Lujza Kramárová
What choreographs the contemporary body? What unseen forces are shaping our desires, behaviours, futures? Through the interplay of sculptures, light, scent, and sound, Taste, State, Behaviour (Xenohormones) confronts the supposedly immaterial agents that mediate contemporary embodiment.
The work begins with hundreds of sculptures recalling the sorts of containers used in the cosmetic, pharmaceutical, and wellness industries. Among the ingredients in the sculptures’ material foundation are cadmium, copper, soya, petrochemical derivatives and zinc — elements and compounds that can be classed as xenohormones (substances produced outside the body that mimic or disrupt its hormonal activity) and are commonly found in everyday consumer products. We are arguably more familiar with the seductive promises of such products than their molecular make-up, yet the ideals they sell are grounded in biochemical realities.
Frequencies deepen. Light shifts. Scent densities fluctuate. A physical tension settles. You step, bend, turn, and adapt.
Max van Meeuwen
Max is pulling things out of the darkness. As in their dreams, so too in monotype printing. They start with an enormous, inked-up plate. They lean in to it, over it; before them a sheet of beautiful black. With a cloth or a Q-tip they then remove the ink to create the image, wiping it away. There’s a gentle violence to the image-making that comes from negation. Creation via inversion. And there’s an intimacy, too. The ink-sodden cloth and the ragged Q-tip are better known to the body for cleaning. The body’s nooks and crannies, its fleshy undulations and oozing orifices, these spots hold the secrets that are silenced with a swipe. Here, at the point of removal, and here in a moment of frozen movement – as in Caravaggio’s last painting The Matyrdom of Saint Ursula, where an arrow pierces Ursula’s chest – here is where the story is. ‘Prepare to meet God.’
The three-headed dog guards the gates of Hell. His heads represent the past, present and future. We’re standing before a portal or passage.
Zoom out. Max’s ink-black print is a single, sharp-lined slice of something much fleshier. It’s bodily, see? See how the image arises from the monstrous composition? The erotics of the cross-section?
In their graduation work, Max conjures huge, powerful bodies in motion. These bodies disrupt the landscape. Over 40 individual A0 prints form multiple works that crouch in the Rietveld garden. This reverse Frankenstein – whole before it became a composite – is unrecognisably feminine, depersonalised by scale. (text written by Clem Edwards)
Emma Panzou – Lespinasse-Ide-Lafargue
Everyone knows the story of the pearl. Molluscs make them when an organism finds its way into the shell. For Emma, the grain of sand that became her graduation work was a small jewellery inheritance that arrived in an orange paper bag. Within it, among other treasures, a pearl necklace.
Emma’s work explodes the archetype of the pearl necklace, troubling the many ways in which value has been assigned onto it. It is a conceptual enquiry into the form that is faithful to the form itself – each necklace summoning one perennial characteristic of the iconic pearl necklace and materialising a new iteration to center that characteristic. Take for instance the extraordinarily long string of seed pearls that guides the viewer into the exhibition space. This work spotlights the hand-led body-delight of repetitive acts in craft practices. A greenish pearl necklace that has been marinating in layer upon layer of electroplating and rust speaks to the slow and unpredictable way in which the pearl grows and takes shape. Elsewhere, something fleshy and pearl-like emerges from a silver disc – it’s like watching all the frames of a stop-motion cartoon at once. The pearl and its host are made of the same material. Questions of rarity, scale and market value are presented almost museologically in Emma’s installation. What’s important is that the body of work sidesteps the emotional and political weight of the jewellery inheritance and of jewellery’s inheritances. Instead and more simply, it delights in the many possibilities of the pearl necklace.
