calendario eventi  :: 

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31/3/2012

Two exhibitions

Kunsthalle Basel, Basel

Latifa Echakhch & David Maljkovic
Morgenlied

Kunsthalle Basel is pleased to present Morgenlied (Morning Song), an exhibition by Latifa Echakhch and David Maljković. The show came into being as a result of the artists’ shared, albeit differently motivated and articulated, interest in Modernist language of forms and the ideologies that used to support it.

Sharing a similar poetic sensibility, Latifa Echakhch and David Maljković named their exhibition after the title of a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe from 1773. The architect Johann Jakob Stehlin used the initial lines of Künstlers Morgenlied (Artist’s Morning Song) in 1868 as the motto for his competition design for the construction of the Kunsthalle Basel. The first lines of the poem are “Der Tempel ist euch aufgebaut | Ihr hohen Musen all“ (The temple is built for you | All you high Muses). They describe the imagined future role of the Kunsthalle Basel – that of a temple dedicated to the arts. The architecture of the Kunsthalle’s main space, the “Oberlichtsaal”, with its neoclassical details and monumental skylight, is typical for the 19th century and may be read as a belated symbolic embodiment of the idea of the Enlightenment. While considering the historic architecture of the Kunsthalle, Latifa Echakhch and David Maljković have produced works that engage with the space and radically transform its expression.

Latifa Echakhch was born in El Khansa, Morocco in 1974 and today lives in Martigny in Switzerland. Her works, ranging from site-specific installations to videos, performances and sculptures using found objects, investigate the phenomena of cultural transfer and the accompanying disintegration and reconstitution of displaced identity. Echakhch uses culturally stereotyped artefacts that relate to specific contexts of use and production, such as flagpoles, Moroccan tea glasses, carpets, and materials such as couscous, Indian ink or clay bricks, modifying the connotations these objects carry. Shifting between the poles of foreignness and familiarity, the objects and materials are recontextualised in unexpected configurations and assume new meanings.

In her installation at the Kunsthalle Basel, another recurrent topic of Echakhch’s artistic work comes to the fore: her concern with marking the surface. This new site-specific work consists of a monumental painting executed in black ink on the skylight of the exhibition space. The black ink drops on the glass produce a play of light and shadow in the space. The painting covers over 80 square metres distributed on the 96 fields of the skylight. Contained within the existing grid, it respects the historic architecture and is set in careful dialogue with the building, but on the other hand it is clearly recognisable as a contemporary intervention. The main feature of the historical space, the skylight, is highlighted in its grandeur, but at the same time its original function, to let light in to evenly fill the space, is radically compromised. With its imposing height and oak-wood parquet floor, the “Oberlichtsaal” was designed in 1869 to accommodate the so-called “Petersburg hanging” of paintings and it can be thus considered a swan song of the 19th century bourgeois culture, associated with the Academy and Salon exhibitions. With the advent of the neutral “white cube” gallery space in the 20th century, this temple-like room has become a splendid obsolescence.

Latifa Echakhch uses the skylight as her canvas. Her paint is Indian ink, a traditional writing and drawing material invented in ancient China. The title of this work is Enluminure (2012). It refers to light and the notion of enlightenment as much as to the traditional art of illuminating manuscripts. However, in stark contrast to illuminating, Latifa Echakhch’ painting is carried out in black only. Instead of a figurative painting or abstract ornament, the artist has spilled and dripped the ink onto the glass, a procedure reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s practice when creating his abstract expressionist paintings.

Another work by Latifa Echakhch on view, chapeau d’encre (2012), consists of six black hats turned upside down and strewn across the floor, as if blown off of someone’s head. These are filled halfway to the brim with what seems to be black ink. A material connoting writing, be it personal letters or romantic poetry, the ink-in-the-hat seems to allude to a wider metaphor for human thought – expressions such as “dark thoughts” come to mind, or the lines from Paul Celan’s Todesfuge (Fugue of Death, 1948): “Black milk of daybreak, we drink it at nightfall | we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night.” The liquid is in fact only a thin layer of ink, poured and dried onto layers of solidified resin. The work, impenetrable and modestly scaled, mirrors the black drops obscuring the surface of the skylight above it, The installation on the walls carries the title Morgenlied (2012) – which also provides the title to the entire exhibition. The work displays a standard modern picture hanging system, whereupon instead of hanging paintings, Echakhch uses the wires and hooks to produce an abstract linear composition on the wall, similar to a score for a song. Through the double absence of visible paintings and audible music in the installation, Echakhch relies on the evocative power of the form of the notation systems itself.

