La Merveille de la Vie marks Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys’ second exhibition at KIN, following the gallery’s opening exhibition in 2023.

In the winter of 2009, the decision was made to create 500 pencil drawings, following the principle of “warsprong.” These drawings sketch a picture of life on Earth. In 2010, the drawings were exhibited in Basel and subsequently in Vienna in the year 2014. After this, the drawings were stored in cardboard boxes for preservation in a state archive. The collection was recently rediscovered during work in the archive. For the exhibition La Merveille de la Vie, a selection of some 140 drawings was made, offering a glimpse into the most striking features of life on Earth.

At Art Cologne, KIN presented works by:

Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys
After 30 years of collaboration, de Gruyter & Thys continue to spawn a legion of videos, drawings, sculptures, installations, performances, and photographs. These materials offer the artists vehicles, which they populate with humans and their stand-ins – stupefied family members, hyster- ical puppets, anthropomorphized objects. Some of these characters are friends, or intermediaries that serve in their place. Others are the derelict occu- pants of a ‘parallel world’ that goes unrecognized by most, despite its being inexorably entangled with the world most of us identify.Sometimes their work is perplexing, but the hushed laughter it elicits is tuned to a rather dark station. After all, or overall, the artists wallow in the most depressing of cultural trenches, in the most vile historical quagmires and, when they emerge – indelibly soiled in the mori- bund and strange aspects of humanity, its absurd technological prosthetics, its endless neuroses and traumas – they wring it out and give it a frozen form, a more appropriately awkward posture.

Shaun Motsi
Born in Harare in 1989, Motsi spent his childhood in Zimbabwe and South Africa before relocating
to Canada in 2005. He is a graduate of the
HfbK Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main (2020),
and has recently completed a residency at
the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. His work has been presented at KIN, Brussels (2025); blank projects, Cape Town (2024); Auto Italia, London (2023); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2023); Freiburg Biennial, Freiburg (2023); Juf, Madrid (2023); Goethe Institut Paris (2022); CFA, Milan (2021); The Wig, Berlin (2021); Shedhalle, Zürich (2020); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2020); PAGE (NYC), New York (2019); Longtang, Zürich (2019); and 3HD Festival, Berlin (2019), among others. Motsi currently lives and works between Brussels and Berlin.

Andrzej Steinbach
Born in Czarnków, Poland, in 1983, Andrzej Steinbach grew up in Karl-Marx-Stadt (renamed Chemnitz after 1989), studied at the HGB Leipzig, and now lives and works in Berlin. He has
already been awarded important prizes and schol- arships, and with his cross-media works and installations, he is one of the artists of a younger generation in Germany who has exhibited interna- tionally. His 35-piece series Gesellschaft beginnt mit drei (2017) was exhibited in 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among other venues. The series was shown several years ago at the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig in the context of the Wüstenrot Foundation’s
important documentary photography award projects, and the Sprengel Museum Hannover
has also exhibited some of Andrzej Steinbach’s works in the region.

Angharad Williams
Williams’ singular practice is multifaceted, working across several disciplines in an intentionally un-disciplined manner, and marked by a highly responsive approach to site and context. Often equivocal in expression, her works are rooted
in writing and shaped by questions of authority, security, and design. She has had solo exhibitions at Simian, Copenhagen (both 2025); Schiefe Zaehne, Berlin (2024); Fanta, Milan (2023); Mostyn, Llandudno; Kunstverein Düsseldorf (both 2022), Kunstverein Kevin Space, Vienna (2021). Williams has participated in numerous group exhibitionsat prestigious institutions and galleries including Bechtler Stiftung, Uster (2025); Museo Madre, Naples, and The Wig, Berlin (both 2024); Reena Spaulings, New York (2023); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2022); FriArt, Fribourg, (2021). Angharad is a participant in the 2025 Edition of the Okayama Art Summit: The Parks of Aomame, curated by Philippe Parreno.

Yalda Afsah, Jarramplas

For more than a century, the town of Piornal, in the southwestern Spanish region of Extremadura, has celebrated the idiosyncratic Jarramplas festival. Its protagonist is the costumed “el Jarrampla”, whose name derives from the Spanish word “arramplar”, meaning to steal. Legend has it that he was a man who came to the town to steal the ranchers’ animals. But he underestimated the ferocity of the locals who bombarded him with turnips until he fled. Every year in January, the townspeople re-enact the event, with one male citizen in costume (with carbon fibre armour underneath) playing the Jarramplas and hundreds of others pelting him with turnips.

German-Iranian artist and filmmaker Yalda Afsah’s Jarramplas observes the annual event and its performance as well as the social context it is informed by, subtly building tension as teenagers gather in the streets, tractors deliver tonnes of turnips and crowds form until the fight begins. However, the Jarrampla himself is never shown. The antagonist of the city’s collective body remains a figure outside the frame, transforming the traditional ritual into a scenario of gratuitous violence. The turnip-throwers seem no longer participants in a folkloric game, but hooligans or street fighters. Slightly slowed down, the filmed event looks choreographed, juxtaposing a mass of bodies moving back and forth with selected faces emerging from it. As the camera zooms in on individuals, some of them show focused aggression, others enjoyment about what is going on.

Never providing a complete picture of what is happening, Afsah’s cinematically constructed space unfolds at the interface of reality and staging. Beginning with an impression of a remote rainy town, the quiet of the streets is gradually replaced by a growing tumult. Moments of irritation intensify as bodies move closer together and the individual is absorbed into the crowd. It is as if the narrowing of the camera’s field of vision corresponds to the force of the attack on the absent symbolic enemy.

Afsah combines documentary filmmaking with a conceptual approach to analyse the tensions of human interaction and the social construction of gender and behaviour. Her previous films have focused on the agency of non-human beings and how we interact with them. Carefully observing power, care and submission in relation to the training of animals, Afsah’s intimate views of social dynamics between species portray, but also fictionalise, humans and animals alike, highlighting the inherent ambivalence in their encounters. With Jarramplas, the focus shifts to ritual, group dynamics and the eruption of violence among humans and the impact these catalysts have on the social order of society.

