THE FAIREST-TEASER 03
the rite to transformMarch 12 - 20, 2022
HOTO
Potsdamer Str. 120, 10785 Berlin
Documentation & artworksREADING NIGHT
with Jordan/Martin Hell & Nina Kettiger
18.03, 6-9pm
Reading start 7pm
ARTISTS + PROFILES
tap on artist name to reveal (& hide) more info
↓Exhibition Text
"This is for those who lie defeated by history and by the present. It isn’t a manual to turn the current defeat into a future triumph, but a rumour about a passage hidden within the battlefield leading to a forest beyond it."
- Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
"I want to love myself for what I want, the way you do…/And watch the wanting itself change my life."
- Arianna Reines, RITE AID
In Ancient Greece, pregnant women would visit hypogea, a typo of circular tomb, where they let their dead beloved visit the world once again through the flesh of their unborn baby. I hope I was a pregnant woman who performed this ritual in a past life, says the poet CAConrad. And then that if they could be pregnant now, they would let all their friends who died of AIDS once again be earthbound. To turn anger into joy, bitterness into peace, ritual as an ancient technology is as old as humankind. As a mode of extreme present, its transformative powers bridge worlds ending and nascent ones. Today anything can be - and everything potentially is – ritual: From hidden quotidian habits to a fully subsumed marketing strategy- slapping eight different products on your face in the name of self-care. The beauty through is that rite is not bound by a certain type of action, but the importance we give to it. A coping strategy, as the more cynical postmodern voice may say, is an acknowledgement that there is more in the world than we may be capable of grasping.
Marginalised in the name of enlightenment, anything falling under the cloak of the occult has recurrently been met with suspicion. Yet at what increasingly seems to be an age in decline, the closing acts of Western modernity’s cosmological story play out, and we awake from a misty trance. The potency of transformation now found. in tools, which for centuries lay dormant, their animistic energies again revived. An end is always a beginning.
And should one be inclined to ask, ‘But you don’t actually believe that—?’ would be so beside the point, as the magic already is completed in performing the ritual itself, besides any desired outcome. To reclaim language in the name of poetic reactivation, the divine unity of desire and language, is magic. The transformative act lies in the acknowledgment of the eradication of Being and culture upon which modernity was birthed, of the women and queers burned at the stake in the name of reason. To speak a rite is thus an act of liberation, shifting the parameters of who we are and what we allow ourselves.
The 14 artists (Anatomie Fleur, Anne de Vries, CKTRL, Collo Awata, Gabriel Possamai, Jordan/Martin Hell, Lou de Bètoly, Lukas Städler, Mauro Ventura, Nina Kettiger, Pandora Graessl, Sarah Bernauer, Tra My Nguyen and Tyler Givens) included in Teaser03 address the many ways in which rituals or transformations appear in our human lives- from the habitual mundane to radical transgression. Opposed to a highly individualistic capitalist logic, the rite to transform emphasises the importance of community-building and collective consciousness as social practice. Through a vast array of mediums, their collective eye raises suspicion on the dominant reality-system of Western Modernity and its binary existence and challenges the position of the human in a natural and cosmic world.
We acknowledge that in times of global crisis, with our thoughts all with those suffering the atrocities of wars, the stakes change when thinking about transformation. Where potency to transform in these penultimate times might seem impossible, a turn to the metaphysical is in no way an exit, but maybe a passage within the battlefield, leading to the forest.
Text by Dara Jochum
Anatomie Fleur
“We are a creative Duo called Anatomie Fleur, made of Amandine Cheveau and Jean-Christian Pullin Aquin. In our work, we use flowers as the main artistic medium. Since the creation of our partnership in 2016, we have concentrated on contemporary art with a focus on large-scale installations.
We refer to our work as “Temporary Art” with many similarities to the ephemeral qualities shared with performance. Whether through painting, photography, or sculpture, flowers have long been represented in art history, primarily as a subject of representation. Rarely, though, has it been used as an artistic material. It is territory we aim to explore, flora as a tool and material rather than a subject; to redefine its emotional impact through the prism of contemporary themes. Thus, engagement of the sense, whether in harmony or discord. Through botanical landscape, we wish to expand the dialogue between space and curation, the form of live performance or installation.