David Maljković was born in 1973 in Rijeka, Croatia and is today living in Zagreb. In the main exhibition space, the artist employs a reduced formal vocabulary of Modernism in a specially built display structure (one long wall with additional walls built perpendicular to it), which serves as a frame for several works nestled in its nooks and corners. The work, A Long Day for the Form (2012), consists of a large studio reflector panel lit by a single spotlight. Reflected light is directed into a corner from which the sound of chirping crickets can be heard. The monotonous sound of the crickets activates and enlivens the space, but at the same time evokes memories of long, hot, exhausting summer days. The work installed some metres further down on the same wall is part of temporary projections (2011), a work that features a 16mm projector with no film on the roll. The empty rectangle of light it projects on the wall evokes an already historical, generic image of cinema in its “Independent” or “Avantgarde” age. Also titled temporary projections is the large illuminated black umbrella – an important tool in a photographer’s studio – turned towards the wall. Hidden behind it, as in a miniature Plato’s cave, visitors find two small paintings, one dark-blue, the other grey monochrome, with two drawings of plants scratched onto the surface of paint. One of the plants seems to be installed on what looks like a tripod for a studio light, with a small circle of light below it, to which some of the plant’s stalks and leaves seem to reach, as if growing downwards instead of upwards. The fourth part of the installation, Untitled (2012), is a large plant, obviously a prop of domestic scale “tropical modernism”, squeezed into a roofed corner.

The installation addresses (and redresses) forms that were developed as common language of international modern movement. Maljković’s other works often spoke of vanishing and near-forgotten modernist monuments in the former Yugoslavia, where important buildings from the Communist era are slated for destruction despite their pioneering, visionary architecture, architecture that was once considered the epitome of a social utopia.

Sparsely enlivened by simple props and specially made works, Maljković’s installation at Kunsthalle Basel opens up contradicting temporalities: on the one hand the display structure may have been emptied of artworks; on the other hand, the projector and empty walls represent the possibility of a future presentation. The installation can thus be read both as a symbol of the absent past or of a history yet to be materialized, or a future that may never arrive – the sense of longing in Maljković’s work reaches in both directions on the axis of time. Conflicting notions of time can thus be said to be a central concern in David Maljković ´s work. Whether he focuses on the present state of the obsolete monuments in the former Yugoslavia, or examines the very condition of a given exhibition through a meta-installation of “displays”, Maljković captures the inertia experienced in these spaces of memory and how ideologies are put to rest. Having located these frozen instants of non-action, that once constituted a living history, the artist restages them in relation to the present, objective-driven course of events. It is left to visitors to make the promises of the heroic history come true.

The exhibition has been generously supported by Fiorucci Art Trust and Dreyfus Söhne & Cie.

Latifa Echakhch (born in 1974, El Khansa, Marocco) lives and works in Paris and Martigny. Echakhch studied at the École Supérieure d’Art de Grenoble and acquired the Diplôme National d’Arts Plastiques (DNAP) in 1997. She also studied at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Cergy-Paris, where she received the Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique (DNSEP). She graduated with the Post Diploma from the École Nationale des Beaux Arts de Lyon in 2002.

David Maljković (born in 1973, Rijeka, Croatia) lives and works in Zagreb. From 1996 until 2000 he studied painting and Multimedia Alternatives at the Akademija likovnih umjetnosti u Zagrebu, Zagreb and in 2003/4 continued his studies at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam. Most recently, in 2011, he was awarded the Augarten Contemporary Residency, Vienna.

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Aleksandra Domanovic
From yu to me

Monumentality and national identity - within and beyond borders - are important topics in Aleksandra Domanović ’s work, which often takes place on the internet as well as she broaches this issue in a reflexive manner. From yu to me, Domanović ’s title for her exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, describes the breakup of former Yugoslavia. The deactivation of the international, countryspecific, and top-level domain .yu (the internet country abbreviation for the nation) in 2010 can be understood as the final, symbolic elimination of the state of Yugoslavia. Yet, as the existing national identity is banned from the internet, new identities emerge. The federated states become independent and receive their own presence within the virtual world. Montenegro is registered under the domain .me and hence has also virtually become a state of its own. To that end, Domanović repeatedly refers to this political dimension of the internet in the context of Yugoslavia’s complicated late history.

Beyond her dealings in the virtual world, Domanović explores the more indirect effects of Yugoslavia’s breakup by working with its cultural artefacts - namely, the public monuments that can be found in all parts of the former Yugoslavia. These historical remains play a prominent role in the collective memory of the inhabitants of new post-Yugoslav states. Accordingly, Domanović ’s practice is a consistently subjective one based on her childhood memories, as opposed to one steadily engaged in her region’s current affairs.

Born in 1981 in Novi Sad, in the former Yugoslavia, Domanović studied in Ljubljana and Vienna, and then moved later to Berlin, where she continues to live and work today. Nevertheless, and most tellingly, a visit to her website aleksandradomanovic.com is much more worthwhile and informative than a visit to her studio in Berlin. Domanović makes use of digital media, which she quotes, transforms, and archives for her artistic work. She runs the mostly visual blog vvork.com with three colleagues, which is just one example of how the artist positions herself as mediator, and how she uses the digital archive of images as her very work material.

