current
* Cornered Rooms
* Poetic Corners
artists
* Ştefan
Constantinescu
* Javier Rodriguez
* Kama Sokolnicka
* Florian Wüst
past events
* Inside outsider
language
* Empty Sets
* ViennaFair
* 3:00
* All that remains
* What will the
next revolution
look like?
* Phoney Language
* unfinished
business
* Tension,
Intervention
and Restraint
* Cathode Ray
Mission
* Weird Science
* just another
shadow
* Javier Rodriguez
* travelling alone
* an inquiry..
* Memento
* Unnamed
Collaboration
Cornered Rooms
Facing In - Facing Out
Hreinn Friðfinnsson, Karim Noureldin, Anna Ostoya, Damien Roach, Egill Sæbjörnsson, Patrick Tuttofuoco
Hreinn Friðfinnsson, Bláhorn, 2010
Placed within a 90º angle, one can either face in or face out. A corner can either cage or cradle. By bringing together ambitious installations, wall drawing and sculpture, Cornered Rooms examines whether this particular space of experience serves to reinforce our fears of entrapment, or whether it can create a positive space for reflection.
Post-9/11 architecture has highlighted the importance of exit strategies. Stephan Trüby discusses the advent of this new spatial orientation in Exit Architecture, Design Between War and Peace in a culture marked by risk-analysis and fear. Rather than welcoming ‘entry situations’, building codes show a desire for a way out.
The corner is responsible for the awkward feeling of walls caving in and the impossibility of escape. By placing this situation alongside contemporary architecture’s preoccupation with ‘exit situations’, the corner may serve as a metaphor for our social condition.
Angles of no escape can, paradoxically, offer the best view of all obstacles. Following the poet Noël Arnaud, in The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes “I am the space where I am. […] Nowhere can this be better appreciated than in a corner.” By creating an opportunity to situate within, the corner creates a moment of physical and psychological transformation.
The two-dimensional arrangement of lines is collapsed and expanded into the gallery. The corners of the exhibition space appropriate the structures employed by the artworks.
The exhibition will bring newly commissioned and previously unseen in the UK works by Hreinn Fridfinnsson (IS), Karim Noureldin (CH), Anna Ostoya (PL), Damien Roach (UK), Egill Sæbjörnsson (IS) and Patrick Tuttofuoco (IT).
Exhibition curated by Annabelle von Girsewald
* * * * *
3 September – 17 October 2010
Private view: Thursday 2 September, 6.30-9.30pm
* * * * *
Poetic Corners
From Modernist Spaces to Homecomings
A seminar with Alice Gavin, Elia Ntaousani, Stephan Trüby, and a performance by Elizabeth Guthrie
* * * * *
An edition of Untitled (More or Less) by Hreinn Fridfinnsson is available during the exhibition at £550 (unframed).
Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Untitled (More or Less), 2010screenprint, two 36x36cm, edition of 50, signed
* * * * *
Hreinn Fridfinnsson has been at the forefront of the development of conceptual art not only in Iceland, but also in Europe, influencing generations of artists since the 1970s. His work is celebrated for its lyricism and stark poetry that transcends the often-commonplace subjects and materials that he uses. Fridfinnsson presents found objects with which he interferes to a minimal extent, often creating new works that investigate the ideas of the self and of time. Although there is a consistency of theme and a common emotional thread to his art, the media that Fridfinnsson employs are remarkably varied in scale and substance, from photography, drawings and tracings to presentations and installations of sound, texts and ready-mades.
In London, Fridfinnsson exhibited in a solo-show at the Serpentine Gallery in 2007, and has represented Iceland at the 45th Venice Biennale. He has also exhibited at the National Gallery of Iceland, the ICA, Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Wien, and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Bláhorn (2010), meaning ‘blue corner’ is a structure of MDF, steel and lacquer whose title mirrors the inquiry of the exhibition. The structure is inviting and open, indicating infinite expansion. In Icelandic, blue-something means being at the edge or the end, being narrow and tight, and hanging by a thread.
Karim Noureldin's geometrical abstraction opens new spatial dimensions. The meticulously executed colourful wall works, described by him as ‘room drawings’, create a multitude of visual scenarios. For Noureldin, abstraction is an international language with local dialects, and his work is based more on intuition than on calculation and deduction.
Noureldin studied at the University of Art Zurich and at the University of Art Basel, and since 2002 has been a professor of Fine Art at University of Art and Design in Lausanne. Noureldin has exhibited at Von Bartha Garage, Kunsthalle Basel, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain MAMCO in Geneva, and Kunstmuseum Winterthur.
The imposing rays of Sunset (2005) project escape routes but also consume the occupier, offering a darker, more contemplative space. The emotional contingency projected from the work invites the dreamer, without excluding the world outside.
