GOOD AS HELL
12 – 28 September, 2019
uqbar, Berlin
Group exhibition
A moody group show with Samantha Bohatsch, Zuzanna Czebatul, Claude Eigan, Kristin Reiman, Wieland Schönfelder.
The world is burning around us and I am burning out. A small fire fizzling, I’m running low to keep it going. I have nothing to feed the fire anymore. Slowly draining my resources. How many spoons do I have left for this week? Let’s burn ourselves out together.
Be connected, be available, please respond. Swipe, swipe. I’m watching Instagram stories of rich people on vacation, that looks nice. Wrapped in cashmere blankets on their private jets. Prince Harry takes a private jet while campaigning against global heating. Heat my heart prince Harry, what a hot ginger.
Why even do anything when the world is ending anyways? Let’s all ban plastic straws, yes yes, we all need to do our part. 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. Videos of sad turtles. Dolphin mouths full of plastic. Saint Laurent makes steel straws, they are 195 euro. Fuck you, Saint Laurent.
I’m tired every day. Do other people feel this way, too? I dream about getting hit by a car, just a little bit, just to be in the hospital for three or five weeks. Oh sorry, no, I actually can’t respond to your email right now, I am in an artificial coma. Yes, that’s right. Just resting.
Can’t go find myself in Tulum, anyway tourism has ruined it, I read online. Where did you go this summer? I went nowhere fast, just rushing away, one big night of dancing, a strange club, we did coke off the hood of a parked car but a gust of wind blew it away. Stupid but who cares, we had more, I thought dancing would make me feel better, no thinking, just moving, feel nothing, feel everything, feel sweaty, feel bright.
I feel like crap at work, and ‘go get coffee’ twice. What else can we do, stuck in between. I’d be under water if we weren’t drowning already. Ping another email. Smile bigger for the ‘gram. Let’s be good, let’s feel good, let’s do good. Good as hell. Wooooh child, tired of the bullshit. Who will dry my eyes.
Samantha Bohatsch (born 1984, Berlin) lives and works in Berlin. She studied in Karlsruhe (D) with Prof. Silvia Bächli, in Vienna with Prof. Heimo Zobernig and in Berlin with Prof. Else Gabriel and Michaela Meise. She was Silvia Bächlis Meisterschülerin at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe. Bohatsch works with reading performances, sound pieces, texts, prints and installations. Her works are about fictional female protagonists who are confronted with internal or external resistances and try to overcome them. They are hybrids of personal experiences, observations from the internet, queer and feminist literature, history and pop culture. Bohatsch's work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at institutions including CAN, Neuchâtel (CH); Bob's Pogo Bar/ KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin; Forum Stadtpark, Graz (AT); Kunstverein Reutlingen (D); o.T. Raum für Aktuelle Kunst, Lucerne (CH) and Kunsthalle Basel. She has been honored with artist fellowships by the Federal State Baden-Württemberg (D), the Arts Foundation Baden-Württemberg (D) and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Her mixed media installation CORE (2019) is a walk through centuries, through the woods and the lakes, reaching the depths of the unconscious and dreams. It deals with (re)birth, ever-changing and commutable bodies, the loss of landmarks and finding the way home. Zuzanna Czebatul (*1986, Miedzyrzecz/PL) lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the Städelschule Frankfurt in 2013, and later attended the MFA Program at Hunter College, New York as Fulbright Fellow. Czebatul has had solo exhibitions at GGM1 Municipal Gallery Gdansk; CCA FUTURA Prague; CCA Zamek Ujazdowski Warsaw; 83 Pitt Street, NYC and MINI/Goethe–Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38, NYC. Recently, her work was included in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Lingen and Kunsthalle Bratislava, in 2020 she will have solo exhibitions at CAC Synagogue de Delme and Kunstpalais Erlangen. The structures and aesthetics of power embedded in political ideologies form the core of Czebatul’s work, which examines power relations through artifacts and decor. As a sculptor, Czebatul concentrates on the visual seductiveness of contemporary and archaic objects and architectural elements, as well as the language of interior and graphic design. Using comparative methodology, the artist reveals the kinships and conflicts between them. Her work is influenced by the aesthetics of ancient sculptures, modern forms of display, as well as the club culture of the nineties. Higher Than The Sun was created as a special commission for the Art Cologne in 2018, where it covered the 1800 sqm floor of the entrance hall. The hypnotic design of the carpet is inspired by casino carpets, produced to keep the gamblers pumped and awake. In Czebatul’s carpet, a set of buzzwords and symbolic imagery creates a psychedelic collage which poetically but explicitly addresses the implicit power structures of an accelerated (art) market.
Claude Eigan (lives and work in Berlin) uses sculpture as a primary medium, often extending to installation, sound and printed material. In her practice, she often uses the symbolism of everyday most unnoticed objects as a starting point to draw a much bigger immersive narrative, relating to politics, labor and work, and the effects of capitalism. Recent exhibitions include: Cloak of Mercy (Horse & Pony Fine Arts, Berlin, 2019), Hear the Lizards Listening (Mélange, Köln, 2019), Fest (La Placette, Lausanne, 2018), A Strong Desire (PS120 Gallery, Berlin, 2018), Augmented Sunrise Beneath the Skin (Gr_und, Berlin, 2018), Sun Sipping Some Syrup (Frontviews, Berlin, 2018). Lean (2018 – 19) is a series of grayscale flowers. Their stems are filled with a codeine-based cough syrup mixture ‘Purple drank‘ or ‘Lean‘, a drink originating from Houston, Texas, where it became popular amongst writers in the 1960s and experienced a revival in the Hip Hop scene of the 1980s and 90s. Eigan’s Lean is a take on the pharmaceutical industry, examining how the over-consumption or recreational abuse of prescription drugs through their accessibility can act as a form of oppression in which their users, like the drooping flowers, are no longer alert to their surrounding, but enter a state of withdrawal, where the mind becomes gooey. When my plane crashed into the soft mountains of your body (2017) is an object as strange as it is sad. Though broken and rendered useless, this neck pillow speaks of the double bind of comfort and control, mobility and stasis.
Kristin Reiman (b. 1992, Estonia) works with the notion of discomfort, human malfunctions and the skewness of perception, mainly through sound, installation and projected image. They have graduated from the Städelschule (Frankfurt am Main, DE) and Estonian Academy of Arts (Fine Arts, BA) as well as studied at the Royal Academy of Arts Antwerp (Fine Arts). Reiman’s current research and work revolves around sound and its cinematic affect, as well as speech-recording as a way to convey text and error of language. She was awarded the Graduate Prize of the Städelschule in 2019. Drowse, or: The Age of Constant Fatigue (2019) is an opera. But it is also a film without images, and maybe even a lullaby. It tells the story of an inescapable, all encompassing fatigue: “Can you handle your own somnia for a moment?“
Born in Berlin in 1985, Wieland Schönfelder lives and works in Berlin. He studied Theatre at the Konservatorium in Vienna and worked as an actor and stage designer. In 2013 he began his studies at the UDK and graduated in 2018 as a Meisterschüler in the class of Manfred Pernice. In his installations he utilizes print, video and 3D printed, mostly figurative sculptures to create seemingly otherworldly narratives raising the question whether our live is not itself a sum of provisional narratives. Nebula Interna (2018) features a figure taken from Schönfelder’s storied universe dancing alone: What happens next? It’s hard to know when the future is cloudy and your hat is on fire.
