Gravity, Money, Concrete, Fabric

Vappu Jalonen

Gravity, Money, Concrete, Fabric

Galerie Suvi Lehtinen, Berlin, March 31–April 21 2012

Haleh Anvari, Sarah M Harrison & Lydia Hymen, Martin Kohout, Mikko Kuorinki & Topi Äikäs, Almudena Lobera

Curated by Vappu Jalonen

Vappu Jalonen: Material Tension

Gravity, Money, Concrete, Fabric examines matter as dynamic, significant and tense. The world is linked and tangible, an assemblage where there are no innocent and self-evident objects and in which agents are not always human.

In Almudena Lobera's drawing Juego de cama there is a small trampoline and above it a cloth that jumps on the trampoline or is about to land on it for the first time. The trampoline is static and looks almost like an instruction picture: here is a trampoline. It is anchored into gravity and the vibration and elasticity of the mat are always attached to the metal frame. It enables the movements of other things and bodies while staying tightly attached to the ground. In the work, the cloth bundles, opens, flutters and jumps, merging into the air, almost without gravity, nearly a ghost. It carries with it the art history of portraying folds (not the manual, never). There is a tense relationship between the trampoline and the cloth, they act and move in relation to one another (the movement has either just happened or is about to happen and almost inevitably repeats itself, it is a feature of the trampoline). In Lobera's drawing, the trampoline and the cloth are material agents, their thingness is vibrant.

Sticks: Class B by Martin Kohout is a series of fairly similar sticks. They have handles with straps that you could slip around the hand as with a ski pole. In order to get a better grip, in order to: flail the air, exercise (but how?), produce pain, produce pleasure, break something. They seem pleasant to hold, it is hard to resist touching them (because one must touch the handle). However, they escape a particular use, they are tools for nothing or they are just almost: almost whips, almost sports equipment. It is as if they refuse to be anything but certain kinds of sticks. At the same, their non-fixed materiality opens countless possibilities for action.

Chador-Dadar, a live installation documentation by Haleh Anvari, focuses on a chador that engages in interventions around the world. It visits Dubai, London, Taj Mahal, Paris, Istanbul and Jaipur. Included are also pictures from the Chadornama series which was shot in Iran. Anvari writes: "If the chador is the icon for Iran, let it meet the icons for some other nations. Chador-dadar became a live installation in every city it was photographed in and ultimately revealed as much about the people it visited as it did about itself."

In the piece, the chador is a colourful cloth that moves with the body and wind. It is not only a repeated icon for a nation, religion, freedom or oppression but an almost playful material agent that rejects its fixed symbolic meaning.

Contemplating The Concept Of Trust - A Script For A Lecture by Mikko Kuorinki and Topi Äikäs is a script for a performance lecture that took place in Pori, Finland. It deals with trust: how it is born, what its conditions are and its necessity for being able to act. The performer must trust the audience and the audience the performer but there must also be trust for the structures of the performance space, that the concrete around endures. In addition, the work examines the relationship between money and trust as well as money as a requirement for artistic activity, money that may come from grants and fees but often more reliably from other jobs or from mom.

The stop motion animation You Can Also Fail by Sarah M Harrison and Lydia Hymen was originally presented as a part of a performance at HAU 2 in Berlin in 2011. Harrison ja Hymen state: "The work deals with the disidentification with the production of the self as a distinct individual and the value systems of cultural capital." In the video, a human body undresses itself from different things and identities while staying thing-like itself.