kinship

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

kinship, installation view, 22/11/24 – 11/01/25

Left: Kasper Bosmans Pressed Flowers, 2021 Marble and pressed flowers 34.5×34.5x14cm each. Upper right: Emile Rubino According to the Microwave, 2017-2023 Silver gelatin print on aluminium welded aluminiumframe,20x21x2cm Edition of 1.

Left: Emile Rubino, Pierrot, 2022-2023 inkjet print mounted on dibond, wood frame, glass 24 × 42 cm. Right: Ryan Cullen, Der Sympathische Imperialist, 2023 Oil on canvas, 145 x 118 cm.

Luc Tuymans, Monkeys, 2020 6 acrylic ink on polyester tracing paper 57.5 x 107.5 cm each.

Left to right: Edith Dekyndt, Eastern Tickle 01, Edith Dekyndt, Eastern Tickle 01, Edith Dekyndt, Underground (Boostraat 04) 3D print on driftwood, 2024 3D print on driftwood, 2024, Cotton on frame, 2023 26x17x11,5cm 20x13x10cm 30x24cm.

Edith Dekyndt, MAKRO, 2023 Video HD, Edition 5 of 5 12:09 min.

Emile Rubino, Pierrot, 2022-2023 inkjet print mounted on dibond, wood frame, glass 24 × 42 cm

Emile Rubino, Musca Depicta, 2022-2023 inkjet print mounted on dibond, wood frame, glass 24×42cm

Erika Verzutti, White Night, 2024 Oil on bronze, 56 x 45 cm Unique

Guillaume Bijl, Sorry, 2024 Readymades, pedestals, vitrine, 170 x 39 x 39 cm

Isa Genzken, Untitled (After Andrea della Robbia), 2007, plaster and lacquer paint, w, 60 x 40 x 10 cm

Leon Kahane, WB’86, 2017 15 black and white analog c-prints, 36×24 cm (detail of 3 from the series)

Paul Kolling, Nadir 1250.564::4433.819, 2024 4 m long 35 mm film section from the exhibition “Nadir” at Kunstverein München both:200x2cm

Rosemarie Trockel, Kangaroo admiring the jaws of a beauty,1983 Newspaper, metal, painted, wire 5 x 33 x 22.5 cm

Left to right: Sâadane Afif, George Grosz’s “The Robbers (Die Räuber)”, Plate 2, 2022, 71 x 48.5 cm (framed), Sâadane Afif, George Grosz’s “The Robbers (Die Räuber), Plate 1, 2022, 71 x 48.5 cm (framed), Sâadane Afif, George Grosz’s “The Robbers (Die Räuber), Plate 3, 2022, 71 x 48.5 cm (framed), Sâadane Afif, George Grosz’s “The Robbers (Die Räuber), Plate 7, 2022, 71 x 48.5 cm (framed)

Yalda Afsah, Untitled, 2024 photographic print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 30 x 28 cm

Zuza Golińska, Piercer, 2018 Steel, 3.5 x 3.5 x 3.5 cm, Unique

Sarah Pucci, Untitled, circa 1980s Beads, sequins, pins, foam, tissue paper 17 x 17 x 10 cm

Sâadane Afif, Is it possible that you have no coal left?, 2023 Facsimile of the original letter 59.4 x 42 cm

Detail of Is it possible that you have no coal left?, 2023

Kasper Bosmans, Legend: Pressed Flowers, 2022 Gouache and silver point on poplar panel, 28 x 21 cm

Marcel Odenbach, Congo Nouveau Vietnam, 2024 Collage and drawing,190 x 138 cm

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
Andrzej Steinbach

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.

Locally Hated
Tanea Hynes

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.

and amputate myself from every function
Michael Van den Abeele

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.

Fact Structures Amount Structures Language Structures
Liam Gillick

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.

Deep Listening Richard Sides

KIN’s fourth 1 Day Project presented a situation by Richard Sides on February 16, 2024 from 6 pm.

