Guest curators: Alberto Garcìa del Castillo, Agata Jastrząbek, Sophie Jung, Eglė Kulbokaitė
4, rue Wiltheim L-2733 Luxembourg
Tuesday-Saturday 11:00 - 18:00
projects@nosbaumreding.lu
- Emma Hart
- Germaine Hoffmann
- Sophie Jung
- Jenny Moore
- Athena Papadopoulos
- Abri de Swardt
- Alice Theobald
Born 1974 in UK. Works and lives in London.
Emma Hart believes there is a gap between how things are experienced and how they might look photographed. The overwhelming real we stumble through is split from the way digital culture references it, then smoothes it all over. Life looks good in images, or if not good, far away enough for us to manage and control. Sculpture, most recently ceramics, provides a way to physically corrupt and 'dirty' images and forcefully squeeze more life out of them. Clay provides a way to work behind pictures, and reveal the raw, crude state of things that images screen off. Recent solo exhibitions include Folkestone Triennial 2014 (UK), Camden Arts Centre (UK), Whitstable Biennale 2012 (UK), Matt's Gallery (UK) and Norwich and CIRCA Projects (UK). Her work was recently included in group exhibitions at Wysing Arts Centre (UK), OHWOW Gallery (USA), Mead Gallery (UK) and Modern Art Oxford (UK). Hart was awarded a Random Acts commission for The Jarman Awards 2013. Hart was resident at Camden Arts Centre and at Wysing Arts Centre. She received an MA in Fine Art from the Slade in 2004 and completed her PhD in Fine Art at Kingston University in 2013. Upcoming exhibitions include solo presentations at Laboratorio Arte Alameda (MX) and Grand Union (UK).
Born 1930 in Luxembourg. Works and lives in Luxembourg.
After having been a good house wife for three decades, Germaine Hoffmann decided to not become a dissatisfied old lady and went on to study various techniques at innumerable summer school courses and evening classes between 1968 and 1998 in Luxembourg. Her technique evolved from newspaper collages into her very own technique involving a mix of collage and paint on wood, sanded and varnished in multiple layers to arrive at a immaculately slick and yet deeply textured image?object. She never tires to experiment with new found ideas and objects, turning household objects reminiscent of her pre-described role as a woman born in the 30s into powerful images of presence, there-ness and solitude, one example of this being a series of plastic table covers re-used as drip catchers for her varnished collages and then re-worked and re-used to become large scale images themselves. Her work sits within the realm of emotional abstraction, with geometric and seemingly coincidental outlines of bodies or vases as her only hint at figurative representation. Germaine Hoffmann has exhibited extensively within Luxembourg and has been in group as well as solo shows in Germany, Hungary, Sweden, France, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands and Poland.
Born 1982 in Luxembourg. Works and lives in Basel and London.
Sophie Jung studied at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (BA Fine Art) and at Goldsmiths, London (MFA Fine Art). Her practice addresses representation and its pitfalls, both culturally as a system of disguised and shifting signs and personally as a way to track and record life. She regularly negotiates between form and affect, pragmatism and romance, between scrutinizing accuracy and magical awe. She has a deep trust in temporary definitions, plays with concepts packed into words, objects or facial expressions, shifting their assumed meaning from work to work to sentence to song. Her position is on the apronproscenium, the pre-stage, as a fluid messenger between reception and production of timelined purport. Her work is strict, slick and abstract as well as emotionally involved, performative and overly literal; the intersection of form, structure and rhythm with the messy, perturbed and oddly sentimental is the underlying tone in her work, be it video, performance, sculpture, text or photography.
Recent projects and exhibitions include Äppärät at Ballroom Marfa, Eh, co - Nah cis. Us! at Kunsthalle Basel for Jungs, Hier Kommt der Masterplan and Uncanny Valley at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge, UK. Future projects include a reading with Fiktion: New Writing Group at ICA, London, a new performance for Art16, curated by Nicoletta Lambertucci, the Transversal Writing Seminar at the School of Architecture, KTH Stockholm as well as Poetry off the Page (working title) curated by Frances Loeffler at Oakville Galleries, Ontario this June.
