The Floating Series ist eine Veranstaltungsreihe, in deren Rahmen in
unregelmäßigen Abständen Ausstellungen, Lesungen, Konzerte und andere
künstlerische Präsentationen stattfinden. Die Serie wurde von Jesse Seldess
und Leonie Weber ins Leben gerufen, um Beziehungen und Kontakte zwischen
Künstlern aus diesen verschiedenen Bereichen zu ermöglichen und zu fördern.
Es werden also jeweils gleichzeitig Ansätze aus den verschiedenen künstlerischen
Disziplinen vorgestellt, die in Form, Inhalt oder Aussage Ähnlichkeiten oder
Schnittstellen aufweisen. Ein zur Zwischennutzung angemieteter Raum in der
Kochstraße bot dafür zunächst einen idealen Rahmen. Inzwischen gibt es
für die Floating Series keinen festen Raum mehr, stattdessen finden
Veranstaltungen an wechselnden Orten statt.

Zum Jahresende 2006 brachte die Floating Series eine Edition heraus.

Computerkompositionen
Samstag, 17. März 2007
18 Uhr, Galerie inges, Berlin

Zachary Seldess, a Chicago native now living in New York, is currently pursuing a PhD
in composition at The Graduate Center CUNY. As a composer, he has collaborated with
artists in many mediums including theater, musical theater, film, painting, and poetry.
His work has been published in Antennae, a biannual print journal of experimental
poetry and music. Current collaborative projects include Street Fighter - an improvi-
sational ballet, an ongoing collaboration with Yoni Niv (composer) and Andy Graydon
(sound/video artist) using Max/MSP to link improvisatory sonic environments to the
2D game engine of the 90's arcade game classic, Street Fighter. Zachary spends much
of his time these days creating interactive media artwork, particularly within the
Max/MSP/Jitter programming environment.

Eintagsfliege
18. bis 30. März, Galerie inges, Berlin

Usually 4 /Dusica Drasic, Sam Hopkins, Karolina Freino, Teresa Luzio/

Together they are Apart
By Naomi Tereza Salmon

Four artists, one from Portugal, one from Serbia, one from Poland and one from
England/Kenya, at different stages of their masters studies, meet in Germany at the
MFA Program ‘Public Art and New Artistic Strategies’ at the Bauhaus University in
Weimar. As a result of their interaction during those studies, they decide to continue
and cooperate, to search their respective individual ways together, as a group. To
communicate with each other, they primarily use English. They share a passion for
music, for cooking and, above all, for art. All four are on a quest to define their artistic
manifestation. The first exhibition showing their work together, named Crossing, took
place at the Entropia Gallery in Wroclaw (PL). From the layout of the invitation it was
clear that these artists, as well as their audience, meet at a virtual gate of a virtual
airport, all boarding on a connecting flight, after which all will part again and go to
their own respective destinations. When confronting all of them together, it seems easy
to find common dominators. All four are questioning the definition of art, its borders,
its act, its documentation and its result, the existence of an object, if there is any. To
each separately I would like to appropriate four terms, which apply to all of them but
also defines each of them as an individual force in the field of art.

D is for Dialect
If dialectical materiality is favouring the primacy of matter over consciousness, so does
Dusica Drazic deal with the forming pattern of awareness and prefer it to the artistic
materiality. In her work suggestive situations are offered, personal decisions made
public, openly disclosing the fact that the auditory perception doesn’t seem to matter
too much to her, in the sense that she would be thinking, doing and dubbing things as
art, regardless of the impact they may have on the viewer. Often she will provoke a
confrontation, as in the case of her project The Sea Book in which she offers a possi-
bility for measuring a certain distance, also a time distance, but at the same time
makes a point of concealing the most important component of the equation: the
distance itself, leaving us with a somewhat disturbing unsolved mathematical riddle,
transformed into one line, one book, and one image. Disturbing mostly in the sense
that we could solve it, but the artist is not really interested in that. For the Crossing
exhibition Drazic has installed two barrels on two different floors of an abandoned
house in Wroclaw, water dripping from one into the other, using a controller. The
viewer could only see the receptive barrel, and hear the meditative sound of the
dropping water as a performance.
In her project Restlessness; Or Display Of A Leukocyte Drazic chose a house in
the city of Leuven, a five story brewery ruin she decided to clean up all by herself,
as a performance. Risking her own security is often involved, as in Surrealism Of
Simplicity, where she disappears for an uncertain time, after informing people about
it through letters, and leaving a mark for each day she has survived. As we know she
is gone, she challenges our anticipation of safety versus fear, of comfort and security
versus homelessness and uncertainty. The spectators wish to be home and safe as
well as wishing for her to be so. What is left afterwards as a document and proof is a
diary, revealing the process, her thoughts and fears while doing her invisible
performance, giving away the fact that she has made Polaroid pictures at each sight,
which we cannot witness, for she had left them there. Drazic is playing hide and seek,
with herself, and above all with us.


