Greta Hauer: IMMUNE ZONE
curated by sarahcrown
Sept 21 – Oct 3, 2016
Opening September 21, 7-9 pm

ROOMSERVICE is pleased to announce IMMUNE ZONE, an exhibition by London-based Artist and Designer Greta Hauer (Germany/UK), who will transform the Gallery into an enclave for outsiders and the lonesome.

The exhibition proposes a type of legal futurism in which the societal and political system is defined by un-adapted norms and codes of the local culture. By interweaving fiction and reality, the work stages modes of kinship and offers a sense of belonging and alternative bureaucratic conventions.

Greta Hauer spent more than a month in Brooklyn, NY, interacting with the local community and diverse subcultures and studying their stereotypes of communication, daily objects, codes of conduct and claiming territories. Drawing on these moral and visual codes, Hauer developed objects of art, fictional legal guidelines and an illusory environment that will be accessible by the audience.

The constitutive elements of the exhibition will therefore narrate the local history and its problems, and at the same time offer ideas of gangland and an alternative to today’s already conflicting politics. By entering the IMMUNE ZONE the visitors will find themselves within a scripted space, defined by imaginary laws that undermine our conventional ideas of protective measures.

Inside David’s Thigh

Giulia Cenci, Andrea Kvas, Gabriel Lima, Nicola Martini, Pedro Wirz

Organized by Nicola Martini

Seeking through the skin of Matter,

Seeing through the sound of the Emergence of the real,

Simultaneity.

The intersubjective matrix of the Work, frozen in five experiences.

Molten.

The affordance of surfaces.

Possibility as necessity.


ROOMSERVICE is delighted to present Inside David’s Thigh, a group exhibition of five international artists born out of a dialog about subject, matter, possibility around the Work seen as a generator of intersubjective experience.


Giulia Cenci (Cortona, Italy, 1988) lives and works in Amsterdam where she’s attending a residency program at DeAteliers. Recent solo and group shows include: (solo) Mai, Tile project space, Milano, La Terra Bassa, SpazioA, Pistoia, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles, curated by Qinyi Lim, Present Future, Artissima, Torino; (group) Ripensare il medium: il fantasma del disegno, curated by Saretto Cincinelli and Cristiana Collu, Casa Masaccio, San Giovanni Valdarno, Neighbours Vol.III, curated by Whatspace, Studio Manor Grunewald, Gent, Lumination, curated by Alex Bacon, Patricia Low Contemporary, Gstaad, Le leggi dell’ospitalità, curated by Antonio Grulli, P420 Gallery, Bologna, Still Light, curated by Taru Elfving, Augusta Gallery, Hiap, Helsinki.

Andrea Kvas (Trieste, Italy, 1986) lives and works in Percoto, Italy. Recent solo and group shows include (solo): Staring Contest, Ermes Ermes, Vienna, Atacai, CO2 gallery, Turin, solo presentation, abc – Art Berlin Contemporary, with Chert, Berlin; (group) Art Cologne, with Chert, Berlin, Andrea Kvas e Nicola Martini, Kaufmann Repetto, Milan, Ab-Stretching the Canvas, Jeanine Hofland, Amsterdam, Dizionario di Pittura, Francesca Minini, Milan, Picchio Verde, presented as part of “The Remains of the Day”, at Casa Masaccio Arte Contemporanea, San Giovanni Valdarno – Arezzo, curated by Rita Selvaggio, Ah, si va a oriente!, Fondazione per l’Arte, Rome, Liste, with Chert, Berlin.

Gabriel Lima (São Paulo, Brazil, 1984) has a BA in Fine Arts from The Cooper Union, USA, and MA in painting from The Royal College of Art, UK.  Recent solo shows include “life, vest ; coffee, tray” at Kai Matsumiya, New York, USA, 2016; Autêntico at Union Pacific, London, UK, 2015; Hanoi, Hanoi at Múrias Centeno, Lisbon, Portugal, 2015.  He also works collaboratively with other artists, he is the co-creator of the independent platform Postcodes in São Paulo, and his writing has appeared in exhibitions in Brussels, Lisbon, and São Paulo.

