Kunstverein Hamburg

Ima-Abasi Okon's exhibitions Avg Pace: S %~E~L%~A%~ H%~s%~peri£meno£pau£sal~P%~S%~A %~L ~M%~’S km —(t!h!a!t-yes-t!!hhat incumbent experiential plane to reorganise a c,a,p,a,c,i,t,y of never having enough— Not as a whole but as aprecise h!e!a!p of digni-fide agility) and S.t.a.n.d.a.r.d. P.r.a.c.t.i.c.e. at the Kunstverein in Hamburg expand the grammatic and syntactic structure of the artist’s working methodology. Okon engages the Kunstverein with a large-scale commission and a number of new works that are considering preventative and palliative care as an essential praxis to pacing life in colonial capitalism’s acceleration.

The ground floor gallery of the Kunstverein will see Okon and the curator and writer Taylor Le Melle continue an ongoing inquiry, S.t.a.n.d.a.r.d. P.r.a.c.t.i.c.e., into the relationship between licensing and authorship. Aligned with questions about artistic essence and its distribution within the larger framework of cultural production, Okon has commissioned an essay in the voice of an anonymous author, available in the gallery, and invited four artists to license installation views depicting their work. The space is filled by the sound of looping pop music, repeating “It’s all in me”, juxtaposed with legal theorist Brenna Bhandar questioning whether freedom and individual subjectivity can coexist.

Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom, Anthea Hamilton, Dominique White, and Riet Wijnen have co-developed license agreements with Okon for S.t.a.n.d.a.r.d. P.r.a.c.t.i.c.e. in which the act of exhibiting, as both a bond and a set of conditions between the artists and organisers is made visible by displaying the contracts that bring the work into this setting at the Kunstverein. In addition, S.t.a.n.d.a.r.d. P.r.a.c.t.i.c.e. contains two publications by stanley brouwn, in which the meaning of objects changed through linguistic propositions, from his 2005 Exhibition at the Van Abbe Museum, loaned by the Museum to Okon.

In Avg Pace: S %~E~L%~A%~ H%~s%~peri£meno£pau£sal~P%~S%~A %~L ~M%~’S km —(t!h!a!t-yes-t!!hhat incumbent experiential plane to reorganise a c,a,p,a,c,i,t,y of never having enough— Not as a whole but as aprecise h!e!a!p of digni-fide agility) a new commission figures centrally. Three wrought iron balconies sit installed against the 40m long, west-facing clerestory in the Kunstverein’s upstairs gallery. The installation juxtaposes classic "belly bars", elegantly curved iron rods, with footage from Los Angeles that depicts calmly bristling palm trees, presented on four large, BrightSign-linked monitors. The palms reach upward, beyond the ornate metal frame, forming a horizon for the Kunstverein's building which looks towards Speicherstadt, the city of Hamburg's historic warehouse complex which stored, among other things, coffee and cacao beans. Together, balconies and palm trees produce a series of possible interpretations that question the language of safety and its opposite, violence, in dialogue with the history of the palm tree’s arrival in the United States and within European industrialisation. The screens are synced to two hand-built Leslie speakers which play a looped and pitched down interpolation of an r’n’b track at the centre of the Kunstverein’s gallery. The speaker’s cabinet contributes to a unique tone affected by the resonance of the wood. Typically built from plywood, the speakers for the Kunstverein are made from decorative hardwood, selected by Okon, which crack and bend to accommodate the sound. Within the speaker a so-called mother (symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast) used in the process of fermention is brewing and will continue to do so throughout the exhibition. Due to their aerobic nature, the cultures breathe in the air produced from the treble horn in the Leslie speaker, metabolising the relationship between the music and the Kunstverein’s environment which will eventually translate into a brewed beverage.

Okon has draped Shearling jackets in the gallery. The jackets allude to attire of market traders and could have been worn by flower merchants in the building before it was repurposed. The jackets wear Garmin Forerunner watches set to measure the biometric data and productivity of a hollow membrane that points elsewhere. Distributed amongst members of the not/nowhere artist worker’s coop in London, Okon set up a “course”, a path on which Garmin users automatically share data and create leaderboards visible to other users. The course follows the approach to - and circumference within the not/nowhere offices - collecting data for members to better understand and anticipate the biometric signals of stress created by their work life.

Finally, the gallery at the Kunstverein contains dehydrated, vacuum sealed oxtail stew, presented on a reclining bamboo chair, awaiting a certificate of hygiene. The certificate serves as a marker of the linguistic threshold, which would enable distribution within Germany. The stew has previously been certified for distribution in the Netherlands and England.

By bringing together new and recent works, the balconies sit within the larger body of an exhibition at the Kunstverein that defines self-actualising as a simultaneous type of ingestion and movement toward a horizon. Here Okon’s work destabilises the relationship between linguistic, symbolic, and material orders of power and what it means to inhabit their domain by introducing new coordinates that challenge culturally defined hegemonies.

The ground floor gallery of the Kunstverein will see Okon and the curator and writer Taylor Le Melle continue an ongoing inquiry, S.t.a.n.d.a.r.d. P.r.a.c.t.i.c.e., into the relationship between licensing and authorship. Aligned with questions about artistic essence and its distribution within the larger framework of cultural production, Okon has commissioned an essay in the voice of an anonymous author, available in the gallery, and invited four artists to license installation views depicting their work. The space is filled by the sound of looping pop music, repeating “It’s all in me”, juxtaposed with legal theorist Brenna Bhandar questioning whether freedom and individual subjectivity can coexist. Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom, Anthea Hamilton, Dominique White, and Riet Wijnen have co-developed license agreements with Okon for S.t.a.n.d.a.r.d. P.r.a.c.t.i.c.e. in which the act of exhibiting, as both a bond and a set of conditions between the artists and organisers is made visible by displaying the contracts that bring the work into this setting at the Kunstverein. In addition, S.t.a.n.d.a.r.d. P.r.a.c.t.i.c.e. contains two publications by stanley brouwn, in which the meaning of objects changed through linguistic propositions, from his 2005 Exhibition at the Van Abbe Museum, loaned by the Museum to Okon.