Magali Reus at Shimmer

Artist: Magali Reus

Exhibition title: World as Lover, World as Self

Curated by: Shimmer (Eloise Sweetman and Jason Hendrik Hansma)

Venue: Shimmer, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Date: October – December, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Shimmer, Rotterdam

Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again—and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy. Because of the journey, we undertook to distance ourselves from our world; it is no longer undifferenced from us. It can appear to us now both as self and as lover. Relating to our world with the full measure of our being, we partake of the qualities of both.

Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self, 2007, Parallex Press

Inspired by environmental activist and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy, our exhibition World As Lover, World As Self turns to contemporary art to help us to “relinquish our separateness” and take account of the residue of the world that we think we know. Our program does this through the concept of defamiliarization as a means to “turn the familiar strange,” to redefine the self and our subsequent community. Defamiliarization, or aesthetic distance, is a literary and artistic technique coined by Russian Formalists during the outbreak of the 1918 flu pandemic. According to the formalists, the technique uses language in a way that ordinary objects are made to be reconsidered, that what is in front of us might surpass our assumptive narratives. How can bodies, technologies and modes of being, be taken outside of predefined cultural presumptions in order to de-categorise, to shapeshift, to morph, to glimmer, to shimmer. In this program, we estrange, not to create a ‘foreign’ or ‘other’ but to radically rethink community, to engage with the World as Lover, and as Self.

Over the course the year we have invited several artists for exhibition chapters that fade in and out of each other. As a format, we see the chapters crossing over as similar to the crossfade in film or in music. The artworks will intermingle, creating entangled relationships and networks of associations. In typical Shimmer fashion, the program means that we will restart the event program Sunday Morning With, add new readings to Across The Way With, and begin publishing ephemera and small books. More information on all the artists and contributors will be announced as the program unfolds.

Chapter 1: City Pollen by Magali Reus

9 October 2020- 13 February 2021

We open with World as Lover, World as Self Chapter 1: City Pollen by Magali Reus, whose sculptural and photographic work evokes new material associations and renderings. The artist resurfaces Shimmer’s interior walls with large-scale images of the facades of Dutch flower trucks en route to auction. These trucks are beautifully contained lozenges of colour and striking typographic detail, a strange paradox of hard external skins with their perishable organic cargo.

Featuring detailed depictions of floral exuberance, these blooms transform the metal armour of vehicle anatomy into softly erotic and malleable substance. Framed in isolation, these images question what it means to render an image and how quickly the hierarchy of looking can enter a process of symbolic reversal.

Overlaying the photographic works, at mirror height, are Settings (City Pollen) and Settings (Headlight) from Reus’s recent series. These sculptural works take the NO PARKING road sign as their immediate graphic communication is the architectural essence of road signs: their message is a first and primary function – go this way, stop here, warning: dog. Yet nested into the public sphere over time they accrue fragments of information, contradictory patterns, or surface interventions that open them up to material collage. Like cultural artifacts they are a quiet canvas for a more unhinged type of mark-making: the obscure shadow-play of nightlife, globs of bird shit or chewing gum, busted headlamp residue, lost dog pleas, advertising, and pornography. In Settings the toughness of the baked enamel surface has been perverted with process interruptions: the surfaces are sanded, masked, adjusted, airbrushed. In each, deliberate erosion creates a slippage of the NO PARKING function, thus altering the original simplicity of the circle-slash pictogram with a more metaphoric type of weather.

The Settings works read as a type of portraiture: polyvocal eyes, heads, or faces, they are watching us as we watch them. Objects from the genre of domestic melodrama (toothpaste, mousetrap, windscreen wiper) are enshrined behind Perspex in small recessed cavities. Like place markers at a table, these utensils are now complicit performers in the watching. Provocatively perfect replicas of their real-life selves, each implies an action – foaming, a snapping, a killing, an isolating. They amplify the pun of their very existence as signs: take one layer away and beneath it lies yet more language and symbolist instruction.

Between the wallpaper and the sculptural works, the structural significance is confused, as Reus collapses the scale and conventional materiality of images as mechanisms for establishing value. An organic form is newly huge, baggy, unidentifiable, whilst fragments of a more domestic ubiquity – toothpaste, a torch, intercom buttons – enter into uncharted cycles of displacement. Everything is abstracted from its expected function: the hinted proximity of human touch lingers, with the material in both its literal and metaphoric sense used as an emotional or chemical sign to subtlety morph or force the tone of the work overall.

About the artist

Magali Reus was born in Den Haag, The Netherlands in 1981, and currently lives and works in London. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, USA; The Perimeter, London, UK (both 2021), Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Ghent, BE and CAC Synagogue de Delme, FR (2022). Recent solo shows include As mist, description, South London Gallery, London (2018); Hot Cottons, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2017); Night Plants, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen (2017); Mustard, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); Quarters, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2016); Spring for a Ground, SculptureCenter, New York; Particle of Inch, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield; Halted Paves, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (all 2015). Reus has been included in group exhibitions and screenings at Tate Britain, London; ICA, London; CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover; LUMA Westbau, Zürich; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporanea, Lisbon, De Appel, Amsterdam and the British Art Show 8 (touring).

Reus has been shortlisted for the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture 2018, and was awarded the Prix de Rome 2015. Her work is included in international collections including Tate Collection, UK; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Collection CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; Kunstmuseum Winterthur; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Lafayette Anticipation — Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin, Paris; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin;, New York David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Zabludowicz Collection, London, Sarvisalo, New York; Arts Council Collection, UK; The Government Art Collection, London. She is represented by The Approach, London.

World as Lover, World as Self Chapter 1: City Pollen with Magali Reus installation view. Wallpaper from a recent photographic series by Magali Reus Courtesy of the artist

Magali Reus, detail of Settings (Headlights), 2019, Powder-coated and airbrushed steel, aluminium, sprayed UV printed resin, acrylic, grub screws 71 x 71 x 5 cm

Magali Reus, detail of Settings (City Pollen), 2019, Powder-coated and airbrushed steel, aluminium, sprayed UV printed resin, acrylic, grub screws, 71 x 71 x 5 cm