Unsayings / Occulting Disk

About

- UNSAYINGS
Mónica Mays (SP/NL)
María Nolla (SP/NL)

- OCCULTING DISK
Tom K Kemp (UK / NL)
Aaro Murphy (FI / NL)
Susan Ploetz (US / DE)

DURATION - 13/8 - 10/9 2020

WHERE TO US? eg bus 67 from "Hlavní nádraží" to the stop "Škrobárenská", or 64 from "Stará osady"

UNSAYINGS

The exhibition Unsayings is a gathering of things and ways of doing that happen in the periphery of grand heroic narratives. Heroes are historically depicted with sticks, weapons and penetrating objects, but if you put a hero in a bag, he will look like a potato. In Unsayings, María Nolla (SP) and Monica Mays (SP) weave together other types of objects: handmade vessels, bundles and foraged goods as the protagonists of unuttered stories about carrying and caring.

Monica Mays’ practice re-members and longs for home beyond anthropocentric relationships. She considers materials and objects through their production and reproduction - following the context they are “taken” from, through the cultural meanings they acquire, to the economies they circulate in.
Her installations embody the vernacular stories of the objects she works with, where craft, lore and agencies meet.

In Unsayings she draws from her recent residency at Rupert (LT), where she traced pre-patriarchal European mythologies about nurture, animism and harvest. These mutated as they traveled from mouth to mouth through multiple histories, both rooted and in motion - from Neolithic paganism, through Marija Gimbutas’ paranthropological research, to their contemporary context. Mays’ installation embodies the extralingual practice of these fables through a series of alchemical printing processes and deconstructed domestic items.

Mays received a BA cum laude in sculpture from the HEAR (FR) in 2015, and an MA from the Sandberg Instituut (NL) in 2017. Since, she has exhibited and performed in multiple institutions and project spaces in Spain, France, USA, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Greece.

Maria Nolla’s work is the result of an intimate relationship with organic materials and found objects that have scatological and abject presences in the sanitised urban and exhibition context. Through her sculptures and installations, she tries to create situations that present themselves as witnesses of time and organic processes, that certain systems won’t allow us to experience. She is particularly interested in the liminal space of decadence, bringing her work towards a delicate balance between living and decaying matter. She is currently investigating care, reproduction, empathy and recollection.

Recent exhibitions include Looiersgracht (Amsterdam) 2020, Tilde (Amsterdam) 2020 and Digestivo (Rotterdam) 2019, and was the recipient of the GRA Autonomous Arts Award in 2019.

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OCCULTING DISK

Inside of a telescope, the ‘occulting disk’ blocks the sun’s light from view: a self-inflicted technical flaw that grants vision beyond our solar system. A miniature, handheld eclipse,
it recentres the user in a far larger and less comprehensible world. In Occulting Disk, scale, systems thinking and intimacy are thought through methodologies that deviate and obscure - briefly bringing their distant subject matter into close proximity.

Tom K Kemp
The films and installations of Tom Kemp use roleplaying game design, improvised filmmaking and animation to parse the eerie consequences of global bureaucratic and financial systems on intimate and immediate human relations. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Sandberg Instituut, NL.
Recent shows include Universes, Leicester Gallery UK, 2020, Me Gustas Pixelad, La Casa Encendida, Madrid ES 2018, Blood from a Turnip, EYE filmmuseum, Amsterdam NL 2018

Aaro Murphy
is a multimedia artist, working across video, sound & sculpture. His practice focuses on the uncanny spatial and perceptual nature of contemporary medias and devices of virtual architecture. An ongoing research question is the ability for complex digital systems to take presence in space and develop a liveliness and performativity of their own. Recent shows include Semantic Noise, De School Amsterdam, 2019 and Polyphonic actants, Bologna.cc, Amsterdam 2018

Susan Ploetz
is an artist/performer, somatics practitioner and larp designer. Her works combine text, movement, song+music, story, technology, choreography, somatics, dramaturgy and thaumaturgy... that lie somewhere between intervention, collage, theater, game, and guided group experience. Recent work includes 2019 - Skinship - workshop, larp and lecture, at Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo; 2018 - Strange Attractors - conference and exhibition, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Katabasis, Space Gallery, London.