Marina Sula
Soft Power
14 Sep - 05 Nov 2016
MARINA SULA
Soft Power
14 September – 05 November 2016
Marina Sula’s inquiry to explore dynamics of and impacts on affect and sense in the age of technologically mediated experiences and communication, in Soft Power, evolves around narratives of rituals and liturgy. In this spatial installation, a new series of abstract digital drawings, photographs and sculptural environment index and depict exchanges with interfaces and their effects as locus of tangible intimacy, personal well-being and meditation to stage interactions of the body with its digital environments as what could be understood as an iconography of contemporary subjectivity.
Made with the fingertips of the artist’s hand onto her mobile device and translated into abstract drawings, the black pixeled lines and stripes of Untitled – Phone, Untitled – Table, Untitled – Home and Untitled – Phone II (2016)manifest various rhythmic expressive patterns that may trigger resonances to Agnes Martin’s well-known practices in the path to the sublime and spiritual transcendence deploying the grid as form for the most nonrepresentational – affect. Conceived in everyday public situations such as riding on the subway, these repetitive gestures that navigate the interface between body and infinite streams of information, in Sula’s works, are deprived of any personal attributes and presented as the rigidly limited act itself – possibly answering to the fact that use value of language and communication in digital economy is abstracted to mere exchange value as fluctuating data filtered through the body. Using a ruler to insert manual straight lines into the intuitive and automatized conception of the swiped drawings only amplifies slippages between control, agency and compulsion in a contemporary condition of fabricated micro-worlds of affect – when everyone is doing the same in increasing separation from collectivity – in which doubt and insecurity is overcome only through continuous re-connection to instant feedback cycles underlying these patterns of synchronization.
In direct dialogue with the digitally produced drawings, and paired like dyptichons, close-ups of portraits of the artist show mythically staged procedures of cleansing, washing, and drying skin with olive oil soap and soft white towels in intimate moments of self-care. An ambiguity and discomfort of the viewing relationship – too close, as if one could touch her skin, and simultaneously distantly observing or even voyeuring – is intensified by the apparent performativity of the scenes, in which the artist carefully orchestrated her movements as if already seeing herself through the eyes of somebody else. Simultaneously employing strategies of advertising, social media performance and affectionate proximity, these narratives of ritualized wellness dissolve differentiations between an inside and outside, privacy and exposure. Resembling a scenography of practices of faith in absolute connectivity and self-optimization, Soft Power 1–4 (2016) uncomfortably adhere a growing desire and pressure to present a positive image of personal productivity and health, in hope of making ourselves visible to a gaze of the Other who, in digital economy, is both opaque and unpredictable and overly present.
Triggering a desire to feel and touch the realistic sharpness, this photographic series likewise designates skin as a surface and interface between inside and outside world that needs to be worked and adapted, thus resonating with the cold-metal sculptural figures holding orange-red tincture in mounted glass-vessels that occupy the space. A brew of eternal youth made from various ingredients, such as rose hip oil, this liquid holds the promise of lawless appearance that transgresses signs of time and limits of material, corporal slowness and obstinacy. Partly resembling a laboratory set up, partly of mythologic presence, the metal beings of Forever Young (2016) emanate a desire for productivity and efficiency, that defy marks of exhaustion. With divisions between night and day, between rest and work, disappearing due to mutations in the experience of time produced by unceasing digital networks, in Soft Power, the proximity between electronic and organic surfaces answers a generalized inscription of human life into duration without breaks, defined by a principle of continuous functioning.
Underneath the poetics of its aesthetics, Sula in this exhibition presents the brutality, frictions and vulnerability occurring in the adaptation of the subject’s soft tissue to demands of the infinite feedback loop, as the body and mind become terminals of information and rituals of wellbeing are followed with the precision of a cult as practices of faith in individualised and consumable self-love and affect.
Franziska Sophie Wildförster
Soft Power
14 September – 05 November 2016
Marina Sula’s inquiry to explore dynamics of and impacts on affect and sense in the age of technologically mediated experiences and communication, in Soft Power, evolves around narratives of rituals and liturgy. In this spatial installation, a new series of abstract digital drawings, photographs and sculptural environment index and depict exchanges with interfaces and their effects as locus of tangible intimacy, personal well-being and meditation to stage interactions of the body with its digital environments as what could be understood as an iconography of contemporary subjectivity.
Made with the fingertips of the artist’s hand onto her mobile device and translated into abstract drawings, the black pixeled lines and stripes of Untitled – Phone, Untitled – Table, Untitled – Home and Untitled – Phone II (2016)manifest various rhythmic expressive patterns that may trigger resonances to Agnes Martin’s well-known practices in the path to the sublime and spiritual transcendence deploying the grid as form for the most nonrepresentational – affect. Conceived in everyday public situations such as riding on the subway, these repetitive gestures that navigate the interface between body and infinite streams of information, in Sula’s works, are deprived of any personal attributes and presented as the rigidly limited act itself – possibly answering to the fact that use value of language and communication in digital economy is abstracted to mere exchange value as fluctuating data filtered through the body. Using a ruler to insert manual straight lines into the intuitive and automatized conception of the swiped drawings only amplifies slippages between control, agency and compulsion in a contemporary condition of fabricated micro-worlds of affect – when everyone is doing the same in increasing separation from collectivity – in which doubt and insecurity is overcome only through continuous re-connection to instant feedback cycles underlying these patterns of synchronization.
In direct dialogue with the digitally produced drawings, and paired like dyptichons, close-ups of portraits of the artist show mythically staged procedures of cleansing, washing, and drying skin with olive oil soap and soft white towels in intimate moments of self-care. An ambiguity and discomfort of the viewing relationship – too close, as if one could touch her skin, and simultaneously distantly observing or even voyeuring – is intensified by the apparent performativity of the scenes, in which the artist carefully orchestrated her movements as if already seeing herself through the eyes of somebody else. Simultaneously employing strategies of advertising, social media performance and affectionate proximity, these narratives of ritualized wellness dissolve differentiations between an inside and outside, privacy and exposure. Resembling a scenography of practices of faith in absolute connectivity and self-optimization, Soft Power 1–4 (2016) uncomfortably adhere a growing desire and pressure to present a positive image of personal productivity and health, in hope of making ourselves visible to a gaze of the Other who, in digital economy, is both opaque and unpredictable and overly present.
Triggering a desire to feel and touch the realistic sharpness, this photographic series likewise designates skin as a surface and interface between inside and outside world that needs to be worked and adapted, thus resonating with the cold-metal sculptural figures holding orange-red tincture in mounted glass-vessels that occupy the space. A brew of eternal youth made from various ingredients, such as rose hip oil, this liquid holds the promise of lawless appearance that transgresses signs of time and limits of material, corporal slowness and obstinacy. Partly resembling a laboratory set up, partly of mythologic presence, the metal beings of Forever Young (2016) emanate a desire for productivity and efficiency, that defy marks of exhaustion. With divisions between night and day, between rest and work, disappearing due to mutations in the experience of time produced by unceasing digital networks, in Soft Power, the proximity between electronic and organic surfaces answers a generalized inscription of human life into duration without breaks, defined by a principle of continuous functioning.
Underneath the poetics of its aesthetics, Sula in this exhibition presents the brutality, frictions and vulnerability occurring in the adaptation of the subject’s soft tissue to demands of the infinite feedback loop, as the body and mind become terminals of information and rituals of wellbeing are followed with the precision of a cult as practices of faith in individualised and consumable self-love and affect.
Franziska Sophie Wildförster