We work on various proposals, from installations in the dimensions of microcosms to those of grand scale landscapes. Since the pandemic, we have been redefining our practice, in a quest for sustainability, we explore new possibilities through transformation into new bodies or through the transfer into a new virtual dimension.”
1. Anatomie Fleur. Photo: Volker Conradus
2-4. Anatomie Fleur, Hope Is Within, 2022
Tulips, sunflowers, concrete, acrylic lacquer, plaster, wood, ceramic, 30 x 161 cm
2+3. Views at TF-T03, HOTO. Photo: Markus Georg. Courtesy The Fairest
4. Photo: Melanie Glück
Anne de Vries
In breast feeding, when breast and mouth connect to each other, they each have a certain degree of intensity driving them, it is an impersonal pressure, that pulls together. There are many other forms of nipples and mouths, appearing in different capacities, places, through different ideas and anecdotes, through media devices and tools. Trained as a video artist, Anne de Vries is creating stories by connecting and manipulating media fragments often to the point where there is no video any more. With this mixed media approach to its subject matter, Anne’s eclectic output forms a labyrinth of interrelated narratives, that break free from the linear timeline and into the exhibition space. This transgression of media own format, play a central role in Anne’s artwork, and lends the works an hybrid appearance. It invites the viewer to re-establish a story's hidden character or the object's relationships to something between manifestations, thereby emphasising the process of extracting meaning from the physical world, and the mechanisms that drive us to make these connections.
1. Anne de Vries. Photo: Courtesy the artist
2. Anne de Vries, No Fear Deep Joy, be careful, 2020
CNC, hard foam, coating, deep joy logo, nails, paint
153 x 80 x 7,5 cm
3+4. Details
Views at TF-T03, HOTO. Photo: Markus Georg. Courtesy The Fairest
CKTRL
CKTRL has a tune for every occasion: as content making beats by himself at home in Lewisham as he is amongst this generation’s fashion and cultural vanguards. Music has been a part of his life for as long as he can remember: from clarinet lessons throughout his school life to fond memories from his NTS days, to his highly regarded masterpiece Robyn which pulled in serious support from the likes of; Vogue, DAZED, and I.D.
Bradley Miller is a proud product of his environment. Having worked with the likes of Virgil Abloh, Bianca Saunders, Tremaine Emory, Nicholas Daley, Mercedes Benz, Jenn Nkiru and most recently featuring in Beyonce’s ‘Black Is King’, Bradley is firmly embedded within the black cultural renaissance emerging here in Britains with his creations soundtracking everything from fashion films to commercials.
1. Cktrl (Bradley Miller). Photo: Ronan McKenzie
2. Cktrl, Mazes, 2021
Audio, looped every 15 minutes, 4 minutes 15 seconds
View at TF-T03, HOTO. Photo: Markus Georg. Courtesy The Fairest
Collo Awata
With eclectic electronic productions and the curation of mixes tailored for the multi-dimensional spheres of club culture, fashion, and art, Collo Awata's work draws strongly from African diasporic experiences met with Western practices. Recent musical work – where club rhythms and ambient moods meet – includes singles for notable compilations for labels Decisions and Radiant Love, along with their second EP, Opal Favours, released last year with TAR Records.
As a partner in AM Studio, Collo produces original soundscape for fashion and art projects. Broadening their musical endeavors through curation, they co-founded NIA records, an experimental label with the aspiration of releasing innovative sound-based projects rooted in honesty and openness, with the priority of underrepresented people and scenes.
1. Collo Awata. Photo: Julia Hebeisen
2. Collo Awata, Yowa Continuum, 2022
4 stages: Kala (birth); Tukula (peak physical experience); Luvemba (physical death); Musoni (spiritual realm); re-birth, collaboration with Madam Data
Single-channel video version, 12 minutes 45 seconds, 4 speaker audio
View at TF-T03, HOTO. Photo: Markus Georg. Courtesy The Fairest
3+4. Film stills, courtesy the artist
Gabriel Possamai
Gabriel Possamai (b.1996, Brazil) is a visual artist working primarily with painting, drawing and installation. Gabriel’s artistic practice consists of an ongoing investigation about productivity and conspiratorial thinking. Through a variety of pictorial and discursive modes, the artist constructs his body of work in a way in which elements such as scale, repetition and spacing appear to be as important as individual pieces.
