May 10–August 27, 2023
Tales of the Altersea
May 10–August 27, 2023
May 10, 2023
Jac Leirner
Swiss Institute presents the first major institutional solo exhibition in New York of Brazilian artist Jac Leirner (b. 1961, São Paulo). The exhibition encapsulates a wide chronological span of the artist’s experience, with works ranging from the 1980s to today.
In stacks, piles and layers, Leirner’s selective accumulation of everyday objects follows an accretive logic. Leirner’s process, at once controlled and compulsive, leads to partially obscuring the very nature of the materials she gathers as they mutate to the sculptural. The paradoxical performance of erasure through accrual echoes the disappearance of Leirner’s objects of choice over the years: plastic bags, cigarettes, banknotes and business cards, once ubiquitous and seemingly irreplaceable, are increasingly pushed out of circulation.
Tethered between an essential urge to amass and incidental forms of serendipity, Leirner’s commitment over more than 40 years to gathering materials, objects and products composes “an idealist lexicon of signs wherein the will to live itself is discernible in an ever-receding materiality,” as Baudrillard wrote in The System of Objects of objects of consumption. Her continued formal tribute to expendable materials elevates the ephemeral to the biographical, the collective and the sublime.
Swiss Institute gratefully acknowledges the Jac Leirner Exhibition Circle, Consulate General of Brazil in New York / Instituto Guimarães Rosa, Esther Schipper and Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel.
This exhibition is organized by Simon Castets, former SI Director, and Alison Coplan, Senior Curator and Head of Programs.
Jac Leirner was born in 1961 in São Paulo, where she lives and works. In 1984, she received her BFA in Fine Arts from the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado, in São Paulo. Selected solo exhibitions include: 2019 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019); Jac Leirner: Add It Up, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2017); Institutional Ghost, IMMA Dublin (2017); Borders are Drawn by Hand, MoCa Pavilion, Shanghai (2016); Jac Leirner. Functions of a variable, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2014); Jac Leirner: Pesos y Medidas, Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canária (2014), Jac Leirner, Hardware Silk, Edgewood Avenue Gallery, Yale University School of Art, New Haven (2011); Jac Leirner, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo (2011); Adhesive 44, Miami Art Museum, Miami (2004); Projeto Parede, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo (1999); Directions, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (1992); Jac Leirner, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1991), Currents, ICA, Boston, (1991), Viewpoints, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1991), and Hip-Hop, Bohen Foundation, New York (1998).
Lap-See Lam: Tales of the Altersea
Swiss Institute is pleased to present the first-ever solo exhibition in the United States by Stockholm-based artist Lap-See Lam. Centered upon a room-spanning video and CGI installation of the same name, Tales of the Altersea marks a continuation of Lam’s invocation of shuttered or sold Chinese restaurants in Europe, and, more broadly, her poetic interpretations of the lives of Hong Kong Chinese communities in diaspora.
The scenography of this central 8-channel video draws from the décor and imagery of one such restaurant: the floating Sea Palace. In the early 1990s, this three-storey ship with seats for 230 dining guests was commissioned by Johan Wang, an entrepreneur in Sweden. It sailed from Shanghai to Europe, docking in various cities but failing economically after only one year. The restaurant ship lay moored in Gothenburg where it fell into decay until 2018, when it was brought to Stockholm where it is annually repurposed as a haunted funhouse in the city’s Gröna Lund amusement park each Halloween. The luminous underwater world we encounter in Tales of the Altersea unfolds from this misfit vessel, where two protagonists, twin sisters, encounter a series of characters born out of Cantonese history and mythology. Accompanied by music and soundscape by composers Linus Hillborg and Marlena Salonen, and vocals by Bruno Hibombo, the story follows the girls across a journey of adventure and discovery. This panorama is bookended by neon and brass sculptures of verdant traces of a dragon head and tail at the bow and stern of the ship that glow in SI’s lower level staircase and hallway.
In synthesizing antiquated and contemporary production techniques, along with styles of magical realism and oral history, Lam maps instances of generational and cultural loss next to identification and disidentification with cultural constructs. Through her forensics and her poetry, she indicates what might blossom in these vacancies.
Lap-See Lam: Tales of the Altersea is made possible through the support of the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, Lena Josefsson, and Galerie Nordenhake. Additional support is provided by the Embassy of Sweden in Washington DC, the Consulate General of Sweden in New York, and IASPIS with support of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee.
This exhibition is organized at Swiss Institute by Stefanie Hessler, Director, and Daniel Merritt, former Curator and Head of Residencies. Tales of the Altersea was first presented at Portikus, Frankfurt-am-Main, where it was initiated and curated by Liberty Adrien and Carina Butkus.
Lap-See Lam (b. 1990 in Stockholm, Sweden) is an artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. Recent solo exhibitions include Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2022); Trondheim Kunstmuseum (2021); Moderna Museet Malmö (2018–2019). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at KINDL—Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022); GHOST 2565, Bangkok (2022); PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv (2021); Performa 19, New York (2019).
Spora
Featuring works by Mary Manning, Helen Mirra, Jenna Sutela, Vivian Suter, T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss
This May, Swiss Institute launches Spora, a curatorial initiative centered in SI’s institutional imperative to integrate environmental consciousness and climate action into all facets of the institution. Like spores spreading throughout the physical structure of our building and permeating the immaterial processes of SI, Spora is an experiment that explores what a practice of environmental institutional critique could be.
Unfolding and growing over the course of the next several years, the initial artworks in the project will be on long-term view in the non-gallery spaces of SI. In the stairways, hallways, roof, and other interstitial areas, artists have contributed to the daily life, maintenance and functioning of the building with artworks that take shape through compost, plants, wall paint, public space and more. These include Jenna Sutela’s earth battery-powered oracle, Vivian Suter’s weather-exposed mural, Helen Mirra’s chance-determined background painting, T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss’s sonic recordings of mycelium, and Mary Manning’s photographs merging private and public, natural and urban spaces.
The artworks at the core of Spora are accompanied by the institution’s initial steps towards climate action, begun in 2022, which take form as a thorough analysis of SI’s carbon emissions through transport, travel, energy, and other ecological and social factors, and a plan of actions developed with the entire SI team for reducing the institution’s environmental impact. SI will publish and share this process with the hopes to sprout inspiration and collaboration across institutional boundaries. Spora is conceived as an open-ended approach, which acknowledges that this is a continuous project that will generate more questions than answers. It is an attempt to germinate change while acknowledging context and limitations, with the understanding that this process is imperfect but urgent.
Spora and the accompanying event series, These Seasons, as well as the institutional initiatives of climate action, propose a start to a morphing process of reflection and transformation.
Spora is made possible by Teiger Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Consulate General of Finland in New York City. The project is organized by Stefanie Hessler, Director, and Alison Coplan, Senior Curator and Head of Programs.