Nicola Martini (Florence, Italy, 1984) lives and works in Milan. Recent solo and group shows include (solo): The sober day, kaufmann repetto, New York, Nicola Martini & Andrea Kvas, kaufmann repetto gallery, Milan; (group) Ennesima, curated by Vincenzo de Bellis, Triennale Museum, Milan, In the land of the blind the one eyed man looses sight, Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin, curated by Julian Charriere, Signori prego si accomodino, Casa Studio Scatturin – Carlo Scarpa, Venice, curated by Geraldine Blais Zodo e Pier Paolo Pancotto, A Breathcrystal, curated by Mihnea Mircan, Irish Film Institute, Dublin (screening), Material Memory, Fluxia, Milan.
Martini will be part of 16th Quadrennial, Rome, Italy, curated by Luca Lo Pinto.

Pedro Wirz (São Paulo, Brazil, 1981) lives and works in Sao Paolo, Brazil and Basel, Switzerland. He is currently completing his artist’s residency at the Swiss Institute in Rome, Italy. He received a Bachelor degree of Fine Arts at FHNW HGK Institute of Arts in Basel (Switzerland). He also studied one year at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart (Germany)-Institute of Arts under the advisors Rainer Gahnal, Birgit Brenner, and Christian Jankowski. His work has been presented at the Tinguely Museum, Switzerland (2016), CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, USA (2015), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany (2013), Dortmunder Kunstverein, Germany (2013), Palais de Tokyo, France (2013), Galerie Mendes Wood DM, Brazil (2013), Centro Cultural São Paulo, Brazil (2013), Post Studio Tales (Germany) (2012) and Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2011). He was also a resident at Cité international des Arts, Paris (2012) and Resident at Residency Unlimited – 2014 in New York.
Wirz is currently presenting a solo exhibition “The Horse Who Drank Beer” at Kai Matsumiya (NYC) which concludes on June 5th 2016.

Water As a Burden: Map

Xinran Yuan

ROOMSERVICE Gallery is proud to present Water As a Burden: Map, an installation by artist Xinran Yuan as her debut in New York.

Identified by the poetic quality of her work, Yuan’s multi-layered practice inquires into the ocean’s phenomenological possibilities and its ecological calamity. Spanning across sculpture, installation, printmaking, poetry and video, her work investigates our notions of territory and history in relation to our (in)ability to visualize the ocean beyond its surface.
Water As a Burden: Map exemplifies Yuan’s artistic syntax. Single elements rich in metaphoric value build upon each other until the accumulation blurs the separation between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces. Their placement and movement are reminiscent of the ancient practice of oriental calligraphy while functioning as contemporary means of personal cartography, attempting to articulate the notions of imaging and imagination, encounters and loss. Xinran Yuan ‘writes’ a visual ballad with objects that she finds and others that she makes. In this installation, displaced objects figure as lone elements of a poem, holding the contradiction of a cerebral self-sufficiency and an interdependency grounded to the laws of physics.

Curated by Sarah Crown and Francesco Lecci

Born in Tianjin, China in 1987, Xinran Yuan has an A.B. degree in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University, and an M.F.A. degree in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently a resident artist at the Center for Book Arts, New York, she has exhibited internationally in the U.S., Iceland, China, and Switzerland.

You! What Planet Is This?*
Mattia Casalegno, Alex Krauss, Eva Papamargariti, Mitch Patrick, Daniel Schwarz, Clement Valla

The hyper-cultural tourist is a non-thinking, restless being. Without moving physically, he is already on the road to elsewhere. However, what is important is not the journey (like in a pilgrimage) but the event as an arrival point.

In November 1994, Microsoft launched its commercial series Where do you want to go?, in which the personal computer is described as “an open opportunity for everybody… [that facilitates] the flow of information so that good ideas—wherever they come from—can be shared.”[1] The commercial shows how the user can now enter distant worlds through the device; can find, store, and share infinite amounts of information; can use the computer as his personal coach, personal trainer, personal educator, and ultimately as his personal transport system. Images from daily life now dominate, and most parts of the world are accessible through media: the user becomes a hyper(-cultural) tourist.

The trend towards digitalization reproduces the world as code. There is nothing left that could permanently escape from this “surgery”—no secrets that could not be made available through this functionalization and operationalization. Marc Augé, in his book Non-Places: Introduction to Anthropology of Supermodernity, explains how the advent of telematics and digital technologies have dramatically changed the way we move around and relate to physical spaces. Heidegger already stated in Being and Time (1927) that media images would lead to a world empty of meaning, that “the result of media images would be the disappearance of reality.”[2] But what does that mean today?