As in her previous films, Afsah denies the viewer a position of neutral observation. Using formal approaches that raise questions of construction and objectivity, she explores the relationship between subject and object, while still allowing for the viewer’s subjective interpretation. The sound, which is removed from the images and artificially post-produced, creates a distance to what is happening on the screen. At times it feels distinctly unnatural, further emphasising the artificiality of the situation. At the same time, it draws the viewer’s attention to a particular frame and directs their gaze.

At the end, the crowd comes to a halt, as if realising that the game has got out of hand. Some faces show signs of fear. There is a tense waiting and a state of uncertainty, now shared between the characters on the screen and the spectators in front of it.

Vanessa Joan Müller, 2025

German-Iranian artist and filmmaker Yalda Afsah (b. 1983, Berlin) explores how space can be cinematically constructed as her films profoundly explore the interface between reality and staging. This formal characteristic of Afsah’s work is conceptually mirrored in her recent portraits of human-animal relationships that reveal an ambivalence between care and control, physical strength and broken will, instinct and manipulation. Despite their documentary focus, her films and video installations seem to capture symbiotic choreographies on screen – equally portraying and fictionalising their human and non-human protagonists. Afsah has presented her work at various exhibitions and festivals including Manifesta 13, Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Berlinische Galerie, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Deichtorhallen Hamburg and recent solo exhibitions at Kunstverein München, Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Between Bridges in Berlin and JOAN in Los Angeles. She is a mentor for the Berlin program for artists (BPA) and a professor of Time-Based Media at HFBK Hamburg.

In Spectacles, the artist brings together a new body of work that extends his thinking across cut-outs, drawings, sculptures and videos.

The exhibition title holds a double meaning. On the one hand, the word refers to the charged appearance of something extraordinary like a staged event or an image that seizes the gaze. But on the other hand, spectacles frame, distort, and direct vision, functioning as optical tools.

What we see in the exhibition is deliberately restrained: white walls and sparse marks form a choreography of interruptions. In this environment, Motsi’s works operate as gestures and fragments that point towards moments where perception is partial, embodied and often structured by an external force. Installed in the interior space are five white masks, set flush into the wall’s surface. In certain cases, the eyes (or pupils) are removed entirely. By arranging the scene and casting the public as peeping toms, Motsi lures viewers into a kind of spectator sport. We lean into certain masks for the chance to catch views that alternate between the public and private spheres. Other masks deny us that prospect and instead protrude outward from the wall. Two works embed fragmented videos, offering partial views into the source material. Together, these works mark a new series in the artist’s practice that develops around themes of spectatorship, power, and the circulation of images.

Outside the cube hangs a group of drawings that are demarcated by holes. On a few, a cast of characters from a 19th century cartoon titled Les Curieux en extase ou les Cordons de souliers appear in the margin or near a hole that leads into another hole or holes that meet the wall. The cartoon satirises the reactions of the French public to the figure widely known as ‘Sara Baartman’ (also referred to as “Hottentot Venus”) public display in the early 1810s. The expressions range from “ah, how funny nature is” to “what strange beauty” and to a reference to roast beef. In Motsi’s drawing series, Baartman herself is omitted.

As the exhibition unfolds, it becomes a stage where visibility is constructed, recalling spaces of viewing that range from the panopticon and the anatomical theatre to the peep show and to the white cube. Across the exhibition, the body is both a subject and an instrument of perception. Drawing, mapping, and abstraction are tools the artist employs to this end, interweaving fragments of image and form into a tale of historical entanglement. Ultimately, the political dimension of spectatorship is at the root of Motsi’s conceptual concerns.

Shaun Motsi (b. 1989, Harare) is a visual artist currently based in Brussels and Berlin. In his artistic practice, he considers the way that cultural narratives are constructed, inherited and appropriated over time and across geographies. Working across painting, video and installation, Motsi organises his motifs across jokes and precepts that have symbolic importance. Shaun Motsi’s work has been presented at MMK, Frankfurt am Main (2025), Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2024), Auto Italia, London (2023); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2023), Freiburg Biennial, Freiburg (2023), Goethe Institut Paris (2022); Shedhalle, Zürich (2020); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2020); 3HD Festival, Berlin (2019), among others. He is a graduate of the HfbK Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main (2020), and is an alumni of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (2023-2025). In 2020 Motsi won the Sammlung Pohl Graduate Prize in 2020 as well as the Städelschule’s Colliers International Rundgang Prize. In 2023 Shaun Motsi received the ars viva prize. Motsi has recently completed his residency at WIELS, Brussels (2025).

At Basel Social Club, KIN presented works by Ryan Cullen.

Cullen’s series of still life paintings of plastic water bottles are meditations on the labor of painting. In his recent exhibition Protestantism in Painting, curated by Nelson Beer, the artist reflected on the endless reflections of the medium of painting through the sociological lens of “work” and its relationship to protestantism. In his bottle works, the artist renders light refracted through various brands of bottled water. Light bounces off the plastic medium and creates vibrant refraction. This interplay emphasises how perception, materiality, and light converge in painting, drawing attention to the subtle, layered processes that shape visual experience.

Ryan Cullen’s (*1992 in Boston, USA) practice draws on a variety of cultural and material sources, focusing on the production of images and objects that reflect elements of larger political and ideological structures. In a process where painting and sculpture often intersect, the artist creates works that mirror Western society’s tendencies toward self-destruction. Cullen studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and at Cooper Union in New York. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions, including at Briefing Room, Brussels; The Meeting, New York; CLEARING, Brooklyn; Etablissement d’en Face, Brussels; Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden; and Portikus, Frankfurt am Main.

