Andrea Acosta, Joseph Beuys, Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Sara Ouhaddou : Notes of a Seeress

Are prophecies akin to interpretations, memories, sketches or schematic images? What do they tell us? Do they unlock new realms in which we can think and act? Such questions form the starting point of the exhibition Notes of a Seeress, which takes its name from a 1958 drawing by Joseph Beuys.

To mark the 100th anniversary of his birth, the ifa Gallery Berlin is presenting drawings by Joseph Beuys from the ifa’s art collection in a dialogue with the artistic positions of Andrea Acosta, Anne Duk Hee Jordan and Sara Ouhaddou. Both Beuys and the featured artists address overlooked, disregarded, handed-down forms of—often collective—knowledge. Based on the relationship to found materials, they use humorous, poetic and social gestures to examine economic and ecological issues, initiating processes that have the potential to effect lasting societal change. Notes of a Seeress unifies four artistic perspectives into a spatial and mental cosmos that comments on the social and aesthetic shifts in contemporary society and the potential dialogues they give rise to.   

Andrea Acosta creates immersive works using found objects. Starting from a small detail or a tactile experience, she composes poetic installations that incorporate drawings, photographs and sculptures. Like a field worker, she collects leaves, twigs, roots and other natural fragments that she later reassembles into new configurations. In her installation Wald, she uses ‘prostheses’ to grant broken twigs a second life. Can the sum of the parts make up a whole again? Acosta’s creative practice spins a web of technical and organic elements that explores the possibilities of coexistence, togetherness and tension in the urban realm.

Joseph Beuys’s graphic work reflects the immediacy of the connection between mind and body in space. In it he found an experimental domain for the interconnectedness of the material and the immaterial and developed his sculptural way of thinking as well as his open concept of work. He created a graphic oeuvre full of dynamism, repetition, of empathetic vision—the core and foundation for his artistic and political activity: “I can only say that if I had not done all these drawings, I could not have done my political work.” Beuys left an indispensable imprint as an artist, storyteller, teacher, and activist. He was an instigator, an animator, an agitator, a provocateur, a modifier—he was unwavering. (Götz Adriani, 1989)

Anne Duk Hee Jordan investigates the complex dialogue between things—whether conscious, animate, processed or malformed. Mischievously creating ecosystems like the figure of the trickster, she immersively negotiates motives of transformation and transience, with one foot in the future and the other in utopia. Her drawings free time and space from their static components and present vividly coloured counter-positions that offer new perspectives on the myth of the explorer or depict the ecological state of the earth and its oceans—like the exotic, queer sea-dwellers that change and mutate in the face of global climate change. Her mechanical works  transform objects such as stones and fossils into performative machines, kinetic sculptures that rhythmically reverberate the physical qualities of their materials.

Sara Ouhaddou transposes overlooked cultural realities and knowledge repositories into new patterns, forms, and narratives. For the work in her Woven/Unwoven series, she used discarded rubber mats as a foundation upon which she created, in a collective and collaborative process, new designs. Embroidery that would otherwise adorn upscale garments are designed by young women from Tétouan, thus feeding them into a new cycle. On the one hand, the series of drawings entitled Al Kalima, meaning “words” in Arabic, are preliminary studies for the glassblowers of Marrakech, a group threatened by extinction; on the other hand they bring to mind calligraphy, whose abstraction opens up new languages and their respective universes. Sarah Ouhaddou looks for ways of writing where nothing is equal, nothing is parallel and nothing is opposite, where things are multidimensional.

Curated by Inka Gressel and Susanne Weiß.