Magali Reus: Hot Cottons

Hot Cottons is Dutch artist Magali Reus’ first solo exhibition in Scandinavia, and her largest solo exhibition to date. The exhibition features a comprehensive group of new sculptures, presented within a bespoke exhibition architecture that reveals itself through a series of spatial chapters.

Magali Reus creates sculptural objects through a working process of continual accumulation and erasure. She deliberately sets the idea of transitory status against what we claim to recognize, creating framing devices that ask new questions about the symbolic relevance of things we are so keen to define.

In Hot Cottons, new sculptures make continual reference to the mutating qualities of the physical materials that surround us. Using smoke, fire and steam as metaphorical triggers, the implication is that each work might be a tool or agent for an active scenario yet to unfold. Every component therefore carries its own authoritative formal importance: like a diagram whose unique pattern forms a language composed of many hundreds of types of internal measurement, equilibrium can be found not in the external world at large, but in the relationships between Reus’ obsessive minute forms themselves.

There is frequent multiplication in Reus’ works—like teeth, bricks or rows of houses, for example—as they enact the formal grammar of an object obviously connected to a larger and more purposeful system or logic. Her work considers the way comic exaggeration or stylized appropriation can shift the rhythm of the decoding of a surface by a viewer. Oversized or imitative forms might therefore be said to be performing, and in this way Reus’ work can be linked with conversations of material flirtatiousness, of sexuality or gender.

The extensive production of new works that makes up Hot Cottons will also appear in her subsequent exhibition at the South London Gallery in 2018. Reus has scrutinized the idea of units of mobility with an installation actively related to the different exhibition architectures of the two institutions.

Magali Reus (b. 1981, The Hague) lives and works in London.

Commissioned and produced by Bergen Kunsthall and South London Gallery. Supported by the Mondriaan Fund and Arts Council Norway.

A new publication will be co-published by Bergen Kunsthall and South London Gallery in 2018. 

Charlotte Prodger
BRIDGIT / Stoneymollan Trail
NO. 5
November 3, 2017–January 7, 2018

In Bergen Kunsthall’s Gallery NO.5 the Glasgow-based artist Charlotte Prodger presents two of her recent video works; BRIDGIT (2016) and Stoneymollan Trail (2015).

Film and video have been at the center of Charlotte Prodger’s practice for over two decades. During this time she has used the technological development of the video medium as a material starting point for her exploration of moving images. At the same time she ties the medium’s format evolution directly to autobiographical elements in her work.

BRIDGIT (2016) has been filmed in its entirety with Prodger’s own iPhone, a tool she uses in her everyday accumulation of visual material. Using the iPhone camera as a “prosthesis,” or an extension of the body and the nervous system, she dissolves the relationship between everyday life and what is normally associated with “production.” In Stoneymollan Trail (2015) the development of the video format is associated even more directly with the artist’s personal history. The video features material from an extensive personal archive of mini-DV cassettes, high-resolution digital film and iPhone videos, as well as screenprinted graphics.

Charlotte Prodger (b. 1974) lives and works in Glasgow.

A publication with a new commissioned essay by Mason Leaver-Yap will be available online and in our shop.