OSLO10 is delighted to present two solo projects:

Marlie Mul - No Oduur (Your Smoke Draws Me In)
Gerda Scheepers - Medium and Modality

08.09. - 27.10.2012
Opening: Friday, September 7, 2012, 7 pm


Marlie Mul often reflects on the cultural backgrounds that lie behind seemingly everyday human behaviour, to thereby single out perception and personal experience of space. In this manner the artist has addressed the social phenomenon of smoking in her recent exhibitions. The development of a public opinion of (cigarette) smoking and the evolution of understanding of this act as a health hazard that affects both the self and the other has not only transpired in the visual language of marketing and advertising campaigns, but also in the division and utilisation of public spaces.
In Switzerland such observations are particularly timely. In anticipation of the vote for the initiative “Protection from Passive Smoking”, which calls for a radical ban on smoking, discussions around the territory of space and the freedom of the smoker are – literally – in the air.

Looking at the topic of smoking in the context of the historical development of our conceptions of health and hygiene, the passive smoker was first recognised as a victim of the active smoker in the beginning of the 1990s. With this discovery public awareness of the health threats of smoking changed drastically, and air thereby becomes a spatial issue: “The passive smoker remained invisible in the decisions made about smoking,” writes Marlie Mul in the introduction to her publication Second Hand Smoke (2012). “It was medical discourse that needed to bring all bodies into view, and make them all discussable, including the body of the non-smoker. The debate over whether there's a moral difference between directly causing harm to someone and allowing harm to come to that person. The smoke for the smoker and smoke for the non-smoker. […] It is the active smoker that creates the passive smoker.”

With the works shown at OSLO10, Marlie Mul emphasises this territorial aspect of smoking and smoke. She makes use of massive steel objects to quote architectural elements that usually go unnoticed, but that by and by have become clandestinely employed as public ashtrays such as in the urban city’s “smokers corner”.
Although they might look like found objects, the steel sculptures were created by the artist, who precisely reproduced the everyday objects and imitated their traces of use. Together with these steel wall objects, Mul combines light, grey and pastel coloured prints on silk, which are hung on the wall as to evoke canvases. Printed with comic-like drawings that remind of insipid cartoon jokes pinned to the bulletin boards in back-office break areas, Mul points to a possible territory of the smoker.

For the publication Second Hand Smoke Marlie Mul asked friends and collaborators from different contexts to write a text related to the very open subject of smoking. The production of the silk prints and steel sculptures happened parallel to the compilation of the publication. The discussions that were generated by this assignment therefore extended their influence in the conception of the works.

With her implementation of two different materials – the hardness of steel and the delicacy of silk, Mul succeeds in transposing and revealing the contradictions of smoking between secrecy and elegance. Furthermore, the objects reveal a gender-specific connotation and move between visibility and invisibility. While the supple silk works are used to envelop and adorn the body, the steel objects are used to reveal the squalid, forgotten corners of architecture. The spatial dramatization shows our perceptions of smoking in all its contradictions: fleetingness and physicality, elegance and disgust, private and public space.


Marlie Mul (*1980 in Utrecht, lives in Berlin) studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht and Architectural History & Theory at the Architectural Association in London. Her works could most recently be seen in the solo exhibitions Stop Being So Attractive, I Can't Get Anything Done at Autocenter in Berlin (2012); No Oduur at Space, in London (2012) and Your Wet Sleeve in My Neck, Lucile Corty Gallery, Paris (2011). Recent group exhibitions are Grouped Show at Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin (2011); Benedictions at Limoncello in London (2011); The Smart Frrridge (Chilly Forecast for Internet Fridge) at Kunstverein Medienturm in Graz (2010); Rhododendron at W139 in Amsterdam (2010). Marlie Mul is co-initiator of XYM, an online platform for PDF artist publications. She is a part time teacher in Architectural History and Theory, and in Art and Media Studies at the Architectural Association in London.



