Andreas Hochuli, INFORMATION AND DRINKS, June 21 – 26 2022
Beth Collar, Face Down in a Ditch, May 22 – June 5 2022
Systems Research Group, Adrenal Fatigue, March 11-13 2022
Spalarnia, 26th-27th of November 2021
Aristilde Kirby, Die Butterfly Die, 26th of September 2021
Tarik Hayward, Serial Dilution, 16th-19th of September 2021
Andreas Hochuli, INFORMATION AND DRINKS, June 21 – 2022
INFORMATION AND DRINKS, exhibition view
SUPERSTITION, stitched fabric, 107 x 23,5 cm, 2022
HISTOIRES D’AMOUR, stitched fabric, 122,5 x 17,5 cm, 2022
The exhibition INFORMATION AND DRINKS presents a series of words materialized through carefully sewn textile pieces. What might look as empty slogans could be the preparatory structure on which a narration could grow.
As most people in the art-world I often think about projects that could be both conceptually interesting and financially rewarding. For the last 5 years I have been fantasizing about writing a romance novel that could be hugely popular and still summon themes that would deeply question our conceptions of life. Of course, such attempts have already be made. The main ingredients would have to be work, love, money, and power, the domains through which we seek salvation and transcendence. All these aspects would have to be reconciled after an initial period of antagonism through some sort of « Aufhebung », an unexpected resolution, to climax in EXORBITANT BLISS.
*
Andreas Hochuli is a Swiss-German, who grew up in France and studied in the French part of Switzerland. After living in Leipzig and Berlin for a few years, he returned to Switzerland in Geneva, which he is now leaving to live in Genoa, in a flat worthy of the novel he dreams of writing, with a panoramic view of the port. His works are anchored in pictograms and words.
INFORMATION AND DRINKS, exhibition view
EXORBITANT BLISS, stitched fabric, 103 x 26 cm, 2022
INFORMATION AND DRINKS, exhibition view
REPAIR, stitched fabric, 124 x 24 cm, 2022
REPAIR, stitched fabric, 124 x 24 cm, 2022
INFORMATION AND DRINKS, exhibition view
Beth Collar, Face Down in a Ditch, May 22 – June 5 2022
Face Down in a Ditch, limewood, mistletoe, found fixings, 2022
Face Down in a Ditch, limewood, mistletoe, found fixings, 2022
My mum when, she’s
worried because she’s not
heard from me for ages
or when I don’t reply to
her messages, or emails,
or answer the phone she
always says for all I know
you might’ve been face
down in a ditch somewhere.
I think she says that
because her mother said
that to her. Her mum was
from Portsmouth and was
the daughter of a publican.
Lots of watery ditches,
ancient waterways,
down in Portsmouth
you might trip into.
If you don’t answer the
phone I’m going to call the
police.
For we like sheep
Have gone astray
And there she is bubbling
her last breaths. Close
your legs darling theres
a breeze. I was in the
bathroom and my mum
apologised to me for
having given me her knees,
until that point I hadn’t
realised. For we, like sheep,
have gone astray, tumbled
into the ditch and poisoned
the drinking water. Kate
Moss returns to form
a scum, a skin on top of the
milk I think, ok, so the first
time I saw him was when I
was doing a job in Warsaw.
He went over your head,
strung up above your head
you had to duck beneath
him decorated with
bruises, blisters and bows,
festooned with ribbons,
pinned at the cross-overs.
My grandmother told me
to not walk on the grass
because there could be dog
mess. Violent and armed
dog shit hiding in the grass,
praying on young girls.
Face Down in a Ditch (detail)
Photography: CHROMA
Systems Research Group, Adrenal Fatigue, March 11 – 13 2022
Competition is transformed/thumb/burning laptop, 2022 Pencil on paper, inkjet prints, tape, frame. 610 x 510 (mm)
Running on fumes. You might know the feeling. Head and body fucked by years of zombie overexertion. You don’t have time to notice the gradual degradation of the world around you, when every waking moment is so F u c k i n g U r g e n t. None of us had time, in the end. We’re all in this ~together~, so we didn’t notice the degradation ~together~ and now we’re here ~together~, on the precipice of imminent collapse.
Toes on the ground, heel bouncing at blastbeat tempo. Tapping my fingernails on the rectangular relief of my phone through the trouser pocket.
In quiet moments, the phantom muscle tremor in my top right thigh almost feels like some unconscious desire for some, any, kind of notification. A server down in the datacenter. 2 for 1 curry Thursdays. National emergency system nuclear alert. All have the same register. All make the same bzz bzz.
We get half-cocked perpetual maintenance. The maintenance budget of our little experiment seems to slip lower down the sheets every year. So we’re panicking, blinkered, plugged, shaving, sweating, twitching, sliding slowly into ruins, again.
Systems Research Group is an interdisciplinary organization founded in Berlin in 2018. Research threads for Q1 2022 are: ◘ strategic fictionalization of ecosystems ◘ destruction of goods and property ◘ reverse-engineering as praxis ◘ soft resistance strategies to soft power ◘ environmental climate controls ◘ practical attacks against AI-informed facial recognition technologies. See https://systemsresearch.group/ for further information.
