“My Place is Placelessness”: Shahpour Pouyan at the Rubin Museum

Posted on November 23, 2019 by Linnea

Installation view, *Clapping with Stones: Art and Acts of Resistance* at the Rubin Museum. August 16, 2019-January 6, 2020

Architectural models turned on their head, or their sides, ash spilling out of them. My Place is the Placeless (2016-2019) is a set of 15 glazed stoneware objects. With them, Shahpour Pouyan transforms architectural form into personal relics. This installation is part of the exhibition Clapping with Stones: Art and Acts of Resistance on view at the Rubin Museum through January 6, 2020.

Installation view of Shahpour Pouyan, *My Place is the Placeless* (2016-2019)

The objects are neat but handmade, finished in a neutral palette yet rough edged. Each is unique, and displays the roof of a different type of building, which might be round or pointed. Thick red earthenware walls peak out of the unglazed edges. Ash spilling out makes them feel a little less static, a little more in process of coming together or falling apart. What brings these miniature domes together in a vitrine?

Shahpour Pouyan made this body of work in response to the results of a DNA test, which informed the New York-based, Iranian-born artist that his genetic heritage came from far-flung parts of the world such as Scandinavia and South Asia. The artist created architectural forms based on the indigenous architectural practices of those disparate places, uniting them just as he in his person unites such a heritage–a kind of architectural genetics. Only later did Pouyan learn that those results were a mistake, and some of those connections were false. As he continued making this group of work, he added ash. The ash serves as a reminder of past histories, which may or may not have been real.

The ash transforms the little vessels into urns, while the form recalls the idea of dwelling and home. Pouyan materializes the forms of home and the past but is distanced from it. The title of the work, “My Place is the Placeless,” comes from a poem by Rumi:

I am not from the East

or the West,
not out of the ocean
or up from the ground,
not natural or ethereal,
not composed of elements at all.
I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world
or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve
or any origin story.
My place is placeless,
a trace of the traceless.

These little monuments of poetic form mark what could be as much as what is. In doing so, they question any kind of origin story.

Pouyan’s work resists the easy and straightforward identities that we give to ourselves and others, offering a multi-valent mode of being instead. From onion dome to stupa, one can draw formal parallels between the rounded and pointed tops as well. Artmaking in this case is an act of reconciliation, imagining all the heritages together at one table. Such a syncretic understanding of culture is amplified by the view of the installation just beyond Pouyan’s vitrine.

272 suspended red lanterns act as a central visual point for the installation Lotus: Zone of Zero (2019) by Kimsooja, from which comes the layered sounds of Tibetan, Gregorian, and Islamic chants. The lanterns visualize the lotus, a motif of contemplation in the Buddhist tradition that here presents a call for unity even while it visually unifies the space around a central point.

The exhibition moves succinctly between the work of many artists–from Nari Ward and Hank Willis Thomas to Kadar Attia and Lida Abdul–and it can be difficult, even jarring, to move so quickly between strong perspectives that require understanding a local context. Within his own work, Pouyan makes it seem both natural and mythic.

Clapping with Stones: Art and Acts of Resistance is on view at the Rubin Museum until January 6, 2020.

Phone Tag: Interview with Bronwyn Katz

Posted on October 27, 2019 by Linnea

*Driekopsieland (Île à trois têtes)* (2019). Mild steel, wire, steel wool, steel pot scourers, cardboard. Installation view at Biennale de Lyon, Lyon

Bronwyn Katz is a South African artist who frequently turns to metal, found metals, and other objects to consider structures of place and language. These resonant and unruly materials bring specificity and context to the minimalist forms. In this Phone Tag interview, Bronwyn describes her family connection to metalwork, the importance of sustaining networks, and how the different environments of Capetown and Johannesburg shape her practice.

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to an artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

******

Linnea West: You mentioned that you are recently back from a project in Lyon. What were you working on there, and what are you working on now?

