Structures of Feeling at Maria Bernheim

Artists: Sascha Braunig, Jacqueline Humphries, Ghislaine Leung, K.R.M. Mooney, Elizabeth Neel, Rachel Rose, Alan Ruiz, Julia Scher, Bea Schlingelhoff, Carolee Schneemann, Aliza Shvarts, Ramaya Tegegne

Exhibition title: Structures of Feeling

Curated by: Piper Marshall

Venue: Maria Bernheim, Zürich, Switzerland

Date: January 23 – March 7, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Maria Bernheim

Sascha Braunig, Jacqueline Humphries, Ghislaine Leung, K.R.M. Mooney, Elizabeth Neel, Rachel Rose, Alan Ruiz, Julia Scher, Bea Schlingelhoff, Carolee Schneemann, Aliza Shvarts, Ramaya Tegegne

Structures of Feeling is a group show featuring artists who work on the subject of material nodes and networks that facilitate meaning and values as they are lived, endured cognitively and physiologically. Key is the entwining of private interpretation with social standard. In this exhibition, historical artworks as well as those newly commissioned are shown side by side, many are presented in Switzerland for the first time.

These practitioners dislodge the regulative messaging engendered by media. Between the formal reverberations, we might ask: What do normative narratives produce in us? What elements must move for us to feel intuitively, anew? These artists reroute the material components of the social to alternative figures and formations. Feeling, here, is palpable and turned-over, aided by a set of predetermined compositional procedures: pattern, loop, frame, and leak.

Sascha Braunig, Jacqueline Humphries, and Ramaya Tegegne physically recast the digital ciphers which undergird the senses: how we feel and are felt. Ideograms are reproduced in rhythmed compositions. These are typically generated by and yet also generating of emotion. Tugging on the grids of automated feedback, a narrative of perception emerges: the personal peels off from its generalization.

Ghislaine Leung, Bea Schlingelhoff, and Carolee Schneemann understand structure at the level of communication and its circuits of distribution. These works cool melodrama through looped sequence. The repetitions, prolonged, detour attention toward the sharing of ideas and the pleasure and pain of dislocation between subjects. Cleaving apart duality re-calibrates the discursive eye and ear toward issues of practical care and support.

K.R.M. Mooney, Alan Ruiz, Julia Scher and Aliza Shvarts attend to systems of control through framing. These interconnected objects manage their subjects: a ball bearing invites certain weights, ventilation arranges fresh air, a virus portrays its hosts, a camera folds voyeurism into surveillance. Sculpture, fomented by performance, points to infrastructure as it tacitly portions physicality and programs bodily movement.

Elizabeth Neel and Rachel Rose stage transmissions to channel flows, accreting matter as it congeals. Stilled momentarily, it spills, pooling, crystallizing, refracting. The pliable lens pushes outward to point to where the appendage becomes a mass and asks us for a certain kind of projection.

Patterns and loops, frames and leaks tessellate into “structures of feeling.” They pulse like the muscle of the tongue, taking in air before a trip towards the edge of legibility. There they loll, cunningly, expecting social movement– I’m struck here those kinds of words, modeled by Adrienne Rich, which coalesce and impart such semantic force:

even you, fellow creature, sister
sitting across from me, dark with love,
working like me to pick apart
working with me to remake
this trailing knitted thing, this cloth of darkness
this woman’s garment, trying to save the skein.

Artists, fellow creatures, who work to pick apart, work to reform language: sliding it, knotting it, skipping the noose of convention to save our skein.

-Piper Marshall

Structures of Feeling, 2020, exhibition view, Maria Bernheim, Zürich

Aliza Shvarts, How does it feet to be a fiction? Zurich Virus, 2020, 13oz vinyl, Viral text and digital performance; performance documentation via continuous screen-grab of email inbox with personal information redacted (2017-2019), 36.6 x 1290.3 cm, 14 3/8 x 508 in

Bea Schlingelhoff, She’s right, 2020, Book, isolated tape, fabric tape, dry transfer decals, 18.7 x 11.7 x 1 cm, 7 3/8 x 4 5/8 x 3/8 in

Sascha Braunig, Furrows, 2017, Oil on linen over panel, 30.5 x 22.9 cm, 12 x 9 in

Carolee Schneemann, ABC – We Print Anything – In the Cards, 1976, Slide show featuring images of 159 index cards, printed with text, each with an accompanying image card, meant to be shuffled by the slide projector, and thus shown in random order, Dimensions variable

Ghislaine Leung, Love Radio USA, 2019, Ocean Digital Portable Internet Wi-Fi/FM Radio with Bluetooth Speaker, Rechargeable Battery Compact, 163 x 44 x 88 cm, 64 1/8 x 17 3/8 x 34 5/8 in

Ramaya Tegegne, Genzken/Wilson, 2019, 5 Nefertiti bust replicas, paint, sunglasses length of the display: minimum 2 meters / maximum 3 meters, each: 49,5 x 19,5 x 29 cm

Jacqueline Humphries, Untitled, 2020, 96.5 x 101.6 cm, 38 x 40 in

Julia Scher, Hidden Camera (Architectural Vagina), 1991/2018, JVC camcorder, bracket, organic fronds, (optional: monitor output, archival video footage), Dimensions Variable

K.R.M Mooney, En II, 2019, Engraving block, polyurethane, cast mistletoe, silver, gold, 17.8 x 11.4 x 10.8 cm, 7 1/8 x 4 1/2 x 4 1/4 in

Rachel Rose, Ninth Born, 2019, Rock and glass, 17.5 x 27.9 x 18.4 cm, 6 7/8 x 11 x 7 1/4 in

Ramaya Tegegne, Genzken/Wilson, 2019, 5 Nefertiti bust replicas, paint, sunglasses length of the display: minimum 2 meters / maximum 3 meters, each: 49,5 x 19,5 x 29 cm

Alan Ruiz, WS-LV2-1, 2019, stainless steel, 30 x 30 cm, 11 3/4 x 11 3/4 in

Elizabeth Neel, The Builder, 2015, Acrylic on canvas, 188 x 119.4 cm, 74 x 47 in