Laura Langer

Simian 🙂

Duo show with Vera Palme

Potential d’en face

Etablissement d’ Enface, Brussels

Doorworld yield point

Laura Langer and Vera Palme are friends. They are of course also artists. Friends that are artists often speak to each other about their work. In our field, this makes many friends also colleagues. Ceci dit, not all colleagues are friends. This exhibition begins and ends with doors.

Insofar as any exhibition that takes place in an interior space necessitates entry through one, all exhibitions can be said to “begin and end with doors.”

There is also repetition in this exhibition.

It should go without saying that not all friends are colleagues. There are also some friends that can act as consultants rather than colleagues or collaborators.

Consultants sans frontières.

Just the same as most exhibitions have doors, most exhibitions have potential. Potential can be realized to its fullest, or it can be dropped down a set of marble stairs– smashing glass and making a mess everywhere. Sometimes you watch others spill potential all over their marble steps, other times you notice that your shoes and jeans are covered in potential because you dropped yours while trying to get a glimpse of what a friend/colleague was doing with theirs. 

There is much that could be said about how things are painted, and there is also much that could be said about why things are painted. In curatorial school they tell you that irreducibility is an easy way to say everything without saying anything.

I saw the film Annihilation 4 times in the cinema during a short lived moment in New York where there was something akin to the Cineville pass, albeit much cheaper. It was called Moviepass and it quickly went bankrupt. At the end of Annihilation, Natalie Portman has a battle with her bodysnatcher self. This version of Natalie Portman seemed to be made of a flexible discoball material, she battled her self but her self was a mirror. Her mirrorself was also not yet fully herself and the battle might have been a dance.

This exhibition could be thought of in similar terms. In this exhibition there is a painting of the results of a shootout in a mirror funhouse. I think of that painting as a model for this exhibition. I think all the works in this show are models for all the potential exhibitions this show could have been.

Potential can produce as much of itself as it can anxiety and dread. Watching a single artist struggle with potential is beautiful at best and funny at worst. Watching two artist friends leverage potential against each other makes me think of the moment when a rubber band is stretched to the limit of its elasticity, where the stretching stops and the rubber band is just a non-bouncy material, like string.

Some things break when pushed past their yield point. The battle / dance is Natalie at her yield point, an alien half-becoming mirror-Natalie.

It also makes me think of volleyball. Or tennis: the most beautiful sport.

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Documentation published in a contribution with Provence Magazine  for their issue Unconscious

In 2022, I made a series of nineteen works for a solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Glarus, each depicting the same spiral form across a range of formats, from 20 × 30 cm to 170 × 270 cm. At the time, I was living in London, at the Hessische Kulturstiftung’s studio residence—a classic Georgian terraced house in Bow that served as both my home and my studio. 

After finishing the paintings, I thought it would be a nice idea to show them in the house first, before shipping them to Glarus—partly to share them with people who wouldn’t be able to see the exhibition, and partly to see how the works responded to a completely different kind of architecture than the one they were originally intended for. The series had been conceived with a white-cube setting in mind, but since they had been created in a domestic space, I was curious how they would behave in a radically different environment.

On July 16, 2022, I hung the works throughout every room of the house and invited people over. The following photographs document that day, taken with a 35mm point-and-shoot camera. Through that experience, I realized that the series is enriched by being shown in multiple contexts—and that the context, in fact, plays a fundamental role in how these paintings function and the meaning they convey. The Spirals reflect the light of their surroundings and engage in a different dialogue with each environment they inhabit.

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Portikus Under Construction, #221, video documentation by Helke Bayrle

Portikus is an institution for contemporary art in Frankfurt am Main. Since its foundation, in 1987, it has played a fundamental part in the renowned State Academy of Fine Arts—Städelschule. Helke Bayrle has—on her own initiative—filmed the installations of exhibitions that have been held at Portikus since the end of 1992. Helke Bayrle’s films go beyond the documentary. A playful and thought-provoking working process tha creates various short films from hours of material characterizes her practice. Her films are subjective, intimate observations of artists’ personalities and of the creative process of individual installations.

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Piper Keys Exhibitions catalogue

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