With a view to a later date, or never

Group exhibition at Badischer Kunstverein curated by Jacob Korczynski,
with Jean Paul Kelly and Emma Hedditch
Karlsruhe, Germany

8 October — 15 December 2021

Excerpt from exhibition text:

Bricolage has its origins in anthropology, with the bricoleur identified as someone who develops a practice via process, understanding their environs by using what is at hand. In an art historical context, bricolage has no single strategy, methodology, or trajectory. This exhibition identifies contemporary practices by Emma Hedditch (1972, Somerset, UK), Lili Huston-Herterich (1988, Chicago, USA), and Jean-Paul Kelly (1977, London, CA) where the limits of one’s own body and its attendant vulnerabilities become a vital material for, and opening into, each of their works.

The power of their projects rests not in the provenance of a unified medium or a single gesture. Instead, it is found in the accumulation of time and the potential for a practice imbricated with everyday life–situating the historical and social context of the bricoleur in relation to the viewer at the moment of encounter. For Emma Hedditch, this includes making manifest via photos and found objects the demarcation of property boundaries that we both access and enforce each day. In close proximity to her home in Rotterdam, Lili Huston-Herterich has sourced fibres from the detritus of the textile industry as the foundation for sculptures that are knotted or felted, thus marking the passage through multiple generations of hands. Finally, Jean-Paul Kelly appropriates image documents we can instantly access electronically, interpreting and transforming what and how they depict. Here, through sculptural panels of perspex and rusted steel, he reshapes and hardens our gaze away from our screens and into other screens that fasten the flesh and choice of sight to material.

With all three artists, accumulation is not synonymous with accretion. Here, accumulation also impels attenuation.

The exhibition consisted of a sculptural installation under the name Real 'til I come, which includes glass sculptures both from 2018 and new iterations made with the waste glass from the gallery staff's household garbage, produced during public workshops held at Badischer Kunstverein the weekend preceeding the opening of the exhibition (read and see more about these workshops here); felted, chorded and embroidered textile objects made from waste and rotted dead-stock textiles sourced from the estate of a Dutch textile factory closed in the 1970s; and a four-channel sound work called The Whole Roach, an improvised acapella version of the first act of Stravinski's ballet Le Sacre du Printemps made in collaboration with vocalists Linus Bonduelle, Chypko F, Tisa Neža Herlec and Juliet Van de Voort. This sound work is the beginning of an ongoing work tentatively titled The Sack Hold You, Panter, a video work with ceramic puppets hopefully to be completed in 2022.

Read a review of the exhibition by Lizzie Homersham in Art Monthly no. 453 here.