Blurred Lines
group show featuring Bernard Williams (Chicago, USA), Joelle Flumet (CH), Baltensperger + Siepert (CH), Pascal Häusermann (CH), Bettina Diel (CH/D), Andreas Marti (CH), Vlad Nanca (Bucharest, RO), Sandra Kühne (CH), huber.huber (CH)
A¦B¦C ontemporary Breitensteinstr. 45 Zürich, CH
Vernissage: Thursday, December 4, 2014, 7-10pm
Exhibition continues until January 15, 2015
Formally, Blurred Lines questions the fragile boundaries between dimensions, with slight missteps in both directions, by moving drawing from the flat plane into space and creating space on the flat plane.
But beyond this formal treatment, the works in Blurred Lines reveal third spaces that defy categorization and that comment on social, political, and personal issues. Zones of marginalization that exist outside accepted norms become the topic of exploration for many of the artists in the show.
Joelle Flumet, Baltensperger+Siepert, Vlad Nanca, Bernard Williams and Pascal Häusermann examine individual perception of space through comments on social inequalities or other social conditions. Joelle Flumet’s digital drawings, Wasteland, show people who reside in marginalized spaces either self-imposed (like the ultra rich who segregate themselves in their opulent communities) or those imposed by society, like the homeless and refugees. Baltensperger+Siepert’s drawings represent the journeys that their immigrant interlocutors made to get from their homeland to Zurich. Complex and dangerous voyages through space and time get flattened to mere points and connecting lines, as maps are – a complete abstraction of the perils of their travels. Vlad Nanca’s Portal, a line sculpture that is actually the recreation in wood of a rebar space-saver found in a parking spot on the streets of Bucharest, becomes a comment on the conflict between the self trying to carve out an identity and the anonymity one feels in the “urban jungle”, but also the reality of the need for space in the city that leads to these artistic street markings. Bernard Williams places common words and concepts in American society on a scaffold, somewhat reflecting sentence diagrams, thus offering a critique of the faulty infrastructure on which that culture is built. Pascal Haüsermann’s two-channel video follows the artist in real time as he strolls for more than 70 minutes through various neighborhoods in Paris, marking changes in the urban landscape and its demographic. The path is documented by the video camera, then traced as a line on the map, thus shifting his movement between dimensions.
Joelle Flumet, Wasteland series
Bernard Williams, Standing Chart
Vlad Nanca, Portal
Pascal Häusermann, Walking through Paris Along a Mosaic
Baltensperger + Siepert, Desire Lines
Other artists are introspective, but push the limits between public and private selves and expose the tension and overlap between the two. Through her fragile wall-installation of outstretched rubber bands precariously tied together by playdough, Bettina Diel undertakes a personal examination of her own artistic practice and struggle to reach a satisfactory form for her preoccupations. Andreas Marti’s metallic line moves throughout the gallery, circumventing other works and architectural details, leading absurdly into a wall where a small motor activates its end, drilling a useless hole – a humorous comment on the grey area between art and craft, form and function, and the artist’s uncertain position in this debate. Hybridia are sticks composed by linking together fragments from different branches to form new wholes, new identities. Huber.huber walk the line between sculpture and drawing offering new ways of interpretation that belong to neither and both. Dear Milena Your Franz is a poetic paper work by Sandra Kühne that also balances the sculpture drawing divide, creating volume from the intense scratching-out of a phrase in a letter written by Kafka to his loved one that he later reconsidered and erased. The ambiguity of the gesture of elimination is also thematized – what once was is no longer, but it becomes something else, a process of becoming that relates to the politics of memory.
Blurred Lines starts with an examination of formal heterotopias but it quickly becomes clear that under the surface the exhibition is an analysis of social and personal ones.
Bettina Diel
Andreas Marti, Testing a Test of a Test
huber.huber, Hybridia
Sandra Kühne, Liebe Felice Deine Franz
Curated by Itinerant Projects, www.olgaistefan.wordpress.com
Itinerant Projects 