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[Image description: A grid shows forty-eight equal-sized squares of different colors.]

PENNY GORING
Please Make Me Love You, 2014 

(video-poem, 4 min. 46 sec., edition of 5 plus 2 AP)

Courtesy the artist, Galerie Molitor, Berlin and Arcadia Missa, London

Online from February 22 until April 7, 2024.

Read the poem here.

[Image description: A low-res image shows a white female water ballet dancer mid-movement next to a pole in diffuse surroundings. Her image is mirrored in the background.]

PENNY GORING

Fear, 2013
Please Make Me Love You, 2014

Penny Goring's practice encompasses poetry, sculpture, and painting, as well as drawing, video and digital artworks. For over 30 years, the artist has produced her work at home with modest means of production. She is particularly well known for doll-like sculptures made from hand-sewn fabrics, and re-imaginings of the human figure in dystopian settings, using ballpoint pen, paint or collage. Unabashedly honest and direct, Goring channels experiences of anxiety, loss and desperation into myth-making by weaving fable into memory, imagination into history and the personal into the political, until the works become universal expressions of crisis. Text is an essential medium for Goring and is present throughout her visual art. During the 2010s, she participated in the online alt lit community, posting poetry on platforms such as Tumblr and Facebook. Fear, 2013 and Please Make Me Love You, 2014 are video-poems that feature the artist's voice in audio recordings of two poems. In the first work, Goring lists intimate and existential fears, speaking of deteriorating health, war and responsibility, deliberately escalating the tension to mimic the sensation of an oncoming panic attack. It is a confessional and unsettling poem that tangibly conveys the emotional state in question. By publicly voicing her fears, Goring confronts them in a vulnerable but possibly freeing act. The anaphoric repetition of 'I Fear' plays over multicoloured squares of flickering pixelated footage. In Please Make Me Love You, the artist uses a handheld digital camera to film her computer screen as it shows water ballet video footage on mute, whilst simultaneously recording herself performing the poem. Similarly based on repetition, the text circles around dynamics of emotional connection and delves into myriad analogies – 'love you like my heart is a bowl' – without resolving who or what is being addressed. Goring's intense delivery spirals with changes in voice inflections and speed. Like much of the artist’s work, this video-poem is permeated with dark humour and biting lines that allude to gender relations, sex and violence.

Recent exhibitions of the artist include Goring's first institutional show Penny World, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2022 and Chronic Forevers, Galerie Molitor, Berlin, 2023. In 2022, Arcadia Missa published two books of Goring's writing: a re-release of her longform poem Hatefuck the Reader and a new collection of poems titled Fail Like Fire. Goring will open a solo show at Treize, Paris in 2024. 

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[Image description: A red background hosts white text that reads: This is a coverup and there’s a coverup within the coverup.]

[Image description: A blue background hosts white text that reads: Release the tapes.]

Evil.81: Is This Amrkkka?: DJ Joe Nice Speaks

For over three decades, Tony Cokes has been producing video and installation works that engage with media, pop culture and politics. He has developed a unique type of citational video essay that combines texts from varying sources – including literature, theory, journalism, interviews and speeches – with pop, dance and hip-hop music. Mostly shunning representational imagery and using a sans serif font set against color fields, these audiovisual works reframe text fragments and deploy music as an affective and intertextual element that may enhance, complicate, or interfere with the reading experience. With this method, Cokes critically explores a variety of themes: life in capitalist society, structural racism and US politics as well as club culture, gentrification, or the transformation of pop icons. Evil.81: Is This Amrkkka?: DJ Joe Nice Speaks, 2021 is part of Cokes’ ongoing Evil series, which he began in 2003. The work features an edited transcript of a video interview with the renowned dubstep DJ Joe Nice at a protest relating to the police killing of Andrew Brown Jr., a Black American resident of Elizabeth City, NC, on April 21, 2021. In the interview, which Cokes sourced from YouTube, Joe Nice, who is also part of the Black community, questions the withholding of video footage, condemns the fatal consequences of police and state power, and calls out Joe Biden and other politicians for their failings concerning racial justice. Stripped of their original context, his words slide across alternating fields of color that are based on the US flag. The diverse soundtrack includes protest anthems and draws telling connections between historic and contemporary events while also inquiring into different forms of politically charged music. Tony Cokes’ work has recently been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein München, Munich (2022). The artist teaches as Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in Providence, RI.

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[Image description: A white background hosts black text in quotation marks that reads: Show me a politician who dyes his hair, and I’ll show you a crooked politician.]