Simon Denny’s installation Less Stale Attachment was first exhibited in 2006 at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand. The installation was shown as part of a group exhibition called Break: Construct that invited nine emerging artists in the region to exhibit work around the ideas of experiential and environmental totality.  Drawing inspiration from the collaged environments of Dadaist Kurt Schwitters alongside Frederick Kiesler’s Galaxies, the exhibition examined how materials and their contexts are shaped by their quotidian environments. 

Less Stale Attachment marks a formative moment in Denny’s practice, shaped by a distinctive material-based approach. This early installation stands apart from the artist’s later work, which is more often associated with investigations into technology, politics, and systems of power.

Almost twenty years on, the installation accrues new associations that contribute to its material afterlife. In 2025, the rhetoric of “attachment” spans a semantic field that stretches from relationship self-help discourse to the digital file appended to an email. At its core, the work begins with the assembly and disassembly of our surroundings into forms that are comprehensible, experiential, or fantastical. The installations embodies a concern that is “conversational in nature” and that addresses how meaning and material intertwines.

At KIN, the exhibition is presented as a near-exact restaging of the 2006 installation at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Taking it back to its original form, scale, and sensibility, Denny reflects on the enduring questions that first emerged in his practice. 

From the 2006 exhibition catalogue: 

“There is a fluidity to Less stale attachment, a process of discovery that is in front of us. A precarious arrangement of wood, wool, plastics and paper gather as an articulation of form and material. Simon Denny uses these objects to divide the space, drawing attention to the material tactility, the way they sit. Each object is employed to speak of how it occupies a volume in relation to other parts, forming a community of structures that points us toward meanings that are conversational in nature.

How forms touch, and how they have been touched, whether in fragile or crude ways, faint or funny, is key. This is wet. Everything is wet. This is folded, everything is folded. Or it’s screwed up. Or it’s just up. This is falling, or rather, it would be falling if it wasn’t taped up here, propped up there. This one’s sloppy, it’s all pretty sloppy. With parts wrapping, holding, balancing and supporting, the work exists as an interdependent arrangement.The performative residue of the making process stresses the potentiality of the materials – the meeting of form, purpose and action.

Simon Denny’s practice emphasises relationships within communities of things—complex sculptural combinations of objects found, bought, gathered, and made. Denny presents his audiences with situations that foreground an engagement with associations of form, purpose, and action. The apparent crude modesty of form belies the poetic intelligence of the works’ coming-into-being and sculptural conceit. 

Denny’s art-making is rooted in doing: considerations of performance and acts of making that embed the artist’s gesture and activity into his objects—objects chosen, in the first instance, for the character and activity they already inhabit.” 

Duo presentation with Laurent Dupont in collaboration with Gauli Zitter.

Laurent Dupont carefully repaints the surfaces of discarded cardboard boxes, mimicking the original lettering, colors, and designs that lie beneath. Overpainting these boxes can be likened to a kind of metaphysical renovation, finding meaning in the activity of simply doing it. Dupont applies his paint as one would lipstick on a pig, there is humor produced by this acknowledged futility, but also perhaps joy in its persistence.

Michael van den Abeele shares this attitude and is a little more omnivorous with material. He takes denim jeans and bleaches them into paintings that produce the weightless, retinal afterimages of Op art as they remain a heavy and common clothing fabric. His bleached metaphysical phrase “Here, nothing becomes, everything is, everything remains. In short, here one can speculate” (from André Gide’s Philoctetes (1899)) makes for an overly long door draft stopper. His untitled paravent, a traditionally decorative furniture used to block heat and cold as well as prying eyes, unfolds to reveal multiple images of rats reading books.

Both artists convert rational modules of storage and consumption. Dupont paints over empty transport boxes previously containing items such as women’s clothing (of the brand “traffic people”), live lobsters, and rice noodles. Van den Abeele turns potato chip bags inside-out, their contents voided and silver insides attached together, occasionally with their backsides or with additional images such the photoshopped sculpture of John the Baptist’s severed head resting on a pile of dirty dinner plates. A low-pixel image of a cat resting on a truck wheel is transferred in oil paint on canvas. By laboriously reanimating spent vessels, Dupont and Van den Abeele create novel reliquaries.

These formal techniques summon the body in various states (unpacking, eating, cooking, dressing, staying warm, losing one’s head, writhing in passion, reading, scrolling through images). Transport boxes are sized to arm-carry, chip bags are opened and evacuated by fingers and mouths, and furniture fundamentally accommodates the body and its needs. In both of their work, the ‘artist’s hand’ is offscreen but decidedly present and busy, painting over small letters and color matching logos, or carefully bleaching words and faithfully applying images of domestic small animals on canvas.

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.

– Jelena Kristic, April 2025

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.

Scarecrows It started with setting fires, fingers still in growth. Perfecting the paper crumble so that air can pass through, catching kindling to generate sufficient heat to engulf the coal. Anthracite is a talisman in Wales. Later, the competition between us siblings is proposed when we learn to light a fire with a single match. Speed is an essential component here, too. These fireplaces from my childhood and imagination are here translated into white foam core, adhered with silicone; developed in various scales from 2017 until now. One of the things I find interesting about fireplaces is that they belong to everyone – especially to Storytellers. And I like that Storytellers understand implicitly that the full tale can never be told. 

Myself as Tinky Winky as Iggy Pop When Iggy appeared on the front cover of his record Lust for Life, he had just that. A lust for life. Just got clean. Sleep out of his eyes. The world was pretty different then. It wasn’t difficult for me to imagine the most wonderful picture: that of Tinky Winky behind the scenes, framed just like Iggy Pop, forever. I think this might also be called getting better at life – being a better pacifist. 

The Sardine Syndrome. Kids – they’re gonna get their own back. Magic. The internet is not the only thing that connects people.

What are we in now??? Part one (suffixed with ?) and part two (suffixed with ??) were group exhibitions curated and organised in recent years by The Wig, an ongoing collaboration between myself, Richard Sides, and Gianmaria Andreetta. We used the title to consider our collective moment in art historical terms, and more urgently as a way of understanding how performance seeps into both life and art in changing times. We were interested in how contingency becomes part of the work; how it shapes the materials we use and the energy we draw on. 

