November 27 - February 6, 2021
With the artists Apparatus 22, Marius Bercea, Simion Cernica, Peles Empire, Alina Feneș Crasovschi, Candice Lin, Justin Mortimer, Vlad Nancă, Umar Rashid (Frohawk Two Feathers), Jimmy Robert, and Jala Wahid
SUPRAINFINIT
Strada Mântuleasa 22
București 030167, Roumania
Courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest
Courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest
Courtesy of Parafin, London
Courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest
Courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest
Courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest
Courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest
Courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest
Courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest
Courtesy of the artist
‘Untitled (Agon)’, 2015
Archival inkjet print
134 x 100 cm
Unique
(ROBERT-2015-0012)
Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin
A clean line that starts from the shoulder, 2016
30 minutes 59 seconds
Unique
(ROBERT-2020-0082)
Performed by Jimmy Robert and Gala Moody
‘A clean line that starts from the shoulder’, M-Museum, Leuven
19 November 2015 – 28 February 2016
Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin
A clean line that starts from the shoulder, 2016
30 minutes 59 seconds
Unique
(ROBERT-2020-0082)
Performed by Jimmy Robert and Gala Moody
‘A clean line that starts from the shoulder’, M-Museum, Leuven
19 November 2015 – 28 February 2016
Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin
Nothing left to proceed you II, 2020, jesmonite, mica, 47 x 70 x 10 cm
My Heart Enflamed, Burns wild, Beats fast, This love will last, 2020, jesmonite, mica, lacquer, 47 x 86 x 2 cm
Lying In Your Stream, Breathless Epiphany, 2020, Glass beads, acrylic, 162 x 58 x 6 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Sophie Tappeiner Gallery, Vienna
My Heart Enflamed, Burns wild, Beats fast, This love will last, 2020, jesmonite, mica, lacquer, 47 x 86 x 2 cm
Lying In Your Stream, Breathless Epiphany, 2020, Glass beads, acrylic, 162 x 58 x 6 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Sophie Tappeiner Gallery, Vienna
Lying In Your Stream, Breathless Epiphany, 2020, Glass beads, acrylic, 162 x 58 x 6 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Sophie Tappeiner Gallery, Vienna
Courtesy of the artist and Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles
Courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest
Courtesy of the artist and Cokkie Snoei, Rotterdam
Courtesy of the artist and Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles
Courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest
In order to find comfort and diffuse fear, children often sing to themselves. Fragments of songs, an earworm chorus, words and rhythms that calm and center in the heart of tumult.
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Space is something that is given to us and we often get attached to a place that initially is unclear to us. The construction of a personal space upholds a vision from the past, a memory similar to a stalker.
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The habit of moving about, moving about freely, without it being too much trouble is different from place to place, from context to context.
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We grow being aware of frontiers and borders between countries, but rarely being aware of their deeper political striations. Imaginary limits are also engrained.
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Space ramified, expanded, got visibly political and questionable. The production of space has merely become unstoppable in the neoliberal society.
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Birds mark their territory through singing. “The refrain may assume other functions, amorous, professional or social, liturgical or cosmic: it always carries earth with it; it has a land as its concomitant; it has an essential relation to a Natal, a Native” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A thousand plateaus).
Liminality has deeply infiltrated in the everyday grid of many in the past months. It delineates the space between worlds, between chaos and a constructed environment that one builds for survival, as well as for creation. Formulated as a threshold to merge the real and the imaginary, liminal spaces intertwine environments and affective realms with residues that unravel personal histories. Of refrains and liminal spaces brings together works that inhabit spaces between ways of working, seeing, and being. SUPRAINFINIT Gallery becomes a space of liminality, of suspense and potentiality, an aggregation of affects, political voices and symbolic agencies.
The exhibition unveils fragments of specific landscapes turned into battlefields over power, identity and mythologies. Landscapes that have struggled to rebuild their threatened identities and micro narratives for which no clean political acceptance exists. Kurdistan’s landscape is as mercurial as its politics (Jala Wahid). Intersections between natural and psychological landscapes, geometries of the routine and lures of the horizon contain the liminality aspect of the spaces it creates. Images and actions of female figures are equally being idolized and bastardised, thus borders of fiction and reality are blurred and each version of the reproduction brings a new layer to the story. The abstract hand-moulded ceramic element seems to grapple with the long history of preconceptions over the female identity.
Dragon's blood — Star Anise — Yerba Santa — Mugwort. Investigations in the matriarchal relationship to land and plants, considering how botanical treatments were historically associated with female social roles of healer, witch, and herbalist. The plant’s multiple use in decolonial struggles, struggles against slavery, and feminist struggles in Europe (Candice Lin). A philosophy of the sub-culture, of the radical visions found beyond the neoliberal surface, reconsideration of the western specie aeternitatis, a reordering of norms and rules through chaos. The studio space witnessing a long process of self-assessment, domestication of actions, and construction of layers.
Human characters and silhouettes that remain at the peripheries and yet summon a poetic imagination and an abstract association of signifiers. Displaced bodies that move from one location to another, carrying a sense of togetherness and loneliness at once. The silhouettes as immortal floating bodies that became the foundation for a post-humanist society, devoid of emotions and fluid movement. Fragments of history where phenomenon like the fetishization and exoticization of queer sexuality or black bodies permeate into the perplexing gaps between mainstream narrations. Trinity — Triangle — Threesome. The convergence of agonistic perspectives that storm out in front of the visitor’s eyes assure that consensus is not always vital.
Departing from the notion of liminal spaces, Of refrains and liminal spaces exhibition attempts to pull together the strands of a cracked world whose ‘kinship’ springs from the same waters. The exhibition space navigates between a real, tangible ground and a free floating, imaginative environment.
Text and curatorial concept by Cristina Vasilescu