Occupations of Uninhabited Space
Gianni Manhattan, Vienna
November 11 2017 - January 14 2018
Zsófia Keresztes, Jenine Marsh, Zoë Paul
"If you like you can read it as a thought-experiment.
The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was
used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to
predict the future - indeed Schrödinger's most famous
thought-experiment goes to show that the "future," on
the quantum level, cannot be predicted- but to
describe reality, the present world."
- Ursula K. LeGuin
One reoccurring trope in Feminist science fiction from the 1970s
is the proposal for a functioning utopia, the very prototype of an
aesthetically and libidinally orientated social vision, which is
often opposed to a technological and engineering-orientated
society. The authors conjure a community or society that – after
the immense struggle to free itself, even in imagination, from the
infection its very minds and values and habits by an omnipresent
consumer capitalism – creates a narrative space radically other,
uncontaminated by all those properties of the old lives and the
old preoccupations; they envision a collectivity untormented by
sex or history, by cultural superfluities or an object-world
irrelevant to human life.
These future(s) so imagined are never predictive; they are
describing a future present. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
Each of the positions from Occupations of Uninhabited Space
imagines a life, a society, a species, a realm as radically other.
Zsófia Keresztes’ works are reminiscent of totems, fountains or
monuments to alien deities. The pale mosaic effigy which
oscillates between soft shapes and sharp thorns, winds itself
around sleek copper pipes, while strands of blond thread overflow
the basins. The disembodied sensual organs – eyes, skin, a tongue
– are perched on top, as if impaled violently as an offering.
Keresztes is interested in how digital avatars can infest the real
and how a digital character becomes incarnated. Her avatars
manifest themselves in the world and cannibalise sensation and
perception, they have become pure desire and drive.
Jenine Marsh’s sculptures work as relics drawn from the pillars of
capital – crushed coins, dangling of metal threads, disfigured
corbels warped by hands grasping them speak of the ambiguity of
homeownership. Marsh assumes the role of a forager, finding most
of her materials discarded on the streets, as if they have been
overrun by time or nature. Her practice proposes an adverse
evolution especially of man-made constructs, such as time, currency
and belonging. In doing so, Marsh bends new meaning out of things
that hold value.
Zoë Paul combines traditional craft techniques with the remnants of
industry. For Occupations of Uninhabited Space, she weaved
intricate abstract patterns on coarse, heavy grills sourced from a
scrapyard on the island of Giali. The island opposes a sharp
contrast of bucolic landscape and heavy industrialisation: While
the original outlay of the landscape is one of white sand and black
obsidian cliffs, the island is owned by a Swiss mining company,
slowly gutting the mountain.
.
whose ruins litter a fictional garden (no. 1, 3-5) 2017.
Found plaster corbel, gypsum cement, plasticine, newspaper.
whose ruins litter a fictional garden (no. 2) 2017.
Found plaster corbel, gypsum cement, plasticine, newspaper,
foreign and forged paper and coin currencies, clock faces, wire.
whose ruins litter a fictional garden (no. 6) 2017.
Found plaster corbel, gypsum cement, plasticine, newspaper,
drywall plaster.
cymbal column (1-3), 2017.
Wire, train-pressed coins of various currencies.
key purse, 2017.
Train-pressed keys, newspaper, acrylic varnish, wire.
wallet, 2017.
Newspaper, acrylic varnish, wire, flower bulb, paper and coin
currencies, train-pressed coins, found metal object, gravel.
keep with the second hand, 2017.
Found wire, flower stem, flower bulb, clock hand, air dry clay,
gravel stone.
hold for the second hand, 2017.
Found wire, clock hand, magnets, train-pressed washers, flower bulb.
Art Viewer
Tzvetnik