Angharad Williams, 2025

Angharad Williams (b. Ynys Cybi, Wales) is an artist, writer, and performer who is concerned with the role of poetry in our increasingly militarised society.

Recent solo exhibitions and performances took place at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2025); SIMIAN, Copenhagen (2025); Schiefe Zähne, Berlin (2024); Fanta, Milan (2023); Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf (2022); Mostyn, Llandudno (2022) and Kevin Space, Vienna (2021). Angharad’s first book Eraser was published by After8 Books, Paris in 2023. Summer 2025 Williams will release a limited 12” vinyl with Concentric Group, London & the Bauhaus Foundation, Dessau. Angharad is a teacher at the Masters Fine Art at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zürich.

Purple 

The English word for purple comes from a Latin word which comes from a Greek word. The Greek word comes from a fish that excretes a dye that is purplish in tone. A rarity in antiquity, it was sought after by Greek royalty who yearned for a purple tunic, perhaps a trouser. When the time came to name the colour the Greeks, faithful to the fish, gave the colour the scientific name of the purple fish: porpura. Once Latin surfaces, the story of fish is gone, but the adjective survives as a reference to pure colour. 

Nevertheless, the Greeks remained committed to their story and their hunt for purple. Their devotion was so pronounced that they formulated a unique verb for the search: ‘kalxainen’, to search for the purplefish. And though the hunt was perhaps long and lonesome, the qualities that came to define the hunt for purple became lodged in the verb itself. Rather than referring to the search for fish, the verb started referring more to a brooding state: to darken, to become vexed and gloomy. 

In the first act of Sophocle’s play Antigone, we meet an embattled Antigone confronting her sister Ismene. The sisters take the stage mid-conflict at odds with how to proceed after the death of their brother Polynices who has been denied a proper burial at the hands of the Athenian state. Early on in the action, Ismene asks her sister: “What’s the matter?…you sound so dark, so grim.” Antigone’s reply is opaque: “why not?” In this version of Antigone, the translator opts to underline Antigone’s sound or the essence of her word choice. Ismene’s purpose is to unlatch her sister’s unease which she is opposed to but has ignited after calling her moody. Antigone’s mood is so important because it is the petrol that pushes the rising action forward. 

In the original Greek, Ismene’s line would have read something like: “you seem to colour a reddish-purple word or to dye your words red-purple.” Once the line is translated into standard English it reads as: “you are obviously growing dark in the mind, brooding deeply.” Antigone’s opposition is the expression of her moral, moody standing: she is elementally purple. 

The purple verb is a vexed point for many translators. The question of how to render a mood verb across a new idiom is a complicated challenge. In Anne Carson’s version, the line reads as: “what’s the matter, you have your thunder look.” In Friederich Hölderlin’s translation it lands as: “You are, Antigone, capricious and very stormy / In your anger you have no measure, and life is denied to us in excess.” In another version I found online, her mood is a storm that haunts the inside of her body. 

Whatever the result, the operative mode of translation is to address and convert old or analogous values into the freshest vernacular available. Words that are fixed in diction are pileups – a storage solution for ideas. Words that don’t make it past their adolescence are paved over. 

*

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.  

Micaela Dixon 2025 

Richard Sides (b. 1985, Rotherham, UK)  is an artist and curator based in Berlin. His works explore contemporary ideas of meaning as an existential problem. These often manifest as environments that treat the exhibition as sites with their own obstructions and particularities to respond to. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include Elections, Shore Gallery, Vienna (2024); Slow Dance (4) with Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Stadtgalerie Bern (2023); Basic Vision, KOW, Berlin (2022); The Matrix, Schiefe Zähne, Berlin (2021); Dwelling, Kunstverein Braunschweig (2019) and PURE HATE, Liszt (2017). Richard has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Kunsthalle Zurich, Bonner Kunstverein, Kunsthaus Glarus, Kunstverein Hannover, Atonal Berlin, Fluentum Berlin and Swiss Institute, New York. He is co-director of The Wig in Berlin and runs Bus Editions since 2010.

kinship is the first group exhibition at KIN. It brings together a selection of works from 35 artists under the leitmotif of the gallery’s founding principle. In definition, kinship refers to the relationships within a community or a family. The structure that defines these connections, through blood or communion, is an organisational tool that gives form and arrangement to the society in which we are participants. Outside of a family union, a kin structure can look like a sorority or a sports club.

kinship is not a thematic exhibition in the standard sense; instead the exhibition foregrounds connection as a generative motor grounded in a visual vernacular. 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 unique spatial registers that belong to the urban landscape. The insistence on connection is the insistence that all manifestations come to represent distinct layers in the wider network of our linkages. The idea is to consider the space of others in structured living, whether through fantasy or representations of reality, across enclosed zones of intimacy and polity. 

kinship brings together a selection of emerging and established artistic practices with works produced between 1983 up until 2024. The exhibition is a tribute to friendship and connection made manifest across our work and our relations. 

Micaela Dixon, Nicolaus Schafhausen & Inès-Gabrielle Tourlet Ordoñez

The show includes:
Sâadane Afif,Yalda Afsah,Guillaume Bijl,Kasper Bosmans,Ryan Cullen,Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys,Edith Dekyndt,Willem de Rooij,Brenda Draney,Isa Genzken,Liam Gillick,Zuza Golińska,Dorota Jurczak,Leon Kahane,Annette Kelm,Paul Kolling,Essie Kramer,Thibaut Henz,Tanea Hynes,Shaun Motsi,Kate Newby,Marcel Odenbach,Shlomo Pozner,Sarah Pucci,Emile Rubino,Coumba Samba, Richard Sides,Charles Stankievech,Andrzej Steinbach,Rosemarie Trockel,Luc Tuymans,Michael Van den Abeele,Erika Verzutti,Angharad Williams & Philip A. Zimmermann

KIN is delighted to present Andrzej Steinbach’s first solo show in Belgium that opened on Thursday, September 12, 2024 from 6 to 9 pm. The artist was in conversation at the gallery together with Bettina Steinbrügge and Vanessa Joan Müller on on Friday, September 27 2024, at 7pm. 

