Lines of Passage
Curators: Nadine Isabelle Henrich & Valeria Schäfer-Curina
Exhibition space: via Luigi Porro Lambertenghi, 6, 20159 Milano
Partners: Consolato Generale Della Repubblica Federale Di Germania, Goethe Institute, Milan & Karl-Hofer-Society, Berlin
Participating Artists (among others): Rüzgâr Buşki, Sofia Duchovny, Lena Marie Emrich, Aneta Kajzer, Nicholas Grafia & Mikolaj Sobczak, Ann-Sophie Stückle, Matt Welch …
Images: Nicholas Grafia & Mikolaj Sobczak, Rooms, Performance, 2020; Matt Welch, Adult Sculptures, Kunstverein Dortmund, 2019; Nicholas Grafia & Mikolaj Sobczak, It’s 10PM. Do you know where your children are?, Performance, 2019; Ann-Sophie Stückle, Untitled, 2020; Sofia Duchovny, Viewers, 2020;
›Lines of Passage‹ invites Milan to get an insight into the art practice of Germany-based young artists. The title refers to Rites de Passage of Arnold van Gennep: rites that celebrate and manifest the transition between stages in life as well as from one social condition to another. The works invite to reflect on experiencing »nowness« in such moments of liminality and societal transition. In the works on view, the artist’s body as a projection surface for expectations, desires, or fears often forms a point of reflection. How can the »private« be rethought in a period of physical distancing but almost unlimited virtual public presence?
A transparent tent (Sofia Duchovny) is like a transparent body: both associate the idea of an interior, they create a membrane between public and private, but expose this interior to the public gaze without protection.
One of those creatures that surrender to the gaze is the transparent Medusa. Free-swimming medusae are only a snapshot of the complex life cycle of metagenesis in cnidarians: the »jellyfish« therefore does not denote a species in its own right, but a temporary, transitive form in the course of generational change: Medusa is a life stage. But these stages become not a given aging process but are dynamized and navigated in the case of the Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish. It has a rare survival mechanism that allows it to regress to earlier stages in moments of threat or exhaustion. Known in biology as transdifferentiation, this process allows adult cells to transform into other, specialized cells. The developmental state of the jellyfish thus becomes relative and dynamic; development does not proceed linearly in time but can change direction and de facto regress, and rejuvenate.
Against the backdrop of the passage, as a starting point for thinking about threshold states, Turritopsis dohrnii illustrates the relativity of linear developmental narratives and emphasizes liminality and metamorphosis as a survival mechanism. Through the jellyfish's transparent bell, whose edges are lined with up to 90 white tentacles, its bright red belly glows inside. Like all jellyfish, it consists of almost 99 percent water, its body is a structure of only two wafer-thin layers of cells, with a transparent gelatinous mass in between. The creature's inner anatomy is directly part of its aesthetic appearance; inside and outside are inextricably linked and equally visible. The outer layer of the jellyfish’s body could be understood as a display, which allows us to see through a condition that is very different from the disconnected perception of a human’s appearance and its undiscovered inside.
In the case of the jellyfish the parameters inside and outside, which are often linked with invisible and visible, private and public, seem misleading here. How are these terms to be thought of for our present, in which the private is capitalized, and the intimate is exhibited? What does it mean to turn the inside out, to make oneself’s skin transparent? Does every act of image production and self-representation renegotiate the boundary between inside and outside, private and public? Is this accompanied by a loss of protection, security, and a feeling of being at the mercy of others, or can this crossing of boundaries create radical freedom and authenticity? Some of the works on view seem to connect to those questions, to a non-binary approach to public and private, they create hybrids of veiling and displaying, and seem to address the human physicality as a matter not so far from other media to transform and expose.
As part of the show, a free exhibition brochure was be published.
Opening: May 27, 2021