CONJUNCTION

source: vimeo

CONJUNCTION was an on-site installation that hosted a live sculptural spectacle using sound and performance to interpret the order of the planetary alignments.
CONJUNCTION, a term used in astrology means that, as seen from some place (usually the Earth), two celestial bodies appear near one another in the sky. The event is also sometimes known as an appulse.


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source: berlinartlink

Donna Huanca is a multi-disciplinary American artist who works nomadically, and has chosen Berlin as her base. Creating artwork with media including performance, installation and sound, she explores cultural hybridity by deconstructing them and recreating her own ceremonies. Materials like discarded clothing and second-hand fabric play a major role in her work. She interplays found objects from material culture which range from diverse fabrics to metals that span from simple nuts and bolts to jewelry and silverware. Her work also includes organic elements such as dirt, smoke, and foods.

Clothing is a critical element in her work, because it represents the diversity and hybridity of culture today. The bright colors of the fabrics are evocative of ethnic clothing, sometimes referencing the tribal clothing of South America or rural Asia. Her portrait ‘paintings’ are made of layered scraps of clothing, fabric, fur or felt. While working, she uses cloth like paint by placing it on the ‘canvas,’ whether that be a human body, a mannequin, or the wall. She controls the movement of the medium, but also lets it fall freely when necessary. In her piece Pachamama “Dressing the Queen” (2009, video) she films herself putting layers upon layers of clothing on a female subject Through this action, she creates a living collage, or as she calls it, an ever changing ICON, which calls upon the idea of cultural ceremony.

As well as using models as elements in her works, she also places a level of importance on collaborative pieces, especially as installations and performance works. In Conjunction (2010 at HBC Berlin), her collaborative piece with Rachel de Joode and performers Helga Wretman and Tallulah Holly-Massey, there is a focus on mixing textural objects in a somewhat contrived but random manner. According to the artists, the “sculptural spectacle” interpreted the relationship between planets as they are seen when they align. Thus Wretman and Holly-Massey visit each “station” to interact with each of the planets, sectioned off by their colours and elements from the mythology surrounding each planet.

In the project Jerusalem 2012 (2007), a collaborative performance piece with AIDS-3D and Wretman, she deals with our anxieties and emotional reactions to social myths. It was based on the collective fear of an apocalypse pertaining to predictions of the Mayan calendar that have been highly transmitted through popular culture in the past decade. In Secret Museum of Mankind (2008) she played upon societies interest in our individual past and future realities. In it Huanca created “[her] own Natural History Museum, which included different ‘memory stations’: that represented [her] genetic past, childhood and future.”

Beginning with her early smaller portraits created from 2004-2006, Huanca has expanded her portrait series to created large mural pieces that reference traditional masterpieces, such as seen in Cuban Rebels (The Last Supper) 1967, 2007 and Calles de Oro (Mar de Crystal), 2006. Unlike the iconic works she references, her pieces always have an underlying political message. Other early works include the Felt Assault Series (2004), which is reminiscent of Alighiero Boetti’s embroidered maps of the world. However, she pushes beyond simply creating felt representations of the world to her creating charted maps of continents known to distribute and freely use weapons to incite free within the public.

Huanca’s mixed medium work ranges in style and arena, with works exhibited in galleries, the street, a shop window and featured in Vogue. Her work is a vehicle for anthropological traces, which relies on a composition of rich and vibrant colors to enliven the history and memories of each presented culture.
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source: berlinartlink

Rachel de Joode’s studio, a large room in an old Berlin apartment, is filled with a universe of things. An ordered universe of things. On shelves lined in boxes are an assortment of objects and materials: plastic chickens, a giant medical ear model, bones made of cardboard, foam, peanuts, plastic bananas, fabrics, a skeleton, Toast bread, real stones, fake stones and so on. These things aren’t merely stuff, the kind that lies around your apartment, but things that have already began to be re-ordered or re-contextualized somehow, a process that will finally be realized through an artwork. Working across photography, sculpture, installation and performance, De Joode’s objects are always centre-stage – carefully arranged and displayed, yet functioning as free floating signifiers.

In her photographic / sculptural works, De Joode frequently mixes real objects with made objects, fake objects with found ones. Some objects are selected purely for their formal qualities, for instance Size Matters (2007), is described simply as ‘Skin colored objects measured on the face of a man.’ Others quote the art historical – De Joode’s frequent use of real potatoes and bananas are a not-so-sly reference to Van Gogh and Warhol respectively. But the real power of De Joode’s work lies in her ability to alienate objects from their original contexts. This is achieved not through sheer randomness or abstraction, but by newly categorizing each object within a system. In her Altar (2009) series, small sculptural clusters were created in urban environments to reflect seven elements of contemporary existence: food, energy, transmission, light, the physical body, nature and home and incorporated elements such as cigarettes, twine, animal carcasses, shoes, toothbrushes, and hamburgers. The result is an exercise almost in neo-mysticism, a sacred spectacle emptied of any specific spiritual meaning, but one that retains a sense of power through the connotative power of the objects themselves.

While De Joode has long incorporated human figures in her work, and for a long-time worked as a fashion photographer, last year she began collaborating on a number of performance installations that seem almost to bring her sculptures to life. In Conjuction (2010) at HBC, De Joode collaborated with Donna Huanca to create an installation that would host performances by Helga Wretman and Tallulah Holly-Massey. The piece interprets an astrological event called an appulse (when two celestial bodies appear near in the sky) and involved the two performers moving through the installation almost as though performing some long-forgotten ritual. In June of this year, De Joode produced a piece for the Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance titled Bone. The body as raw material in collaboration with dancers Jared Gradinger and Angela Schubot. ¬ The surreal and almost mythic quality of much of De Joode’s work is intensified through performance, almost as though her sculptural worlds have been waiting for inhabitants.

As well as being a prolific artist and collaborator, de Joode is heavily involved in many other aspects of the contemporary art-world. Earlier this year de Joode started a contemporary art auction house with artist and auctioneer Maria Kamutzki, with general aims towards accessibility. In their manifesto they reason; “many people who are actually passionate about art would never consider purchasing it.” And so the pair aim to match up “The Right Art to the People and the Right People to the Art”. De Joode is also co-founder of the experimental magazine project META magazine – an online publication that allows viewers to browse by association.

Artist Statement:
Rachel de Joode’s artistic intention is to decipher human existence in absurd and surreal ways, through photography, installation and performance she seeks to portray the otherworldliness in the most profane aspects of her world. De Joode regards her work as anthropological research into the relationship between man and objects in postmodern culture.