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19/2/2015

Four exhibitions

Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich

Slice A Slanted Arc Into Dry Paper Sky

Arriving in Dubai at Al Barsha Street at the house where the three Iranian artists Ramin Haerizadeh (*1975), Rokni Haerizadeh (*1978) and Hesam Rahmanian (*1980) currently live, you might think, “Wow, this is eccentric.” Yes, it is an extraordinary villa full of things, but it is also a stage, a film set and movie theatre. It is their studio and a cabinet of curiosity; it is a test site-cum-monastery, an academy-cum- pleasure dome. The house informs their art as it results from both collective and individual endeavor — and half of it just has been shipped to Kunsthalle Zürich.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian work both individually and in collaboration, but do not form a collective. Their art translates into multiple forms — films, installations, artworks and exhibitions — and often evolves around friends, other artists or people they meet by chance. This includes Iranian artist Niyaz Azadikhah and her sister, a DJ, Nesa Azadikhah, Iranian sculptor Bita Fayyazi, polyglot writer Nazli Ghassemi, American artist Lonnie Holley, gallery manager Minnie McIntyre, Iranian graphic designer and artist Iman Raad, Maaziar Sadr, who works for a telecommunications company in the Emirates, Tamil friends Edward St and Indrani Sirisena. Sometimes these people occupy central roles, sometimes they are marginal, but in either case they bring with them a reality that interrupts the trio's universe and language, and channels their – and our – attention in unexpected territories.

Another important strategy in their practice is the inclusion of various artistic worlds that are as respectfully acknowledged as they are shamelessly appropriated and adapted. This ranges from artworks and objects held in their own private collection to broader aspects of Iranian culture. Confronted with their projects, their thinking and art-making, one can learn a great deal about how Iranian artists have absorbed modernity – how, for instance, filmmakers, cartoonists and artists such as Ardeshir Mohasses, Ali Hatami, Mahmoud Khan Saba, Kamran Shirdel, or Noureddin Zarrinkelk combined Persian culture with Western influences and vernacular traditions. One realises that there is another chapter of (dissident) modernity yet to be written.

These are some of the main ingredients to the exhibition, which partly transforms Kunsthalle Zürich into their house to offer us the trio’s artistic universe through films, wall paintings, sound, a new floor, and an eclectic collection of their and other artists’ works. Just like Al Barsha Street, Kunsthalle Zürich will be the center of a centrifugal world where divergent directions (and laughter) abound, and where one starts to wonder how it all holds together. Through aesthetics, one could argue, through the languages that they develop (and are still developing), and through that thing called art, which, in their case, is of stunning precision and craft backed up by broad, passionate, and generously shared knowledge. This makes their collaboration a model for how to approach a multi-directional, if not multi-chaotic, world as well as an art institution like Kunsthalle Zürich.

Slice A Slanted Arc Into Dry Paper Sky is the first institutional exhibition of the trio in Europe

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Hannah Weiner (1928 - 1997)
Curated by Franziska Glozer

Hannah Weiner was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1928. She studied literature at the renowned Radcliffe College, Massachusetts, and worked as a reader for various poetry magazines. When she became active as a poet in the 1960s in the immediate surroundings of the New York art and performance scene, she had already established a professional position as a designer of lingerie. Her first attempts at writing, of which her cycle of poems The Magritte Poems (1963) has survived, are clearly influenced in their playful dealings with the structure and figurative power of language by the New York Poetry School, which she encountered at the New School for Social Research with Kenneth Koch, Ted Barrigan and others. Due to her association with the later Pop artist, Marjorie Strider, and the performance artist, Carolee Schneemann she was integrated into the New York art scene no less as a designer than as a poet.

In 1968 came Weiner‘s first Code Poems: adapting the International Code of Signals – a signal system developed for communications at sea – she composed dialogue scripts, absurd and humorous “poems”, which were performed in various constellations and with changing casts. In these scripts she experimented with new methods of communication – visual, auditory and body-related. When the Code Poems were published in 1982 a rotatable mandala was attached to the cover of the book, encouraging readers to make their own experiments with poetry: “Where does It or You begin?”

