Villa Aurora Events Archive
December 2021
Exhibition: all the lonely people
Los Angeles (LAXART)
Information
In Loving Memory of Kaari Upson (1972 – August 18 2021)
Saâdane Afif, Vajiko Chachkhiani, Louisa Clement, Lauren Halsey, Annika Kahrs, Susan Philipsz, Anri Sala, April Street, Thomas Struth, Andrea Zittel
The exhibition, curated by Berlin based Nana Bahlmann, examines the ancient figure of the hermit against the backdrop of the current pandemic. The show presents examples of loneliness, melancholy, and longing, as well as physical and mental withdrawal. Some of the works by former Villa Aurora fellows and Los Angeles-based artists, have been created during periods of personal isolation, others have been newly conceived for the exhibition. Before L.A., "all the lonely people" was shown in Berlin at silent green in autumn 2021.
"all the lonely people" makes the experience of isolation and solitude visible. In doing so, the artworks take up traditional motifs associated with hermitage— retreat into nature, contemplation, and the dualities of inside and outside, exchange and silence, exclusion and trauma—and apply them to some of today’s urgent questions. They offer new perspectives on loneliness in the digital age, off-grid self-sufficiency, and imaginary places of refuge in the midst of gentrification and systemic oppression.
The selected works explore the motif of the hermit through photography, video, sculpture, sound, and installations: Vajiko Chachkhiani's video Life Track presents an impressive image of a physically and mentally isolated man whose loneliness takes place in the midst of our society, yet remains invisible. Louisa Clement's Representative, a lifelike self-portrait of the artist as a "Real Doll," thematizes the solitude of lives lived increasingly online and the alienation from oneself experienced when virtual avatars become noticeably distinct from reality. Thomas Struth's Vacuum Chamber, JPL, Pasadena and GRACE-Follow on Bottom View, IABG, Ottobrunn depict metaphorical, yet real places of hermetic isolation and evoke notions of boundless distance, expanding the idea of alienation to outer space. Bahlmann's exhibition toggles between nature and artificiality, as in the works of Annika Kahrs and Andrea Zittel. In Playing to the Birds, Annika Kahrs revives artistic echoes of retreating into nature and shows the attempt to overcome its solitude through music and communication across species. Andrea Zittel’s Wall Sprawl (Next to Las Vegas Bay) – aerial photographs of fringe areas where the wideopen desert meets largescale urban developments montaged into an ornamental, all encompassing wallpaper – depicts the encounter between the natural world and civilization and will cover almost the entire exhibition space, framing the exhibition as a whole. April Street's Still Life at 12 o'clock references nature as an imagination and creates a fantastic landscape where physical reality and the artist’s inner world are united into a single pictorial plane, while Lauren Halsey imagines the collective refuge of many marginalized groups in the artist's native South Central LA, In Trees and Flowers Suzan Philipsz lends her voice to the fear of the outside experienced during isolation, whilst Anri Sala's early video work Uomoduomo captures the isolated existence of an unhoused person, forced to live on the fringes of society. In a new work, Saâdane Afif explores strategies of shared authorship in the context of artistic self-encounter.
The exhibition is accompanied by a supporting program of films, readings, talks, performances.
Participants
Nana Bahlmann, Curator: "Being alone has taken on a completely different meaning in the long months of lockdown. Artists have some tools to offer in dealing with isolation, since distance is an essential part of artistic positioning towards the world. Art transcends loneliness by making it visible, interpreting it, and allowing the opportunity to share that experience, and that's what we're trying to do with this exhibition."
Heike Catherina Mertens, Executive Director VATMH: "For many artists, Villa Aurora is a place of retreat and contemplation, similar to a hermitage, where inspiration for new things emerges from a distance. For writers and journalists who are threatened in their homeland, it is at the same time - as it was for Marta and Lion Feuchtwanger in 1943 - a place of refuge, a sanctuary. We wanted to highlight these aspects with an exhibition on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the house as artist’s residence, reinforce the exchange between the art scenes in Los Angeles and Berlin."
Partners
The exhibition is generously supported by the German Federal Foreign Office, the Berlin Senate Chancellery, the Friede Springer Foundation and a private patron.
The Los Angeles version of the exhibition was further made possible through support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the LA Arts Recovery Grant.
LAXART is a nonprofit visual art space that promotes developments in contemporary culture through exhibitions, publications, and public programs. LAXART believes that contemporary art is a means of understanding key issues of our time with all their inherent contradictions. Contemporary art assumes many forms. Rather than provide answers, it raises questions. Through a range of offerings, LAXART contextualizes contemporary art both socially and art historically. LAXART’s programs are free and designed to be accessible to the general public.
