VOL. XXIX & VOL. XXX

Kunstmuseum St. Gallen & Rodeo, London

2 July 2023 - 14 January 2024

&

7 October – 18 November 2023

I imagined we were strolling through a big building somewhere not far from Lake Constance, it was hot and humid.

Not unlike a hazy summer day, the light was coming from the big windows and the post-modern lamps lighting the ceiling, illuminating what was exposed beneath them: body parts made of wood amidst geometric structures, sleek metallic surfaces forming what back then some coined minimalism, fragments from past travels, traces from the previous centuries have landed and been placed within this voyage, where the only sound I hear is our steps on the wooden parquet, interrupted by coughs of invisible others; it was, after all, winter.

The walls do the trick, and hide while they reveal, a choreography of surprise and balance between vulnerability and vigour, organic matter within seemingly cold surfaces, representation within abstraction and at most times geometric shapes holding bodies, humans or animals.

Walls, dividing mechanisms, always separate and still there is always life behind them. The fantasy of what lies and hides on the other side prevails. In our path, we encounter brass grasshoppers on aluminium sheds, an illuminating globe, wooden spheres balancing on high-up corners, an aged fax stack of paper looking at its reflection in the mirror, a broken foot of a horse standing on supports. Shapes vary in scale and proportions and there is a tripping loss of centre, and as always, the path is what matters, even within a maze of materials, forms and shapes.

Around a corner and behind another wall we are watching a group of dancing medusas as they call cnidaria in the Greek speaking world. A film that feels historical, dug out of a science lab, while phosphorescent tentacles swirl in indigo blue in a hypnotising and soundless rhythm, and shining planets turn into bubbles in a pool while two bodies of what turn out to be seals, practise eros.

A miniature wooden anatomical body is looking down at us while we are trying to decipher through a series of paperworks with new planetary information on new geography maps. A baby iron snake slithers behind an archetypical shape of a house, and then you gasp as our gaze hits what looks like a surgical tray that holds together coloured feathered wings. Are we in someone’s dream, you whisper.

It’s getting dark outside, and you’re walking ahead of me towards the exit going down the big staircase. A smaller flight of stairs on the right side of the main hall is taking us downwards to the basement.

There is a big glass door strangely facing a street outside, dark and wet and the room is lit to the contrary of the halls upstairs, with fluorescent lamps placed on the floor, facing upwards. I would swear we are teleported to a different era and what eerily feels like a desert island.

The room is small and resembles an old stable with glazed petroleum tiles on one side, while the rest is bricks painted white. Another minimal aluminum formation rests on the floor, not unlike the one upstairs though bigger, five lines. It contrasts the aged, used floor, that still carries the grease of cars and the breath of horses.

I lift my head and the walls are covered with a series of pencil doodles under plastic surfaces; lots of them.

I go closer and I see bodies, pleats and folds on dancing bodies, dancing leaves, trees, bushes in the wind, landscapes, rock formations, clouds, waves… and everything else we tend to want to recognise when things are not meant to be defined.

Mostly what this graphite family records is time, time in isolation, in despair and in a lightless place. They are also measuring mechanisms of emotional landscapes, of her moods. The numbers on the papers signify nothing but reveal her obsession with collecting what can then be archived and possibly collected again.

It is the first time we witness her hand. Interestingly, and not a surprise, it is the hand that she never uses that made these drawings; the left one.

It is with extreme joy to present the fourth exhibition at the gallery of Haris Epaminonda.

This exhibition is conceived alongside the artist’s solo exhibition at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen VOL. XXIX, and runs in conjunction with it as a satellite.