Vital Softness to Hard Spaces, 2024, site-specific mural, graphite, paint and wall-engraving, 660 x 240 cm. The selection of nine colors is the remains of paint used to color the exhibition walls in different institutions in Berlin.
22.11.2024 - 28.02.2025
After the Butcher - Exhibition Space for Contemporary Art & Social Issues, Berlin.
Participants/Contributors:
Yane Calovski, Hristina Ivanoska, Gergely László, Nóra Lukács, Katarina Sevic, Sonya Schönberger
Iteration #1: 22 November - 10 December 2024
Iteration #2: 13 December 2024 - 14 January 2025
Vital Softness to Hard Spaces is a site-specific mural conceived for the group exhibition On Seeking. It employs my non-binary typography, Archetype Open Form, which stems from my ongoing exploration of letters and text as primary visual elements and content producers. This typographic research is inspired by Josef Albers’s typeface Architype Albers, developed in 1926–1931 and based on the use of basic geometric forms (square, triangle, and circle) as well as by Oskar and Zofia Hansen’s Open Form Theory from 1959. During the development process, all vertical and horizontal lines —often representing hierarchies— were eliminated, resulting in a typeface consisting only of longer and shorter diagonal lines, circles and semicircles. This approach plays with visibility and invisibility, as well as the legibility and illegibility of writing. Words or sentences written in this typeface initially appear as abstract drawings, echoing Hansen’s visual explanation of the Open Form Theory that forces reading to become an active performative process on the part of the viewer, deciphering what is hidden and what is written.
The mural was executed in two phases. In the first iteration, the text “Vital Softness to Hard Spaces” was inscribed and painted through a process of overlapping letters, producing a dense, layered composition. In the second iteration, an additional text was engraved into the wall, emerging and receding within the existing structure, appearing and disappearing between the first layer of forms.
On Seeking
Developed as an echo of Katarina Sevic and Gergely László’s exhibition The Seeker at Trafó Gallery in Budapest in 2023, On Seeking functions as an extended dialogue with Berlin-based artists. It manifests as a series of episodic installations that will take place in Berlin from 22 November to 28 February 2025. On Seeking is an evolving exhibition unfolding in three phases, exploring anxiety concerning the disintegration of social structures, and the erosion of solidarity. Gathering Berlin-based artists, who share a background in the (post-)socialist context as well as research-based practice, the project reflects on a future shaped by fractured truths and histories. Focusing on the fluidity of artistic inquiry, the exhibition will transform over three months as an evolving, altering, morphing installation in which individual works will be replaced and repositioned, with performances and screenings inserted, refocusing the initial constellation and keeping the dialogue fluid and ongoing. Alongside research-driven approaches, the presented works and performances attempt to reinterpret and reimagine archival material and biographies, to (re)archive the ephemeral, the discarded, the waste of history or archival waste and to address practices of remembrance, while reflecting on the act of seeking itself, as a response to our time that demands new forms of knowing.