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Exhibition
Avalanche - Katinka Bock
31/08 - 09/11/19
free
Tuesday to Saturday
from 1 pm to 7 pm

*Opening August 31st from 3 pm to 7 pm

The exhibition is about places where people live together, populations, problem zones, contact zones and tenderness, polluted bodies, loss of control, suspended moments, reasons to hold together. Cities are all different but the same. Paris and São Paulo, who cares, humans and animals, concrete and words, vessels and cracks, maybe it’s just a question of temperature and intensity. In the end it’s about dignity.

– Katinka Bock

Pivô’s annual exhibition program finishes with the exhibition “Avalanche”, by Katinka Bock. This is the first time the Paris based, German artist presents her work in South America. The project is comprised entirely by new works informed by her recent visits to São Paulo, and by a thorough investigation of the building that houses Pivô, the iconic mixed-use giant Copan, projected by Oscar Niemeyer in the sixties. Bock will present a series of sculptures made out of bronze, ceramics, unfired clay and other materials, organic or inorganic, all recurring in her production. The opening will be held on August 31st, from 3 to 7pm, with free admission, until November 9th.

Curatorial Text

Avalanche

By Fernanda Brenner

Build fire and read
the future in smoke
Carry out ash and
scatter over head
Be sure
not to look back
Attempt
the art of metamorphosis
Paint face
with cinnabar
As a sign
of grief

(W. G. Sebald) 

 

The book Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz), by Lebanese artist and author Etel Adnan, is a compilation of letters written to Fawwaz, her editor, to whom she had promised an essay on feminism. Instead of fulfilling the task, the artist wrote a series of letters, which were sent from cities as diverse as Berlin, Beirut and Aix-de-Provence. The tone of the texts oscillates between meditation, mediation and immediate responses to situations experienced by the artist herself and the women she met on the way. The content of her accounts stems not only from a sensitive and cosmopolitan gaze, but also from the experience of a body that is invariably open to listening and relating, and that apprehends – or perhaps absorbs through the skin – the intrinsic relationship between certain cities and their inhabitants (in this case, women). 

 

‘She lives in that zone where humanity can dissolve in Nature’, ‘what is the malaise of women in the streets of Marrakesh? In Marrakesh women carry their social status much more than they carry their soul’, ‘I tell myself that we are terrorists, not terrorists in the political or ordinary sense, but because we carry inside our bodies – like explosives – all the deep troubles that befall our countries’, ‘everything about her, and around her was poverty’. Etel Adnan uses her own perceptions while in transit to meditate on the feminine, opting for letters rather than an essay, or perhaps for affective excursions rather than critical argumentation. Her acute prose reveals, without any fuss or over-complexity, the psychosocial and political issues that affect women’s lives in different parts of the world.

 

These sentences, extracted from Adnan’s letters to Fawwaz, reverberate both in the work and methodology of Katinka Bock. Like Adnan, Bock opts to inhabit, and react to, the context where her exhibitions take place. Avalanche, her first exhibition in South America, was no different. 

Bock visited São Paulo for the first time in September 2018. On this occasion, she explored not only the space in which her exhibition would take place but also the service and common areas in the commercial and residential zones of the Copan building, Oscar Niemeyer’s mixed-use modernist complex where Pivô is housed. The textures and idiosyncrasies of the building and the contingencies of its current state of repair (the protection net that breaks loose with the wind, the glass tiles that break off the façade…) were of more interest to the artist than its history or the architect’s skill. After her first visit, Bock turned her gaze to the city of São Paulo, she collected samples of materials, tasted local fruit and, with the help of her analogue camera, created images that add to what she calls the ‘periphery of the work’: a collection of often delicate and enigmatic images that constitute a sort of diary of the artist’s working process. These photographs bear no captions or have documental pretensions. Instead, they are hints. Evidence of lived experiences and also her way of delving into the daily experience of the specific contexts she inhabits, in a free search for its constitutive elements and particularities. 