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.

Steinbach’s practice often begins with a linguistic or visual provocation, mirroring the techno-administrative language of our late-capitalist society. This strategy continues to unfold after the title, through a series of seventeen photographic works, out of twenty one, both methodical and elusive. The photographs do not merely depict the human form, they interrogate the very processes by which we come to judge, recognize and categorize that form within a technological framework. Looking at it more closely, alternating colour and black and white, the model here, though not a merely passive recipient of power, poses with a variety of tools – including an invisible machine – or loose building parts, all within a staged set excluding them from any specific temporal spatial context.

Underlining philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s notion of technology as extensions of the human body, these images invoke the standardising protocols of industry, governance and biopolitics, examining how innovations and societal norms regulate and discipline bodies. Yet, they remain intentionally opaque, resisting the clarity these systems strive to impose. We could see them as expressions of social processes, as holders of knowledge, as demonstrations of biopolitical power, although never fully capturing a sense of absolute truth. They might raise the issue of who has the authority, or the actual ability to represent opinions or even themselves, of who wields the power to shape certain perspectives. Who trully controls their own image and has the autonomy to direct their own development, moving beyond the bounds of standardisation? In this way, each photograph becomes a site of tension, where the familiar is rendered strange, and the boundaries between the self and the other, the real and the represented, blur.

The exhibition also features one readymade, two altered objects and the video work ohne Titel (dreihundert Nägel) (2019). The video piece with its rapid succession of bent nails, reminiscent of the human form, captures the disintegration of standardisation. What was built to be absolutely normative, both in its form and in its utilitarianism, becomes an abstract image, made singularly unique by its distortions. These different elements, punctuating the space, underscore Steinbach’s reflections on materiality and objecthood. They reinforce the artist’s dialogue with the intricacy of contemporary visual and social systems and transform these banal objects into sites of ambiguity as well as contemplation.

Now, while Steinbach’s work is deeply analytically engaged, it always befriends a sense of idiosyncrasy. Though serious in its inquiries, the research is not without a mischievous core; this openness to levity enables an additional layer of complexity, inviting to navigate the tension between reflection and the whimsy, encouraging us to look beyond how an aesthetic can sometimes be read. Simultaneous Localization and Mapping creates a space where the extensions of our bodies through tools and devices extend the ambiguities of our identities and how we represent ourselves. This compels us to consider not just what we see, but how we see and how our ways of seeing are governed by the very technologies that promise to extend our reach. Engaging with Steinbach’s work means navigating the complexities of contemporary life, where conceptions, our notions of the self, are in constant flux, and the maps we use to chart our course are subject to endless reconfiguration.

Inès-Gabrielle Tourlet Ordoñez

Andrzej Steinbach (b. 1983 in Czarnkow, Poland, lives in Berlin), earned his Meisterschűler in 2017 from the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig under Prof. Heidi Specker, after completing a Diploma in Fine Arts at the same institution in 2013. His education also includes international experience, such as a period at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India. Steinbach is active in curatorial and collective practices, having co-directed the project space Briefing Room in Brussels from 2022 and participated in artist collectives like Eurogruppe and Galerie BRD. He has held numerous solo exhibitions, with recent highlights including “Verschont mein Haus, zündet andere an” at Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2022), and has also been featured in significant group exhibitions, such as “Planet Earth: 21st Century” at Folkwang Museum, Essen (2023), or “Being: New Photography 2018” at MoMA, New York. Andrzej Steinbach’s work belongs within several international institutions, including MoMA and Centre Pompidou Paris.

Town of Uneven Love (But All Love is Uneven)

Towns are illusions that things hang together naturally. But the town, or its illusions, hold themselves around matter of all sorts: a body of water, mountains, big holes etc. Rent a car from Montreal YUL Airport with Labrador City as your destination in mind: you will traverse 1240 kilometres over eighteen hours. The route takes you over a small body of water on the Tadaoussac-Québec ferry and an inch over the border between the province of Québec and Labrador you will have gained an hour on your watch.

Labrador City is a town dedicated to the extraction of iron ore. This procedure remains the chief driver of its economic success since the town was built in the 1960s. Deposits of iron ore were first discovered by the Iron Ore Company of Canada in the area around 1892 and it was then that the idea of the town began.

Since then, the town has seen the arrival and departure of workers, managers, and spouses of those penchant on making a buck from major scale hole-making and rock removal. In its raw form, iron ore is a substance concentrated in rocks or minerals found beneath the earth’s surface. Then it is extracted, crushed, screened, crushed again, ground up. In its refined form, it is a perfectly soluble end-product. All that remains is for the uneconomic fraction of iron ore to be pumped back towards the landscape.

A week before we open the show, Hynes tells me that there is enough iron in the human body alone to make a fairly large nail. The artist was born and raised in Labrador City by a family whose subsistence is a direct effect of the mine. Hynes too was an employee for a time. The artist’s work takes an oblique look at the mining town arm in arm with its co-curriculars. The scenes vary: a man standing beside his Ford 150, a drawing of a strike shack, a crushed truck drawn with iron ore concentrate, two swimmers and a pond framed by the mine in the distance. In each, Hynes underlines how an unequal combination of economy, land and life prove to be inseparable yet as foundational as a page of the creation. Faced with a scale of production that outweighs human lives by the thousands of tonnes, Hynes’ body of work amalgamates photography, drawing and sculptural forms as agents or pillars of documentary: a quality felt to be sober but subjective.

