Honey-Suckle Company, Nairy Baghramian and Kate Davis
April 2 – May 28, 2006
Opening: Saturday, April 1, 2006, 7pm
Nairy Baghramian
Es ist ausser Haus
Kate Davis
STOP! STOP! STOP!
April 9 – May 21, 2006
Opening: Saturday, April 8, 2006, 7pm
KUNSTHALLE BASEL
Steinenberg 7
CH-4051 Basel
Switzerland
Tel 41 61 206 99 00 Fax 41 61 206 99 19
info@kunsthallebasel.ch
www.kunsthallebasel.ch
Opening hours
Tue/Wed/Fri 11am-6pm / Thu 11am-8.30pm
Sat/Sun 11am-5pm
The Kunsthalle Basel is delighted to present three solo exhibitions in the Spring season.
In the Oberlichtsaal (the upper room of the Kunsthalle) the Berlin-based artist group the Honey-Suckle Company will show their new installation non est hic. Honey-Suckle is one of 38 flower remedies used in Bach Flower Therapy. It helps people to learn from the past in order to get a new perspective on the future. The members of the HSC met in 1995 in Berlin, where they live and work today. Based on their shared need to find new ways forward in the Berlin of the 1990s, they developed collective actions, projects, concerts and self-organised venues (Neue Dokumente, Allergie Raum, Galerie berlintokio). Much in the spirit of an avant-garde production team, and adopting the path of many artistic or spiritual communities of the last two centuries, the HSC developed their own style, clothes and music. At the time, they have succeeded in keeping control of the distribution and mediation of their own work, while operating stealthily on the fringes of the art-world, or just outside it. The projects by the Honey-Suckle Company hover between installation, anti-fashion, new music, photography, video and dance performance. Each of the members is specialised in a different domain, and the sum of the different abilities results in works based on refusal of individual authorship. The HSC re-samples Bauhaus and the Russian avant-garde, recreates the instruments of medieval wandering musicians, and plots references to the Lebensreform movement of the 19th century. These appropriated aesthetics are given parts in associative installations, which aim at producing a totality of experience for the viewer.
The HSCs new installation non est hic will pursue the idea of a borderless and indefinite reality using light, sound, sculptural pieces and architecture made of found objects and dyed silk. Otherworldly, extra-sensual and yet real, it is not here, and yet is fully hic et nunc, here and now.
The Honey-Suckle Company, who celebrated their 10-year jubilee in 2005, are: N. Pleasure, Simone Gilges, Petr S. Kisur, Nico Ihlein, Zille Homma Hamid, Friedrich M. Lloch. Since 2001 the projects of the HSC have been realised in collaboration with the musician Konrad Sprenger.
Nairy Baghramian was born in 1971 in Isfahan, Iran, and she lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Her exhibition Es ist ausser Haus (It is outside of the house) at the Kunsthalle Basel is the artists first solo show in a public institution. The works of Nairy Baghramian are complex mise-en-scenes including elements of re-worked furniture design, set design and fashion. Her still lives in space involve references to material history, re-contextualized and turned into political statement. Classic modernist objects of desire, vintage apparel and photographic prints are fixed in the order imposed by hard-edged frames. These hybrid constructions can be read as stand-ins for imaginary games of power, but also as conversation pieces referring to literature and theatre. The sparse graphic form and the geometry of Baghramians strangely corporeal sculptures generate captivating visual scenarios, a mechanical and optical ballet in which the gaze hits one scene after the other, directed by the prescribed movement of the viewer.
Baghramian is interested in eccentric and shadowy characters of modernity, such as the writer Jane Bowles or the designer Jean-Michel Frank. In Baghramians work, the reflection on the arcane visual and textual codes of modernity is projected back onto the seemingly very different realities of the Middle East, where Modernism seems at the moment to be just a bygone episode. The artist focuses in particular on the issues of emancipating gender discourse versus the currently dominant conservative and patriarchal politics in Baghramians native Iran and elsewhere.
Es ist ausser Haus is an installation involving mirror structures, photography and architecture, which gives a new definition to the two large spaces of the Kunsthalle by nesting on both sides of the wall that divides them. The works take control over the visitors gaze, offering a series of fixed vantage points from which to contemplate them, such as seats installed in doorways between the rooms. At the same time, the narrative content includes a photo of a palatial interior in Persia, with memorabilia of Hitler, Adenauer, Attatürk and Mao Tse-tung democratically lined up on an elegant table.
Concurrently, the Kunsthalle Basel presents Kate Davis first institutional exhibition in continental Europe. The artist was born in 1977 in New Zealand, and lives and works in Glasgow, Great Britain. STOP! STOP! STOP! is a new installation including a series of drawings and collages and a specially built architectonic setting, a take on the signage system for pedestrian traffic.
Kate Davis works remind one of ready-mades and more specifically of the assisted ready-mades, in which the original found object is transformed or altered. Her installations often involve drawings in relation to objects such as display furniture or exhibition architecture (steps, stairs, purpose-built walls). Her exquisite pencil drawings render three-dimensional volumes of almost sculptural intensity. Kate Davis ingeniously uses simple silhouette drawing and paper cut-outs, she works with a range of collage and frottage techniques, as well as she employs a variety of printmaking technologies. These two-dimensional pieces have been used in contexts ranging from full-scale installation to ephemeral posters, and recently the first artist book by Kate Davis has been published under the title Partners (by Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, 2005). Kate Davis work explores the space between the body and the object, between the use and the appearance. She is focusing on mundane, functional tools designed to conform, to varying degrees, to the shape and abilities of the human body, thereby enhancing its capacity to perform certain everyday tasks. (This text contains edited excerpts from the essay Build Cracks by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith published for Kate Davis solo show at Dicksmith Gallery, London, 2006).
For further information please visit our website: www.kunsthallebasel.ch
KUNSTHALLE BASEL
Steinenberg 7
CH-4051 Basel
Switzerland
Tel 41 61 206 99 00
Fax 41 61 206 99 19
info@kunsthallebasel.ch
Opening hours: Tue/Wed/Fri 11am-6pm / Thu 11am-8.30pm / Sat/Sun 11am-5pm
