calendario eventi  :: 

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18/9/2014

Two exhibitions

Esther Schipper, Berlin

Jean-Pascal Flavien
days, between placing and displacing

Esther Schipper is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Jean-Pascal Flavien at the gallery.

Working in the field of conceptual sculpture and installation, Jean-Pascal Flavien considers and reconsiders the structural organization of our most intimate living space: the house. He has built four houses and worked with them as places of experimentation and production, especially with the placement of furniture. Flavien’s houses present real living situations, and in most of them guests can stay.

For the exhibition days, between placing and displacing at Esther Schipper, the artist treats the gallery as a living space and shows arrangements of blue furniture specifically designed for the show. The presentation of furniture focuses on its organization, rather than on each piece as a separate work of art. Flavien uses elements including a ladder, chairs, stools, tables and beds. They are presented spatially in lines, which like sentences in language that can be read. In a living room, a stool may be attached to a certain verb, such as ‘to rest’ and a table may refer to the verb ‘to work’. Each line of Flavien’s furniture is a phrase. In addition, a functional sink and new colored electrical sockets will equip the space, highlighting elements typically found in houses.

The arrangement of the furniture in lines can be traced back to his no drama house, which was erected as a stand-alone building in Berlin from 2009 until 2012. It was a two-story corridor-like construction, where the furniture was forced into linear placement due to the narrowness of the space.

In days, between placing and displacing, Flavien introduces a new element to his practice of arranging and placing. For the first time, a guest – an inhabitant – of one of the artist’s previous houses will be part of the exhibition. Ulli is present in the gallery at certain times and will relate her personal experience as an inhabitant of the breathing house (currently in Parc Saint Léger in France) to exhibition visitors. She will travel from one space to the other and acts as a link between the two spaces.

Jean-Pascal Flavien, born 1971 in Le Mans, studied in France and USA. Selected solo exhibitions include: Cinonema, no drama cinema, South London Gallery, London (2012); breathing house, la maison respire,
 Parc Saint Léger, Centre d’art contemporain, Pougues-les-eaux (2012); Kunstverein Langenhagen (2012); PLAY, Hedah/Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2011). He has exhibited work at Capacete, Rio de Janeiro; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Tate Modern, London; MUSAC, León; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen; Villa Arson, Nice and La Biennale de Lyon. The artist lives and works in Berlin.

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Christoph Keller
ANARCHEOLOGY

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce ANARCHEOLOGY, a special presentation by Christoph Keller in the /Ground Floor/ space of the gallery.

As part of his ongoing examination of the history of science and of the way in which knowledge is gathered and organized, the artist continues his project investigating Western anthropology, in particular the history of Western European engagement with the Amazon region. Keller has created large-scale images based on digital scans of foliage he collected in Brazil. Works in the series Herbarium Amazonas, show leaves in different states of desiccation. The decay of both organic and man-made material (on which the leaves are seen to rest in the scans) suggests the impossibility of halting entropic processes, alluding to the realization that nothing can be preserved, particularly not states of cultural development.

The images of a green feathery fern-leaf and a velvety fur-leaf, scanned in far more range and detail than either a human eye can perceive, or a lens based photographic systems could possibly depict, printed to measure 150 x 225 cm, are installed on a wall entirely covered with a wallpaper showing colorful vertical scan lines. The irregular pattern is in fact generated by a faulty calibration of a digital scanning device, which then produces an autopoietic color strip image, akin perhaps to a machine’s self-portrait. The combination creates a visual equivalent of the conflation of nature, technology and its failure.

In a small basement space of the gallery a new film entitled Anarcheology will be screened. Images of tropical landscapes devoid of humans alternate with text passages, creating a haunting picture essay about Western engagement with other cultures and about the encounters of written language with oral tradition.

With these works the artist refers to a post-archeological situation, in which the narrative connecting an object or an image with a larger historical context is examined. His collecting of foliage from the Amazon region, for example, recalls the gestures of earlier Western European naturalists who assembled specimen (from flora, fauna and the animal world, both dead and alive) during their explorative journeys in order to deposit them in museums of Natural History in their own lands. Part of a wider Enlightenment project to classify and map the world, in some sense these collections (and the processes assembling them) constitute the beginning of the modern notion of natural sciences. It is this procedural definition of a discipline by its approach, in this case by its scientific method, that Keller continuously addresses in his work on the history of scientific inquiry, exploring how the organization of knowledge influences our thought and results in the sometimes arbitrary distinctions between what is considered science and what is not.

Christoph Keller, born 1967 in Freiburg/Breisgau, studied Mathematics, Physics and Hydrology in Freiburg, Berlin and Santiago de Chile, as well as liberal arts and film at the University of Arts, Berlin and at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne.

Selected solo exhibitions and projects include: Small Survey on Nothingness, Schering Stiftung, Berlin (until October 4, 2014); Expedition Bus–Shaman Travel, presentation at abc Berlin (2012); Aether–between cosmology and consciousness, Nouveau Festival du Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011); Voyages Extraordinaires, CRAC Alsace Lorraine, Altkirch (2010), Observatorium, Kunstverein Braunschweig (2008). Recent group exhibitions include: Marie Voignier / Olaf Breuning / Christoph Keller - os trópicos, curated by Tobi Maier (until September 28, 2014) Centro Cultural CAIXA São Paulo; The Reluctant Narrator curated by Ana Teixeira Pinto Berardo Museum, Lisbon (upcoming, October 15, 2014—January 11, 2015); Realität und Fiktion, Villa Schöningen, Potsdam (2013); Ghostbusters–or how to stress photography, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2013); Virtuosity–A Concert on Skill and Disruption, Strength and Nonchalance, Morale and Cheating, Berliner Philharmonie, Berlin (2013); L’Institut des archives sauvages, Villa Arson, Nice (2012) and A Terrible Beauty Is Born, Biennale de Lyon (2011).

Christoph Keller lives and works in Berlin.

Image: © Jean-Pascal Flavien, 2014

Press office:
I David Ulrichs I david@david-ulrichs.com I +49 (0)176 5033 0135 I www.david-ulrichs.com I

Opening: Friday, 19 September, 6 - 10pm

Esther Schipper
Schöneberger Ufer 65 - 10785 Berlin
Tues- Sat: 11am - 6pm

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