The most prolific antecedent to Hynes’ approach is the history surrounding documentary throughout her home province. Between 1950 and 1970, documentary filmmaking became the most successful apparatus for socio-political change that the region had ever seen. It brought the faraway problems facing towns and small communities straight to the doorstep of the federal government in Ottawa who were forced to provide answers and solutions to those affected by the impoverished economic conditions that were the result of large-scale natural resource guzzling.

While Hynes’ work approaches these possibilities with the grammar of an optimism that spoils quickly, there will be no revolution from major-scale resource extraction. The scale is far too large. The final summer Hynes was employed at the mine, the global conglomerate of Rio Tinto (58.7%), Mitsubishi (26.2%) and the Labrador Iron Ore Royalty Income Corporation (15.1%) opened a new open-pit mine that would ensure the region at least 50 more years in business. For Hynes, the presence of the paradox seems to be enough. The bones of extraction are odious and unrelenting but they are necessary to the ongoing and typical runnings of everyday life.

In the end, resource extraction isn’t just the story of one town, or even one commodity. It is the story of many towns, across many commodities and their separate or joined transcontinental voyage for increased production elsewhere. It is this web of entangled relations between land ownership, labour and life that connect this body of work to other realities that rely on labour-intensive extraction for continued survival.

Micaela Dixon 2024

Tanea Hynes (1996° Labrador City, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Montreal, Quebec. Many of her works take an autobiographical and documentary-style approach to focus on the complex nature of extractive industries on unceded territory, and the place of corporations within small, isolated towns. Through her photographs and works of various media, Hynes intends to build an intimate, personal map of survival as a young woman, a hopeless romantic, and a worker under late-stage capitalism and in the climate crisis.

Hynes has shown work across North America, and self-published an artist edition entitled WORKHORSE in 2021. She holds a BFA from NSCAD University, Halifax (2019) and an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal (2024). Hynes is the 2021 winner of the Roloff Beny Foundation Fellowship from Concordia University and most recently exhibited at the Fogo Island Gallery alongside Ethan Murphy.

Sloughing the swamp

Buy the bag, open the bag, eat what’s in the bag. Then turn the bag inside out, reveals its inside and prove its frame. In and amputate myself from every function, Michael Van den Abeele unites chip bags, bleached denim, fingers, an iPhone video suspended within an aluminium structure and a single watercolour in a unique almost mannerist rhapsody. It is a tendency that we can see in fingers that belong to no hand or to the ornate arrangement of chip bags. Mannerism was an artistic style that borrowed from critical understandings of form born and canonised in the Renaissance. At its peak, proportion, balance and beauty were its holy trinity.

But the Mannerists were less convinced, favouring decadence and abundance over relative form, they were drawn to exaggeration. They prioritised asymmetry, elegance that was unnatural and environments built around the spectre of artifice. In this pursuit, they christened the possibilities of form beyond its purpose and disposed of functional representation at the hands of something less knowable, more decorative: a new drama.

Emancipating function from form is a recurring motif in Michael Van den Abeele’s artistic practice. Often, he begins with a material 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.

Still, it is with some hesitancy that Van den Abeele approaches the possibility of total renewal. Rather than dancing in duplicity, he exaggerates the possibility of their decor but prolongs their existing corporeality. Whether through bleaching or exposure, the image produced is often a feature of subtraction. Already hereditary to its host, its substance is a minus – but one that comes to represent an economy of insides where critical organs have lost their function and their technicality is translated into a new object of desire. Optical illusions, pasta squiggles and imperfect eggs become mirrors in a funhouse, they distort our sense of reality but intend on keeping a playful view.

Last time we saw Van den Abeele, he was dealing in cupids, therapy and cowboys. This time, the script favours a more florid inclination. The jeans drop their function in favour of ornament, the chip bags beam like low-cost jewellery, the fingers no longer belong to the hand, the flat iron becomes aware of its own image. Elsewhere, an aluminium sculpture revokes the phone from the hand, and returns the image to us through a sliced mirror suspended at a 45 degree angle: the performance of social media suspended in slap-stick. Together, their past lives as everyday commodities become monuments of desire and deficit and their materiality is made concrete in a vernacular idiom that can never become completely obsolete.

Perhaps the quality that comes to define its contemporaneity is patented in the approach to form that favours substance. Though this new body of work is self-governed and sensitive, it negotiates with the rules of consumption that reign over our epoch. Van den Abeele’s works highlight the conditions of its production at a time when our capacity to remain functional is our principal value. In the final act, the myth of productivity becomes camp, the idea that chip bags, flat irons, phones, and even cats could be subjects of utility becomes laughable and what’s left is cultivated into something entirely – and unproductively – ‘cultural’.

Micaela Dixon 2024

Michael Van den Abeele °1974, lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Current & Past presentations include: No sleeper seats, that’s a mattress at Cherry Hill, Cologne DE; Left to my own devices at The Wig, Berlin DE, Slow Dance at Stadtgalerie Bern; FRAC Ile-de-Paris, FR; MuHKA, Antwerp B; gallery Gaudel de Stampa, Paris FR; la Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels B; la Salle de Bains, Lyon FR; CAC, Vilnius LT; Museum Leuven B, and WIELS Brussels B.

KIN presents an exhibition of new work by Liam Gillick: Fact Structures Amount Structures Language Structures, opening on March 1st 2024.

Liam Gillick’s newest production elevates and transforms aluminum t-slot extrusions, a fundamental form of advanced production. The resulting art works, while captivating, defy conventional description. They hover in a reality where representation gives way to suggestion, serving as enigmatic placeholders for modernity and the complexities of social production.

Aluminium t-slot extrusions have a structural adaptability that allows for the generation of smooth, seemingly neutral surfaces. Generally resisting critical attention, the material is central to advanced production in laboratories, semi-conductor facilities and computer controlled manufacturing. Typically unseen, the material paradoxically serves as the staging for rendering the ineffable tangible. Advanced production is created using a material designed to efface itself. Gillick’s transformation and elevation of the material into a new language of abstraction results in a delamination of meaning in relation to any functional interpretation and is rooted in the use of a complex form that produces ever more complex forms.

