SoiL Thornton: Choosing Suitor / Mai Ling: NOT YOUR ORNAMENT / Mykola Ridnyi

SoiL Thornton: Choosing Suitor
SoiL Thornton’s works resist categorization along preconceived notions of genre, medium, artistic subjectivity, biography, as well as gendered and racial identity. They have been traversing boundaries between media such as painting, sculpture, and photography; in turn, their work expands to installation, and they frequently act as a curator. Based in Brooklyn, New York, they have exhibited widely and internationally.

A multifaceted play with language and meaning can be grasped in their work and exhibition titles. They have been working against the grain of some of the art world’s conventions, from medium specificity to questions of branding and commodification. In so doing, they inquire into modes of circulation of artworks, and how artists can become brands and accrue value with their public personas. To the artist, renegotiating the limits of artistic media and common presentation formats seems as crucial as unsettling expectations and conceptions of identity directed at individuals––above all, artists.

For their exhibition Choosing Suitor at the Secession, SoiL Thornton has created a new body of work that addresses issues of gender identity and blurs their common attributions. The works range from photo series to paintings, combined acquired materials, and an inflatable sculpture.

Stretching across almost the entire width of the exhibition space and standing just behind the glass doors, the tailor-made inflatable titled Husband Chair (VS) blocks the main entrance to the exhibition space. This sculpture is a recurring element in exhibitions by SoiL Thornton. Its measurements are based on the room’s dimensions, on the one hand, and on the height of the respective curator on the other. Invariably, the sculpture blocks access to a space and obstructs the view inside. With this deliberately restrictive set-up, the artist comments on a theme they have been paying attention to for a long time, namely the question of the postulated social accessibility of institutions, spaces, and discourses of art.

SoiL Thornton was born in 1990 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Programmed by the Board of the Secession
Curated by Jeanette Pacher

Mai Ling: NOT YOUR ORNAMENT
Founded in Vienna in 2019, Mai Ling is an artists’ collective and association dedicated to facilitating dialogues on experiences of racism, sexism, homophobia, and any kind of prejudgment, particularly against Asian FLINT* (women, lesbian, inter, non-binary, and trans). Rooted in solidarity against patriarchal and racial discrimination, the group offers a space and growing network to give voice to the many individuals affected by such discrimination and foster new forms of collaboration. As an anonymous collective and a multi-hybrid figure, with everyone identifying as “Mai Ling,” the group employs a variety of artistic and discursive formats such as performances, texts, videos, sound, installations, talk series, interventions, and protests.

In NOT YOUR ORNAMENT, Mai Ling investigates the racialized and gendered logic of “Ornamentalism”—a term conflating “Orientalism” and “ornamental” that the American feminist scholar Anne Anlin Cheng discusses in her book of that title, which analyses how the European and American imagination has constructed Asian femininity as a hybrid human being and decorative object. Mai Ling challenges such an objectified condition through ornamental and invasive plants by exploring the concept of “stickiness” as an agency of resistance and pleasure. During the exhibition, Mai Ling offers a series of guided tours centering the voices of artists, cultural workers, collectives, and initiatives of Asian descent based in Austria.

Programmed by the Board of the Secession.
Curated by Christian Lübbert.

Mykola Ridnyi
In his most recent works, Mykola Ridnyi has turned his attention to fundamental questions concerning the role of media and the representation of war. The two works he shows at the Secession shed light on different facets of his oeuvre: a new video that, in light of the current situation in Ukraine, came into being in unwonted circumstances; and a work on the façade that extends the exhibition into the public space, which has long been an important arena for the artist’s activities.

Two monumental banners emblazoned on the Secession’s prominent and widely photographed façade bring images from the war in Ukraine to downtown Vienna: one shows a residential building that was hit in a rocket attack in 2014, a reminder that this war actually began almost a decade ago; the other is an aerial shot of North Saltivka, the district of Kharkiv in which the artist grew up and that is also the new film’s subject. The motifs derive from Blind Spot, a series Ridnyi started working on in 2014, initially by gathering images from the internet that documented the war in the Donbass and other areas in eastern Ukraine.

Inside the Grafisches Kabinett, he presents the new film The District, a very personal meditation on the war as it manifests itself in his native Kharkiv. Footage recorded on the scene is defamiliarized by effects such as pixel clouds and montaged photographs and drawings, forging a coexistence of past and present, outward and inward landscapes, facts and recollections. The images are accompanied by a voiceover narrative that recites the artist’s memories of places of his childhood and youth that no longer exist.

Mykola Ridnyi, b. Kharkiv, 1985, lives and works in Kyiv and Berlin, where he is currently a fellow of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe’s Artistic Research Grant Program.

Programmed by the Board of the Secession.
Curated by Bettina Spörr.

Publications
The exhibitions are accompanied by publications. The digital publications are available for free here.

Opening program
Opening: Thursday, September 14, 2023, 7pm, DJ-Set by Hotpotposse, 8pm
Exhibition talk: Mykola Ridnyi in conversation with David Riff, an event by the Friends of the Secession, Thursday, September 14, 2023, 6pm

Press contact
Julia Kronberger, presse [​at​] secession.at
Press preview: Thursday, September 14, 2023, 11am
Press materials: secession.at/presse