Microsoft’s commercial series exemplifies precisely how the real essence of the world eludes the user, or hyper-cultural tourist. The World Wide Web has doubled our world but replaced its depth with a screen that the user navigates like a flat maritime landscape: the hyper-cultural tourist surfs in the waters of images and information and travels the hyperspace of events, where he carries not the attitude of an adventurous sailor, but rather that of a navigating consumer. This hyperspace, lacking in Logos, is characterized by the log-in or the logo. The experience of our surroundings is now determined by windowing.[3]

We scout our next wine tasting itinerary from a Starbucks coffee table, peek at the Himalayan sunset from our iPhone, share our latest recipe with a best friend on the other side of the globe, surveil the downtown rally from our living room, rove across the Afghan mountains from an office in Arizona, join in some events of the everyday but surrender our evenings to facing our phones and laptops. We hop from window to window, through other windows, while staying physically in the same place.

Virtual photography, Google Earth snapshots, fictional yet domestic environments, dystopic remote video chatting, sound installations, and other media in this exhibition will shed light on these aspects of hyper-tourism and offer an unexpected view of our planet and the world we live in. The exhibition will not only showcase different forms of hyper-travelling, but also critically question our own existence and the influence of technology on our life today. By investigating the shifting boundaries between, and our movements through, virtual and real life, we acknowledge their fading distinctions.


..
*Cit. McCoy, to a homeless person upon appearing in 1930’s Chicago in The City on the Edge of Forever, 1967

1.Wieden & Kennedy, New York, November 1994
2.Martin Heidegger, Sein & Zeit, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tubingen, 2006, pp.26 f.
3. Byung Chul Han, Hyperkulturalitaet. Kultur und Globalisierung, Berlin 2005, p. 17

Ice Melts Only in Winter

Myeongsoo Kim

ROOMSERVICE presents Ice Melts Only in Winter, the first solo exhibition in New York by Korean artist Myeongsoo Kim. 

In his most recent production, Myeongsoo Kim captures through the lens of his camera distinct landscapes and urban environments to successively re-contextualize them with found objects and pictures of his personal archive. This methodology sometimes facilitates glimpses of a narrative discourse, other times requires a more active role by the viewer towards the comprehension of the work. 

The title of the exhibition is a contradiction. A reference on natural and uncontrollable forces, yet colored with a dash of romanticism: the impossible becomes real, loss becomes transformation instead of disappearance. 

In Kim’s work, the frame is not a functional support nor has the mere role of documenting a moment of life. Cut, bended, trapped, and rarely alone, those images function as a looking glass promptly asking to being freed from the habitual way of understanding, while the frames become an essential element of the work itself, almost taking over the original intention of the pictures. 

Ice Melts Only in Winter is a journey on the edge of fading relations and merging inner selfes, a slide on an ever-changing surface. 

— 

Myeongsoo Kim is a Korean artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He holds an MFA from Yale School of Art. 

I walk deserts full of matter

Jarrod Beck, Lilly Handley, Christian Hincapié, Alexa Hoyer, Alexandra Phillips, Paz Ortuzar, Alona Weiss, Alex Yudzon 

We walk deserts full of matter, monomaniacs pushing boundaries, escaping realities and diving into new habitats, melting together what we were with what we will be.


A new not-for-profit art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn has recently opened its doors at 485 Lorimer Street. The space, named Room Service and run by Mattia Casalegno, Sarah Corona, Lilian Kreutzberger and Francesco Lecci, will focus mostly on site-specific installations developed by one or few artists at a time. 

I Walk Deserts Full Of Matter is the first of a series of shows investigating art and space, how they interact and what they draw one from another. The group show is composed by works by Jarrod Beck, Lilly Handley, Christian Hincapié, Alexa Hoyer, Alexandra Phillips, Paz Ortuzar, Alona Weiss, Alex Yudzon.

Alex Yuzdon and Alexa Hoyer rethink the great American landscapes’ iconography. Yuzdon with an hybrid formula, melting together stories from the Great American Book and icons of the former Russian Empire, revisited with mysticism and an iconic manga/Marvel attitude. Hoyer, in other ways, describes another American iconic imaginary: guns and deserts, emptiness, inner desolations, a desire for escape. Disappearance, lack, and absence are present also in Jarrod Beck’s work, but in a performative way. A dialogue between nine actors lingering on space and memory gap — a performance about falling, love, death and 9/11, declined in the shape of newspaper column, as if the whole pamphlet was found on the news.