Paris and San Francisco
September 24, 2015–January 16, 2016
Kadist Paris
19 bis-21 rue des Trois Frères
75018 Paris
Fall exhibition: Otobong Nkanga, Comot Your Eyes Make I Borrow You Mine
September 27–December 20, 2015
Opening: September 26, 7–9pm
Otobong Nkanga’s Comot Your Eyes Make I Borrow You Mine explores what it means when material abundance is replaced by absence, and when desire is superseded by cool disinterest. Written in Nigerian Pidgin English, the title implies “take your eyes away, I’ll lend you mine.” Operating within a personal register, Nkanga invites the viewer to “borrow” her perspective and to look intently at that which has been purposefully obscured. In spring 2015, Nkanga traveled to Namibia, making her way from Swakopmund to Tsumeb along a dilapidated railway line. She was intent on reaching the Green Hill in Tsumeb, an area renowned for its minerals, crystals and copper deposits. In Paris, Nkanga has created an ambitious wall drawing. It stems from her sifting through both her memories of Namibia and the vast amount of material she generated and collected over the ten day field trip. Nkanga examines how access to objects and images is often just as ring-fenced as any other resource. In Comot Your Eyes Make I Borrow You Mine questions of agency are central: Who has the agency to “see” and who is landscaping the view.
Kadist Curatorial Fellowship 2015
In collaboration with Portikus, Frankfurt/Main
Comot Your Eyes Make I Borrow You Mine is curated by Clare Molloy who is the Kadist Curatorial Fellow 2015. The Kadist Curatorial Fellowship supports a fellow from Curatorial Studies, a master’s programme at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule and Goethe University Frankfurt, to engage in research. She also worked on Otobong Nkanga’s exhibition Crumbling Through Powdery Air, curated by Fabian Schöneich at Portikus.
Kadist San Francisco
3295 20th Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Fall exhibition: A Painting is a Painting isn’t a Painting
September 24–October 31, 2015
Guest curated by Hamza Walker
We don’t ask ourselves why we look at paintings. We look at paintings because they are made to be looked at. For all of its self-reflexivity, painting has become more rather than less of an ideology. It’s just there. Part of the air we breathe. Can a painting ultimately be about anything other than itself? If the common denominator among all paintings is that they are things made to be looked at, then just as soon as we speak of differences that make each painting unique, we could also speak of their essential sameness: a painting is a painting is a painting. Maybe recourse to painting’s materiality is symptomatic–it isn’t so much a recourse to materiality as much as materiality trumps whether or not we view painting.
Works by: Anthea Behm, Victoria Fu, David Haxton, Geof Oppenheimer, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Mike Rubin
Fall artist in residence: Adelita Husni-Bey
Exhibition: November 18, 2015–January 16, 2016
During her residency, Adelita Husni-Bey will carry out a project that uses competitive sport as a reflexive arena to map the complexities of the dominant ideology in America—capitalism. She asks: “How has the concept of competition, vital to the current socio-economic system, come to structure the present notion of the ‘American Dream’? How are the aspirations of marginalized groups structured around narratives of success in the sports industry? What affect does a individualistic notion of ‘failure’ produce when it is divorced from class and collective conditions of disadvantage structurally present in a neoliberal milieu?” Conceived as a three-phase project, Husni-Bey will work closely around these questions with a group of athletes as part of a workshop. From this workshop, the artist and athletes will collaboratively shape a short film, to be presented alongside a small public archive at Kadist opening November 18, 2015.