In addition to her personal works, such as Hannah Weiner at Her Job (1969), Hannah Weiner meets Hannah Weiner (1969) and the draft (and performance) of an abstract/minimal labelling system for doorplates and doors in public places, Hannah Weiner was part of a small avant-garde group of poets, art critics and performance artists who organized poetry events to bring poetry “off the page” and onto the street. In the Fashion Show-Poetry Event (1969), which Weiner helped organize, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and James Lee Byars showed fashion designs. The Streetworks (1969/1970), a series of collectively conceived events and happenings in New York streets, poets, artists and the passing public were all challenged to try out poetic interaction in the immediate urban environment. In 0 to 9, a magazine edited by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer, the streetwork poets found their publication outlet. In it, authors were published whose poetry moved symptomatically between (writing) process and speech deconstruction and who are still setting the style for the language-poets movement far beyond the borders of the USA.

“The words began to appear in 1972 and led to the clairvoyant journal a three voice performance poetry book about learning, explaining instructions and the counter voice” (Hannah Weiner in Silent Teacher, 1993)

“I see words” – announced Hannah Weiner at the beginning of the 70s, and she withdrew almost completely from social life to research language in analogy to her sense ability, as well as to provoke and write down: how can one capture and copy down the language taking place around one? How react to the constant achievement of language? In answering these questions Hannah Weiner no longer made texts out of her own words but rather she intervened in the language material around her and translated it into hour- long or day-long sessions immediately from her subjective field of perception into a form of writing or imaging. Between 1971 and 1978 Weiner worked exclusively on the Clairvoyant Journals, which she published as excerpts in various sub-cultural magazines, poetry newsletters and anthologies. The Clairvoyant-Journals were followed by various book projects, including Weeks (1986), which translates the communications structure of television, and Silent Teachers (1989 – 91), in which the poems lay out clairvoyantesque dialogues with fictitious “teachers”. Apart from her work as a writer, Hannah Weiner also appeared regularly at the Poetry Center St. Marks Church and readings – for example in the legendary avant-garde broadcasting program Public Access Poetry – make clear how close her poetry is to performance. In addition, her visual and other styles of real-time transcriptions of the language taking place around her gained increasing influence as avant la letter poetry in the context of Language Poets. How difficult it remained to find a place for her work in the current genres of literature is shown by the insistent search for new terms to describe her idiosyncratic form of writing; Avant-garde Journalism (Patrick Durgin) or Large Sheet Poetry (Weiner) are some examples of that.

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Flavio Merlo / Ben Rosenthal:
Bottom Feeders—The Battle Of The Cataplasm

We are pleased to announce Flavio Merlo and Ben Rosenthal as this year’s recipients of the Kadist – Kunsthalle Zürich Production Award, offered for the third time to young Zurich artists by the Kadist Art Foundation and Kunsthalle Zürich. Merlo and Rosenthal utilized this grant to conceive and realize Bottom Feeders – The Battle of the Cataplasm, a puppet play staging a crime plot for ten puppets and three stages. Paul and Ted, two idiots, encounter a dying puppet. A murder, a second, a third. A letter under suspicion. Because comprehending signs may be a deadly virtue. While “bottom feeders“ (a residue-eating fish, or, more colloquially, a creep) eke out a rather miserable living on the expense of others, the cataplasm (a balmy wet pack) entails the capacity to cure. Performed by two actors Bottom Feeders – The Battle of the Cataplasm involves existential contradictions, communicative confusions, and corporeal thresholds. A film version will present the project before and after the plays.