He obtained in a BA in Painting from Escola de Música e Belas Artes do Paraná, Brazil (2018) and studied at the Städelschule in the classes of Laure Prouvost and Gerard Byrne. Recent exhibitions include: Adolescence, Opelvillen Rues-selsheim (2021) The Whistle - Absolventen Ausstellung Städelschule (2021); (solo) Country-Human & My Love’s Right o Passage - Joanne, Frankfurt am Main (2021). Upcoming group exhibitions include Sleepwalking at Goethe Institute, Dublin.
1. Gabriel Possamai. Courtesy the artist
2. Gabriel Possamai, Coin Toss, 2021
Oil, acrylic, cardboard & various objects on canvas, 50 x 50 cm
3+4. Detail views
Views at TF-T03, HOTO. Photo: Markus Georg. Courtesy The Fairest
Jordan/Martin Hell
Jordan/Martin Hell is an interdisciplinary artist & writer. He is the author of three books of hybrid criticism/auto-theory, "S.O.S. Some Oscillations Suck!", "Collected Poetic Rock Criticism with Translations in Morse Code", "It’s ‘Antichrist’ to You", and "THE WAR IS OVER".
He attended Cooper Union, New York and Städelschule, Frankfurt.
1. Jordan/Martin Hell (he/him)
2. Jordan/Martin Hell, P.E.R.R.S.: POWDER, ETHER, ROOFIE, REVERB, SMOTHER–Dusty, Dahmer, & Davis, 2022
Acrylic, beads, laser cut on plexi & wood, 62 x 52 cm
3. Jordan/Martin Hell, TÆ, 2022
Metal, bells, ribbons, chains, braided fabric, suede, & knife, 35 x 40 cm
4. Jordan/Martin Hell , The Children’s Hour, 1962, 2022
Machete, rope, dye, acrylic, tape, fabric, horse hair, & chastity cage; Machete: 60 x 6 cm; rope construction: 10 x 40 cm
Views at TF-T03, HOTO. Photo: Markus Georg. Courtesy The Fairest
Lou de Bètoly
Lou de Bètoly (b. 1985) is a Berlin-based artist who learned a variety of handcraft skills during her childhood, including hand knitting, crocheting, and embroidery. She worked at Jean Paul Gaultier's Paris studio for a few seasons after graduating in fashion design and pattern drafting with a focus on Haute Couture in 2006.Lou's most recent works, which incorporate abstract and surreal innocence into distinct graphic textures, are the result of several years of experimenting in fashion, sculpting, and sketching. The artist's lighthearted and colourful method of accumulating ideas from scratch and translating them into sculptural output finally leads to the materialisation of daydreaming. Archaic characters come in a variety of colourful disguises, such as apples or rabbits. In a humorous approach, the artist veers and plays around the boundaries of applied arts, questioning functionality as well as objects themselves, taking into account time and the spirit of creation, and hence story and history.
"My work is done with what I know intimately; needles and yarn. I am dealing with tradition while also rejecting it. I play with the ornamental and narrative sides of tapestry. With an intuitive approach, I let the work grow inevitably. The recent works juxtapose sexuality and innocence in an otherwise precariously vague universe."
1. Lou de Bètoly. Photo: Iga Drobrisz
2. Lou de Bètoly, Lapin câlin, 2022
Wool, cotton & nylon yarns, 100 x 140 cm
3+4. Detail views
Views at TF-T03, HOTO. Photo: Markus Georg. Courtesy The Fairest
Lukas Städler
Lukas Städler’s photography is an intimate exploration of the world that surrounds him and the people who find themselves in it.His photos capture fleeting moments and almost overlooked details, as the images scale between staged and candid, containing motifs that convey a feeling of warmth, closeness and sometimes melancholy. The boundaries are fluid, blurring and dissolving.
He lives and works in Berlin.
1. Lukas Städler. Photo: Emilia Stroschein
2. Lukas Städler, Schädel auf Angelinas Couch, 2022
Fine art print on Hahnemühle Baryta, 31 x 40 cm
3. Lukas Städler, Angelina, 2022
Fine art print on Hahnemühle Baryta, 31 x 40 cm
4. Lukas Städler, Stillleben im Schnee, 2022
Fine art print on Hahnemühle Baryta, 61 x 81 cm
Views at TF-T03, HOTO. Photo: Markus Georg. Courtesy The Fairest
Mauro Ventura
Mauro Ventura (b. Vila Nova de Famalicão), studied at Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto (2011) and at HFBK in Dresden (2014).