Deep Listening is a situation that engages with the architecture of KIN by activating the gallery’s interior walls as a loudspeaker. Transducers are installed on the outside of the walls turning them into a conduit; a resonant body that hosts an extended multichannel sound-work. The source audio materials are edited from an archive generated by the artist over the past 20 years. Inside, a grid is constructed of tensioned string with an accompanying wall text.

I never work with a zoom, I work with a fixed focal length and I never crop my pictures. I usually know how the image will be even before I take the picture. My eyes and feelings take the pictures, not the camera ( I know the camera by heart and can use it blindly yet I have no idea how to use other devices). The pictures are created just like that, and when it's close to the subject, it means that I am close. Why the extreme close-up view? Because over time I was no longer interested in having the context around the subject. This way, I can combine new, somewhat more abstract, also subjective context for images that are otherwise contextless. I found that it was more complicated to create clear compositions when you could see the surrounding. I find it exciting to make abstract pictures from 'real' motifs. Portraits are different and are more difficult. By defintion they are not abstract, but sometimes you have to make a head to find out what it should be.

Intervall
Thibaut Henz

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
Zuza Golińska

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.

In my practice,I outline the seemingly binary relationship between modernism and contemporary romanticism, between discipline and magical thinking. I explore the impact of space and architecture at the human level. I analyse the relationship between an organised structure and the body. The public sphere and the private sphere. Through my projects, I try to build new and less hierarchical relationships, between people and their environment.

Film Screening: Yalda Afsah, CURRO (2023)

For our next 1 Day Project, KIN will present CURRO, by Yalda Afsah, on the 23rd of October, at 6pm.
The 32mins film explores the ritualized taming of wild horses according to the Galician custom Rapas das Bestas, questioning the social construction of masculinity, dependence and alienation from nature through the act of “taming” in interspecies relationships.

The Desert Turned to Glass
Charles Stankievech

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.

A fieldwork engages with the geographic site but then warps one’s perception of the space comparable to a mathematical “strange attractor.” Sharing, on the one hand, the history of art installation and on the other hand, the history of “site-specific” or earthwork art, a fieldwork creates its own temporary architecture within a space or in a landscape. However, such a landscape need not be natural and the architecture may not always be a traditional shelter or sculpture, but can be composed of sonic material, electromagnetic fields, light fluctuations, or relationships. At its core, a fieldwork is dynamic and geospatial.

Reading & Screening: Michael Van den Abeele, Jeans & Pasta

KIN’s second 1 Day Project will present a new live reading & video screening by Michael Van den Abeele, Pasta, alongside a selection of works from the ongoing Jeans/Denim series.

Pasta -currently a working title -is a religious comedy. I’m writing it as a monologue in which the ‘Who will come’, and the ‘What’s for’ dinner can get confused, and the topics on the table are Payment in Psychoanalysis, Inflation of Soul, closet-Calvinism and Cupids, among other issues.

John C. Welchman’s Royal Book Lodge

KIN and HISK are delighted to be co-hosting a book launch on September 20th at 6 pm of John C. Welchman’s Royal Book Lodge published by Hatje Cantz. Welchman will present on the art, actions, exhibitions and books of the para-collaborative Royal Book Lodge. John C. Welchman, author of Royal Book Lodge (Hatje Cantz, 2023), introduces the history and achievements of this nimble and richly innovative international network of artists formed in the late 1980s in Berlin, Paris and Marseille, spearheaded by Juli Susin and Véronique Bourgoin.

bratki
Dorota Jurczak

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.

Schatten personaze
gehen außenrum
schmieren ihre wizage
spielen dumm
bizarre bandage
was kann mann machen?
schon lange schantage
einfach lachen

Film screening: Cemile Sahin, Four Ballads for my Father/Spring (2022)

Kurdish, Turkish and French with English subtitles

The first 1 Day Projects organised by KIN will present Cemile Sahin’s film Spring, the first of her multi-part project Four Ballads for my Father, at Cinema Galerie on Thursday 1st of June at 8pm. The screening will be introduced by Nicolaus Schafhausen and followed by a talk with the artist.

For me, images and text belong together. And that also corresponds to the way I generally work. When you work with film, you also must have a certain relationship and access to language, because you can’t detach one from the other.

MICRO
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys

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.