Paul Kneale

Stare into the maxed-out brightness: Paul Kneale + Toby Ziegler present After Image at Cassina Projects, Feb 28 – Apr 15

2 March 2017

Paul Kneale and Toby Ziegler‘s After Image exhibition at New York’s Cassina Projects opened February 28 and is running until April 15. 

Stare into to the maxed-out brightness of your smartphone, tablet, or monitor and hold your gaze there. Notice how its immediate surroundings become darker. Now turn away and close your eyes; 

Curated by Artuner, the project presents work by the two artists, which will explore ‘symbolic detritus’ that characterizes the afterimage, both physically and digitally. Looking at the medium of painting, and its relationship to future technologies, the show immerses itself in the reproductions of lenses, sensors, chips and screens.

The show is happening alongside a number of fairs in New York this week, including Independent New YorkNADA NY, and The Armory Show, running from March 2 to 6.

See our list of recommendations for a more comprehensive guide to the full week.

See the Cassina Projects website for details.**

‘After Image’ (2017). Promotional image. Courtesy the Artuner + Cassina Projects, New York.
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PROJECT 1049 @ Gastad, Jul 29 – 21 Aug

26 July 2016

The PROJECT 1049 artist-led group exhibition presents large-scale and site-specfic works in and around Switzerland’s Gstaad, opening July 29 running through August 21.

Co-curators Raphael Hefti and Paul Kneale work together to “encourage collaborative networks of production and dissemination” and to push boundaries of making and exhibiting work. Other participants include Megan Rooney, ÅYR, Vanessa Billy, Laura Mclean-Ferris, Haroon Mirza, Marlie Mul, Laure Prouvost, Dan Solbach, Julia Tcharfas, Ben Vickers, and Richard Wentworth.

Artists involved have been invited to “respond to Gstaad and the Saanenland as a host venue, and PROJECT 1049 as artist-organized—acknowledging the spirit of both core elements to make new and critically relevant work that is engaged in the immediate context, both ideologically and geographically”. Works included vary greatly in form and content and are dispersed across the region to create unexpected “moments of engagement and reflection” for viewers.

The opening includes the world premiere of a film by curator Paul Pieroni, made in collaboration with artist Holly White, live performances at high altitude, a curators’ tour, artists panel discussion, music, food, and a party.

See the PROJECT 1049 website website for more details.**

PROJECT 1049 @ Gastad 29, Jul – 21 Aug

Paul Kneale, ‘Browsing History’ (2016). Courtesy the artist.

 

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Moscow International Bienniale for Young Art 2016 announces artists

30 March 2016

The fifth Moscow International Bienniale for Young Art will happen this year from July 1 – August 10 in Moscow’s old textile factory, Trekhgornaya Manufaktura and it has just announced its 87 artists, two curators and its theme, Deep Inside.

Nadim Samman —general curator of the biennial—suggests the theme reflects, like the work submitted to the open call, such cultural developments as “ecological collapse, the dissolution of distinctions between ‘nature’ and technology, the inescapable topography of the network, and the interplay between transparency and opacity in the information age.”

Included in the line up are the likes of Joey Holder, Marguerite Humeau —who had a solo show at Berlin’s Import Projects, of which Samman is the founder, in 2014 —Paul Kneale, Julius von Bismarck, Chris Coy and Martin Callahan, all of whom work with these themes close to the words of Samman.

The curator explains the positing of the question of the inside as an alternative to fantasies of open untouched beaches, outer body avatar transfers and even dreams of colonising new lands like Mars that are perhaps not dreams or escapes, but traps. What if the price of tickets is too high?

See the exhibition page for more details.**

Marguerite Humeau, Echoes (2015), installation shot. Courtesy the artist and Duve
Marguerite Humeau, Echoes (2015), installation shot. Courtesy the artist and Duve

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Abjects @ Import Projects (2015) exhibition photos

4 March 2016

Abjects, a group exhibition at Berlin’s Import Projects, curated by Franziska Sophie Wildförster, brought together artists’ Eloïse Bonneviot, Emily JonesPaul KnealeYuri Pattison and Andrew Norman Wilson, which ran from September 19 to October 25, 2015. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject is summarised in the press release, acting as a foundation from which the works depart and expand on a contemporary experience of the vulnerable body. Shifting from a focus of disgust and revulsion at the raw corporeal materiality, the exhibition finds disturbance within the disparity between a disembodied, infinite connectedness of the immaterial and the opaque constraints produced by the digital economy. The works reflect on the hidden pathways that lurk under, above and in between a contemporary experience mediated within the age of technology and information.

