Overpass/Underpass

Overpass/Underpass

Overpass/Underpass

A Solo Commission by Ciaran Begley

Private View 16th April 6pm–9pm

Open Thursday – Sunday 17th April – 3rd May 12–5pm

Overpass/Underpass by Ciaran Begley is a response to an invitation by Amal Khalaf and Tom Trevatt, curators at Hold & Freight, to realise a site specific installation in the gallery space. The work is a 1:4 scale model of a railway footbridge based on a Hornby Dublo component from the early 1960s. Constructed from sawn timber and plywood the bridge is usable. However, as it is built to the maximum dimensions allowed within the railway arch space of the gallery anyone attempting to walk over it will have to duck as they near the top, bringing them face to face with the exposed London brick. As a scaled down model using standard construction timber the work asks a number of questions. What is produced in the interface between the very specific materiality of the timber used to build the bridge and the dark, cold London brick used to build the arch? Where do we position ourselves as viewers of this scaled down model of an everyday piece of architectural furniture? How do we negotiate the work in its uncanny but comprehensible form? As it uses construction timber and plywood, materials often used not just in the building trade but also, increasingly as the very materials of contemporary art, this work plays into the language of both whilst being reminiscent of both actually existing architecture and models used in Hornby train sets.

Curated by Amal Khalaf and Tom Trevatt

TRANS Part 2 - Transient Conditions

Lisa Marie Damm Philipp Ricklefs Timo Schierhorn Sonja Vohland

curated by Nadine Droste and Swen-Erik Scheuerling – initiated by Wiebke Gronemeyer

20 - 28 March 2009
, Thursday to Sunday 12 - 5 pm

Preview: 19 March 2009, 6 - 9 pm

Hold & Freight, Unit 7, Apple Tree Yard, Bradwell Street, London E1 4DR

transient conditions is the second part of the exchange project TRANS. It understands itself not only as a reaction to the first part that took place in Hamburg in February, but also aims to draw attention to an alternative perspective in which exchange between artists, curators, and exhibition spaces can be understood. The connection between two specific places triggers an encounter with space and is concerned with its variability. This endeavour tries to explore the boundaries between exchange and exchangeability, and thereby internalises the inherent tense texture between determination and indefiniteness. Space as such becomes treated incorporating this duality, exploring it either as something manifested in reality or as an imaginative affirmation.

In response to this conception of space, artist Lisa Marie Damm suggested an idea from which the curators together with the other Hamburg-based artists Philipp Ricklefs, Timo Schierhorn and Sonja Vohland developed an exhibition model utilising the specific architecture and context of Hold & Freight’s project space: an expanse of water extends throughout the space and mirrors the vaulted ceiling structure. By entirely covering the galleries floor and subsequently withdrawing the room’s base, the gallery becomes a support structure for other, imaginative spaces and also works as a projection surface. The artists respond to this spatial intervention with works made in various media that merge into this structure and only reach a level of completion in the mirroring principle.

While for the first part of the project the curators and artists from London chose to travel through time and space in between the two cities of London and Hamburg, the group from Hamburg will cover this distance via plane. This implies that the crossed interspace between two places becomes an impalpable notion that can only exist as an imagination due to the relativisation of the spatiotemporal distance between both sites. In terms of the working process this means to work with an unknown component, an assumption, that only when coming to London can be verified. Against the backdrop of spatial and temporal relations the exhibition aims to visualize the states and conditions of being that only become apparent when moving through the space and that always contain the possibility of change within them.

Nadine Droste and Swen-Erik Scheuerling (HfbK Gallery)

http://galerie.hfbk-hamburg.de/

TRANS Part 2 - Transient Conditions

TRANS Part 1 - thirtyeighthoursandfortyfiveminutes

Sam Curtis, Justin Gainan, Ana Noble Nava

Curated by Robert Dingle, Amal Khalaf, Tom Trevatt

Exchange initiated by Wiebke Gronemeyer

A journey from London to Hamburg with three artists and three curators

TRANS Part 1 - thirtyeighthoursandfortyfiveminutes - Exhibition

TRANS Part 1 - thirtyeighthoursandfortyfiveminutes - Journery Pictures

TRANS Part 1 - thirtyeighthoursandfortyfiveminutes

TRANS - Reply from Hold & Freight

In response to Wiebke Gronemeyer's Trans proposal we are traveling by coach to Hamburg and back with three London based artists, Sam Curtis, Justin Gainan and Ana Noble Nava and installing an exhibition of their work in HfbK Gallery in Hamburg

An exchange exhibition project can potentially display a tendency towards its own neutralization by emphasis on the cut and paste structure of swapping. Trans allows us the opportunity to ask, what is produced in an exchange?

Here the focus is not on the deferential other space but the interstitial spaces and how in that space an idea of Trans can stimulate new knowledge, possibilities and discourses. We are suggesting a curatorial strategy that makes discourse and exchange its purpose, aiming to create dialectical spaces for heterogeneous ideas to flourish that simultaneously facilitate an exchange between the disparate geographical spaces of Hold & Freight and Galerie de HFBK. The proposal is to invite artists, who will ideally work across various media (film, photography, video, text, performance, objects etc) to respond to the proposed journey between London and Hamburg. Taking a coach from London to arrive in Hamburg, we intend to begin the journey with three London based artists, developing a discourse on the long trip.

