Artist: Simon Wald-Lasowski
Exhibition title: Can’t face another sad salad!
Curated by: Marianna van der Zwaag
Venue: Welcome Stranger, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Date: October 13, 2022 – June 21, 2023
Photography: all images are copyrighted and courtesy of the artist, Welcome Stranger, Amsterdam and studioLNDW
Since 2020, Welcome Stranger has invited several Amsterdam based artists to make new, temporary artworks on the facades of their homes. In doing so, they are revealing something personal in public space within their own neighbourhood. The facades create an environment for new observations, where every passer-by is welcome to experience strange encounters through different parts of the city.
Simon Wald-Lasowski has transformed his house into a cuckoo clock. Every hour a plump turkey emerges from the attic window and releases its long tongue, alongside a scream. Can’t face another sad salad! is a technically ingenious artwork that uses a playful, hallucinatory glitch to interrupt the logic of productivity, increasingly woven into daily life as Amsterdam undergoes increasing gentrification.
Simon Wald-Lasowski has lived in Amsterdam since the late 1990s, with more than 10 years based in Hasebroekstraat. During this time, he has witnessed the city change dramatically with both public and private spaces, becoming increasingly dominated by efficiency, order and the needs of the market. This includes what some call ‘Disneyfication’, the transformation of the city’s public space to support the needs of the tourism industry. Can’t face another sad salad! is a metronome of the absurd, providing a small interruption to the logic of late stage capitalism and an invitation to dream different futures.
‘This work is for the ‘paradijsvogels’ or birds of paradise that coloured the streets of the Amsterdam I loved. It’s an ode to the outcasts, weirdos, the queers and the provocateurs that used to shake things up a bit. I miss them – there seems to be less and less space for chaos in a city losing its colourful edge to the doctrine of ‘normaal’ culture, which turns everything beige.’ – Simon Wald-Lasowski
Simon Wald-Lasowski (b 1980, Paris) collects, studies and builds installations of often mass-produced sculptures and objects, which almost function as an archive of the Anthropocene. Wald-Lasowski’s multifaceted practice bears witness to a genuine love for trinkets and curiosities, as well as a use of objects as actors within installations. This results in artworks that are colourful and recognisable yet simultaneously uncomfortable as they touch on aspects of life that are taboo, such as alcoholism and over consumption. Simon recently had solo exhibitions at W139 in Amsterdam and 1646 in The Hague.
The technical design of Can’t face another sad salad!, which is partly mechanical and partly manually driven, was developed by artist Lefki Mevissen.
More about Welcome Stranger
Welcome Stranger has organised several manifestations and projects, beginning in the 1990’s. The initial manifestations were intended as a comment on the official art circuit – not from recalcitrance or idealism, but to seek reflection. Instead of a preconceived subject, motto or motif, the focus was simply on the discoveries that naturally arose from the situation: a house in the city, and with that the interaction between private space and public space, publicness and privacy. As the relevance of these and their related issues only grows, think of surveillance techniques and online privacy. Also notions of hospitality, being a stranger and belonging to a place have taken on new social and political significance. Welcome Stranger continues to explore them unabated, creating space for dialogue between artists and opportunities to show art in unexpected places. Since the ongoing pandemic, the focus has temporarily shifted to the outside: the façade and the windows of the homes.