Bronwyn Katz: Currently I’m working in my studio. I’m preparing work for a solo show at Peres Projects in Berlin. While I was in Lyon, I was preparing work for the Biennale. I spent three weeks there preparing the work for the Biennale.

LW: Were you in Lyon for so long because you were making work there, or because it just takes that long to install, or…?

BK: For the Biennale it was important that all of the artists make new works. Most of the works that were on show were new works created specifically for the Biennale. It was also important for the Biennale that we collaborate with local factories and local artisans. Many of the artists ended up producing the work from start to finish in Lyon.

LW: What did you make?

BK: I created an installation out of wire and steel wool. The installation is called Driekopsieland. Basically, it’s a continuation of work that I’ve done before, but on a larger scale. I was trying to also shift some of my previous thoughts and ideas about what I was making. Most of the work that I made for the Biennale is very similar to work that I made earlier, where I was working with the idea of language, language formation, and the possibility of creating an alternative language with material. Also sounds. I created sounds.

For the Biennale, using the same material, I was still interested in the sound but also in trying to create a landscape. I was also reflecting upon the fact that the Biennale was being held at an old washing machine factory, and so I wanted to create a type of metal landscape. The installation looks like a fuzzy cactus metal forest, and the wire extends from nine meters up so that it begins to look like a type of water source or rainfall.

LW: That sounds amazing. The first image on your website is of some sculptures made out of steel wool. When I first looked at those, I didn’t know what that material was, and it almost looks like it could be soft instead of sharp. Why do you like working with steel wool? Where does that interest come from?

BK: I think I’m generally interested in metal. Growing up, my father was a metal worker. He made gates and burglar bars, and I’ve always had a relationship with metal. I think that the work comes out the way it comes out, because I try to find alternative, quirky ways of working with the material. Instead of spending time welding a large structure, I’m more attracted to softer metals and also found metal.

*Untitled, notes on perception (i)* (2018). Wire and rope from used beds. 186 x 250 x 23 cm, 186 x 127 x 5 cm. Image courtesy of André Morin and the Palais de Tokyo

LW: That’s sounds like it has been an interesting influence. I wonder who else or what else influences how you work now?

BK: I’m not sure. I’m very influenced by my community that I grew up in, but also the community of artists that I practice with currently—my network basically. Also what’s happening in the country, in South Africa, but also the rest of the world. It’s difficult to point out one specific thing. It’s more about the way I’m living at the time, how the city works, or just what is around me and the space that I’m living in. So many things. I think place would be the number one influence on the work.

LW: You mentioned working in a community of artists. Is that a community in Johannesburg? What’s that art scene like?

BK: I’d say it’s a community between Johannesburg and Cape Town. I spent a lot of time in Cape Town. I studied in Cape Town. After studying, I spent two extra years in Cape Town. Most of my community is in Cape Town. Now, having moved to Jo’burg, I’ve been able to broaden my network and expand my community.

In Cape Town, I was part of iQhiya, a collective of 11 women. We all met at university, at different stages of university, and we decided to come together as a network to support each other’s practices. When I speak about a community or network, that was a very structured community-network.

In Jo’burg it is more fluid. There are artists in similar positions of their career that I’m engaging with. I’ve also recently joined a reading group called the Lessor Violence reading group. Just being able to share ideas with people on a regular basis is important for my practice.

LW: Absolutely. I’m interested in this collective in Cape Town that you were part of. You mentioned that it was 11 women. Is it a coincidence that they all happen to be women, or was it specifically women coming together?

BK: It was very specific. Like I said, at the time we were all studying together but at different stages. We were all black women students at the university, and the way that we were taught about art, the art world or just who was able to have a successful career or who was acknowledged within the institution… it was almost never a black woman. Coming together, we wanted to create that space where we give each other the attention and support that we were not finding within the university.

