* Title of a painting by Lisa Ivory
gerlach en koop (2024-ongoing)
En om drie uur?
Dan slaap ik.
Sleep can neither be learnt nor mastered. A force that cannot be forced. Sleep is something that is granted. All insomniacs can do is imitate a sleeper, adopting the posture of a body that sleeps. In fact a re-staging of the night before and the night before and the night before, hoping that at some point their imitation will match, that the faithfully copied sleeper will coincide with the original from last night… and that is when you fall.
In 2020 gerlach en koop displayed works by other artists in an exhibition at the edge of sleep at the GAK, Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst in Bremen, Germany. Over the course of this coming year a faltered re-staging of this unusual solo exhibition will unfold in the space of Rib. One work at a time. A full re-staging will follow, later on, in a somewhat larger space. Not all works exhibited in Bremen will be re-staged however, and the ones that are will be changed by the very act of re-staging. For this first one—En om drie uur? Dan slaap ik.—gerlach en koop decided to retrace their steps and invite an artist to discuss a work that had been present in their thinking about sleep from the beginning, a work that was absent in Bremen.
Untitled 2020/2022/2024 by Tomo Savić-Gecan is one of three spatial interventions, functional walls initially built for an exhibition at MSU in Zagreb in 2020. This particular wall was reconstructed in Galženica Gallery, Velika Gorica in 2022, and will now be reconstructed once again in Rotterdam. The wall is straight and white and taller than wide. You can imagine this wall for art or thoughts about art. You stop in front of it, standing still. Other walls exist, sure enough, walls you walk along or past, thinking about the art you’ve just seen or are about to.
Lisa Ivory(2024–2025)
For when the animal being supporting him dies, the human being himself ceases to be. In order for mankind to reveal itself ultimately to itself, it would have to die, but it would have to do it while living— watching itself ceasing to be. In other words, death itself would have to become (self-)consciousness at the very moment that it annihilates the conscious being.
—Georges Bataille, Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice, 1955
In a recent phone call, Ivory made it clear that the female figure in her paintings does not represent her. She rather identifies with the monster. The female figure in her paintings mostly interacts with a skeleton, a classical symbol of death, and a dark fluffy monster figure. In a painting titled Upper Hand, she is slapping death on his meat- less buttocks with his own detached radius while the monster is watching from afar, and elsewhere death is returning her the same favour in a painting titled Cross Bone Style. Here we see death sitting cross-legged (boned) on a rock, slapping her on her buttocks, while the now tiny slightly shapeshifted monster is watching them passively from close by.
Roles and scales interchange as well as the framing of events. The same scene is sometimes painted twice. Revealing only in a later version an overview of the entire role distribution of all the reoccurring figures, including possible absentees. When paying close attention and reading for an extended period, the paintings seem to enter your soul and then your dreams.
The presentation of a larger collection of Ivory’s paintings will be broken down into eight distinct chapters and shown as a developing story over the course of two years.
The exhibition opening was accompanied by a beautiful performance by Janneke van der Putten. Rib did not record the performance, but you can listen to her impressive throat-signing here.
In an intuitive and physical way, she explores her voice as a sound texture. She has specialized in extended vocal techniques, producing two or more sounds simultaneously: basic tones, harmonics, interferences – like glottic attacks – and spatial reflections. Van der Putten uses architecture as a natural sound amplifier and as a trigger for echoes or other sonic effects. Wandering in space makes the sound move and generates a dynamic listening experience.