Central to the artist’s abstract process is the use of vivid colour from the RAL colour system, developed in 1920s Germany. This interest in an optimistic period where new systems of understanding were proposed and rationalised is echoed in the muted announcement of a book that accompanies each work. Each unique book design shows a potential abstract symbol to represent the elusive processes of production that surround us. Drawing on the work of Marie and Otto Neurath’s Isotype system, the artist suggests the difficulties we face when trying to convey complex information today. Combined these new works embody a dual nature – facilitating and resisting rationalisation at the same time.

The persistent theme in Gillick’s work – elevation and delamination – shows a vulnerability embedded in the semiotics of technology. Learning from Yuk Hui’s concept of techno diversity, the artist strips away layers in an attempt to echo the inherent complexity of contemporary discourse, further blurring the boundary between representation and abstraction.
Through this new body of works, Liam Gillick reaffirms his multifaceted practice, meaning to address new and evolving systems of ideological control. His work is articulated in the ongoing tension between minimalist designs – questioning the language of renovated spaces – and a critical approach rooted in text and writing, avoiding a singular starting point in his practice. Gillick invites us to contemplate the intricate interplay between materiality, representation, and meaning — by definition, elusive.

Liam Gillick finds his inspiration in the zone where decisions get made and has aimed, throughout the years, to destabilize these boundaries, to challenge the frameworks of engagement. A space of compromise, strategy, contingency and speculation that resists didactic interpretation and instead alludes to mutable and evasive power structures of our time.

Liam Gillick, born 1964 in Aylesbury, United Kingdom, is an artist based in New York working across diverse forms, including installation, video and sound. Gillick’s work reflects upon conditions of production in a post-industrial landscape including the aesthetics of economy, labour and social organisation. Exposing the dysfunctional aspects of a modernist legacy in terms of abstraction and architecture when framed within a globalized, neo-liberal consensus, his work also extends into structural rethinking of the exhibition as a form.

Gillick’s work has been included in numerous important exhibitions including documenta and the Venice, Berlin and Istanbul Biennales – representing Germany in 2009 in Venice, and solo museum exhibitions have taken place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate in London. His work is also held in many important public collections including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Bilbao and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2022, he produced A Variabiltiy Quantifier (The Fogo Island Red Weather Station), an artwork that functions as an operational weather station on Fogo Island, Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada. Over the last twenty five years Gillick has also been a prolific writer and critic of contemporary art – contributing to Artforum, October, Frieze and e-flux Journal. He is the author of a number of books including a volume of his selected critical writing. High profile public works include the British Government Home Office (Interior Ministry) building in London and the Lufthansa Headquarters in Frankfurt. Throughout this time Gillick has extended his practice into experimental venues and collaborative projects with artists including Philippe Parreno, Lawrence Weiner, Louise Lawler, Adam Pendleton and the band New Order, in a series of concerts in Manchester, Turin and Vienna. Gillick has also produced a number of short films since the late 2000s which address the construction of the creative persona in light of the enduring mutability of the contemporary artist as a cultural figure. Margin Time (2012) The Heavenly Lagoon (2013) and Hamilton: A Film by Liam Gillick (2014)

Zuza Golińska’s work often takes the form of sculptures. For Golińska, the occupation of space itself,  is the primary medium. Over the last few years, materiality has gained increasing significance and importance in the artist’s work. This development can be traced back to Golińska’s residency in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine in 2019, where she lived and worked in a centrally located complex of the Promprylad factory. Once a leading producer of gas meters in Soviet Ukraine, now post-socialist reality has lead to the decline of Promprylad’s production. Nowadays, creative industries have entered the complex. Yet, unlike in the capital-intensive urban centres where traces of labour have almost entirely disappeared, parts of Promprylad continue to be lined with the lives of former workers.

In the middle of a scorching summer, Golińska found herself within the industrial ecology of Pomprylad, observing the factory workers as they bent, cut, welded and powder painted steel in a bright yellow color typically used to protect gas infrastructures from rust. The industrial production process, concealed behind walls of factories and protocols of industrial safety, became directly known and tangible to her. She came across heaps of scrap metal and ordinary waste from the cutting process, ultimately destined for remelting in the heat of the steelworks oven. Golińska made use of that scrap metal, upcycling it in cooperation with the welders and painters of Promprylad into initial test sculptures that eventually became her series entitled Suns.

The time in Promprylad initiated a shift in Golińska’s practice. Promprylad is to Ivano-Frankivsk, what the shipyard is to Gdańsk. The city where Golińska was born and raised. The manufacturing giant grew at the centre of Gdańsk since the mid-19th century. In the 20th century shipbuilding, maintenance, and service employed and fed major parts of the city’s population, including, in the second half of the century, Golińska’s grandfather and his brothers who were all ship mechanics. In the 1980s, the Gdańsk Shipyard became the central stage of the fall of socialist governments across Europe. Since then, the formerly state-owned complex has been progressively privatized and divided, leading towards its decline. Nevertheless, shipbuilding and ship maintenance continue to this day, and large central areas of the city are still organised around the industry. It is in that landscape that Golińska rooted her practice since returning from Ivano-Frankivsk.

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.

When we enter Swarm, we encounter an alien environment created from the leftovers of the declining factory complex. We are confronted with an ecology in which technology has replaced nature once and for all. Part of the swarm constitutes entities which seem to recall stick insects, remaining at a defensive standstill in order to avoid being consumed by more aggressive types in this uncanny crowd. The latter seems to be governed by those used for combat. They seem to originate in a cross-breeding of insect-devouring sundews with military drones. For sure they hear our steps, having satellite antennae and owls among their ancestors. Unlike the ruins of the past, contemplating the swarm does not bring recollections of the past, nor allows us to say anything certain about the future. It is a rush of here and now, gently awakened by the artist from a rusty dream of scrap heap.