Katinka Bock’s sculptures and installations stem from encounters and the precise mediation of natural and induced processes. In this exhibition, items as varied as a floor polisher borrowed from the building and two tropical plants bought at the local market (Polo norte, polo sul, 2019), architectural fragments crushed by hand (Sand (01046-925), 2019), and an iron radiator brought from Buenos Aires (Warm sculpture BA/SP, 2019) are turned into sculptures, counterweights and supports for objects cast in bronze and ceramics. Bock’s found-object sculptures quietly trace back to their origins , their titles often give clues for the stories and personal liaisons involved in their making but never fully disclose them. Her works insistently straddle time and hold a clear suspicion of everything that is supposedly steady and irrevocable (her multi-sourced material arrangements are mostly transitory or reversible). It is not rare that the artist ‘profanes’ the exhibition spaces she works in, making it porous to whatever is going on outside the often immaculate institutional walls. Slight transgressions unfold from simple operations, such as opening a window in winter or via more ingenious solutions, like in the installation Fountain for avalanches (2019), in which she created a route of suspended pipes that transported rainwater through the two floors of Pivô’s space to finally pour it back on the street. The expectation of heavy rain, or the frustration of dry days, interrupts the lethargy of the displayed objects. These, as well as us — the spectators — are kept waiting for something to happen. By instating this state of imminence, Bock also turns time into palpable matter. 

The effects of natural phenomena are also seen in the work For your eyes only, parte pelo todo I/II/III (2019). During her second stay in the city, four months before the exhibition opening, the artist rolled out almost 20 meters of blue fabric on the roof terrace of the Copan building. The material, marked by strong sunlight, rain and dust, and partly ripped by the strong winds, is a record of the time and weather to which it has been exposed. The size and shape of the frame are the Bock’s choices in response to the tonal variations created by the circumstances. This operation, as well as several other works by Bock, undoes the common opposition between active subject and passive object. 

In Horizontal word, Copan, (2019) — perhaps the most radical example of this agency exchange — Bock threw a piece of raw clay wrapped in resistant industrial fabric from a high open terrace at Copan. The impact of the free fall irremediably shaped the soft matter. Its final form depends not only on the skill and attention of those transporting it but also on the surface that absorbs the impact of the still-wet clay. The level of energy used to create this work — from the effort of the many people who carried the clay up to the negotiations with the building administration and the care involved in transporting the heavy and fragile volume back to the exhibition space — imprints the sculpture as much as the effects of gravity. It is the direct outcome of a collective endeavour. The artwork lasted as long as the exhibition, and was destroyed at the end of the project. Bock temporarily lent this piece an “artwork status” only to later return it to its initial estate, like an actor coming in and out of character.

In Lebanon, Etel Adnan wrote: ‘nothing can save us from the sadness we feel. But then, what a bliss when we find a restaurant without noise, when war hasn’t yet broken out in the desert’. Avalanches can be caused by many reasons, from an abrupt climate variation to the weight of a skier. To prevent them is almost impossible. Katinka Bock chose Avalanche as the title of an exhibition in a country where it never snows but which has always been underscored by turmoil. The most dangerous time for avalanches is after a rapid snowfall,

 

Bock’s artworks remind us that space — or the city — is not a static plane orthogonal to time, but an interlacing of trajectories and phenomena. The artist reminds us that a city is made by people and is interested in the nuances and in the loose ends of narratives in the making, which often unfold in quiet restaurants that host conversations loaded with complicity and connections still to be made. 



Artist
Katinka Bock
Among her solo shows, we highlight “Radio/ Tomorrow’s Sculpture”, IAC (2018); “RADICETERNA”, Manifesta 12 (2018); “Smog”, Meyer Riegger (2017); “Horizontal Alphabet (black)”, MUCEM; “-0-0—0”, Mercer Union (2017). Held different prizes and grants from important institutions such as Fondation d’entreprise Ricard Prize (2012); Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art (2010) and Cité internationale des Arts (2007). On October 2019 the artist will hold a solo show at Centre Georges Pompidou, as part of Marcel Duchamp Prize. Her work is regularly featured in key media channels, such as Le Monde, Vogue, Beaux Arts Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Art Press, ArtForum, Artnet, among others.

 

The exhibition is about places where people live together, populations, problem zones, contact zones and tenderness, polluted bodies, loss of control, suspended moments, reasons to hold together. Cities are all different but the same. Paris and São Paulo, who cares, humans and animals, concrete and words, vessels and cracks, maybe it’s just a question of temperature and intensity. In the end it’s about dignity.

Katinka Bock

 

Pivô’s annual exhibition program finishes with the exhibition “Avalanche”, by Katinka Bock. This is the first time the Paris based, German artist presents her work in South America. The project is comprised entirely by new works informed by her recent visits to São Paulo, and by a thorough investigation of the building that houses Pivô, the iconic mixed-use giant Copan, projected by Oscar Niemeyer in the sixties. Bock will present a series of sculptures made out of bronze, ceramics, unfired clay and other materials, organic or inorganic, all recurring in her production. The opening will be held on August 31st, from 3 to 7pm, with free admission, until November 9th.

 

Bock’s work often responds to specific geographical contexts and space.  Taking into account the architectural, urban, social, climatic, temporal and environmental features of the place she is currently working in. Her works build an ongoing movement between the interior and the exterior of the spaces where they are installed, also affecting the social interactions that inform these places. The artist uses sculpture to address the relations between time and space, history and geography, natural and artificial, perennial and ephemeral. Interested in natural processes of transformation, Bock produces sculptures and installations that result from events that seem to challenge the chosen material, generating a symbiotic relationship between static artificial constructions and nature in constant motion. The artist frequently uses natural materials, such as leather, wood, stone, fabric, plaster, ceramic or graphite, in addition to found objects.

 

Displacements and catastrophes of another nature

 

“Avalanche” is the combination of a series of sculptures and spatial interventions inspired by Copan’s microcosm, in which the artist confronts her usual working materials with the local context and the space’s unusual architecture. Horizontal Words is perhaps the most radical gesture in the show, in which the artist drops a large block of unfired clay from the top of the building. Like a falling body, the piece will bare in its final form the violence of the impact of the raw matter on the ground. A type of violence that points out to the complex living conditions of a large and dysfunctional megalopolis like São Paulo. In which its high social injustices are often imprinted on the bodies of a great deal of its inhabitants. In another sculpture, Bock creates a mechanism to capture raindrops with a funnel connected to copper pipes running through the space. The water runs over the gallery, falling first into a sink borrowed from one of the apartments and then finds its way to the street again through a hole on Pivô’s floor.

 

In the work For Your Eyes Only, Katinka Bock stretches a 20 sqm piece of blue cloth on Copan’s rooftop. The fabric was placed during her visit to São Paulo in April, and after almost four months of exposure to the weather, it will be framed and hanged in the exhibition space, showing the marks of time passage. Bock’s will also present a group of ceramics made in a workshop at Centro Universitário Belas Artes and build a large hammock-like structure with a cut-off piece safety net wraps the entire building (Copan is under a renovation process for the past years). This kind of appropriation of elements of civil construction as starting point for sculptures and installation also will be seeing in Sand in which the artist crashes debris into tiny pieces until they are transformed in a kind of “sand”, as Bock calls it.

 

Literally, an avalanche refers to an abrupt and massive displacement of snow. As a figure of speech, however, the phenomenon refers to anything that strikes with violence. If the climatic conditions of a tropical country like Brazil do not allow the occurrence of real avalanches in its territory, catastrophes of another nature arise from the country’s political condition. Bock is interested in the changes these kinds of abrupt irruptions can provoke.

 

“Avalanche” was made possible by means of partnerships with the Institut Français and the Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo (Fine Arts University Center of São Paulo), that lent its ceramic workshops for the artist’s use.

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