Anna Ostoya’s work spans multiple aesthetic traditions, drawing on art history, theory and literature. Ostoya’s practice poses complexities of social problems such as war and economics. She analyses these issues from historical and psychoanalytical perspectives in relation to expressions of masculinity.
Ostoya studied at Parsons School of Art and Design in Paris and at Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. In 2008, she participated at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City. This year, her solo exhibitions include Galeria Foksal in Warsaw and Center for Contemporary Art Kronika in Bytom. Previously her work has been presented at the Portikus in Frankfurt am Main, Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw, Manifesta 7 in Rovereto (2008), 2nd Athens Biennale, CAR Projects, Bologna and Lisson Gallery in London (2009).
Saturday Afternoon, 1st of December, Leeds (2007) is a sound sculpture, consisting of a domestic CD player and a triangle shaped table with a seat. A Sense of Perspective and Other Attempts (2008), an oil painting accompanying the installation was based on an image from a newspaper depicting children living on a garbage field. The audio element presents the chapter "Leonia" of Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (1972) read by the sociologist Zymunt Bauman. The fictive city Leonia is renewed daily and its inhabitants are very proud of its constant modernization. They do not notice the mountains of waste produced by this process. Bauman has sourced Leonia as a metaphor for his theories about the postmodernist consumer society.
Damien Roach’s practice is an ongoing investigation into modes of perception and understanding, analytical thought, creativity, and mental freedom. Using video, sculpture, sound, installation and collage, Roach’s works are stand both individually and in groups, to present dynamic constellations of possibility, weaving dense tapestries of connections and paths through ideas and images.
Roach studied at the Royal College of Art London, and has recently exhibited in solo shows at Meessen De Clercq, Brussels, David Roberts Art Foundation, Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf, IBID Projects, Gasworks, and also at 176 Project Space, Level 2 Gallery at Tate Modern, and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and Swiss Institute, New York.
Roach will create a new, site-specific work for Cornered Rooms, responding to the architecture of the gallery.
Egill Sæbjörnsson is a musician as well as an artist and continually appears in new roles. He creates arrangements that cannot be described as mere installations and are seen by him as a (techno)logical continuation of painting. They are all at once performance set, sculpture and three-dimensional drawings. Sæbjörnsson invents his own media and creates a fantastical world populated by animated objects, singing plants, and anthropomorphic heavenly bodies.
He has exhibited in Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin, Kölnischner Kunstverein, DeAppel in Amsterdam, Museum for Contemporary Art in Reykjavik, Museum of Modern Art in Sydney, and Kunsthalle Wien.
In his practice, Sæbjörnsson playfully looks at reality and its projections. In Five Boxes (2009), a constellation of objects - some real, some imagined - try their best to escape the gallery frame. Their outlines, however, are literally boxed in and return to the physicality of the four wooden structures.
Patrick Tuttofuoco’s practice reflects his utopian ideals and his interest in society, cities and community. He is best known for large-scale sculptures, which synthesize global architectural elements. Recently, Tuttofuoco has moved to making smaller works that focus less on the architectural elements and more on the human perspective.
Tuttofuoco studied architecture at Politecnico in Milan and Fine Art at the Academy of Fine Art of Brera, Milan. He has recently exhibited at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the 10th Biennial of Havana.
Michael (2009) is colourfully spray-painted masked head formed from balaclava headgear. Although the sculpture is cast to an individual’s head, the face underneath is absent. Adjacent to the scupture’s plinth is a pigeon-spike - an urban accessory of protection. Transformed through time, Michael represents the human being who has been shaped by his environment.
Annabelle von Girsewald is a curator and PhD candidate at the London Consortium. She obtained her MA in Cultural and American Studies from the University of Tübingen and her BA in Women’s Studies and Art History from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
Her curatorial research here is process-orientated. Her aim is to reconfigure the notion of ‘home’ together with artists, curators and architects, and by revisiting thinkers such as Frederick J. Kiesler and Gaston Bachelard.
In 2005 and 2006 von Girsewald curated a trilogy of exhibitions: Home is where the Heart is, Home is where the Hurt is, and Homing Desire. In 2007, she organized the conference HomeBodies at Birkbeck College and in 2008 curated HomeBodies at Atelier Frankfurt.
* * * * *
The exhibition is supported by Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Cultural Fund in Britain, Center for Icelandic Arts, Embassy of Iceland London, Adam Mickewicz Institute as part of Polska! Year, Enigma FX and ArtAV, and The London Consortium. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Mr James Ellery and Wonder. We would like to thank the artists, Isabelle Maidment, Steve Connor, Anna Julia Fridbjornsdottir, Júlia Marí Bernaus, Maxa Zoller, Anna Tryc Bromley, Josh Love, Annie Rudnick, Nock Joyce.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |