Artists: Michele Abeles, Lutz Bacher, Getho J. Baptiste, Peter Coffn, Kendra Frorup, Celeur J. Herard, Adriana Lara, Katja Novitskova, Racine Polycarpe, Fatima Al Qadiri and Thunder Horse Video, Evel Romain, Ettore Sottsas

The Still Life of Vernacular Agents is an assembly of works that come together tonegotiate the following agenda:

High defnition imagery, digital manufacturing, genetic engineering, and increasinglyrefned forms of virtual communication foster the debate on how these new realms ofhybrid mediators challenge our concepts of being and reality.

The schizophrenia of division – between culture and nature, subject and object, lifeand death – as introduced by the Enlightenment has already been detected. A criticalbreak with the supposed tribal naiveté – that interpreted natural objects as signalsfor human affairs, and which likewise viewed human songs and magic spells aspotential forces of nature – did not really take place. While modern society becamecomfortable in its empire of dualism, it actually never stopped producing hybrids andnetworks. Threatening the categories of rationality, they were sent off to populaterepressed spaces and the unconscious of the modern mind.

The expanding network of agents that connects subjects and objects in multipleforms and changing constellations calls for a new preoccupation with thesemediators that make things talk, and through which references can be mobilized.

Michele Abeles' photographic works oscillate between studio photography and digital amalgamation. Setting up the image in a process of stacking and piling up layers of backdrops, objects, bodies, surfaces and colour screens she engineers her photographs in an animated still life in which objectifcation and subjectifcation blend.

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Fatima Al Qadiri’s sound work D-Medley from her latest album Genre-Specific Xperience, and the video by Thunder Horse Video interweave hybrid auditory and visual realms from the Brazilian electro-tropicalia movement. Addressing how Hélio Oiticica’s revolutionary concept of Tropicália was turned into a tropicalist mainstream fad that was content with proclaiming freedom as pop liberalism and wearing bellbottoms, Al Qadiri creates subversive landscapes that further appropriate the original
movement. As an immaterial chimera the sound piece interweaves varying sensuous correspondences and formations within the exhibition.

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Lutz Bacher’s GIFT to a secret receiver, is part of an ongoing project where the artist sends selected objects to a circle of people in the art world initiating a bond between herself and the recipients that goes beyond a simple exchange of goods. Bacher’s gift in the exhibition is a reconstruction of a burned arm made of the forensic material ballistic gel. The scientifc cast of a human body blurs and questions the division between personal forms of exchange and the mechanisms of the art market.

Peter Coffn’s Untitled (shoe) is a 3D printed prototype of a shoe that has beenscanned and virtually transformed according to the theory of embryonic development. The creation of an embryo of an old leather shoe in its frst trimesterspeculates how structures and concepts of the living world are applied to the world of things.

Celeur Jean Herard, Getho Jean Baptiste, Racine Polycarpe and Evel Romainfrom the collective Atis-Rezistans in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, produce paintings and sculptural collages from found objects and discarded materials of western civilisation. Their work is informed by their cultural heritage of Vodou. Vodou defnes the individual person as a web of relationships that includes family, ancestors and spirits. Vodou rituals are carried out to adjust or to activate this relational web. Withinthe ritual system objects, sounds and gestures are highly metaphoric references that concretize relational states between the living the dead and the spirits. In the work of Artiz-Rezistans the unsuitable shoes and broken electronic devices assemble as rising spectres. Their sculptures are animated not by ancient spirits but by the agency they express through their particular materiality. As artists living and working in the slum of Port-au-Prince and facing the exclusion from the globalised market Artiz-Rezistans create spectres that set out to infltrate and challenge the dominating political and economical forces.

For the Italian designer and founder of the famous Memphis group Ettore Sottsass design was not simply a matter of function but a mean to place humans in contact with the universe. Sottsass studied antique civilizations, visited their ruins and was intrigued by their ability to create powerful symbolic systems of drawings, decorations and paintings. His iconic, totem like furniture, ceramics, domestic objects, computers and typewriters offer an alternative to the rationalist design and are characterised by fluid, conceptual and mystical approach towards design.

Adriana Lara is interested in the screen as an object and a medium before any image or message appears; the screen as an emancipated surface with its projection yet to come. Lara’s Tube Scryyns are sculptures and paintings at the same time. They refer to digital modes of image production and reception. Interesting Theories turn the plasma monitor into a painting that displays theories visualized through diagrams. The theories themselves, the messages, are not specifed. Instead they become pure signs without referents; placeholders for speculations about reality.

Katja Novitskova’s series of sculptures titled Apical Dominance 1- 3 are made of weight stands that can usually be found in ftness clubs and fabrics imprinted with a virtually bonded landscape from various species of moss. Inspired by the neomaterialist philosophy of Mexican scholar Manuel De Landa who aims to rediscover objects and our environment by using the human senses and science Novitskova is interested in human-made artifacts such as products, images and the expanding digital environments as forms that co-exist in complex ecologies of matter and value. In plant physiology, apical dominance is the phenomenon whereby the main central stem of the plant is dominant over (i.e., grows more strongly than) other side stems; on a branch the main stem of the branch is further dominant over its own side branchlets.

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