Gitte Villesen / Emma Hedditch, Lili Huston-Herterich and Jean-Paul Kelly

Gitte Villesen
With a contribution by Beverly Buchanan. In cooperation with Dental, Chiara Figone, Joerg Franzbecker, Emma Wolf-Haugh and Saidou Ndiaye

Badischer Kunstverein presents Gitte Villesen (1965, Denmark) in a solo exhibition accompanied by a special programme of education and events. The exhibition focuses on current projects, including two new works produced for the Kunstverein. Until a few years ago, Villesen developed her primarily filmic and photographic works as situational encounters with protagonists who are present not just through the moving images of the video footage, but also as important dialogue partners. Villesen’s practice of telling and re-telling as forms of manifold montages of the encountered, the staged, and the archival is continued in her recent projects, but extended through pervasive references to feminist science fiction. In the video installation There is an Affinity (2019), Villesen combines a drawing of enlarged soil organisms by the botanist R. H. Francé with a quotation from science fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Another audiovisual affinity unfolds in the newly-produced video work that gives the exhibition its title: A ramble through real and fictional landscapes tells the story of how languages are created and signals transmitted. The recordings point toward fragility, sensitivity, but also strength; characteristics that can be found in phenomena as diverse as mimosa or dyslexia. Through references to the activist practices of the artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, The Flyers of Lucy and Suzanne (2021; together with Joerg Franzbecker) demonstrate how prevailing assumptions concerning eccentric, non-male persons can be deployed as the basis for conspiratorial practices. Particular noteworthy are the presentation of works by Beverly Buchanan, which have accompanied Villesen’s artistic practice for several years.

Curated by Anja Casser.

Programme
October 21, 7pm: A meeting between Chiara Figone, Saidou Ndiaye & Gitte Villesen

November 12, 7pm: The Flyers of Lucy and Suzanne
Lecture performance (Materialsichtung) by Joerg Franzbecker & Gitte Villesen

November 13, 3–5pm: Readings & Re-tellings from feminist sci-fi
Workshop with Emma Wolf-Haugh & Gitte Villesen

7pm: Talk with Jennifer Burris & Park McArthur on the works by Beverly Buchanan


Emma Hedditch, Lili Huston-Herterich & Jean-Paul Kelly: With a view to a later date, or never
Bricolage has its origins in anthropology, with the bricoleur identified as someone who develops a practice via process, understanding their environs by using what is at hand. In an art historical context, bricolage has no single strategy, methodology, or trajectory. This exhibition identifies contemporary practices by Emma Hedditch (1972, UK), Lili Huston-Herterich (1988, US), and Jean-Paul Kelly (1977, Canada).

The power of their projects rests not in the provenance of a unified medium or a single gesture. Instead, it is found in the accumulation of time and the potential for a practice imbricated with everyday life—situating the historical and social context of the bricoleur in relation to the viewer at the moment of encounter. For Hedditch, this includes making manifest via photos and found objects the demarcation of property boundaries that we both access and enforce each day. In close proximity to her home in Rotterdam, Huston-Herterich has sourced fibres from the detritus of the textile industry as the foundation for sculptures that are knotted or felted, thus marking the passage through multiple generations of hands. Finally, Kelly appropriates image documents we can instantly access electronically, interpreting and transforming what and how they depict. Here, through sculptural panels of perspex and rusted steel, he reshapes and hardens our gaze away from our screens and into other screens that fasten the flesh and choice of sight to material.

Curated by Jacob Korczynski.

Due to its historical building, the Badischer Kunstverein is only partially accessible. Exhibitions in the Atrium are accessible with no step barrier. For further information, please contact us: info [​at​] badischer-kunstverein.de

Supported by the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario and the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council.