Archaic Futures
Anna Bochkova, Jérôme Chazeix, Jacqueline Doyen, Philipp Gufler, Samuel Henne, Nina Maria Küchler, Zoë Claire Miller, Lucas Odahara

With a wink and through quotations, the artists engage with history and integrate it into their research, either making it their own or offering a new interpretation. A personal interpretation emerges from these juxtapositions: political, aesthetic, poetic, utopian, futuristic.

Anna Bochkova
Silent Places is an archive on its own, showing algorithms of suburban landscapes in different post socialist countries: the absolute silence of panel construction quarters which are situated in suburban areas. The quality of the utopian concept of socialism which stayed there is the silence of unspoken fears, the silence of point on no return, the silence of unfulfilled desires and hopes.

Jérôme Chazeix
More than 5000 images scroll in an stroboscopic manner, accompanied by a pulsating electronic soundtrack. Stemming from a research project on excavations and the messages delivered by human remains and civilizations, also their display in museums, the installation with textiles and sculptures aims to reveal the message raised by all these artifacts. The art object appears as a force that reminds us of the ephemeral nature of life.

Jacqueline Doyen
Jacqueline Doyen’s sculptures are (…) prostheses: Extensions of the body that allow it to become an image. Her work always revolves around the question “what happens when an image is created?” Unlike the Tableau Vivant, in which dead images are re-enacted by living bodies, Doyen does not merely translate the paused image of time back into physicality, but sets in motion a complex process of image genesis between present and absent bodies, pre- and post-images, sculptures and poses’.

Philipp Gufler
By combining text and image, Philipp Gufler’s Quilt series refers to artists, writers, + magazines and lost queer spaces, which are often omitted from the usual history books. The subjects that are central to Gufler’s quilts are closely related to his own artistic practice and interests, but also his personal life.

Samuel Henne
(…) In the process of their artistic appropriation, the objectless and empty display cases and pedestals prove to be pictorial objects of the second order. They are object forms and pictorial forms that developed around the actual historical fragments or exhibited objects and that consolidated to become independent visual forms. By emptying them, Henne renders visible that the allegedly ancillary form of any presentation develops its own, genuinely aesthetic and deceiving dimension. By removing what is supposed to be presented, the artist causes the presentation and the staging to become the object of contemplation and thus displays the act of presentation itself. To present, to place a sculpture on a pedestal, is not a neutral act of making something visible, but a form of interpretation. Exhibiting inevitably also means creating, establishing and implying meaning. (…)

Nina Maria Küchler
„Gibellina – La Citta Moderne“. After its destruction by an earthquake, the Sicilian city of Gibellina was redesigned by international architects and artists as a utopian planned city. The intro and outro of the film feature passages from Italo Calvino’s “The Invisible Cities”, a panorama of poetic designs of urban utopias.

Zoë Claire Miller
The sculpture series Tintinnabuli takes Pompeian wind bells of the same name as its starting point. In Miller’s series, the imaginative and humorous, often zoomorphic penis representations of the ancient Tintinnabuli, which were turned towards the cult of the phallus, are updated and expanded to include female and non-organic motifs from the genital / phallic haze, with the intention of freeing the phallic symbol, at least for a moment, from negative clichés and associations such as dominance behaviour and humourlessness.

Lucas Odahara
In the series of works A Desatadora (the Untier), Odahara turns to art history in search of paintings in European museum collections which depict examples of knots. These images are sewn together by the artist to form a continuous body. Questioning western representation of the body and possibly European art history itself, the ongoing series recall the South American catholic belief of Mary, Untier of Knots – a Marian devotion known for solving problems.