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MOMENTUM EMERGING TALENTS SERIES
ABOUT FACE
With Mariana Hahn, Jarik Jongman, Sarah Ludemann
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch and Cassandra Bird
23 August – 1 September 2012
OPENING 23 August 19:00 – 22:00, with the artists present
FINISSAGE 1 September 19:00 – 22:00, with live performance by Mariana Hahn at 20:00
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ABOUT FACE. A military command. A reflection of our tumultuous times. A comment on the cult of beauty perpetuated by every television screen.
The works in this exhibition – ranging from painting to performance, video, and poetry – each address in their own way these turbulent times. Wars, financial crisis, environmental disasters. They have all happened before. About face. They will all happen again. Not even the art world is safe. Artists are busy responding, re-thinking, revolting. Some people stop and listen. The rest of the world goes on as usual. The revolutionaries become icons. About face. The next generation of revolutionaries rises against them.
What drives our destruction? About face. What drives our self destruction?
Is destruction at the heart of all creation? Is our sinister devotion to icons the same fuel we burn when we destroy them. The microscopic line between destruction and construction. A postmodernist’s wet dream.
Terrible beauty. About face. The beauty of terror. Yet even while we indulge in it, we deny the filth, we wear masks of purity, clean facades maintained by wipe-clean surfaces. Anything to save face. About face.
Reversal, revolution, repetition, identity, defacement, destruction, rebirth. The three emerging talents in this group exhibition converge upon these issues in surprising ways. Jarik Jongman, a painter, invokes performance for the first time in his interactive painting series, (de)facing revolt (2012). Ensuring the complicity of the spectator, this exhibition is not about watching – it is about being. States of being and becoming are reflected through Mariana Hahn’s evocative performance, I Sweat You (2012), her poetry sticking in our brains. The rhythms of Sarah Ludemann’s video works stick too from the relentless demolition of body in Schnitzelporno (there within the tender embrace of humanity’s structures) (2012), to the repeated dissintegration of structure in flap goes the wing of the butterfly in slow motion. and I close my eyes and sense the cracks in my flesh (2010-2012). Flesh and blood or concrete and steel, it is all created to be destroyed.
Mariana Hahn was born in the mid 1980s in Schwaebisch Hall in the south of Germany. She did Theatre Studies at ETI in Berlin, and has a degree in Fine Art from Central St. Martins in London. Her work has been described like an itch under the skin. The itch of something that is there but cannot be caught, be laid finger on. Subtle movements of what lays beneath the surface that carries us, moves us back and fro. Transparent and yet hidden, isolated and yet profoundly prominent, like the voices of an oracle. Voice becomes a palpable medium in Hahn’s performance. The poetry inflected cadence becomes the action, the performance of the body’s stillness, draped in plastic, like a defunct statue.
Jarik Jongman – ARTIST STATEMENT
A former assistant of Anselm Kiefer, Jarik Jongman uses both his own photographs and anonymous pictures found in flea markets, books, magazines and the internet as a starting point for his work, which often deals with archetypical imagery. Dutch born, he studied in Arnhem and has had numerous exhibitions in London, Berlin, Switzerland, Amsterdam and at the 53rd (2009) and current 54th Venice Biennale in a collateral event. He lives and works in Amsterdam. In ABOUT FACE, Jongman will be showing a series of ten painted portraits of icons of the contemporary art world; some of the richest and most influential players of our time, which he will subsequently, with the help of the audience, deface. The result will be a series of mutilated images, reminiscent of the damaged murals and toppled statues of ousted dictators across the world.
Sarah Lüdemann – ARTIST STATEMENT
Sarah Lüdemann continuously disassembles her body and identity, explores psychological states, concepts of self, social roles and ways of perception and (re)presentation. It is all a self portrait and yet generally relevant and open to identification and interpretation. Repetition and proximity, seduction and repulsion, love and hate, destruction and resurection. The birth of poetic brutality. As a woman and as a being with tender harshness. Visuality and sensuality play a vital role in Lüdemann’s works as she aspires to create experiences that are at once sensuously engaging and thought provoking. Sarah Lüdemann finished an MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins/Byam Shaw in September 2011. In 2009 she was selected for an influential residency with Mona Hatoum. She has been awarded the South Square Trust Award and was shortlisted for the Arts & Humanities Research Council BGP Award in 2010.
MARIANA HAHN’S PERFORMANCE VIDEO
IMAGE GALLERY:
