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Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS: gerlach en koop EdB/Dolores - WELCOME (TO THE TEKNIVAL) - Kasper Akh�j - 27 Nov 2010 to 2 Jan 2011 Current Exhibition |
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gerlach en koop Niet niet precies. Not not precise. Pas pas pr�cis. From the immensity of phenomena taking place around me, I draw one thing. I notice, for example, a cigarette butt on the floor (the rest of the objects on the floor slip into non-being). If I can justify why I noticed the butt in particular ('I am looking for an ashtray to drop my cigarette ash'), everything is all right. If I noticed the cigarette accidentally, without any intention, and I never return to this observation, everything is still as it should be. If, however, having noticed this phenomenon without significance, you return to it for a second time ... woe! Why did you notice it again if it is without significance? Ah, so it means something to you after all, if you returned. ... Oh yes, by dint of the fact that you concentrated unjustifiably on this phenomenon one second longer, this thing already begins to stand out, becomes remarkable ... -No, no (you deny), this is an ordinary cigarette! -Ordinary? Why are you denying it if it is ordinary?* gerlach en koop is a collective of two persons who gave up the habit of starting their proper names with a capital letter. They are known for minimal gestures -very minimal sometimes, that appear effortless, and elegant. For their first solo show at Ellen de Bruijne Projects they decided to leave their familiar surroundings in The Hague and live and work in Brussels for a while. They made long wandering walks from the outskirts to the center of the city. Brussels is not easy to understand and certainly not in three months time. They saw a boy walking down the Boulevard Anspachlaan, juggling with an orange in one hand and carefully turning round a curiously bent plastic straw with the fingers of his other hand, as if to structure his unstructured and confusing impressions of the city, like a clock, like a timekeeper. And they identified with this boy. There was a sweet mechanical voice that guided their travels in the metro: -Correspon�dance ... Aansluiting ... French and Dutch. They repeated after her: -Correspondance, aansluiting, correspondance aansluiting, until it became one word, and added, one to the other, murmuring under their breath: -Aansluiting, afsluiting. -Opsluiting. Insluiting. -Eh, ontsluiting. -Uitsluiting, buitensluiting. -Ritssluiting? -Kortsluiting.** It is not the connection to some deep truth hidden underneath the surface that an object will appear as meaningful, no, it's the way it is organized, repeated or shifted in relation to other things on the surface. * From the one hundred and sixty-three words, written down by Witold Gombrowicz in his diary in 1963, nine were changed and five were added by gerlach en koop in 2010, which is a bureaucratic way of saying: an ashtray was removed. ** Connection, disconnection. Confinement. Enclosure. Eh, opening up. Exception, exclusion. Zipper? Short-Circuit. EdB/Dolores WELCOME (TO THE TEKNIVAL) - Kasper Akh�j In WELCOME (TO THE TEKNIVAL) Kasper Akh�j examines the process of restoration which is currently taking place at Eileen Gray�s Villa E.1027 in Roquebrune, Cap Martin. Taking as a starting point the series of images that Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici (her collaborator on the house) published for the first time in 1929 in a special issue of the architectural journal L�Architecture Vivante, Akh�j has produced a series of 31 photographs that re-position these first images in time. The classical approach to restoring a historical monument is to bring it back to it�s original state. In this case, however, the final version of the house will also contain five of the nine murals that Le Corbusier painted, without the permission of Eileen Gray, on the walls of the villa in the late 1930�s. These murals play an important role as reference to the convoluted history of this site, and without their presence the house might not still exist. If one thinks of photography as a method of holding back time, photography might be quite close to that of restoring a house. Both are about fixing an image of sorts and both are about a certain connection with the past. As Akh�j puts it �It was this ongoing process of trying to fix the past that I became interested in capturing and documenting. A journey back in time, revealing and holding on to some of the more complicated layers of history that are also being erased as part of this undertaking. It is about making time stand still, and then again, it is as if time is moving in all different kinds of directions with this project.� Kasper Akh�j�s series of photographs are also subject of a forthcoming book published by the artist and Wiels Contemporary Art Center, Brussels. In line with the ongoing nature of this project, the book is being published in stages, one chapter for each visit to the house, eventually to be assembled in a single volume once restoration of the villa is completed. Kasper Akh�j (Copenhagen 1976) studied at St�delschule Staatliche Hochschule f�r Bildende K�nste in Frankfurt and at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He was a studio fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2009 and an Artist in Residence at the 29th S�o Paulo Biennial 2010. Recent exhibition venues include Ludlow 38 in New York, the 28th S�o Paulo Biennial, K�nstlerhaus Stuttgart and Overgaden in Copenhagen. At present Kasper Akh�j is an Artist in Residence at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul, and his solo exhibition �After the Fair� is currently showing at Wiels Contemporary Art Center in Brussels. The exhibition at Dolores has been made possible with support from the Danish Arts Council. Opening at EdB/Dolores: Sat 27th November 17-19 hrs Exhibition period: 27/11 - 2/1 (gallery closed 25 Dec - 1 Jan, open by appaointment) Gallery hours: Tue - Fri 11 - 18 hrs / Sat 13 - 18 hrs / 1st Sun of the month 14 - 17 hrs Curator for Dolores: Karin Hasselberg |
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