In the city of Porto, Mauro started projects like Arena Spa Superiora, originating the genesis of their work with rave culture, and entered performative and subversive events with the organisation ACIDA. Associating to the iconography and aesthetics of Porto's queer nightlife through Maus Habitos and Passos Manuel, Mauro was immersed by less conforming spaces.
Moving to Berlin in 2018, painting, installation and developing their visual identity became priority. Mauro's investigation asserts itself to the research of ancient languages that study the occult, inducing a hyperreal, or parallel video-game-like melting pot of syncretism. These alternate realities indulge in ritualesque actions and ways of painting that question formats with the aim to transform social structures.
Currently they work together with the organisation and label Herrensauna, in artistic direction and curatorial management, as well as with Dauwd’s label, Psssh.
1. Mauro Ventura. Photo: Philippe Gerlach
2. Mauro Ventura, Limbo Metal Membrane, 2022
Acrylic, sand, gloss and oil on fabric, 130 x 120 cm
3. Detail view
4. Mauro Ventura, Exterminating Angel, 2022
Steel, wax
Views at TF-T03, HOTO. Photo: Markus Georg. Courtesy The Fairest
Nina Kettiger
Nina Kettiger’s practice weaves sculpture, drawing and poetry. Mostly thinking at the scale of installation, her work focuses on the narrative that is revealed by object dynamics and interactions; vessels of associative thoughts. Overlapping ready-mades and carefully hand-crafted objects, she aims to blur the line between play and reality.
Sculptures become physical manifestations of an allegorical power, a magnifying gesture attempting to affect the material world through acts of attention and intention.
The idea of performance, as in “the execution of a role”, is something she explores by suggesting moments of unrealised participation, moments of dysfunction in the exhibition room. It is a way to challenge an object performing its function or art as performing its role of art, text as per- forming its role of text : sometimes as a self reflexive exercise or some- time as a psychoanalytical tool.
Text is an inherent part of her work; it does not exist as an instructional element, but rather as a disruption, dislocating the viewer and their ex- pectations towards the work. She questions how mediums are utilised to inform other mediums and how these different epistemological spheres interact to create endless loops of contextualisation: (image illustrating text, text explaining visuals and so on).
Nina (French/ Swiss) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She graduated from the class of Josephine Pryde at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) in 2020.
Additional to her art making, Nina hosts an experimental radio show titled “Tales from Beneath” airing monthly on public radio Reboot FM (88.4 Berlin, 90.7 Potsdam), since 2018.
1. Nina Kettiger. Photo: Lee Thieler
2. Nina Kettiger, Flat Mates (Marc, offering an unsolicited opinion in the kitchen), 2022
Framed digital print of a scanned object, 83 x 63 x 3 cm
3. Nina Kettiger, Flat Mates (Pippa, practicing nonjudgmental awareness in the privacy of her bedroom), 2022
Framed digital print of a scanned object, 83 x 63 x 3 cm
4. Nina Kettiger, Flat Mates (Pierre, second-guessing a creative idea right outside of the bathroom), 2022
Framed digital print of a scanned object, 83 x 63 x 3 cm
Views at TF-T03, HOTO. Photos: Markus Georg. Courtesy The Fairest
Pandora Graessl
Pandora Graessl, born and raised between Lucerne and Paris, currently based in Mexico City, has formed a multidisciplinary practice rooted in the relationship between nature, our bodies and the mind. Extensive travel and an insatiable curiosity for our planet has equipped her with a global creative vision and broad frame of references that enrich her work, while continuously returning to nature.
After extensive work as a producer and curator, Pandora founded her own creative studio ‘Graessl Studios’ in 2015. Implementing photography, video and installation, she began to invite others for participation in a series of immersive artworks. Following the need to share her own truth and the reality she experiences, she started creating worlds that could take people on collective journeys. This led to her “Re Project” and first solo exhibition, in a chapel in Arles.
Through ceremonial exhibitions, wreathed in flowers and light, Pandora connects the viewer to the cosmos and Mother Earth. Mythological elements and dazzling worship leave the viewer with a sense of wonder and respect for the planet, that both empowers and intimidates.
