken according to a shape, which represents the connection of the 11 places in the world where Seth Siegelaub’s exhibition July, August, September took place in 1969. This form is represented in Exhibition Diagram Shape, 2021. Patricia L. Boyd made Ceiling Analysis (2021), a frottage on tracing paper made from her memory of the ceiling of her psychoanalyst’s office in New York. This index of a memory attempts to make materially present something that is absent. It is a second iteration; the first was lost by Fedex at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Michail Pirgelis’s Show Low (2021) is a sculpture made with a reworked part of an airplane: the section on which the passenger seats are fixed under the carpet has been remodeled to become an architectural display. Marc De Blieck has retired as a teacher, and with that his ambition of being an “author”. He is using the exhibition runtime as production period for a new project: Reading Piece, where he works on portraits for the needs of others, here for the mothers of the exhibition makers. Image representing another Image (2021) is shown as long as the new project starts to materialize.
Relics Wanted (2021) by Moyra Davey consists of four different mailings, of which only three parts have arrived so far. One has been lost in the mail, but we hope it will arrive soon. Nairy Baghramian’s Breathing Spell (2018) is a discrete sculpture, smoothly blending into the visual and technical infrastructure of the future handicraft store. It seems to provide pressure relief to a stressed architecture which obviously collapses under today’s neoliberal economic pressures on individuals and their surroundings.
Phung Tien Phan shows two new sculptures reflecting implications of her everyday life in relation to labor, office work and praying: a miniature playing kitchen for children in a sort of Modernist design, using basic material, as well as an altar piece made from logistic trash and leftover material. With Sieben gegen Theben/apotropäischer Versuch, 2021 Jan Paul Evers premiers a new body of work departing from one human genome sequence. Michael E. Smith’s untitled video sculpture uses surveillance camera footage in an anonymous teaching/disciplinary institution. Its soundtrack consists of a 16.000 Hz tone, which is usually only perceivable by kids and dogs. Another work of the artist will be in the exhibition in the last week before the closing. Phyllida Barlow has produced her Nightworks in 1982-83 – meanwhile destroyed, they speak of maintaining artistic production in the spare time during active motherhood. The author Heike Geissler has written a fairy-tale on obstacles, entitled Einige Märchen von guten und schlechten Hindernissen, which can be listened to on the iPod in the corridor.
BASEMENT
Jean-Marie Perdrix’s first sculptural proposition from 1987 is entitled Insaisissable-2. Originally drafted in two versions, the second version has arrived in Cologne September 1st and is on view in the entrance area. been executed yet. Terry Fox`s sound work The Labyrinth Scored For the Purrs of 11 Different Cats (1977), is on display, which is a translation of the floor labyrinth in the Chartres Cathedral into a sequence of purring cats.
Flint Jamison shows Applicate 4.0 (2009/21), an artefact in half-state right before it’s becoming a real work of art.
An egg shaped work by Sarah Ortmeyer appeared during the last two weeks of the show.
FIRST FLOOR
One of Yuji Agematsu’s zips is presented upstairs, small sculptures the artist generates from trash collected during daily walks, erected in the cellophane from his cigarette boxes. This calendar-like presentation covers a period between mid-January to mid-February 2013. Yuki Okumura’s new production is entitled 11 Locations and 11 Intersections in Cologne from the 5th to the 7th of July 2021, 2021, and was realized in the respective period. Gust Duchateau has painted his immediate surroundings in Brussels in oil. He has been doing this against the advice of Marcel Broodthaers, whom he met in 1968. His participation in July, August, September is his second international exhibition, after he just opened a group show together with Harald Thys and Jos De Gruyter at Duflon/Racz in Bern/CH. Oksana Pasaiko has improved technical deficits of the ground-breaking design lamp L 25 by Gerrit Rietveld, entitled Correction d’une lumière (2019-2020).