[Image description: A white background hosts black text that reads: Who said that? Mark Twain? O.K., maybe I said it.]

POLITICIANS WHO DYE THEIR HAIR -- WHAT ARE THEY HIDING?

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES are the Seoul-based artist duo Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge. Since the late 1990s, the duo has been creating text-based animation work with a very distinct aesthetic: predominately black, sleek, capitalized text in the ‘Monaco’ font set against a stark white background. In step with mostly self-composed jazz music, their narratives unfold with flashing and disappearing sentences, cascading words and in-your-face letters. Circulating their work online from the beginning – almost all videos are available on their website free of charge – the artists are considered pioneers of the ‘net art’ movement. In reference to binary code as the basis of their digital practice, for which they have long used the Adobe Flash animation software, the duo replaces every letter “O” with a zero. Anonymous and shifting voices carry the playful, humorous and sometimes trenchant stories that merge observations of everyday life with critical social, cultural and political commentary. Among other things, YHCHI’s works have engaged with the division of Korea, the threat of nuclear power, Samsung and urban alienation. POLITICIANS WHO DYE THEIR HAIR -- WHAT ARE THEY HIDING?, 2006 features a rant-like monologue of an unknown lyrical subject. Questioning why some politicians see the need to dye their gray hair, the voice gets worked up about untrustworthy, greedy and corrupt political actors. In the text, rich with playful symbolism, the fear of death and society’s fixation on appearance play as much a role as the public’s complex relationship with politicians and the lust for power. YHCHI’s work which has been translated into 26 languages to date has recently been shown in solo exhibitions at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2022/23) and Tate Modern, London (2021). In a rare move, in 2018, the museum M+ Hong Kong acquired the artist’s proof 2/2 of YHCHI’s entire body of work which also includes all of their future artworks.

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[An asphalt black and sparkled mica ground hosts a line of yellow open captions that read: "Tolerate as much emotion as you can".]

[An asphalt black and sparkled mica ground hosts a line of yellow open captions that read: "It's a crime that I feel this fucking way sometimes."]

Scores for Carolyn

The artists Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos both focus on questions of dependency. Sharing a desire for crip sociality, they engage in mutual care work and collaborate on texts and videos that highlight how all bodies depend on their social and built environments. Addressed to their artist friend Carolyn Lazard, the work Scores for Carolyn, 2019 is an open captioned video of instructional scores for care including two or more people. The poetic text gradually blurs the roles within this relationship. Its words are read in a slurred way and visually paired with slowed close-up video footage of asphalt, details of artist Jessica Vaughn’s work Ground, 2015. Exploring the dynamics of care with its own distinct sense of time, Scores for Carolyn bridges into territory where that very care might verge on something else. The artists’ collaborative scores take various forms and have been exhibited at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin and at The Brooklyn Museum, New York, among others.

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[Two blue sheets of paper float upon water side by side, each carrying one line of writing in white letters. The top sheet shows writing in Sinhalese script, while the bottom one shows writing in Portuguese. Their mutual translation which reads “the drunk captain” is legible at the bottom of the frame in the form of open white captions.]

[Two blue sheets of paper float upon water, each carrying one line of writing in white letters. The angulated top sheet which takes up more space of the frame shows writing in Sinhalese script. The bottom one shows writing in Portuguese. Their mutual translation which reads “the soldier’s handkerchief” is legible at the bottom of the frame in the form of open white captions.]

O Sapato do Mestre, Masthaharage Sapattu (the Master’s Shoes)

Lucas Odahara works in video, writing, drawing and other media. Born in Brazil and based in Berlin, the artist engages with the construction of personal and historical memory, colonial power relations and gender. The work O Sapato do Mestre, Masthaharage Sapattu (the Master’s Shoes), 2021 is based on a poem Odahara authored together with Sri Lankan writer Indrakanthi Perera. Diamant, heaven, pistol and master – these are a few of the words that make up the poem which only uses Sinhalese words of Portuguese origin paired with their Portuguese equivalent. Floating on water marked by a horizon line in motion, the text connects the colonial histories of Brazil and Sri Lanka, and exemplifies how language is shaped by power. With each line, the poem sketches varying scenes that form in the mind’s eye fueled by one’s own imagination and inscribed imagery. Lucas Odahara has exhibited at venues such as Berlinische Galerie, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen and the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi. In 2022 he was awarded the Berlin Art Prize.

Impressum

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