1. Pandora Graessl
2. Pandora Graessl, Sacer Sanguis, 2020
Inkjet Print 5+2AP, framed 60 x 80cm
3. Pandora Graessl, Love Sex Dreams, 2022
From the series, We bleed and tear together
Ceremonial sculpture on glass with beeswax, wax, offerings, flowers & fur, opening performance, ongoing, dimensions variable
Views at TF-T03, HOTO. Photos: Markus Georg. Courtesy The Fairest
Sarah Bernauer
Sarah Bernauer (b. 1981) is an artist and curator based in Berlin. She studied at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna and at the Academy of Art and Design, Basel.
Sarah transfers her themes into a wide variety of art genres such as painting, drawings, sculpture and film and develops spatial installations from them. She pays special attention to the various forms of language - spoken, written, but also the manifestation of symbols and signs - and the resulting transformation processes between different cultures and time periods, filled with constant flowing translation. Sarah is particularly interested in the failure of these very processes, sometimes deliberately bringing them about in order to artistically renegotiate their effects and impact.
Her work has been exhibited at the Kunsthalle Basel, Kunstverein Heidelberg, Salt Galata (Istanbul), Thames Side Gallery (London), Austrian Cultural Forum London and Kunsthaus Baselland, Centre Pasquart (Bienne) and at the Outsider Art Fair in Paris, among others.
As well as her artistic practice, Sarah has initiated and curated various projects and exhibitions, e.g. the Independent Artspace Festival and radio désir during Art Basel (2011–2012), the travelling artist (2011) at labor gallery, Budapest and das weisse haus, Vienna, a Word for a Play at Kunsthaus Baselland and Kunsthalle Mulhouse (2012), and The Stage of Making Things (2013) at la rada during Film festival in Locarno. In 2017, Sarah founded the Kunstraum and independent publishing house Blake & Vargas in Berlin.
1. Sarah Bernauer. Photo: Philippe Gerlach
2-4. Sarah Bernauer, The Diary Series, 2022
Acrylic on paper, dated & signed, 29,7 x 42 cm
Views at TF-T03, HOTO. Photos: Markus Georg. Courtesy The Fairest
Tra My Nguyen
Tra My Nguyen (b. 1992 Hanoi/Vietnam) is a Berlin-based artist working within sculpture, video and textile. Her practice draws upon Vietnamese diaspora perspectives for identifying connections as well as disconnections of material culture within the tangling nexus of hyper-globalization. Deploying speculative narratives, her work explores the tensions of gender, labor, migration and technology within the current neoliberal order.
Tra My graduated from Universität der Künste Berlin and her work has been exhibited at Bundeskunsthalle Bonn; Hebbel am Ufer HAU, Berlin; International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), Kunststiftung des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle; Human Resources, Los Angeles; State of Fashion Biennial 2022, Arnhem (forthcoming). In 2020 she received the Jury Prize of Fashion Positions Award.
1. Tra My Nguyen. Courtesy of the Artist
2. Tra My Nguyen, Bag #3, 2017
Teel, faux leather, textile, eyelets, 63 x 120 x 35 cm
3+4. Detail views
Views at TF-T03, HOTO. Photos: Markus Georg. Courtesy The Fairest
Tyler Givens
Tyler Givens:"I am a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Inspired by the existentialism found in my favorite animes and the flamboyance of 00s fashion imagery, my work explores themes of sex, escapism, and the end of the world through my lens as a gay, black man in America. Working with ink, oil paints and pastels, and 3D software, I create fantasy worlds in which queer black bodies are placed at the forefront of epic adventures. A future in which their blackness does not threaten their existence. Instead they challenge dragons, alien species or live out tropes of melodramatic romance, heartbreak and drama - always confronting a high stake choice: Slay the dragon or tame it? Save the planet or let humans die for the greater good of the cosmos? My stories confront and live outside of gender and sex, religious and social stereotypes, challenging the shame I carried growing up in the Church and the expected social construct of hetero, cookie-cutter perfection. I believe that presenting queer black bodies living freely, owning their being, is necessary at a time when our physical bodies are still policed, beaten, and disregarded in almost every existing system."
1. Self portrait
2-4. Tyler Givens, To capture a butterfly 003; 004; 005, 2022
Ink, soft pastel on paper, 13.5 x 19.5 cm
Images courtesy the artist