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30/1/2015

Two Exhibitions

Praxes - Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin

Chris Evans

Teasing out the subplots and maneuvers permeating cultural production, Chris Evans operates through fronts of affiliations and loose collaborations evading decisive definitions of author- or ownership. Evans has incited diplomats to work as draftsmen, police to recruit art students, and a commercial sponsor to create a luxury adornment as an exhibit. Thriving in nebulous environments where private or corporate patronage crosses the arts, the artist persistently laces this badland with poetic notes beyond political motivation. Evans’s practice filters clouded backstories, social processes, or institutional visions into a single object or gesture—a part for a whole—whilst producing spiraling narratives that simultaneously echo and pervert.

At PRAXES, Evans’s Cycle unfolds in four modules titled Hat, Hat, Hat, and Uniform. The initial Hat summons a gallery of airbrush works produced throughout the artist’s career, shown together for the first time. Proxies for (sometimes non-existing) projects, posters, contributions to publications, as well as singular paintings, this body of work—sharing crudely propagandistic yet dreamlike industrial aesthetics—is accompanied by a recreation of Magnetic Promenade (2006) on the façade at PRAXES. Introduced in parallel, the exhibition module Uniform delineates the conception, production, and finally the installation of an eight-meter weather vane pointing away from the roof of the institution, bearing the words "HOME ENTERTAINMENT."

Based in London, Evans has recently exhibited at Project Arts Centre in Dublin, 2014; Liverpool Biennial, 2014; Kunstverein München, 2014; Tate Liverpool, 2014; Witte de With in Rotterdam, 2012; Taipei Biennial, 2010; and Objectif Exhibitions in Antwerp, 2009. In addition, he is an artist-tutor at De Ateliers, Amsterdam.

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Rimini Protokoll

Founded in 2002, the collective Rimini Protokoll has developed their very own branch of experimental theater, documentary performance, film, installations, and actions. Based at the theater HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, a few blocks from PRAXES, yet touring extensively around the world, the group continuously test and augment audience relations. Neither a theater nor an archive, PRAXES aims to stage dialogues between placeholders, “Ich-Vertretern,” and other surprising experts of the everyday. Divided into various Chapters, this Cycle presents the first extensive investigation of the practice of Rimini Protokoll in an art institution, drawing on a carefully orchestrated crash between exhibitions, live actions, auditions and tryouts, and the making of a book.

On the heels of the World Climate Change Conference, a mammoth-scale participatory production inaugurated at Hamburg’s Deutsches SchauSpielHaus in December 2014, the opening Chapter at PRAXES spans an entire decade of work including Deutschland 2 (2002), Hauptversammlung (2009), and Situation Rooms (2013–ongoing), pointing towards radically different acts of involvement, assembly, and audience agency. Chapter I thus proves a timely occasion to engineer an unruly loop of delayed feedback from the global network of participants who have influenced Rimini’s protocol over the years.

Rimini Protokoll has presented work—produced collectively as well as by the individual members, Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel—in countless festivals and theaters internationally. Current productions include World Climate Change Conference, Situation Rooms, and 100% City. A new production Home Visit: Europe opens in Berlin in May 2015.

Image: Chris Evans, Magnetic Promenade, 2006. Airbrush painting. Courtesy of the artist.

Press Contact:
Denhart v. Harling: dh@segeband.de

Opening: 31 January, 7pm

PRAXES
Alexandrinenstraße 118–121 10969 Berlin
Germany

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