Reading and Conversation: I've been Walking
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, 90272 CA)
Information
Sternburg donned a mask and gloves and ventured out to explore the city streets, taking photographs to capture her journey through the altered landscape. "For a while I walked through Los Angeles’ empty streets, seeing mostly what was desolate," Sternburg writes. "Then I started to see a poetry that I hadn’t always seen in more populated times." In the following months, signs and traces of life appeared throughout an urban environment that had once seemed frozen in time. I’ve Been Walking applies Sternburg’s attention to perception, memory, and layered experience to the unprecedented pandemic year. Sternburg’s ability to notice and communicate these nuances of sensation presents her viewers with an opportunity for deep reflection on the meaning and metaphor of each image. Although many of its photographs have no human figures, I’ve Been Walking expresses profound humanity, gesturing toward the social and personal resonances of the 2020 shutdown. "I walked photographing what I’ve come to think of as a kind of fullness — an enlargement of the senses that can be found in the midst of emptiness," Sternburg says. "I do not mean to turn the griefs and losses caused by COVID-19 into artistic gain. I do mean that we are enlarged when we become part of the landscape of all of us." Janet Sternberg will be in conversation with Boris Dralyuk, editor-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Participants
Janet Sternburg is a fine art photographer, a writer of literary books, a maker of theatre and films, and an educator. Since 1998 when she began taking photographs, her work has appeared in Aperture (2002), followed by The Utne Reader ("A New Lens," 2003), which selected her as one among forty international artists and writers who "with depth, resonance, ideas and insights, challenge us to live more fully,". A 2016-17 monograph of her photographs, Overspilling World: The Photographs of Janet Sternburg, was published by Distanz Verlag (Berlin) with a Foreword by Wim Wenders in which he writes, "Photographers don’t have eyes in the back of their heads. Janet Sternburg does." Her literary books include the two volumes of The Writer on Her Work, (W. W. Norton, 1981 and 1991). Other critically praised books followed, among them Phantom Limb (University of Nebraska American Lives Series, 2002) about which Bill Moyers has written "Janet Sternburg has found the perfect metaphor for the ultimate inevitabilities of life." This hybrid of personal story, essay, and history was followed by White Matter (Hawthorne Books, 2016); in a review published in Forbes, Sternburg is described as "using all the skills at her disposal, the sensitivity, precision and lyricism of a poet, the hard edges of a photographer, the intelligence and scholarship of an academic, to plumb the many facets of this story." Her play, The Fifth String (2011-2014) about pre– and post–Expulsion cultures, produced in Berlin, Pact Zollverein Essen, New York, and Los Angeles. Sternburg lives in Downtown Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. In 2016 she was co–recipient of the REDCAT AWARD, given to individuals who exemplify the creativity and talent that define and lead the evolution of contemporary culture. Her newest book (October, 2021) is I’ve Been Walking: Janet Sternburg Los Angeles Photographs.
Boris Dralyuk is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution and Ten Poems from Russia, and translator of Isaac Babel, Maxim Osipov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authrs. His poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Hopkins Review, The New Criterion, and elsewhere, and his collection My Hollywood and Other Poems will be published by Paul Dry Books in 2022.
Exhibition: 6 Friedberg-Chicago
Dortmund
Information
6 Friedberg-Chicago, the first institutional solo exhibition by German-American artist James Gregory Atkinson, illuminates a part of African-American-German history on a personal, social, and political level. In the exhibition, the artist presents his new film of the same name, which was shot at Ray Barracks, a former US Army Base in Friedberg. It was made in collaboration with dancer and choreographer Josh Johnson and harpist and singer Ahya Simone, among others. The exhibition also presents a non-linear archive that explores the history of Black soldiers in Germany and their descendants, which Atkinson developed in collaboration with Eric Otieno (sociologist and political scientist) and Mearg Negusse (art historian).
Participant
James Gregory Atkinson (b. 1981 in Bad Nauheim, Germany) studied with Douglas Gordon at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, and received fellowships and artist residencies at Villa Aurora, Los Angeles (2016), the Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht (2017), and a studio fellowship from the Hessische Kulturstiftung in New York (2018).
Partners
An exhibition by Dortmunder Kunstverein sponsored by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation as part of the "Catalogs for Young Artists" grant.
The film production has been supported by Hessische Kulturstiftung, Goethe-Institut and Villa Aurora.
*Dortmunder Kunstverein e.V. was founded in 1984 as a civic initiative as a non-profit association for the promotion and mediation of contemporary art in Dortmund. Since 2014, it has been located in the immediate vicinity of the Dortmunder U - Center for Art and Creativity, thus helping to strengthen this cultural center for contemporary art in Dortmund.
Further information about the exhibition and the supporting program can be found here (in German only).