In 2015 Sophie has spent 6 months in New York at ISCP, courtesy of the Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg, which she received in 2013. In March 2016 she was awarded the LEAP - the Luxembourg Encouragment for Artists Prize.
Born in Canada. Works and lives in London.
Jenny Moore is an artist and musician; she makes live events and installations where sculpture and performance meet, using music and comedy as way of exploring the 'now,' and collaboration as a way of making the 'now' happen. She plays in the all-female, all-drum band Charismatic Megafauna and performs with the art collective Gandt, who make events, performances, and dinner parties. Currently, she is the producer and host of You can't win them all, ladies and gentlemen, a live, travelling radio show exploring the insane neo-liberal demands that artists be everything to everyone. Recent performances include Library Gallery (CA), Wysing Music Festival (UK), Victoria & Albert Museum (UK). Other recent projects: Almanac Projects (UK), Tate Modern (UK), South London Gallery (UK), Hayward Gallery (UK), LA Pedestrians (USA), Bergen Kunsthalle (NO), and the Printed Matter New York Art Book Fair (USA). She went to art school twice, in Winnipeg and London.
Born 1988 in Canada. Works and lives in London.
Athena Papadopoulos attended the University of British Columbia for her undergraduate studies in Visual Arts and Contemporary Art Theory and graduated from the MFA Fine art programme at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include, Honeymoon in Pickle Paradise at the Landmark Hotel, London, curated by Leopold Thun and Jasmine Picot-Chapman (2014), OUT COLD, OTHER Projects, Berlin (2014). Selected group exhibitions include Bloomberg New Contemporaries at the Liverpool World Museum and ICA (UK), Sunset Terrace, (CA), Vitrine Gallery (UK). Upcoming solo exhibitions include, Zabludowics Collection Invites: Athena Papadopoulos (UK) and T.B.A Annarumma Gallery (IT).
Born 1988 in South Africa. Works and lives in Johannesburg and London.
Abri de Swardt studied and taught at Stellenbosch University, before receiving his MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2014. Through various modes of collage, his work explores fantasies of digitization and forms of amnesia in relation to the figure of the ghost, the tumblrification of knowledge and erotohistiography in ways at once occult and baroque. He has held solo exhibitions at Blank Projects (ZA) and MOT International Projects (UK). Group shows include the IV Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (RU), the Cooper Gallery (UK, forthcoming), Kappa Theta Phi (USA), Unseen Photo Fair (NL) and the US Museum (ZA). In 2015 he will be artist-in-residence at the Sober & Lonely Institute of Contemporary Art.
Born 1985 in UK. Works and lives in London.
Alice Theobald creates live performance, video, installation and music to actively explore the devision between stage and life and the discrepancy between expression, appearance and feeling. Borrowing from the vocabulary of cinema, television, theatre, literature and musical scores, Theobald is interested in the make-up and construction of performance, the challenges of acting and the blurring of character creation on and off stage whilst circling questions of representation, manipulation and genuine behaviour. Layered wordplay, gesture, repetition and double-entendres accumulate to multi-faceted compositions that reflect and loop back on themselves as fabricated truths about relationships, neurosis and everyday life. She graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2014 and is currently undertaking The Future Autumn Residency at Wysing Arts Centre. In February of 2014 she presented I’ve said yes now, that’s it. for the Chisenhale Gallery’s Interim programme. In 2013 she completed the Gasworks, London International Performance Residency. Selected performances, exhibitions and film screenings include: South London Gallery (UK), Outpost (UK), Gasworks (UK), P/N Gallery, Spike Island (UK), Modern Art Oxford (UK), Baro Galeria (BR), V22 (UK) and Pilar Corrias (UK). She is represented by Pilar Corridas.
