Ginta Vasermane, Working Frames, video still, 2013
Person, in all its complexities, has so much more to reveal than we like or believe to accept. Influenced by its social surroundings, it acts and manifests itself in a certain way, tracing both: the norms of conduct and self – commitments. Somewhere at the intersection of common and private, object and subject, work and leisure, known and alien – the body moves. Looking at the body as a responsive form, Posture presents four artists with different perspectives on everyday choreography in various social settings, so playful and yet uncomfortable.
POSTURE
Artists: GINTA VASERMANE, ISABELLE WENZEL, LUCIA NIMCOVA, MML STUDIO
Curated by F.L.O.A.T.
Opening 9th July at 19.00
Open 9-21 July
Contemporary Art Space, Batumi
Zviad Gamsakhurdia st, 1/5
Memed Abashidze Ave,
Batumi 6000, Georgia
https://www.facebook.com/CasBatumi
The comfort zone of bureaucratic offices and gestural procedures comes into question with the Working Frames, a video installation by Ginta Vasermane. Here, seemingly improvised set of unpredictable movements in randomized spaces and situations, are rigorously repeated in continuous circles, bringing up front the absurdities and tragicomic aspects of human’s slapstick. Progression of forms and movements which shifts the most familiar image into the unknown, comes into play with the performance without an audience captured in the photographic work of Isabelle Wenzel. Picturing herself as headless model in acrobatic, against gravity positions, the artist studies her own bodily actions in between authentic experience and staged set up, fascinated with surreal outcomes of the figural moment. Interest in archiving the dynamics of movement constitutes MML Studio’s two monitor’s installation registering the operations of shipyard’s workers. Abstracting the workplace into black and white grid model, helps them to focus on motorized memory, which blends the past with the present, the utopia of modern times with the life experience of human machine choreography. Juxtaposition of two times, the communist past and present days of Slovakian town Humenne, brings body to the work of Lucia Nimcova. In the video called “Exercise” she engages the neighbors from her hometown to replay for camera the physical training they had to obey under the soviet rule. Some twenty years after the fall of the regime, this – at first sight – light and funny reenactment traces back the influences of communist times commanding bodies to move, live and believe according to the state order of things.
GINTA VASERMANE
Working Frames, 2013, video installation
In non-narrative videos she compose and choreograph theatrical-performative scenes, which play with relationships between bodies, architecture, the space of the frame, their limits and expansion. While setting up human bodies both in architectural space and in the space of the frame as sculptural elements, she stages an existence with its own logic and rules.
Movements are composed in a specific rhythm and becomes irrational and possible at the same time. The arrangements of body positions are expressive of, and play with, the inner conditions of an observer placed in diverse social conditions, spaces and structures. With light irony and poetic methods she plays with a subject through staged scenarios. There’s a questioning of who we are and what we do in specific locations.
Born in Riga (Latvia), received M.A. from the Netherlands Film Academy and B.F.A. from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Works and lives in Amsterdam. Has been nominated for Mondrian Funds Young Talent grant, 2013 and to Rene Coelho prize by Dutch Media Art Institute, 2010. Participated in artist residency at “Lower Manhattan Cultural Council”, NYC.
ISABELLE WENZEL
Building images, 2010, photography
She confronts the visitors with partly surreal and partly dynamic studies of the human body. They show cropped sections of a performance created especially for the camera. Her main emphasis is on the photograph’s performative and sculptural aspects. The results is images that depict an explicitly created and staged world in which Wenzel takes the stage as photographer, model, sculpture and, in the final instance, as viewer, too. All three levels meld here into one new medium.
Isabelle Wenzel, born 1982 in Wuppertal (Germany) studied photography 2008-2010 at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Received several grants, European Photo Exhibition Award(Kober Stiftung Hamburg),2011; Mondriaan Fonds(2013) amongst others. Her work has been widely exhibited in national and international solo and group shows.
http://www.isabelle-wenzel.com/
LUCIA NIMCOVA
Exercise, video, 2007, color, DCP
The Slovak artist Lucia Nimcova filmed older citizens from her hometown Humenne while they are performing physical exercises they had to learn by heart under the communist regime. Even though the performers are a bit stiff, they can still bring back the stretching exercises and dance routines they had to perform on a daily basis decades ago. Nimcova shows how the traces of communism are still very much present in the older generation.
Born in 1977. Lives and works in Brussels and Humenne. Nimcova studied at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She has recently exhibited her works at Galeria Arsenal, Bialystok; Albumarte, Rome; Bozar, Brussels; Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; transit.sk, Bratislava; Prague Biennale; Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow; Via Farini, Milan; Utah Museum of Contemporary Arts and Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Lucia’s videos were recently shown at Festival Fotograf, Prague; Filmmuseum, Dusseldorf; Ex Elettrofonica, Milan and Now & After Festival, Moscow, Russia.
Nimcova is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Images Vevey, Photography Prize (Switzerland), ECB Photography Award (Germany), Oskar Cepan Award (Slovakia), Leica Oskar Barnack Award (Germany) and Baume & Mercier Award (Italy). Her works have been acquired by Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, MUDAM Luxembourg, Slovak National Gallery and private collectors worldwide.
MML STUDIO
Shipyard, 2013, video installation
“Shipyard” juxtapose the utopia of industrial time with the current reality within the space of a highly symbolic space that saw the birth of the Solidarnosc movement which, in the 1980s, toppled the communist system. It draws its inspiration from contemporary worker movements and the current state of local industry, which vacillates together with market fluctuations.
This work constitutes a chorographical dictionary, which is not only the archive of a physical and motorized memory of the Gdańsk Shipyard but, also, an attempt at an emotional, non-verbal communication with its current, unstable condition.
Collective formed in 2008 that experiments with film, video, its production, its forms of writing, narratives and montages. Their theoretical vision intertwines the fictional and the real, taking its shape by the empirical practice of the image. Their filmic objects are shown in cinema’s screenings as well as in the form of video installation.
MEMBERS: Gilles Lepore, 1972 (CH) ,Maciej Madracki 1984 (PL), Michal Madracki 1979 (PL)
F.L.O.A.T.
F.L.O.A.T. is moving artist’s initiative. It focuses on composing pop up, short term art exhibitions/events adapted to chosen theme and available space. F.L.O.A.T. searches to discover, contextualize and electrify the confines of audiovisual art.
https://www.facebook.com/EFLOAT
https://exhibitionposture.wordpress.com/
Exhibition under series “PACING RESTESSLY BACK AND FORTH”.