Adrenal Fatigue, exhibition view
Invasive Species/Icons: People, 2022 Acrylic on inkjet prints, frame. 510 x 610 (mm)
Adrenal Fatigue, exhibition view
Desktop Fire 01, 2022 Enamel and inkjet print on aluminium, frame. 420 x 520 (mm)
Damage patterns, 2022 Pencil on paper, inkjet print, sticker, tape. 510 x 410 (mm)
Adrenal Fatigue, exhibition view
Effigy/Laptop/Tools, 2022 Tape, graphite and stickers on inkjet prints, frame. 514 x 414 (mm)
Spalarnia, 26th-27th of November 2021
GUTS is very pleased to present a concert of spalarnia, a music and poetry alias of Wojciech Kosma.
spalarnia is a promiscuous blend of hypnotic, darkly melodic sound, auto-tuned poetry, intimate performance and earnest dissent against the exclusionary and violent politics of the authoritarian government of Wojciech’s native Poland. At times spalarnia sounds like new-old folk, at times like slowed-down pop, hedonistic protest song or fucked-up religious meditation, all making a stage for gently sung poems in Polish that move between telling utopian stories from a nonfascist future to reimagining pleasure, sensuality and closeness as forms of resistance and meaning-making. spalarnia will play a live set followed by an informal conversation about the poems’ translations and their context, especially the ongoing refugee crisis on the Belarusian-Polish border.
Wojciech Kosma is a performance artist known for staging nuanced representations of intimate relationships that wove together dance, theatre, and personal biographies. More recently, since moving back to Poland, Wojciech works with music and poetry under an alias spalarnia. spalarnia’s performances have been presented at Tate Modern in London, The Island Club in Limassol or Komuna Warszawa in Warsaw. spalarnia’s tapes are released on Dym Recordings in Poland. Wojciech is a founding member of the artist collective East London Cable.
Aristilde Kirby – Die Butterfly Die, 26th of September 2021
Act I, Scene III: Lyco meets Gran Arbolyn.
On September 16th 2021, The New York Times published an article entitled If You See This Beautiful Insect Please Kill It, or Die, Beautiful Spotted Lanternfly, Die. I saw it the day it was published, & it immediately pinched a nerve concerning thoughts I had about the supposed human nature of “invasive species,” a concept I was introduced to while learning about plants as a Master Gardener. The spotted lanternfly is said to have consequence, especially in regard to climate change.
This is the second performance in a series I call Shadow Install, which are shadow plays which arc towards parables. They utilize the silhouettes behind a backlit screen in dialogue & action, which usually leads to drama. Die Butterfly Die, or The Butterfly The, is a meditation on life in the midst of so much death, natural & unnatural, logical & illogical during our time. It is about the interconnectedness of fates as sentient beings. As a brief intermission between two acts, I will be reading a bit of my own poetry. Om mani padme hum.
performed at GUTS Art Space, 26th of September
Top view of spotted lantern fly, Chester County, Pennsylvania
Aristilde Kirby (she/they, b. 1991) is a poet, like the play of the ripples on the water. Daisy & Catherine², her latest chapbook, is out in October via Auric Press. Past works include Daisy & Catherine (Belladonna, 2017) & Sonnet Infinitesimal / Material Girl (Black Warrior Review & Best American Experimental Writing 2020). She is presently featured in Artforum & Illiberal Arts at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, curated by Kerstin Stakemeier & Anselm Franke. She has a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing from Bard College. You can just call her Aris, like Paris without the P.
Act I, Scene II: Lyco & Fürstinne listen to the philosophy of Dan-Di.
Aris reads Entropics / Entities from Daisy & Catherine2
Tarik Hayward – Serial Dilution, 16th-19th of September 2021
Pure Life, 2021, plastic container, water extracted from pig blood, variable size.
Tarik Hayward’s work starts with technical research, a form of primitive engineering, an architecture of necessity for which the materials, and structural principles that bind them, express a logic of their own.
Hayward stages natural processes, resonating with a multitude of strong, culturally connoted images. The work “pure life”, named after water sold by the multinational corporation Nestle, presented in banal PET bottles was inspired by Hayward’s dialogue with Ariana Reines. After reading his horoscope, Reines challenged Hayward to make a piece with water. The liquid inside the bottles, called H2O, is pure, but the filiation of its content (completely harmless and drinkable) leads us straight into the slaughterhouses.
To frame the scenery, the artist draws a copper barrier called “drop shadow” whose dissolution -corroded by water- has already begun.
Terms such as “dark” or “dystopian” might be called to mind. But this depends on the view taken of the world. Anyone disappointed by roses, growth, and wealth accumulation can also see Hayward’s work as a form of release from that continuous stagnation called progress.
Tarik Hayward (*1979 in Ibiza) Lives and works in La Vallée de Joux (CH)
Recent solo shows include Archifossile at Cima Norma art Foundation in Ticino, 2021; Resolutions: Zero. Hopes: Zero. at the Centre Cultrel Suisse Paris; Neutral Density at the Musée cantonal des beaux-arts, Lausanne, 2017.
Tarik Hayward’s works were awarded the Swiss Art Awards in 2018; the Swiss Award for Performance, Kunstraum, Baden in 2012; the Irène Reymond Award in 2014; and the Accrochage Vaud Award in 2016.
He was also the 2019 Studio Resident of Pro Helvetia in Beijing.
Tarik Hayward, with Ariana Reines, edition Periferia & Swiss Art Council, 54 pages, 2019.
Serial Dilution, exhibition view.
Serial Dilution, exhibition view.
Drop Shadow, 2021, corroded copper, size variable.
Serial Dilution, exhibition view.