The journey is planned to provide the basic backdrop in terms of subject matter or stimulus from which the artists will be asked to respond. The vehicle takes on an active form of an office, studio, information point and an exhibition space where the development of projects, performances, conversations and screenings take place. The programmatic organisation of the journey will be carefully considered to incorporate, into its geographical trajectory, a series of peripatetic events, showings, mini-exhibitions and screenings (operating between London and Hamburg). These fleeting, fragmentary and ephemeral incidents will be documented and archived. Once in Hamburg we shall spend four days producing work and installing the exhibition in HFBK.

TRANS - Invitation from Wiebke Gronemeyer

Exhibition Programme

by Wiebke Gronemeyer

TRANS is an exhibition project that embarks on the idea of exchange and its manifold layers on both artistic and curatorial levels. It manifests itself as collaboration between two exhibition spaces, the gallery inside the Fine Art Academy Hamburg (Galerie der HfbK) and Hold &Freight, a project space in East London. The curatorial team behind Hold & Freight in London created an exhibition in Hamburg in February, while in turn the team of the Galerie der HfbK in Hamburg curated the subsequent exhibition in London in March. The project was initiated and conceived by Wiebke Gronemeyer, a curator based in London and Hamburg, who acts as a translator between both parties.

'trans' is a prefix that derives from Latin (meaning across, over, beyond) and found its way into both Anglo-Saxon and Germanic languages in many ways. As a prefix to no matter what it indicates a motion, a process of formation and change, regardless if that is two-dimensional, recurrent or irreversible. It not only indicates but moreover articulates the structure of movement and development.

Taking this prefix as a starting point to initiate an exchange project, TRANS is not only characterized by a simple exchange of ideas and materials, but understands the motion that results in two consecutive exhibitions as a further progression of the idea of exchange. The project not only aims to facility exchange, but result exchange, which means: exchange itself is transformation and transferral embedded in a structure of both time and space that are not only the framework but also the conditions for such an endeavour. If exhibitions are sites of knowledge production, this project exchanges the conditions for this production and thereby shapes its outcome. Subsequent to this initial exposé of the exhibition project both spaces formulated their own perspectives that function as a concept for their individual exhibition at the other space, making the foreign their own. The medium that carries through this process is uncertainty, as the curators exchange their spaces and are confronted with a new context and the task to transform it once more. This exceeds the 'simple' notion of art exchange projects, whose result is that artists and their work find themselves in new contexts. For TRANS this is only the starting point. The way exchange is thought of here is not so much dialectical, but rather transgressive. It does not happen as a result of clashes between social, political and cultural antagonisms respectively through the process of negation, but through a transgression of existing assumptions and dispositions as limits that become subject to subversion.

When programming an exchange project, the role of the curator requires a more constructivist conception of translation, which is as a way of thinking about the relationship between concepts and its new sites of interpretation. Key to this is the translatability of multiple forms of curatorial and artistic expressions over space and time. The process of translation itself is understood as a methodological form of critical reflection and communication. Here, the translator directs the communication between both exhibition spaces and constantly negotiates the many ideas that become projected towards the conception of the two consecutive yet individual exhibitions at both sites. This leads to a production of some level of equivalence, some shared conceptual space, which forces the exhibition spaces to trade their particularities, as they become subject to transferral, translation and transgression. The spaces are referred to as places: two places in two cities, two countries, shaped by two curatorial teams that act out their own ideas, surrounded more or less strongly by the culture of two academies (HfbK, Hamburg and Goldsmiths, London). Those comparative definitions do not provide for much more than tracing their differences or similarities. For the nature of this project, those evaluations don't make much sense, as any conclusions that derive from such evaluations are always already too deeply embedded in the deadlock of identity politics.

In this context, the spaces' own particular identities are more precisely subject to a cultural translation. Insofar as translation is itself understood as a cultural activity it be able to actualize culture as its medium such that the cultural something that forms the point of departure and reference of translation can become subject to transferral and transgression, indicating a formational process and change. Only in this context the idea of translation acquires meaning, which transcends a purely linguistic horizon and becomes concerned with social, political and ideological issues.

The Night.... Installation views and opening night (images by Jack Holt and hold&freight)

The Night Though Clear Shall Frown, & The Stars Shall Not Look Down

Flash blindness is caused by the oversaturation of light in the retina. This blindness happens at the most densified space of seeing. At night, the dark-adapted pupil is wide open so flash blindness has a greater effect.

The night permeates Flavia Sollner’s photographs. In her recent work, using a long exposure that denies the capture of a precise moment, she sheds the transitory details of time. A flicker of light in the middle distance reveals another world, one with a different time, at once both myth and reality, dark, intimate and always surprising. What is revealed in that flash of light is the possibility to see beyond the blindness.

In a questioning of the ‘original image’, Flavia developed a technique with Polaroid film for this project. As the milky white turns to dark there is an intimacy that takes place between the photographer, the scene and the print. The sense of literal presence of “being there” that a Polaroid gives is unparalleled, for you are with the scene and the image at once. Standing in the scene itself, these new Polaroids can trigger suppressed hallucinations, a reconfiguration of shadowed stories at once beautiful, genuine and scary.

The exhibition was of new work by Flavia Sollner, her first solo show in London. A series of polaroids were shot in Hold & Freight and were exhibited in the show. The Night... ran from 14th – 23rd November then until 15th December 2008 by appointment only. The project was curated by Amal Khalaf.
For more on Flavia Sollner and her work please see:
www.flaviasollner.com