Badischer Kunstverein

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.

Curated by Jacob Korczynski