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CONDO is a large-scale collaborative exhibition of younger galleries. Several London galleries will host the show by dividing their galleries up and allocating spaces to the invited visiting galleries to have their own temporary exhibition space in London for 4 weeks. Each London gallery will also have one of these smaller spaces for their own exhibition. Partly critiquing existing models, but also thinking about the complaints that people don’t go to exhibitions anymore and only see art in art fairs. This is a way of pooling resources and acting communally to have almost a ‘festival’ of exhibitions by younger galleries.
We are proud to announce our participation at CONDO London 2016,
invited by ARCADIA _MISSA.
A.L. Steiner Greatest Hits & Phoebe Collings-James Just Enough Violence
Opening at Arcadia_Missa : 16.2.2016, 12 – 6pm
For Condo A.L. Steiner and Phoebe Collings-James, Arcadia Missa and Deborah Schamoni, will be presenting together new series of works within a one-room installation. Both artists create disparate narratives through the loose autobiographical storytelling that informs their research and practice. Steiner much more directly uses photography to string together sets of relations and moments, whereas Collings-James has been thinking about the terms ‘Can I Live?’ and ‘Just Enough Violence For The Whole Family’ that have come into her life through recent personal situations whilst making new work.
Where Steiner uses a camera lens to not only present the self but also generate conversations around visibility, Collings-James has been using painting (and specifically the painting of animals, the insertion of language) to attend to the representation of gendered and racialised bodies, without the direct documentation or representation of these bodies. At the occasion of Condo, hosted by Arcadia Missa gallery, Steiner will present a site-specific installation entitled “Greatest Hits”.
Collings-James is a London born artist who has recently spent periods of time in the US (where she encountered the phrase ‘Can I Live?’), Steiner’s (US based) new video pieces for this exhibition are a nod or a throwback to her days spent in the UK.
This is not a collaboration, but the two galleries have an ongoing friendship and are excited for this duo exhibition to develop further through the exchange that unfolds during the installation period and the collation of two series of different work, work that yet still crosses over in unlikely ways.
CONDO Filmscreening:
Sunday 17th January, 3:30 – 6pm
at Genesis Cinema, 93-95 Mile End Rd, London E1 4UJ
UK premiere :
Jonathan Penca
THIS IS TILLY STUFF THAT IS CONFUSING AND/OR SEEMINGLY USELESS (BUT I DIDN’T DARE DISPOSE OF IT), 2015, 9:40min, Video
Citing the audiovisual language of classic animation the video collages aspects from the biography of Germany’s first female paleontologist Tilly Edinger (1897 – 1967) centering around her 1921 doctoral dissertation On Nothosaurus. In it Edinger examined the fossilized brain of the marine reptile Nothosaurus mirabilis (the „wondrous bastard-lizard“ found in Bayreuth) by comparing it with the brain of the modern American Alligator. As she later on admitted herself, the paper contained several misconclusions – it nevertheless made her the pioneering figure in in the field of paleoneurology in which she made groundbreaking work for the rest of her life. Eventually forced to leave the Senckenberg natural history museum Frankfurt by the Nazi Regime, Edinger’s good scientific contacts enabled her to emigrate to the USA in 1939 where she found a new home at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge. „One way or another, the fossil vertebraes will save my life“T.E. At the age of 70 Edinger died of head injuries caused by a car accident on the way to the museum; it is believed she hadn’t turned on her hearing aid as she often did to better concentrate.
Jonathan Penca studied fine arts at Städelschule Frankfurt in the class of Judith Hopf form 2009 until 2015 working with drawing, sculpture, video and performance and is often part of collaborative projects. In his graduation piece the artist continues his interest in the subjective experience of nature and its forms of representation in the arts, science and pop-culture and examines the stages of artistic production from excitement to crisis until the trivial conclusion. The title of the resulting video THIS IS TILLY STUFF THAT IS CONFUSING AND/OR SEEMINGLY USELESS (BUT I DIDN’T DARE DISPOSE OF IT) is taken from one of the many archive-boxes containing Edinger’s estate Penca came across during his research in the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge.
Tilly Edinger had a struggle finishing her doctoral dissertation On Nothosaurus. To encourage her the befriended literature scholar Friedrich Gundolf dedicated Edinger a poem from the perspective of her object of study, praising „the Ty“ for bringing it back to life.