Flavio Merlo (*1990 in Zug) studied art history at Zurich University, and art at the Zurich University of the Arts. He works mainly in sculpture, performance and music, fusing stage-like installations and larger spatial environments. Small-scale sculptural pieces often bear resemblance to organic props in a broader play of subversive urgency. Collaborative practise is a crucial ingredient to his work, for example with Stefan Tcherepnin, Emmanuel Rossetti, and Tobias Madison. Merlo’s work was most recently presented at The Power Station, Dallas (2013), Supportico Lopez, Berlin (2013), Marbriers 4, Geneva (2014), and at Basel Art Book Fair (2014). Ben Rosenthal (*1990 in Zurich) also studied art at Zurich University of the Arts. Through a practise of writing – a novel (A Perfect Lover Is The Angel I Wanna Be, 2012/13), poems, and performances – he generates intimate and/or collective social situations, which transpose poetics into spatial contexts. In his recent two-day project Chora – an event around writing for example (presented at the Geneva project space Forde, together with Géraldine Beck), the constellations he creates are fundamentally based on collaborations with other artists. Anthropomorphic sculptural works provide Rosenthal with a further field of inquiry into the monstrosities of feeling, imagination, and politics.

Actors: Annina Machaz, Garrett Nelson

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Theater der Überforderung
Directed by Barbara Weber

According to plans, Zurich theatre director Barbara Weber will open her four-theme theatrical venue “Theater der Überforderung” at Kunsthalle Zurich on April 14, 2015. This will-o’-the-wisp project shows an interest in the work of the Japanese dramatist, poet, photographer and film- maker Shuji Terayama (1935 – 1983).

Like others in the seventies of last century, Terayama chose paths outside established ideas and demanded that life, art and the theater be thought of as a unity. For example, he claimed that it was possible to learn more from boxing and horse-racing than in school and study, and he underlined this with such films as Throw Away Your Books, Run into the Streets! (書を捨てよ、町 へ出よう). In 1967 Terayama founded the Tenjo Sajiki (天井桟敷) theatre troupe, with whom he outspokenly took up such controversial themes as incest and polysexuality.

Going beyond the failure of the social aspirations of the 1968 revolts, Terayama insisted on cross-border critical action. While doing so, he was nonetheless notable for an undogmatic attitude. In his stories, like feverish dreams, he mixed fact and fantasies. In this way he made space for internal conflicts no less than apparently insurmountable oppositions, through collage, coloration and citation, without dissolving them or rendering them harmless. To demonstrate the inconstancy and self-will of people in their interactions, neither his (amateur) ensemble nor he avoided kitsch, camp and porno. In the serial breach of norms and conventions a brilliant body of work was made, reflecting the times and society as if in a broken mirror – sometimes surreally, sometimes unemotionally, sometimes passionately or with laughter.

Terayama’s work is scarcely known in Europe. As a first step, we are introducing it through a film and some texts. And yet we wondered what might be done with it today: can it be taken as a kind of guide? Under the direction of Barbara Weber we decided to make theatre out of this questioning uncertainty, our discussions and contradictions. It will begin at the latest on April 14 and go on until May 17, 2015. There will be rehearsals every day, always in public and during the opening hours from 11 am to 6 pm. Discussions, talks and performances will be announced on our website. Premieres take place on Fridays (April 24; May 8; May 15) as well as on Thursday April 30. The theater, the exhibition, the costumes, the stage set and the bar might exchange roles. Or actors make fun of artists. Or artists turn into actors – always with an uncertain outcome. In the time and place we shall see how things come together from moment to moment – or not. With the participation of Carl Hegemann, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Lily Koper, Tobias Madison, Madlaina Peer, Gabrielle Schaad, Elia Schwaller, Thomas Strässle and others.

Image: Invitation

Press Contact:
Martin Schmidt, presse@kunsthallezurich.ch

Opening: 20 February, 6pm

Kunsthalle Zürich
Limmatstrasse 270

8005 Zurich
Switzerland

Opening Hours
Tue/Wed/Fri 11 am – 6 pm, Thur 11 am – 8 pm, Sat/Sun 10 am – 5 pm, Mo closed
Holidays April 3, April 5, May 5 & 14, 10 am – 5 pm

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