Muzzle Velocity refers to the speed at which a projectile or bullet exits the barrel of a firearm or artillery. Sixty-five rounds per second is currently the fastest rate for a traditional firearm. It’s also the title of the 9-minute, 40-second 4K video featured in this exhibition. In the video, I (Angharad), along with three friends, silently fly over Brooklyn in a helicopter, heading toward a landing pad in Manhattan’s Murray Hill. In 2023 I paid for us to take a helicopter for the first time. The Blade shuttle service is accessible to anyone with some disposable money. You buy the Blade, you buy time. The footage loops: we arrive, then immediately depart. It’s almost impossible to take in New York (America) all at once.

Presentation of Michael Van den Abeele & Laurent Dupont in collaboration with Gauli Zitter.

“Both artists recruit a new kind of headlessness. At first Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and Martin Kippenberger’s pallets, packaging multiples, and oatmeal-and-paint coated Ford Capri might come to mind, but the mood here is humble, there is a lack of showmanship, outsourcing, deadpan, or aggression, and rather a willing submission to limitations. The work is quieter, more amateur and industrious than that of artists like Michael Krebber or Lutz Bacher. With programmatic, almost obsessive, practices, Dupont and van den Abeele emphasize the body’s current dissociation from spirit and passion, in a morally decadent age marked by extreme consumption but lacking the debauched sensuality of previous cultural declines. These Belgians seem to be interested in blood, sweat, and tears, in conjuring passion through restricted means, and a redemption perhaps acquired through this process.”

In Years, Richard Sides makes use of the notion of technics popularised in 1994 by Bernard Stiegler. In Stiegler’s view, the technical object is made in-between nature and human intention. It exists as an access point to a temporality that dissolves the distinction between subject and object, between the human and the technical. It is through this logic that Sides arrives at images of cave drawings, quantum computers, and extraterrestrial life. These are connected as the necessary tools needed to operate back and forth across time – not so much in body but in mind. The paintings, on the other hand, develop through a process of accumulating past compositions and previous artworks, and eventually overpainting them with layers of a monochromatic colour.

kinship brings together the diverse works of 30 artists under the leitmotif of the gallery’s founding principle. Through a variety of media, the exhibition delves into kinship as a fluid, contingent structure that reframes social bonds and offers nuanced reflection on affiliation in contemporary society. The exhibition is a tribute to friendship and connection made manifest across our work and our relations. This question of connection, of how we find, make, and remake our relations with others, is explored across a variety of mediums that touch on far-ranging themes, from the generation of empathy to the origins of intimacy and theorizations on the beginning of time. Sometimes this emerges through domestic motifs or in the adaptation of spatial registers that belong to the urban landscape.

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) exhibits Andrzej Steinbach’s latest series Extensions (Erweiterungen), aimed at exploring the intricate terrain where technology and representation of the human form intersect. The exhibition title borrows from a core system in robotics, where understanding and mapping the surroundings whilst simultaneously keeping track of its own location is necessary in order to navigate effectively. This concept matches Steinbach’s approach — a continual re-mapping and exploration, compelling us to question how images are constructed, deconstructed, and reimagined today.

The departure point of Tanea Hynes’ work is the awareness of the complex socio-political reality of living within the extractive economy. Hynes grew up in Labrador City, Canada, a town that was founded in the 1960s to accommodate employees of the iron ore mine, which remains the primary industry in the town to this day. Hynes’ work reveals the mundaneness, darkness, and difficulty of place. The city’s inhabitants have a complex relationship to the mine, whose presence looms large in the landscape. Her work explores this relationship and the social reality it reflects, including the complicated interconnections between the city, residents, and this industry.

Emancipating function from form is a recurring motif in Michael Van den Abeele’s artistic practice. Often, he begins with a material or motif so wedded to its economic value that their separation comes with tricky conditions. The flat iron is tired of working, the jeans take leave from the domain of workwear and turn to ornament. In a single motion, Van den Abeele unlatches the commodity from the throes of its market and ushers it into a new arena where eros, excess, and mythology prevail. Here, the possibility of a given thing renews itself in desire, decadence and a romance for discernible things.

KIN is delighted to present Liam Gillick’s new exhibition: Fact Structures Amount Structures Language Structures, opening on March 1st 2024. For this new body of works, exhibited in three different cities, Gillick rethinks what fundamental forms of advanced production might be, and finds inspiration in Marie and Otto Neurath’s Isotype system – illustrated by Gerd Antz – named Fact Pictures, Amount Pictures, Language Pictures; as well as Yuk Hui’s philosophical writing on techno-diversity. 

Everything that Thibaut Henz photographs bears witness to physicality or to physical closeness, to a connection to things, society and its physiology. Regardless of whether he photographs the human body, animals, plants, spaces, or objects, Henz approaches his motifs in an exploratory movement — not in a reserved way but instead aggressively, observing the subject close up, in extreme cases, even as far as body orifices.
Rather than fulfilling a representational function, Henz’s photographs, often dyptichs, tryptichs or large scale compositions, illustrate the present as a contingency, reflected in coexisting realities, challenging the viewers to consider their own biases and referential contexts, through fantasised violence.

Swarm exhibited at KIN continues on the path set by Golińska in her previous works. The sculptures have a strong material presence that result from Golińska’s involvement in producing them within the boundaries of her workshop in the Gdańsk Shipyard. She moves through the metal workshops, scavenging through heaps of scrap metal, selecting, arranging and testing the forms in space. Cooperating with the welders, who used to approach her with disbelief and now are familiar with her presence, she binds and scrapes metal together into sculptures. Or, if the scraps allow it, she bends them into the desired forms. Finally, the rusty metal is partially powder painted in bright colours adding futuristic and painterly dimensions to the final form of the works.

The Desert Turned to Glass is a meditation oscillating between the cosmic and the chthonic. Traveling through vast distances in space and time from outer space to Paleolithic caves, Stankievech entwins science fiction speculation and contemporary theories on the origin of life, consciousness, and art. A meteorite sculpture floats above a sand floor, a psychedelic video crystallizes deep time. Fog, clouds, and smoke venting from volcanic lava flows spill across the screen. At a moment obsessed with planetary endings, the visual dynamism and resonating sound of air recapitulates not only the invention of the concept of atmosphere in the history of meteorology, but also the formation of the earth’s atmosphere in geologic time—in a word, to creation itself. The Desert Turned to Glass calls forth otherworldly experience from within the depths and heights of this world, at the same time cultivating an aesthetic disposition to receive them.

For years, Dorota Jurczak has been creating an immensely analogue body of work devoid of digital characteristics. An output that is defined by a deep appreciation for texture, colour and the qualities of physical material. Combined with a fearless approach to expenses, this results in most immersive and tactile works of art. Jurczak’s understanding and consequent interpretation of crafted history has become the signature of her style, evoking a sense of timelessness and permanence. All executed with a confident scratch and little to no admission of a modern world.