Emil Michael Klein, Flora Klein, Tiphanie Mall, Johannes Willi: UNDISTURBED SOLITUDE

Curated by Chus Martínez

Solitude. A funny word. I associate the term solitude with form. Even more so, I pair solitude with modernity. It is a projection, of course, but in my imagination the modern condition implies isolation, autonomy, absorption… solitude. The modern spirit says that the “good” thing is a separate thing, a particular, a body, a fortress, a nation state… It is this logic that we need to contest, the logic of an undisturbed solitude. Solitude needs to learn to be included in another. Our solitude cannot but be disturbed and start a radical process of mixtio, to use the latin term. It allows forms and bodies and formats and languages and genders and nations to blend, to learn how the “entering” of one another is possible.

We fear that in this process of fading individuality there will be no becoming, no future. Indeed, we will and already need a totally new concept of the social in order to understand a notion of LIFE in which we recognize that what we share with others is not our individualities, but our singularities. In other words, a concept in which the social does not rest on a contract, but on an experiment with what precedes both the individual and the collective forms of life. It is for this reason we make art. It is also for this reason that the four artists in the exhibition are Swiss. Historically, and contrary to common sense and the majority of European assumptions, Switzerland represents an incredible attention to and experimental play of singularities without the temptation of subsuming it all under the nation-state model. Yet the true reason, however, for why these artists are here is because they all reconsider the abandonment of form as a way to penetrate experience differently, to render separation a sterile notion to explain both what you see and what they do.

Through new media, we are experiencing—I would say again—the importance of merging and of making form morph. Whether it’s image becoming matter, or objects becoming hybrids, it all touches the many ways of being present. Flora Klein, Johannes Willi, Emil Michael Klein, and Tiphanie Mall use the exhibition space here as an opportunity to reconsider the space they inhabit as artists, to examine it for details that reflect not only what this space is, but also how all the spaces we now use for exhibitions mirror—very strongly—aspects of our inner life, and of how art-making constitutes an exercise of preventing us from being “ourselves.”

Emil Michael Klein (*1982), studied at Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne and Academy of Art and Design Basel, based in Thalwil/Zurich

Flora Klein (*1988), studied at Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne, based in Berlin

Tiphanie Mall (*1987), studied at Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne, based in Paris

Johannes Willi (*1983), studied at Zurich University of the Arts and Academy of Art and Design Basel, based in Basel

The exhibition is kindly supported by Kulturbehörde Hamburg and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.