For her exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, Domanović will show a series of new sculptures as well as further developed versions of previous works. Her paper-stacks (2009 and ongoing) are comprised of A4 and A3 sheets of paper piled into steles. By printing the sheets full-bleed on the margins only, an image is formed on the lateral sides of the stack through the accumu- lation of thousands of sheets piled up. In the paper-stacks, the query of monumentality is as important as the visualisation of content sourced from the internet. Single specific files downloaded and printed from the internet form the steles of the respective groups. Their subjects, varying from images of football hooligans to the ruins of the former Hotel Marina Lučica situated on the Croatian coast, belong to the symbolic iconography of the new states that emerged after Yugoslavia was dissolved. A stack that presents an image of the Plitvice Lakes National Park, a registered UNESCO World Heritage, functions as a connection to the region in general, as well as part and parcel of the artist’s personal memory. Domanović visited this park one year be- fore the so-called Plitvice Lake Incident, the first confrontation of the Croatian War of Independence. Nevertheless, the park is part of a now disbanded collective memory, as it is one of the biggest tourist attractions in the former Yugoslavia.

With her video work 19:30, Domanović refers to an experience that everyone shared in the former Yugoslavia. At 19:30, the national Yugoslavian tele- vision broadcasted the news nationwide. But the artist’s 19:30 is a compilation of the news jingles from that former national news station and their transformations over the years. Domanović combines the jingles with their remixes, exclusively commissioned by her, and thus refers to a techno- culture in which the music genre cannot be ascribed to one nation, but instead emerges from an itinerant youth culture that makes national borders obsolete. By these means Domanović emphasises how shared experiences can change and constitute an identity, especially by use of the internet as an archive and a platform of exchange. 19:30 can be shown as two-channel video in exhibitions; the artist also adapted sound remixes and parts of the video for Techno parties.

Collective experiences also play an important role in Domanović ’s video work Turbo Sculpture (2012). The term “Turbo Sculpture” designates figurative sculptures that can be currently found everywhere in the former Yugoslavia. Unlike war memorials, these public monuments do not refer to a common history of a specific site or occurrence; they are based, instead, on modern popular culture that knows no genius loci. Instead of war heroes, who would have been immortalized by classical monuments, local authorities now decide to eternalize Hollywood stars and heroes of the Western world in bronze and other materials. Bruce Lee, Johnny Depp, Rocky Balboa, and other film characters or public personae (here the real and the fictive figure blur) provide new points of identification for the community. The verbal reference of Turbo Sculpture to the term Turbofolk, the regional pop music, suggests that those sculptures remain neutral in the turmoil of political disputes. In the end, Turbofolk became a regional pop music that was not only composed of music from the performers’ own regions; it also captured folk music from other countries, including in the Middle East and the Mediterranean area. In the early 1960s, classless and stateless societies were seen as utopias embodied by the Non-Aligned Movement. Many countries from the Middle East and Africa, like Morocco, Syria, or Pakistan, joined this movement in order to emphasise their neutrality during the Cold War. With the idea to create a work that relates the history of the former Yugoslavia with the culture and tradition of Morocco, Domanović recently created a series of sculptures coated with Tadelakt, a finishing material typical of the North African country. Reminiscent, as they are, of the language of abstract forms employed in monumental sculptures in Central and South Europe, the appearance of Domanović ’s works is complicated by the use of mate- rial and technology rooted in a local vernacular tradition. This tension, then, addresses both the exoticization of local craftsmanship and the alienating function of high art’s seemingly universal modernist idiom. A case in point is a series of works Domanović developed around Ivan Sabolić ’s monument of three raised fists at the Bubanj Memorial Park in Niš, Serbo-Croatia. For her work, the artist translated the three fists into reliefs and a freestanding, open-air sculpture for the Marrakech Biennale. At Kunsthalle Basel, Domanović presents the reliefs with red Tadelakt finishing hung on the wall next to a new work, which itself takes on Bogdan Bogdanović’s 1960s monument Partisanen-Nekropole in Prilep, Macedonia. Treated with Tadelakt, the sculpture obtains an artificial patina, evoking the historical monument that inspired it.

The sculptures on view at Kunsthalle Basel are accompanied by one large print: it features a computer-generated rendering of the “regendered” pro- file of the former president of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito. The masculine personification of nation-building is represented here with subtly female facial features. In Yugoslavia, every school classroom once displayed a portrait of Tito on a wall in front of the pupils. Domanović captured the resemblance of one of her former female schoolteachers to the former president and created a portrait merging both. By using artificially generated brass as a surface of the profile, the picture becomes even more elevated and refers to the steady presence of the monumental character “Tito” in the common mind. And it is this repeated admixture of collective and personal experiences that persist and reappear long after the break-up of Yugoslavia that is the very heart of Domanović’s practice.

Aleksandra Domanović (born in 1981, Novi Sad, former Yugoslavia) lives and works in Berlin, DE. Domanović studied at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Ljubljana and at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 2009 she participated at the Rhizome Commissions Program at the New Museum in New York as well as in 2011 at the residency program of Western Front in Vancouver and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin.

Image: Latifa Echakhch & David Maljković - Morgenlied, Installation view, Chapeau d’encre, 2012. Hats, resin, Indian ink. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, kamel mennour, Paris and kaufmann repetto, Milan. Photo: Serge Hasenböhler

Kunsthalle Basel
Steinenberg 7 CH-4051 Basel
Opening hours: Tue/Wed/Fri 11am–6pm - Thu 11am–8.30pm - Sat/Sun 11am–5pm
Admission: CHF 10.-/6.- incl. S AM Swiss Architecture Museum

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