Architects, artists, and philosophers, epoch after epoch, were drawn to the sublime spectacle of decay which occurs when a building loses its ‘function or meaning in the present while retaining a suggestive, unstable semantic potential.’ For most, ruin gazing triggered a nostalgic rumination about the past. Yet here we are, at the dawn of the Anthropocene epoch, waving goodbye to the stable balance between humankind and nature as it fades in the side mirror of a gasoline-fuelled car. In front are the ruins, triggering anxiety and fear. The ruins of colonialism, war and industrial progress, decay into landscapes of rust, rubble and waste stretching towards the horizon. The carcass of industrial production, that once pumped carbon-infused blood into the veins of the European cities lies on a shore of global supply chains. The digital nomads feed upon the dead beast, while ruderal plants grow over it. The atmospheric soup is progressively boiling.

For several years, Zuza Golińska has been consistently looking at, searching through and reflecting on life in this new landscape of modern ruins. Initially looking from afar, she gradually moves closer and closer, establishing lasting relationships and finally recognising this place as her own.

Adam Przywara

Zurich, October 2023

Zuza Golińska, born 1990 in Gdańsk, Poland. She lives and works in Warsaw, Poland. Her latest exhibitions include Material Fatigue, at Central Museum of Textiles, Łódź, Poland, in 2023, Piercers, at Phoinix, Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2022, Villa(in) with Markéta Slaná, at Villa Tugendhat, Brno, Czech Republic in 2022, The Discomfort of Evening, at Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland, in 2022 as well as the Biennale Zielona Góra in 2022 and was awarded the same year the DOROTHEA VON STETTEN ART AWARD, at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, for The Claws of Events.

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.

Charles Stankievech, born 1978 in Okotoks, Canada. He lives and works in Toronto, Canada. His latest exhibitions include The Eye of Silence at Contemporary Calgary, Canada, in 2023, La llave de cristal (viajes-espejo) at Tae Foundation, Hacienda Ochil, Yucatán, Mexico, in 2021, and The Last Museum, at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany, in 2021.

Image credit: Eye of Silence (Sakurajima), Photograph, 2022

Addressing the wardrobe

Dazzling elegancies contrasted by a sense of ascetism. Interplay of gloom and serenity. A distinct concept of beauty rather than aesthetic convention: these traits have defined both the artist and her oeuvre ever since she first made herself visible.

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.

An aesthetic lineage is curiously hard to trace. One can sense slightly folkloristic tendencies, possibly a European influence, however it is hard to pinpoint which places and times this would involve exactly.

A stark cosmos inhabited by slender, very erect figures, curiously devoid of interaction. A lack of negative space results in a claustrophile mood, with a sense of detachment, resenting the outside.

The technique in which she tells these stories is one of sumptuous fluidity, unhesitating and exuberant. The atmosphere exudes an aura of sombre elegance, blending an innate sense of sophistication with an unassuming, self-informed charm. This highly refined naivety is palpable in every aspect of the work, from the (floral) decor to the clothing, characterised by a whimsical yet delicate touch. It exudes a sense of purity and simplicity, yet there is a constant nuance of experience that underlies it. Together, these elements create an endearing and captivating environment, one that lingers in the mind and in the heart.

What sets her apart from her peers is the suspicion that she does not have any. Our last encounter had us sharing water on the beach. I have no idea where she is now.

Christian Flamm 2023

Dorota Jurczak, born 1978 in Warsaw, Poland. She lives and works in Palermo, Italy and Brussels, Belgium.
Her latest exhibitions include for instance PICPUS, at Saint-Martin Bookshop, Brussels, Belgium in 2022, Andante Remix, at Linseed Projects, Shanghai, China, in 2021, In Restless Dreams I Walk Alone, at Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2019, Złotousty, at Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf, Germany, in 2019, Bzzz, in Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway, in 2018, <JOHANNA, at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany, in 2017. Dorota Jurczak is present in the collections of Mu.ZEE, Ostend, Belgium, UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

All images: Useful Art Services

At the end of the 1970s, we watched Micro Macro on Belgian television every day. In this game show, a number of candidates were shown an extreme close-up of an object. While the image zoomed out very slowly, they had to guess which item it was. Whoever recognized it first won the corresponding object. Usually, it was a trivial thing like an ashtray, a padlock, a bucket or a mixer.

The program was mostly watched in black and white because color televisions were few and far between. This made the close-ups even more abstract and mysterious. The prolonged viewing of an object by the candidates and the TV viewers, with the tension increased by the excruciatingly slow zooming out of the image, made the game very popular, but at the same time gave it an enormous sadness. Winning a worthless bucket, lighter or candlestick gave a feeling of joy and euphoria for a very short moment. This was soon followed by an indefinable feeling of sadness and depression because the prize had no value whatsoever. However, its presence on prime-time television gave the won object a soul. It became an animistic fetish and took on a life of its own.

This “animating” of dead matter is a recurring theme in the works of Jos De Gruyter & Harald Thys. Photographing an endless series of useless objects (Objects as Friends, in 2011), a video in which immobile puppets act out a tragic story (Das Loch, 2010) or a collection of mechanical figures of dubious character (Mondo Cane, 2019), are always attempts to give inanimate matter a soul and to bring it to life.

For their simultaneous exhibition at KIN & Gladstone, the artists create both a Microworld that refers to a kind of earthly garden of Eden and a Macroworld that refers to a kind of purgatory or hell on Earth.

In the Microworld, the viewer is invited to closely observe haunting creatures imprisoned in a terrarium. Self-contained ecosystems inhabited by altered beings. Mutated snakes and rats with human heads live in enclosed spaces reminiscent of an illegal laboratory experimenting with new life forms. New life forms that have the potential to replace humanity.

In the Macroworld, it is the viewer who is observed by the sculptures.

We are beings populating a weary society, in which people attempt, with the courage of desperation, to create a cozy contentment from a, maybe, failed existence. But, once they escape from their biosphere, we cannot withstand the emergence of the new organisms from the Microworld.