and so on, 2022, das weisse haus, Vienna, Austria

_{Images courtesy of Klara Schnieber, Joanna Pianka, and Xenia Snapiro}

Further Info, Exhibition Expanded at dwhx
and so on is a group exhibition at das weisse haus featuring the works of Ana de Almeida, Caroline Garcia, Rami Geroge, Na Mira, Rebeca Romero, and agustine zegers, from November 2022-February 2023. Together the artists of and so on provide guidance towards ways of moving through personal and cultural bereavement rooted in the loss of relationships and knowledge that is inevitable. and so on considers sites of loss as a space for creation, immeasurable to producing living archives.

agustine zegers ongoing olfactory research is intertwined with their relationship to the history of environmental extractivism in Chile. Considering non-normative artforms and methods of storytelling, their poetic installation brings a macro view to and so on and imagines the scent of Earth before anthropogenic destruction altered the composition of atmospheric breath. Their work invites one to imagine communing with a ‘precarious breath’ and acts as an expanded interpretation of intergenerational memory found within the other artists’ works.

Caroline Garcia and Na Mira use ancestral rituals from their matrilineal heritage to directly process their personal experiences with the passing of life. Garcia’s installation along with her performance draws from Indigenous Filipino practices of headhunting and martial arts, as a way of processing grief, specifically that of matriarchal loss. Mira’s drawing uses the process of ‘automatic writing’ interwoven with the practice of Korean shamanism as a space for channeling with and listening to ancestors and spirits. Mira notes, “when my arm broke I adapted to automatic writing with my non-dominant hand which wanted to write red, in words unfamiliar to me. I asked and listened and bodied and recorded what we needed for the passage.”

Ana de Almeida has conducted in-depth research into the architecture of das weisse haus’ current location, and the former uses of the building, particularly when it was a female Teacher’s Training College (1885-1962). Considering the concepts of displacement within nostalgia and ersatz nostalgia, de Almeida’s installation intertwines the immateriality of gendered labor with the intent to materialize a glitching modernism. In an adjacent methodology, Rebeca Romero utilizes digital technologies and her research of pre-Columbian cultural objects, textiles, and yet interpreted symbology, to consider the possibilities of fictional artifacts and how history is translated.

Rami George utilizes the ritual of collecting to archive an ongoing aftermath. A translucent unfinished wall created with readymade construction materials, has a selection of intimate photographs embedded onto it, revealing a video in the furthest room: a collation of everyday moments from friends in Lebanon, who recorded life after decades of civil war.

By engaging with personal and collective loss, these artists utilize melancholia as a site for generating new perspectives and meanings. Their respective areas of research are driven by personal sensibilities and an urge to understand, redefine, and reinterpret their experience of loss—whether it’s the loss of life, knowledge, or cultural memory. Thusly, and so on is a response to how one can be reshaped in speculative, non-linear, and embodied ways by both profound and ordinary loss.

kathycho.info

and so on, 2022, das weisse haus, Vienna, Austria