Nectar, in collaboration with Carles Taché Gallery & ON MEDIATION_Platform on Curatorship and Research, presents "Land(e)scapes", a group show with Aki Hoshihara (Japan), Nanao Tsukuda (Japan), Netai Halup (Israel) and Sasha Sime (Russia).
This exhibition shows the projects developed by the four artists during Nectar multidisciplinary art residency program, held from May 18th to June 8th 2018. The artist’s texts are the results of the collaboration with invited guests and from their visit to the Open Studio in Nectar studio spaces.
The residence program is based on an open call for project proposals, which allows resident artists to delve into their artistic and creative process in a rural environment and to connect their practice with the Barcelona art scene with the collaboration of On Mediation and the exhibition at Galeria Carles Taché.
This exhibition shows the projects developed by the four artists during Nectar multidisciplinary art residency program, held from May 18th to June 8th 2018. The artist’s texts are the results of the collaboration with invited guests and from their visit to the Open Studio in Nectar studio spaces.
The residence program is based on an open call for project proposals, which allows resident artists to delve into their artistic and creative process in a rural environment and to connect their practice with the Barcelona art scene with the collaboration of On Mediation and the exhibition at Galeria Carles Taché.
[ARTISTS SHORT ESSAYS]
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AKI HOSHIHARA
The series made during the Nectar residency establishes an intimate connection between environment, process and spectator. The uid and sensual brushstrokes –the fusion of the black characteristic of the sumi-e ink and the bright chromatic palette of the western watercolors– reverberate the nature of the Parc Natural de Les Guilleries –its mountains, its trees, its leaves, its rocks, water, sound or temperature– to take us to a moment of contemplation and harmony. The pictograms, which recall female and male bodies, reveal the dual character of the Eastern worldview, the yin and yang. Born in Japan and settled in the United States for almost two decades, the double background has led her to place as one of her centers of interest the combination of the place of origin with the culture of the adopted country. Aki Noshihara was trained as a calligrapher according to the traditional method from 5 to 17 years. Manual skill cultivated with e ort, discipline and perseverance, calligraphy is, as well as a way of understanding the world that relates language to aesthetics, a spiritual exercise. The calligrapher must execute the brushstroke in a single gesture, without any hesitation. This gestural precision is only possible when the mushin (“mind without a mind”) is reached, a meditative state in which the movements ow freely. The works of Hoshihara then translate the energies of ki and chi at a speci c moment. The textures, colors and shapes that we see could only emerge at that time and in that place. Gisela Chillida, art critic and independent curator. NANAO TSUKUDA. For Nanao Tsukuda, materiality and space are at the centre of her work. Nanao summons the memory of ancient objects that she collects in the places where she works as an artist. As if they were made of a photosensitive material that records the memories of a place, these elements become narrators of the human stories they have witnessed. Nanao complements the selection and collection of these objects with the realization of exquisite ceramic or textile sculptures. On some occasions, they recreate the found objects, and in others they work in dialogue with them. She often uses white cloths or papers, which function as a sort of podium or frame that allows the objects “to speak”, revealing their evocative and poetic power. During her residence at Nectar, Nanao has followed this same procedure: recovering remains of previous occupants of the farmhouse and arranging them on several layers of craft paper, has managed to isolate and highlight them. Afterwards, the artist has attributed a place in the house for each of these compositions, which is documented photographically. Working with the relation between the space of origin and destination, the artist nely asks the future owners of these works to send photographs of the new site. Thus, she can complete the circle of the di erent lives of these small nails, hinges or rusty locks that in their own materiality record the passage of time, as well as the existence of those unknown people who have lived in the farm of Nectar throughout the years. Julia Ramírez, art historian |
NETAI HALUP
Netai Halup’s work proposes anarchitectural elds of intensities. The bodies found through his praxis are exposed to a relational intensity that exists within the fragility of their own thingness. When we see his work, we aren’t just seeing the objects there, we are rather witnesses exposed to a moment of touch, to an imperceptible state of contact, we are there at the instant of an encounter where a critique is materially displayed, in an aberrant motility. This perceived raw tension is a skin from where Halup’s praxis eventually happens. Like hanged bodies in exhaustion, these actions appear to increase the environmental continuity through solidary cuts. The given and known space, where bodies are, is forced by the bodies themselves, performing fragile intensities that make visible an incorporeal metastasis. Halup allows these encounters to exist, the chance meeting of an intensive contact. Modeling traces that subtle lines compose through methodical accidents, frictions allowing surfaces to arise. Positing, displacing, even breaking, it is almost impossible to de ne that point of encounter which suddenly happens beyond the scope of things. Because an encounter changes everything. It transforms everything. An encounter is an event through which a subject becomes vacant. In Halup’s works exist an intensity for delineating inscriptions of connections. In that condition of the almost-nothingness that the things Halup decides to use, the connections produced convoke a poetic of precarity. But this precarity is that of their weights performing instability throughout the constantly happening space. The things nd themselves at the skin of the space, exposed in their naked gathering of touches. Like a theater of suspension, where apparently nothing is happening, at least nothing to the daily capitalistic counting of life, the convoked things enable a spacing that happens to be force like a thin skin doubling the unseen reality in silence around. Luis Guerra, artist and philosopher SASHA SIME The work of Sasha Sime (Russia, 1982) has been moving between reminiscent forms of abstract expressionism and informalism, but at the same time it presents traces of the visual culture on and o line of contemporary society. In his most recent projects, the appropriation of everyday materials is a constant, and this is related to trends such as pop, (not so) new realism or poor art. In Zero Flags (2018) he ironizes with the flag as a sign, proposing a leap from the canvas to the space, without losing the surface quality of the means employed. These cellophane and adhesive tape plans work, not as flags themselves, but as ideas of flags, beyond the politicization that such symbols arouse. Plastic, a post-territorial material, has no concrete connection with any physical place; likewise, the Zero Flags do not refer to any nation-state, neither real nor fictitious, but to the current possibility of the structures of abstracting from the territory. As can be seen in the manifesto that accompanies them, the flags have been programmatically resolved through a work process that is both structured and destructive. In parallel, the artist elaborated process schedules and work schedules. But these, like the Zero Flags, were voluntarily deviated, devoid of regulatory power through a play of forms and senses. With these (post) flags, Sasha Sime invites us to (re)think about the structures of contemporary collective organization, between artificial brilliance and the society of transparency. Pablo SanaOlalla, art historian and On Mediation's coordinator |
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