Hans Theys

 

 

 

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Hans Theys

 

 

Fragility, Tension and Equilibrium

Some words about an installation by Nathalie Karagiannis

 

When we stay in another country and start cooking, cleaning or gardening, we discover that every place cherishes tools that we have never seen before and sometimes only exist there.

Thus, we picture all human beings traveling to the next country every year, be it South, East, West or North,  leaving all their gear behind and discovering the instruments used by the neighbouring people. At the end of one’s life cycle, one would have lived everywhere, having partaken in all kinds of habits and rituals, finally familiar with all clothing styles, colours, textures, tastes, smells, herbs, plants, fruits, vegetables and animals alive or dried, smoked, steamed, cooked, broiled, baked, pulled or grilled for a cosy braai.

Alas, since the majority of mankind is not so keen on being displaced, the experiment is limited to offering foreign residencies to artists, writers and scientists, hoping their alienation might produce some joy for the others.

And indeed, displacing Nathalie Karagiannis, a thinker, writer, draughtswoman and sculptress from Europe, has led to some wondrous minimal displacements in Johannesburg, shaping a spatial poetry that echoes the discontinuity of all our lives, dreams, relationships, strivings, stories, beliefs and values. (She didn’t have the time to cook, clean and tend to a garden, but she allowed her eyes to wander in all sorts of places.)

One square meter of lawn is removed from a park and placed on the floor of an exhibition space. The work might remind us of the square meter called Private Property demarcated with ropes by the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers at dokumenta V in 1972. Here, the rectangular wound in the park is marked by four short sticks at the corners, which are linked by orange elastic bands that look like the ones used by cyclists in my country fourty years ago. In my mind, two time shifts take place. In your mind other things happen, invisible to me, unless we share our experiences.

I love the feathers in the outlets. Electricity gone soft. Forbidden pleasures for children. Poetic safety mesures. Pseudo-literary soft porn. Unexpected, subtle intervention… In my country, the feathers would have belonged to seaguls or maybe pigeons. There are no other wild birds with a black and white plumage. Unless the come from chickens? Feasants? Guinea fowl? Strolling about in the park?

Two needles of a porcupine connect yellow tennis balls to a white, yellow and blue drawing. A hybrid sculpture-drawing. An error. A cross-over.

Did Schopenhauer write a story about people being like porcupine? Always trying to get closer, but always getting hurt?

We think of unsafe attachment, precarious love, intimacy fragilised, momentary equilibrium, estrangement, loneliness, craving, probing, clinging, clawing for breathing space.

Let’s build a bridge with two garden tools, yellow as well. Look how they have needles too, that meet like rigid, needy fingers.

Red strings tying the fingers of an adolescent scrub.

Attached to a wall a big red elastic band stretched and ending in round claws hooked behind two screws, preventing a glass from falling.

A meeting between eight eggs and four used wooden chairs leaning against each other, legs up, only one leg resting on an egg… In 1964 the young German artist Bernd Lohaus, sent abroad by his teacher Joseph Beuys, does a performance in Madrid, having the four legs of a wooden chair rest on four eggs: El Nacimiento del Huevo. Karagiannis’ sculptural installation is exquisite. An inert dance, a frozen movement, a delicate encounter of singular objects; speaking of tender feelings, hesitations, prudence and tact.

On a window, we read samples of texting. Of two people trying to understand each other? Or is an artist speaking to us? To the objects and the space around her?

Two couples of yellow rakes meet, two of them resting on an lemon. The colour yellow prevails. A bifurcating branch springs from the wall, holding yellow and green sponges. At some distance a white plastic bottle with green and yellow label stands buy… Women artists love to toy with cleaning gear (to use it inappropriately, to tease their moms). In 2007 Marlene Dumas told me she doesn’t like to clean her brushes. At the end of the day she just leaves them in a bucket filled with water. And that’s how she ended up painting a portrait of a weeping Marilyn Monroe with the dirty water.

No tears are visible here. The world is stripped of sentimentality. Skin and flesh ripped away. Swept by the wind. Stuck in the branch. We recognise the bones and joints in the drawings. Invisibly struck by grief, self-doubt, anxiety, craving and hope.

 

 

Montagne de Miel, Saturday 4 February 2023