K is for Keenness
Standing at a crossroad between presence and absence, Karolina Freino is materializing
the nothing, giving it shape in thought and matter, questioning the essence of our
perception of what is not: not to be grasped, not to be seen, not to be had. In one of
her early works, The Video Installation, two screenings of hands exchanging the same
ball rolling across the floor, are facing each other on opposite walls of a room. The
viewer is in the middle. He or she can follow the movement of the ball virtually
crossing the space on its way to the other projected side. Helplessness occurs,
as one cannot take part in this interactive performance although definitely playing
a role in it. In her Walking project, created for the 577,4 The Distance Between
exhibition in Leuven in 2006, she was walking and re-walking a defined distance,
the city ring, to exhaustion. Her movement was registered via GPS and a repeating
circle is the only evidence of her performance. As she states: “Only a representation
of an experience can be shared, as the experience itself is totally singular”. Few are
the traces, either virtual or in form of documentation, and we are left with a sense of
absence, of having missed something, something we did not see until she pointed
it out to us. Or, we have to further sharpen our sensibility in order to fully experience
her Untitled (for Rafal) piece, in which she has transcribed a quotation of Robert Walser,
presenting a three-way junction of words, music and Braille typeface with which we
are confronted, witnesses to what is there and what is missing. In her "Void and
Beyond" project, Freino has installed 11 fishing rods in different wells around the
city of Weimar, they were leaning on the wells, fishing for nothing. All the rods except
for one were stolen. The one left will be sold through an eBay Auction, in the art
section, thus all other rods will have disappeared, while only one of them has managed
to change its status into a work of art, a sharpened view on the rules of the market today.
Challenging our new coding systems and putting communication to its limits, Freino is
experimenting intensely for herself, but is also using her audience as lab creatures, and
this in a very sensitive way, as they remain passive spectators, no harm done to them,
only thoughts provoked.

S is for the Sublime
Sublimation derives from a term in chemistry, and stands for the purification of a
substance. In times of de-sublimation of the arts (after Mladen Dolar) Samuel Hopkins
confronts us with the art of the re-subliming. Insisting on meticulously *painstaking as
an approach, you may encounter him sitting on a bench as an intervention, demons-
trating his practice with a regular office hours schedule, putting the concept of mobile
society in question, as he did for Crossing in Wroclaw, or purposelessly numbering the
bricks of a prison wall with a white chalk in The Seduction of Completion piece he made
for Leuven. While he was in Weimar, he spotted a pile of bricks removed from the
pedestrian zone on a construction site. He sneaked in at night and stencilled them all
with letters and numbers as they appear in the famous Scrabble game. As long as the
site was under con-struction, people walking by played around with the bricks,
creating words and names. At the end, the bricks disappeared back into the pavement.
If any words were created and buried forever, it is be known only to the construction
site workers. The ephemeral plays an important part in his work, either as matter or as
an idea, as he doesn’t necessarily believe in the role of the artist as a sensitive gifted
being, but rather as assigned to point out the ridiculousness and absurdity of some of
our everyday actions and moreover, our ambivalent perception of political and social
events. In his video performance The Naked Snail, the viewer is intrigued to watch a
living snail moving about on Hopkins’s face, the starting point was placing the snail
like a little moustache, inevitably reminding the viewer of Adolph Hitler’s moustache,
and filming as it was crawling its way around his nostrils, his eyes, and into his hair,
creating a very uncomfortable situation for himself and a voyeuristic one for us.
Hopkins understands what he is doing as “using a dialect, which is bound to become
a language one day”. In his new project Have You Seen My New Glasses? Hopkins
is standing next to a photo automat soliciting passers-by to make their portrait while
wearing his new glasses, and handing the results to him, thus playing around with
identity, creating a self portrait via total strangers.

T is for Topos
Topos, meaning ‚place’ in Greek, is used rhetorically to describe stereotypical themes
and images or commonplaces, deriving from the Aristotelian argument that if we
cannot remember things, we should at least be familiar with the place, (or topos)
where they are kept. Teresa Luzio often deals with such non-places, as well as with
loss, displacement, and false expectations. In Waiting For You, a performance
realized for the “I’m Trying To Tell You I Love You” exhibition shown in Weimar,
Berlin and Chicago, Luzio was wearing a bright green dress, spending the whole
time of the opening waiting. You could approach her and talk to her, but you would
not find out if you are the one she is waiting for. In It’s Difficult To Write About
One’s Face, a video installation exhibited at K&K Centre for Art and Fashion in
Weimar, her face was displayed on a monitor, showing her touching and cleaning
it, the camera serving as a mirror, and so would the viewer. Luzio emphasises her
interest on what is shown versus what is seen. In Appropriately Dressed, a photo
series depicts her from the waist down standing in a provocative manner with high
heels in a pink dress in front of different backgrounds. She plays with our prejudicial
views of femininity, of exposing private parts. She once gave away her own precious
sketchbook in a performance named Now! Now! Now!, leaving it on a bench and
documenting (secretly) the person who found it and took it for himself. Luzio proceeds
to discard her private belongings in One Of Those Days, an action that took place at
the Friedrich Bridge in Berlin. A woman throws away the contents and, then the hand-
bag itself into the Spree River. Then, not showing even a documentation of the action,
but rather a new piece will be made, documenting its memory. Luzio is creating a
series of broken acts, each lives on from the memory of the previous one, a delicate
way to deal with the uncomfortable facts, and the traces they might leave.


Finally, after referring to each of the artists individually, it becomes clear why they are
working together: piercingly characterized by strength and distinctness of perception,
all four are practicing poetic art in public space, using what I would like to call reverse
interactivity while stressing an emphasis on non-exploitation of the viewer, a rare
commodity in that field. They are not afraid of showing implicitness, and at the same
time expose their fragility and self-reflection, staying modest. Their common aim is
making invisibility visible, the non-place a site using their own doubt as a weapon,
and researching the borders of physical and mental standing as artists, staying
extremely sensitive and yet intense.

Naomi Tereza Salmon, February 2007

Lesung
Donna Stonecipher
Samstag, 17. März 2007
18 Uhr, Galerie inges, Berlin

Lyrik aus ihrem gerade veröffentlichten Buch "Souvenir de Constantinople"
(in englischer Sprache)

Donna Stonecipher grew up in Seattle and Teheran. She studied at the
University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received her MFA in 2001.
She is the author of The Reservoir (University of Georgia Press, 2002),
and Souvenir de Constantinople (Instance Press, 2007). Her own poems and
her translations of French and German poems have been published in many
journals. She currently lives in Berlin.