ART-PRESENTATION: Horizontal Vertigo

For the first time in its history, the Julia Stoschek Collection presents an ensemble of solo exhibitions, performances, and screenings of works not included the Collection. Over the course of a year, three exhibitions in Düsseldorf and three in Berlin, will open successively, beginning in March 2019 and running until April 2020. They will be accompanied by screening and performance programs, artist talks, lectures, and readings at both locations.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Julia Stoschek Collection Archive

The exhibitions “Horizontal vertigo” features commissions and new productions as well as existing works by a group of international artists whose interdisciplinary time-based practices share focused perspectives infused with feminist, queer, and decolonial critique in resistance to restrictive concepts of identity, history, and representation. Each project deals with a specific context driven by the artist and what the artwork affords, creating a web of associations and stories over time that is both fluid and multivalent. Düsseldorf: Rindon Johnson’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe features new and site-specific works mixing virtual reality, video, painting, sculpture, photography, and poetry to generate multisensory experiences. Shifting in and out of falsely tranquil physical and virtual landscapes characterized by surveillance and scenes of subjugation, Johnson contemplates the impact of globalization, capitalism, and new technologies on our lives and our planet. Through acts of improvisation, manipulation, and care, Johnson explores the relationship between racialized and gendered bodies and the environment, as well as states of complicit consumption and being consumed. The work begins with and returns to languageand the ways language contradicts, fails, and empowers us. The second exhibition to open in Düsseldorf will introduce New York–based artist A.K. Burns, whose interdisciplinary practice explores the body as a contentious site—using video, installation, sculpture, drawing, and collaboration to agitate systems of value. The exhibition will be the artist’s first institutional solo show in Germany and will premiere a new multi-media installation titled “LEAVE NO TRACE” as well as restage the works “LIVING ROOM” (2017) and “A SMEARY SPOT” (2015), all of which are part of Burns’s ongoing speculative fiction series “Negative Space.” This cycle of works is conceptualized as a cosmology that draws on theater, quantum physics, and philosophy to explore the intra-action of human and non-human entities. NEGATIVE SPACE raises questions about resource allocation, environmental fragility, marginalized bodies, and their relationship to place.  Sophia Al-Maria’s first solo exhibition in Germany and the third in will feature a survey of video works and moving-image installations. An artist, writer, and filmmaker, Al-Maria’s works grapple with the fiction of history and the fact of the future, and how we cope with the encounter of a nonconsensual reality. The Qatari-American artist’s work is deeply impacted by the experience of growing up in the Gulf region in a time of extreme cultural and environmental change precipitated by the oil industry, climate change, and mobile technologies in late capitalism. AlMaria’s films, installations, and writings therefore oscillate between a critique of history written and an inescapable future defined by collapse, delving into the murky folds of cross-cultural identity, representation, and desire. Berlin: Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz (26/4-28/7/19): In their collaborative practice, driven by ongoing conversations around performance and performativity, companionship, and resistance, artist duo Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz excavate unrepresented moments and gestures in history, challenging normative narratives and binary categories of identity and meaning. Through their camera work, and by exposing the camera as a framing device, Boudry & Lorenz reflect the violent history of visualization, questioning what or who is seen and in return goes unseen, or unheard. Their solo exhibition— comprised of four large-scale moving image installations—will experiment with the possibilities articulated by Ulrike Meinhof starting in 1968 “between protest and resistance” employing additional objects such as microphones and club-lights, cubes and stages. They expose the object’s ambivalences in between technologies of power and signals of an urgently desired future. The second exhibition to open in Berlin marks the first presentation of Jon Wang’s work in Europe. On the ground floor of the collection’s Berlin space, Wang will exhibit a body of time-based work started in 2016, concluding with a new video installation. Wang’s practice is charged with queer world-building and its politics, be it through art, film, and/or architecture. In search of solidarity, intimacy, autonomy, and sanctuary, Wang explores deeply personal processes of transformation and renewal. Wang calls for a haptic cinema where touch, atmosphere, and desire become highly techno-sensual political fields. The third exhibition in Berlin is Meriem Bennani’s first solo exhibition in Germany, the artist will present “PARTY ON THE CAPS” (2018), a multi-screen moving-image installation that explores displacement and the connection of identities to the fantasy of place. Clad as a sci-fi documentary about daily life on the Caps, an island in the middle of the Atlantic where illegal migrants are detained, the work amplifies reality through magical realism and humor. Bennani’s works tell stories of fractured identities and cultural hybrids, question gender issues and the ubiquitous dominance of digital technologies to play with the boundaries of what we regard as familiar or strange, real or virtual.

Participating Artists: Sophia Al-Maria, Morehshin Allahyari, Meriem Bennani, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz,  A.K. Burns, Dorota Gawęda und Eglė Kulbokaitė, Sky Hopinka, Rindon Johnson, Chelsea Knight, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Arjuna Neuman & Denise Ferreira da Silva, Colin Self, Martine Syms, Jon Wang, Eduardo Williams and Anna Zett.

 Info: Curator: Lisa Long, Julia Stoschek Collection Düsseldorf, Schanzenstraße 54, Düsseldorf, Duration: 31/3-28/7/19 (Rindon Johnson),  7/9-22/12/19 (A.K. Burns), 9/2-26/4/20 (Sophia Al-Maria), Days & Hours: Sun 11:00-18:00 and Julia Stoschek Collection Berlin, Leipziger Straße 60, Berlin, Duration : 26/4-28/7/19 (Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz), 12/9-15/12/19 (Jon Wang), 25/1-26/4/20 (Meriem Bennani), Days & Hours: Sun 11:00-18:00, www.julia-stoschek-collection.net