*Droom boek* (2017). Salvaged bed springs and mattress. 180 x 150 cm

LW: It’s wonderful to make spaces like that. When did you first think of yourself as an artist?

BK: I’m not sure.

[laughter]

LW: Do you think of yourself as an artist?

BK: I do, but I can’t think of a point where I didn’t think I was an artist or a point where I started to think that I was an artist. I’m not answering your question well. [laughs]

LW: Well, one of the things it seems to me, from the outside, is that you’re younger and you’ve already been quite successful. That you have galleries in different places, and you’re showing work all over. Maybe you haven’t had to wrestle as much with that identity because you’ve been able to show work.

BK: I agree with you. I was on a residency just outside of Jo’burg with an older artist a few years ago, and she was telling me every five years she had to make a decision to continue being an artist. In my career, this is something I haven’t experienced because my career has been so short. Maybe that’s a question for the future.

*Untitled, notes on perception (iii)* (2018). Wire. Image courtesy of André Morin and the Palais de Tokyo

LW: Do you have a studio? What is an ideal day like in your studio?

BK: Yes, I do have a studio. An ideal day is me waking up on time, going to studio, maybe reading for a bit, working on a project I’ve been working on, and hopefully somehow magically discover a breakthrough.

[laughter]

Or discover something that I haven’t seen in my work before or just lean something from the material. I think most days, I go to studio and I try and find something that I haven’t found yet. The ideal day would be finding something that I’m looking for.

LW: You mentioned that you recently moved to Johannesburg. Do you think it’s important for an artist to be in a big city where there are galleries where you can see art, where you can make connections but where it’s often expensive or chaotic, or better to be somewhere smaller or quieter, where it’s a little easier to make?

BK: Basically, this is my second time coming back to Johannesburg. I lived in Johannesburg in 2017 for a few months. I had moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg to test out how it would feel to live in the city. Then in February this year, I moved back to Johannesburg. I would say that there is a lot going on in Cape Town, in terms of cultural institutions. My gallery, for example, is not in Johannesburg; It is only in Cape Town. I don’t know if you’ve ever been, but the cities are on opposite ends [of South Africa], and they’re very different from each other.

My main reason for moving out of Cape Town was that Cape Town is a very expensive place to live, because it’s a tourist destination. It’s a lot cheaper to live as an artist in Johannesburg, especially in the center of the city. Most of the center has moved to other parts and the center has sort of been abandoned. The center is poor in Johannesburg, whereas in Cape Town the center is very wealthy. The poor in Cape Town are outside of the center, pushed out far outside of the center. It’s much more affordable to live in Jo’burg, and I would say it’s much more interesting to live in Jo’burg as well. I think Cape Town has the potential of becoming a bubble. There can be a disconnect from what’s actually happening in the rest of country.

But in comparison to a place like Kimberly, which is a smaller city, where I’m from, that’s a different aspect of your question. I think it would be very hard at this stage of my career to live in a place like Kimberly where there is no art market. I think that maybe at a later stage of my career, that would be possible, but at such an early stage of my career I think it’s important that I live in either Cape Town or Jo’burg. And for the way that I wish my practice to grow, Jo’burg makes more sense.

LW: That makes sense. It was great speaking with you—thank you!

BK: Thank you.

Burgeoning Forms: Mrinalini Mukherjee at the Met Breuer

Posted on July 14, 2019 by Linnea

I feel astonished when I encounter powerful, oversized female forms in art; they are all too rare. In itself, that is a reason the exhibition of large knotted fiber works by Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee on view at the Met Breuer demands closer attention. Modernist forms expand freely across medium into humble and coarse textiles that recall their origin in a living world. Her hanging gods and goddesses invoke an experience of presence and awe, and they straddle (or collapse) ideas of Western and Indian art. All of which this concise exhibition of some thirty large textile sculptures, rippling with pockets and folds, and smaller groupings of Mukherjee’s ceramics and bronze demonstrates.

