FUTURES Open Call: Ties That Bind Selected Artists

Below you will find a brief description of the selected proposals:

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Ihar Hancharuk, What if I am a spy?

A few years ago, while trying to make a photography project on the national identity of Belarusians, I encountered an unexpected reaction: besides the typical questions "Who are you?" and "Why are you photographing?" I also heard a strange "Are you a spy?", although I was always photographing openly and in non-restricted areas. 

While working on the project, I also found objects or images at home that, when put in a certain context, could be associated with espionage. By mixing these pictures, I create a fictional story, a report of a spy who has no intention to be one.

But what if I AM a spy?

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Sasha Chaika, Off The Map

The modern world presents a complex system of interconnections, where modern myths serve to maintain stigmatization and create the illusion of communication between people, where the system tries to impose a role model - to replace the internal content with external reality setups. And the closer we get to the perfection of the simulacrum, the further away we are from mystery and freedom, but where there is no mystery, there is no potency for new forms of interactions. What is art if it just reflects everything as it is, is it just a duplication of reality without the ability to go beyond the existing order of realness?

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Angyvir Padilla, Home Unfoldable Home. Flashbacks

“In Padilla's series Home Unfoldable Home, the artist presents works consisting of silkscreens and wax on fabric, draped over steel frame structures. The sculptures extend across the center of the exhibition space, standing in the way and preventing people to move freely around the room. Mounted on the walls, they appear to have claimed every corner of the room as their own. Hardened puddles of wax form on the floor, serving as tangible traces. As a viewer, there are various ways to engage with the installation. Standing directly in front of the works, the depicted motifs, always veiled by paraffin, appear almost too blurred to discern. They reveal an archive of faded photographs, captured by her mother in the flat they shared in Caracas. It requires some distance from the works to discern the outlines of what is being depicted. Here, as well, it is the trace that the photographic medium leaves behind on Padilla's objects. The solidified paraffin puddles, the stable yet eerily fragile bodies, and the unrecognizable photographic motifs – all embody a paradox that consistently resonates in Padilla's work: a nostalgic irrevocability of time.

Marlene A. Schenk"

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Jan Durina

My work deals with the themes of mental health, identity, relationships and imagination. It reflects on feelings, both positive and traumatic, that we all share, yet experience and communicate differently. I feel naturally connected to your statement on Ties That Bind and it attracts me as an artist, and as a human being. I believe you can recognize its mirroring within my art-work. In the past years, I started to shift my artistic interest in a more political and socio-political direction, especially because of the troubling current political situation in the country I come from - Slovakia. I view my art as autotheoretical practice, whether if it's photography, fine art, performance, music or writing. Exhibitions and performances, to me, serve as opportunities to heal together, to nurture our imagination, provoke introspection, build new communities and safe spaces.

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Dev Dhunsi, Tales They Don't Tell You

In Tales They Don't Tell You, the past meets the present through cylindrical water sculptures and woven images into textiles. The visibility of the images are constantly on the verge of renewal and disappearance inspired by ecosystems, queer theory and mythical tales from the Vedas 1500-500 BCE.

In the Hindu scripture Shatapatha Brahmana, written between the 6th and 8th centuries BCE, we encounter scientific knowledge of geometry, observational astronomy, and many tales, where time is told in a cyclical, nonlinear way. The book recounts how the sweat dripping down the god Shiva’s head is the water of Ganges River, where the ashes of generations of deceased people travel along the currents like a miniature collection of the past. I depart from a lens-based practice to explore remains of untold ancient tales, including gay love.

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Luna Mahoux, How I feel when I look black

Luna Mahoux's work is a kind of large memorial collection, made of images, music and words. Her projects are built on the collection and transmission of black personal and community emotions, that is to say what is shared by people within spaces or in practices of resistance and self-definition.

This practice of collection and collaboration gives rise to step-by-step work processes, which first consist of identifying stories and the people who carry them, meeting them and working with them in the way they want it to be transmitted, and choose the most accurate form to demonstrate it. They most often involve a physical movement, which Luna explains: “I cannot talk about a story without having seen it, without having approached it, without having listened to it, because everything changes once there.”

From logobi to sprint images to wedding recordings, Luna Mahoux produces a sensitive – and sometimes critical – discourse on popular culture of the 2000s, revisits notions of kinship or addresses the issue of police violence. She declines a series of gestures which (re)assembles, repairs the tears.

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Sheung Yiu, Between Two Trees, There Are Many Worlds

Between Two Trees, There Are Many Worlds explores how ecological changes are observed at different scales—at the human and the planetary scales—in remote sensing of the forest. Taking two trees, a surviving tree and a dead infested tree, in the central forest in Helsinki as a starting point, the project explores hyperspectral imaging and posthuman sensing of the natural environments in the context of the ongoing bark beetle infestation in Northern Europe. Inspired by James Gibson’s notion of environmental affordances and biologist and cybernetician Jakob von Uexküll’s observation of how a tick’s sensory abilities create its own world, the project compares the optical scientific measurements of the forest with the chemical sensing of the living creatures in the woods. Capturing the forest using hyperspectral imaging and laser scanning, the data is transformed into different visual forms, combined with writings on algorithmic models of seeing and the a-visible complex sensory worlds in the forest. The resulting work is a video essay that challenges the human-centric understanding of natural landscapes.”

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Donja Nasseri, The mummy eye

The Mummy Eye, is part of the project Leaky Archive, the digital project of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum (RJM) in Cologne. The intention of the project is to work together on the collection in digital and analog spaces in order to make content and structures more open and polyphonic. 

How can the collection database, most of which contains little information, be more transparent and accessible?

I selected some objects from the collection from Egypt and 3D scanned them to artificially enlarge and fictitiously transport them back to the places where they potentially came from. Through the All-View shot, I have "taken" the object with me and have the power to decide how much I enlarge it and how much attention it gets. The fusion of new 3D applications and classic watercolor blurs the line between current and old. The mummy eye is the first object from my series that I have printed as a 3D print, transferred as a photograph into an artificial leather skin ceramic or as a photographic water collage. The aim is a discourse, a repair and a strong visibility of hidden objects that can be found in many museum storages.

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