Moving out of lockdown, the world is opening up, a chasm to be filled by STEM courses at Universities where the arts are systematically destroyed in an attempt to keep the economy going.
Today I am meeting Viennese artists Christiana Spatt and Maria Hanl at the Torhaus. Maria’s work is a film piece and has already been installed, Christiane is a painter and photographer and her work is the final piece in the Corona jigsaw.
Yesterday in a special edition of the Lockdown Journal, we updated you on the status of the ‘Compressed Time Frames’ exhibition by ArtCouple, and today I bring you some material by Abdullah Adekola, poet and founder of the Black led and Leeds based poetry collective ‘Say It. With Your Chest’. We hope to be working with Adekola in the very near future, watch this space.
The city streets do not seem to be very busy with cars. There is a hire system for electric scooters, they are everywhere and people just leave them parked at the edge of the pavement. Bikes are also popular. Dortmund feels like a city with an environmental conscience.
Today, I depart for the Industrial Rhineland of Westphalia, specifically the city of Dortmund for an exhibition entitled ‘Meine Welt Auf Corona’ (My World After Corona).
The work of Lou Hazelwood and Chris Graham, when working as a duo, seeks to make sense of the slippage from one political and philosophical state to another.
The ‘Emergence’ exhibition looks at the energy that transforms material and gives new form to that which already exists. It is about the hand of the artist in the transformation process, the mind of the artist in the conception of the work and it is about the nature of the material being transformed.
As we emerge into a post-pandemic world, rubbing our eyes and blinking in the sunlight, the importance of the root system becomes apparent. The things that we thought may not survive did in fact just die back for an exceptionally long winter.
It is sometimes said that the final form of a sculpture might already be suggested by the shape of the starting piece. This might be true for irregular lumps of stone or wood, but when beginning with a square-sawn block, as I have done here, the final form is only limited by the sculptor’s imagination.
The question is how to achieve those elusive steps to improvement, how to train your vision on a new horizon and attempt to take people with you on that journey.
In the scene pictured, here, the ”Feeders” take parcels from the metal or cardboard containers (pictured on both side of the print) onto the belt at a constant pace, starting the operations.
Many of our discussions in previous weeks have been about the intervening 10 years as much as they have involved what this project will entail. Our discussions have also revolved around situationist ideas and strategies, phenomenological understandings of environment and our engagement with people as artists and individuals.
this was the first time I conceptually considered presence and absence of the figure and the space around the figure, and this has kept with me ever since.
there is something really fascinating about revisiting, reworking and stripping back. Sanding down the floor of the studio, peeling back layers of varnish and paint that had become caked on the floor was both an incredibly satisfying feeling - like cleaning a dirty kitchen and then seeing it sparkle
. . . the fact that there is much art out there that most of us will never be able to experience firsthand does not mean that there is no point in trying to experience or understand it.
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Lou Hazelwood]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1635112055249-DRPLKRKP6YYPLPCV9SBU/Circumvent%2C+Join+the+Dots.png)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Travelogue 03]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1635000200597-OLEKHCCN8KU8K8TKXNR2/IMG_6884.JPG)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Adekola]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1634834352930-VVHVCJ75MU04WTN9ALT7/Screenshot+2021-10-21+at+18.37.43.png)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Travelogue 02]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1634923502966-5QKJ51ZWVMFHIMHDP90Q/IMG_6768+4.JPG)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [ArtCouple]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1634830612369-EWYWYKRQU8FA5AQQ1J4Q/ArtCoupleShadow2.jpg)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Travelogue 01]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1634825417813-WTWG3XJLOI7BJB5PVY9E/IMG_6737.JPG)
