Nana Wolke at Management

Artist: Nana Wolke

Exhibition title: Breed

Venue: Management, New York, US

Date: May 17 – July 14, 2024

Photography: ©installshots.art / all images courtesy of the artist and Management, New York

Management is pleased to present Breed, Nana Wolke’s debut solo exhibition in New York. Constructing and documenting narratives observed typically by surveillance tools and our peripheral vision, Wolke’s multi-faceted practice operates as much in the slippage between subject and object, performance and voyeurism, desire and shame, as between reality and fiction. A text by David Lisbon accompanies the exhibition.

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Probing Collective Nostalgia

Starting with the obvious. We mediate and understand so much of our worldbuilding* through the nexus of screens, these could be in a private home, a panopticonic monitoring room, or a doorman’s outdated security post. The awareness we have of these screens is something like a catalog. Viewers can sense, or infer, value, context, and age based on the size and quality of the moving image. This library of screen-mediated images is compared against our physical world constantly to arrive at truth. The questions that arise as a result of this divided existence are complex ones. Mainly, which reality to prioritize? After this is satisfied (if that is even possible), next we ask what lens to interpret it through (first person/third person/ominous narrator/artificial environment). In the age of omnipresent surveillance, Nana is constructing an opening through which we can interrogate ideas about value, ownership, viewership, wealth, and other forms of hierarchy.

Within Breed, we are asked to traverse a network of relational images, and, one that is unfolding in real-time, the livestream. Wolke offers us an experience as a ‘fly on the wall’. She is both mediator of that view(screen/camera/service person, lap dog), and in painting, merges many layers into an eerie monochrome rendering of what happens behind closed doors. Sometimes from the nosebleeds of a stadium looking down on the impossibly expensive seats 00:02:15,300 – – > 00:02:45,800 (Ansicht mit Rum-Kokos Kugeln). In the one work that connects the static and the moving image, – – – (Tell me when it’s over), we see the ongoing construction required to keep the 10021 intact. A reminder that elements of the veil are physically constructed, constantly maintained, and just out of sight. In 00:00:00,000 – – > 01:36:06,960 (It’s good enough for Nancy. It’s good enough for Nancy) we are offered a unique type of non-human, non-man-made spectatorship.

Probing into the inherent veil of secrecy that lies between the ‘gossip girl’ presentation of the upper echelon and the reality known by the unhappy ‘captives’ who stand on the other side of the veil. This work asks for interrogation of our relationship to exclusivity; our part in upholding the lives of the rich and famous? The brands of the braindead upper class have always been a calling card. It’s not about the object, or it’s quality, or your belief in the ‘designer’. It’s about placing yourself in a food chain, separating yourself from the rung on the ladder right below you.

It’s gross – we just want to see a painting of a rich woman’s face (from any era) to compare to our own, in hopes that the most recent beauty haul will be the thing that finally closes the gap between us and Kim K. Newsflash! the gap will never be closed. To effectively close it you would have to go back in time and re-birth yourself on the opposite side of the impenetrable veil that I mentioned earlier. The people who have the face that you want started paying for it a long time ago. They spend their afternoons fencing, and their evenings indulging in spectacle. The sad part is, even the picture-perfects can’t acknowledge the weirdness of their hypoallergenic, hyper-visible, hyper-homogeneous world. Nana masters the act of interrupting these spaces to conduct lablike reenactments of situations, as an act of disturbing the veil, the image of the space, and reality. It’s about how people want to be perceived and how they occupy that space where perception is understood. Learning to surgically split the veil in this way is no easy task; what you find on the other side … is for you to ponder.

— David Lisbon

Nana Wolke (b. 1994 in Ljubljana, Slovenia) is based in New York and holds an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Solo exhibitions include Breed at Management, New York; Wanda’s at NiCOLETTi, London; High Seat at Castor Gallery, London; 4:28 – 5:28 am at VIN VIN, Vienna; and Some Girls Wander by Mistake at Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza. Group exhibitions include Over you/you at the 31. Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana; Daddy at G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig; Painters Painting Painters: A Study of Muses, Friends, and Companions at the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; Love is the Devil: Studies after Francis Bacon at Marlborough, London; and No Angels at Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin among others. Wolke was also selected for the 2021 cohort of Bloomberg New Contemporaries.

Nana Wolke, Breed, 2024, exhibition view, Management, New York

Nana Wolke 02:10:34,195 – – > 02:18:06,207 (Sleeping pills, sneakers, turtleneck, power cord), 2024, Oil and construction sand on linen, 24 x 36 inches / 61 x 91.5 cm

Nana Wolke, 00:00:00,000 – – > 01:36:06,960 (It’s good enough for Nancy. It’s good enough for Nancy), 2024, Oil on linen , 24 x 36 inches / 61 x 91.5 cm