Mrinalini Mukherjee at Met Breuer — Fiber works made between 1982-1985. Installation view of *Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee* exhibition at the Met Breuer.

A strong hand in the design of the exhibition cuts the Met Breuer’s Brutalist interior into a serpentine path, lilac and neutral curtains delineating alcoves for groupings of the large hanging sculptures. Grouping the sculptures brings individual figures–created separately over many years–into tableaus that suggest narrative. Combined with the curtains, the effect is of refined theatrics. This might trivialize weaker work, but here each piece retains its gravitas. Their frontality, even in clearly three-dimensional works like the above, recalls the line up of a frieze or suggests characters on a stage. The exhibition text suggests that Mukherjee, although not religious, was inspired by Hindu temple carvings and paintings of gods and goddesses. The works are titled with names such as Yakshi (Female Forest Deity) and Rudra (Deity of Terror). Whether looking up at imagery in a temple or at Mukherjee’s larger-than-life sculptures, the intended impact is awe.

Mukherjee began working with rope while an art student in Baroda, India in the 1970s, under the guidance of K.G. Subramanyan. Subramanyan encouraged his students to abandon the Western divide between art and craft, and under his guidance she experimented with ways of braiding and knotting rope. Initial wall hangings quickly grew to embrace all the possibilities of this humble material as she developed ways of knotting that create internal support for her intricate and heavy organic forms. In works like Basanti (She of Spring), she brings a modern aesthetic (a turn to abstraction and an engagement with objecthood) to this rough material that recalls local craft traditions. Basanti was made in the 1980s, when Mukherjee was embarking on her most ambitious attempts to turn fiber into beings that hovered between the plant and animal kingdoms. She began to hang them from the ceiling so that they inhabited space as a free-standing sculpture rather than hanging flat against a wall. They spill out and over themselves, suggesting the growth of plants or the arrangement of organs as much as the human form.

As with flora and fauna, so with sexual organs, which the curator reads particularly in these two later works from the 1990s pictured above. One might understand Pushp (Flower) as one does many works by O’Keefe; in both cases representations of flowers begin to seem more and more like female genitals as you look. Here, it is many times larger than life-size. If Pushp is an enormous vulva confronting the viewer, it is one that exudes lifeforce and creates the sense of a powerful female sexual energy. A more complicated sculpture depicts a woman riding a peacock, that is, mounting a traditionally male animal in a union in which the female is the dominant force. This piece, her first fully free standing work, suggests a union not just of male and female, but human and animal, realms.

Mukherjee began to work more in clay and metal in the 1990s, spurred by a residency at a ceramics center in the Netherlands. She was also working less with rope; it had become more difficult to source and some dyes less available. Installations like the one above show her working with rounded, ribbed, and furled shapes, arising from the ground like plants in a garden. Even in smaller works, Mukherjee takes up space, and it is clear that the natural world is her main source of inspiration.

Mukherjee’s bronze palms likewise echo the natural world of plants and suggest fecundity pushed out to the limits of the natural, with thin leaves unfurling around long stamen. They are grounded in the natural world in their physical positions as well. They lie across the ground, preserved in the twists and furls of their making and with a soft sheen. These forms, much like those of nature, can seem grotesque as much as beautiful. Although concise, this exhibition overall allows one to see the artist expand, develop a mastery over form and material, and then continue on the next medium, from fiber to clay and bronze.

Muherjee’s practice of working in textile set her apart from many artists of her generation, as it has for so many who have gravitated to the medium of cloth and textiles, arts often associated with the home and the work of women. The scale and power of Mukherjee’s fiber works, combined with the controlled, elegant folds and braids that seem to hold them up, gesture to the type of world that might contain them. The phenomenological experiences of the fiber sculptures–how one feels in ones body in the presence of this larger, abstracted monstrous body–is that of an antediluvian past made present. It is well worth seeing in person to have that experience.

Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee is on view at the Met Breuer until September 29, 2019.