Isa Melsheimer: Der unerfreuliche Zustand der Textur / Anna Barriball and Dirk Braeckman

Isa Melsheimer. Der unerfreuliche Zustand der Textur
Curated by Kathrin Becker
Maschinenhaus M2

In her solo exhibition Der unerfreuliche Zustand der Textur (Predicament of Texture) at the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Isa Melsheimer (*1968 in Neuss, lives in Berlin) presents various series of works from recent years, including concrete sculptures, ceramics, textile works, and gouaches, as well as her only video work to date, Wasserballett für Marl (2017).

Melsheimer’s artistic universe revolves around architectural and urban topics. One focus is modernist and postmodernist architecture and the underlying conceptions of people, built space, nature, and society. Her work is inspired by literary sources, films, elements of pop culture, and academic texts. These include the book Staying with the Trouble by the American science theorist and feminist Donna J. Haraway, who foresees the need for new relationships and interferences between humans, machines, animals, and plants for life on the destroyed earth in the Chthulucene era.

Starting with three ceramic whale hearts that were inspired by impressions from a fellowship on the island of Fogo in Newfoundland, in the exhibition at the KINDL a wide-ranging story unfolds that connects series of works by way of specific aspects. Marginal phenomena within modernism such as the architectural utopias of Japanese Metabolism, a movement of the late 1950s and 1960s that called for the fusion of architecture and biological material, and Brutalism, which has long had a negative connotation in public discourse and is now being rediscovered, are addressed in model-house-like sculptures, thought through, and commented on.

The exhibition presents a nuanced engagement with postmodernism. The title Predicament of Texture is a reference to a chapter title from Collage City (1978), a critical work by Colin Rowes and Fred Koetters on modernist urban planning and its approach of “total design.” In her installation Tea and Coffee Piazza d’Italia in Post-Katrina Times (2013), the artist distances herself from postmodernism and points to its failure in the teapots and sugar bowls of the Tea and Coffee Piazza project by Alessi.

Isa Melsheimer’s gaze is always directed at the present: in the exhibition she brings together various discourses from different periods in order to link them from today’s perspective, question them, and thus make the change within our society visible.

Anna Barriball and Dirk Braeckman
Guest curator: Eva Eicker
Maschinenhaus M1

The double exhibition Anna Barriball and Dirk Braeckman brings together new and recent work by two artists whose practice is deeply embedded in process and working with the surface and tactile qualities of paper. Both challenge the boundaries of their chosen media and share questions of time. However, they stand in opposition in their treatment of subject: whereas Braeckman captures the fleeting moment in which his images were taken, Barriball considers time a medium with which to create her drawings, revealing something unseen.

In her work Anna Barriball (*1972 in Plymouth, lives in London) combines various media such as video, drawings, and photography characterised by its often particular, strong luminous colour. Her interest lies particularly in the relationship of the mundane object to the flat surface of the paper. To reveal the peculiarities of the texture, Barriball processes paper with wax, graphite pencil or pigments before revealing the object’s imprint. In doing so she creates drawings such as the series Windows (2018-2020), where the processed paper’s new surface carries the structure of the glass. Her newest work Blinds (yellow and pink) (2020) is presented for the first time at the KINDL, a diptych of horizontally folded wax drawings that simulate window blinds and the changing light falling through the slats. The exhibition features the large-format three-channel video Fade (2017) which reflects Barriball’s enduring interest in temporality across mediums.

Dirk Braeckman’s (*1958 in Eeklo, lives in Ghent) black and white photographs have an enigmatic impact and unfold a strong physical presence in the space. At the KINDL Braeckman combines photographs from the past two decades with his most recent works. His mainly large format photographs, mounted on aluminium, depict the overlooked, mundane with an ever-present distance. Never tethered to time and place, Braeckman photographs non-places. Through labour-intensive chemical processing and experimental compositional modification in the darkroom, the images become eternal observations and timeless moments. Braeckman never immediately uses the negatives but places them in his archive. He dates his work based on the printing date – months or years after the images were taken. Only at that moment does he consider the work to be finalised.

Press contact
Denhart v. Harling, dh@segeband.de