Dear Luxembourg (yours, bucktoothed grl)
Emma Hart, Germaine Hoffmann, Sophie Jung, Jenny Moore, Athena Papadopoulos, Abri de Swardt, Alice Theobald
Curated by Alberto García del Castillo with the company of Sophie Jung
Dear Luxembourg (yours, bucktoothed grl) is an exhibition that speculates on a symbolic capital exchange between London and Luxembourg City. It introduces a band of Londoners and their cutting edge aesthetics to invade the pretty, virgin soil of this landlocked country in the heart of Europe. It speaks and lucubrates a response to nationalisms and acts as a space dislocation; face off with what was once called nationalism. Dear Luxembourg (yours, bucktoothed grl) is all about individualism through communality. Two cities, that stand for and under hyper-capitalist egoism, whose connecting airport lounges are abounding TV screens flashing stock-market mountains, come together to try something else. So what if the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts?
Applied to the biological site of individuality, the face. (Of the banker’s wife wanting that smile and those ears and yet after all bandages are off things just won't fit. SHLD have kept your buckteeth.) Applied to the EU: Cameron and Junker having it out, while we sit and watch the utopia of peace-through-union disappear into nationalist, or was it globalist URGHs. Applied to a project space too small to host all of us ladies side by side. So let’s commix the fringes of authorship for the greater, good?
The greater good is a virtual and actual merging of text, video, performance and sculpture into one overpoweringly concise and messy Gesamtkunstwerk of a show. Strands point toward individual positions and melt in the neo-liberal pot, furnaced by the ray of light bouncing off the glass facades of the Kirchberg, off BA planes overhead. To fly. To serve. To serve the bucktoothed girl from Luxembourg. That applied to love.
“What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person’s own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person’s. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that someone can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs.” - (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p. 35)
Applied to the body the body, the bodies in the Luxair boarding queue, so tight against each other it’d be more economical to temporarily become ONE, just while we’re passing btw LUX and LDN. U know, high up in the air btw two billionaire European parents quarrelling over custody of their fragile neo-liberal Ikarus. If it’s not
Dear Luxembourg wants to be an accumulation of faces, an expressionless or massively mimic response to the game of today’s individual cumulus that draws contemporary art utilities for the edification of wealth. There is the face of the Duke of Luxembourg and that of the Queen of England; And between those two there are all our pop postered faces – FACE –and you just sit there writing frightening verse to a bucktoothed girl from Luxemburg. – The Smiths, “Ask” from the album Louder Than Bombs (1987)
Luxembourg City hosts the ultimate shelter for advanced capitalist exchanges and flaunts the history of a tax heaven; one that is now being transformed to accommodate the current common European market. Its cute and clean pseudo-medieval city centre sits on top of a rock and sometimes shines like a fairytale castle. Over the nearest hill rises Kirchberg –the church hill– the Manhattan of Luxembourg, a conglomeration of skyscrapers that are home to a handful of international banks; at its feet shines the very modern dome of MUDAM (Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean de Luxembourg).
“Contemporary Art had become a very sophisticated system of value creation with the turbo-charged art system that emerged during the preceding financial boom requiring artists to provide – at its peak – around $60 billion a year (according to artnet.com) worth of window-dressing for art’s three main economic functions: the acquiring of status, the cleansing of conscience and the sheltering of tax” - Christopher Kulendran Thomas, ART & COMMERCE: Ecology Beyond Spectatorship (DIS Magazine, 2014) / http://dismagazine.com/discussion/59883/art-commerce-ecology-beyond-spectatorship/
This exhibition is a poem from London to Luxembourg that takes into account the odd location of Nosbaum Reding Projects to draw on and out a common cultural laughter, “Dear New York, Here’s your novel. If I could have held myself together longer, I would have. I wanted to. I feel like I prostituted myself for you. I went all the way with a lot of people and for what? It was our time, I guess. Everybody was fucking everybody. I don’t blame you for anything that happened, nor do I particularly give you credit for it. I fell apart somewhere around the time the war began… was that the idea? If so, fuck you too, loads of love, loads of novel, and it’s been real. Meanwhile the buildings are still changing all the time and you’re thinking that the city isn’t what it used to be. Well it never was. I do love you.” - Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spaulings (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004)
WATCH HERE; Jenny Moore and Sophie Jung during an evening of performances, 15 January 2015.