Using a group of her recent works, Gerda Scheepers develops an abstract spatial situation at OSLO10. By pointedly referencing genres of classical art production (painting, objects, and drawing), Scheepers moves away from dualisms such as form/content and figuration/abstraction. As hybrid media, her works comprised of textiles, paint, wood and porcelain focus on psychological tensions that arise between abstract forms, graphic diagrams and language.

With her exhibition title, Scheepers reflects the semiotic meaning of “image,” which is medium and modality at the same time – the latter referring to how information is coded for human communication. Scheepers presents these symbolic meanings – their function as representatives and placeholders – in an individual reference system that visualizes narrative approaches, references film and literature, and imitates linguistic components of language. Thereby, her methods and motifs develop a syntax that reveals and addresses the process of artistic production. Often her own studio – its layout, the materials stored there, as well as the contemplative moments it offers – serves as the initial point for Scheeper’s works.

The paintings and sculptures reveal the artist’s ongoing interest in outlines, textile collages, and the modular composition of materials and forms, along with the strong relation to the human body. Hands, figures, and clothes (such as a t-shirt) are motifs that Scheepers repeatedly uses. References to the body are reflected in the presentation of often multi-part works as furniture-like structures and cabinet-like ensembles, which remind to fragments of interior design in private space. In the series Medium and Modality Pictures (2011/2012) Scheepers shows painted canvases with textile appliqué supported by delicate, wooden chair-like structures. The reference to modern art and its aim to merge art and everyday life through total works of art within domestic interiors – such as the Dutch De Stijl movement or Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau –, becomes identifiable just as the production of a site-specific context, in which the individual pieces become part of an overall picture.

In her work, Scheepers confronts the material nature of the medium of painting – the carrier components, its potential as a projection surface and its borders between two- and three-dimensionality. In the large-format triptych, Very flat 3 hour conversation (My Partial Truths) (2011), the frame shows through the white canvas, lending structure to the forms and motifs that appear on the front screen. The figures and planes derive from observed forms of reality, which Scheepers reduces and abstracts to develop a rhythm of punctuation and visual codes. Horizontally aligned on their surface, her paintings resemble functional objects such as tabletops, notepaper, studio floors, or billboards on which data and information are usually seen and read.

By using correction lines, montage techniques, and repetition of motifs to invoke variable signifiers, she destabilizes the legibility of her pictures. Scheepers says of her works that they are “paintings actively jealous of literature and film.” With this she refers to the narrative potential and the simultaneous immateriality inherent in the two media through language and moving pictures. Scheepers creates narrative approaches in her work, looking to their ephemerality in the moment that they transition into the realm of language. Through the visibility of the working process, she underlines the shift that occurs in the perception between the sign (signifiant), the signifier (signifié), as well as their associative connection.


Gerda Scheepers (*1979, Tzaneen, South Africa) lives in Berlin. She has presented her work in solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Nürnberg (Low and Partial – Romantic Comedy, 2012); blank projects, Cape Town, South Africa (Modal Approach and Accent, 2012); Gallery Micky Schubert, Berlin (Rauminhalt Äquivalente, 2011); Center, Berlin (Written Spoken Pictures, 2011); Mary Mary, Glasgow (Inside Arrangement, Arrival II, 2010); Sprüth Magers Berlin London in Berlin (Taras Bookies 2007/2009, 2009); and the Bonner Kunstverein (Come Garden of the Combed Rocks, 2006). Her works have been shown in group exhibitions including in Halle für Kunst Lüneburg e.V. (together with the artists around the Bar Ornella); at Kölnischer Kunstverein (Élégance: Automne Frottée 06/07, together with Thea Djordjadze and Rosemarie Trockel, 2007); as well as Kunsthalle St. Gallen (Modus: Automne Frottée, with Djordjadze and Trockel, 2006).






Opening hours:
THU – SAT, 2 pm – 6 pm

Supported by:
Christoph Merian Stiftung, Migros-Kulturprozent

Images:
Marlie Mul (links), courtesy the artist
Gerda Scheepers (rechts), courtesy the artist; Sprüth Magers Berlin London; Micky Schubert, Berlin