The installation is clean and institutionalised. Pattison presents us with a makeshift desk made of steel shelving titled ‘productivity table’. Six Modafinil tablets (used for combatting fatigue and distraction) are laid out beside a Google prototype computer. The exposed aesthetic extends into ‘dust, scraper, fan .1-5′; a set of five rectangular acrylic boxes placed on the wall and floor of the gallery. Jones’ ‘The Draining of the Mesopotamian Marshes of Iraq’ combines a picketing aesthetic with factual and instructional language within three separate sculptural assemblages. Sitting between a cenotaph and a memorial, a yellow sign that reads, “They were shouting and singing at the top of their lungs” is held up by bits of wood clumsily nailed together. Beside that lies another yellow sign quietly placed on the floor that announces, “The use of force may be necessary to protect life.”

Abjects (2015) Exhibition view. Courtesy Import Projects.
Abjects (2015). Exhibition view. Courtesy Import Projects, Berlin.

Framed between the signs in the first room, Bonneviot’s tent sits in the doorway of the second. Titled ‘Thinking Like A Mountain—Limited’ the installation fills the small personal space with camping gear, energy bar wrappers, notes of paper and a laptop playing a video game. The recreation is unclear but the aesthetics combine the act of trekking, whether in camping, protesting or the passing of time in a ‘gaming hole’.

Also strongly focusing on material and its residue, Wilson’s ‘Global Mosquito City Proposal’ uses the hardware of a computer to create a sci-fi housing scenario. Two dolls are propped on top of each other in a sexual act. Computer parts, concrete, resin, oil paint, pepper, plastic, acrylic paint, foam and cotton are forced together into an abrasive dollhouse. Beside it, a proposition to Bill and Melinda Gates asks for a contribution of “their blood to malaria mosquito larvae that could potentially be nurtured in this computer-habitat to erase all human beings around the world.”

Outside the window, a bag of water hangs delicately. Titled ‘Insect Repellant’ it encases hydrochloric acid, liquified coins, and copper. In contrast to the sic-fi machine invested manifesto, Kneale’s ‘Aphasia Tags and Performative Empathy’ presents abstract images; the content barely recognisable. Light and hopeful, the images are layers of time made by using the ‘scan’ function of a printer, leaving the lid open. The mechanics replace the intent, and the painterly result is naturalistic in its use of space, daylight and floating particles.**

Exhibition photos, top right.

The Abjects group exhibition was on at Berlin’s Import Projects, running September 19 to October 24, 2016.

Header image: Abjects (2015) Exhibition view. Courtesy Import Projects, Berlin.

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Artissima Fair @ Oval, Nov 6 – 8

4 November 2015

Artissima international fair of contemporary art focusing on art curation and collection returns to the Oval in Lingotto Fiere Torino from November 6 to 8.

The fair, which garnered attention from the international art market for its innovative research for over 20 years, will invite critics, curators and collectors to award six prizes—five from past editions as well as the Reda-Artissima Prize for exploring “the language of photography”.

This year’s fair brings a long list of talent, including Luca Pozzi‘s site specific installation ‘Wilson Tour Majestic’ at MEF Museum, Evan Roberts solo show with new pieces from the fence series, and a group show fromwith Brand New Gallery with Ry David Bradley, Ryan Conrad SawyerGraham Wilson and Letha Wilson.

There’s also a solo show by Hayv Kahraman for The Third Line, Hannah Perry with Seventeen, shows with Julie Bena, Daiga Grantina and Jo-ey Tang for Galerie Joseph Tang, and three solo shows in Torino’s magnificent Palazzo Capris with Tabor Robak, Michael Armitage, and Paul Kneale.

See the Artissima website for details. **

Luca Pozzi, 'Wilson Tour Majestic' (2015) @ Artissima. Courtesy the artist.
Luca Pozzi, ‘Wilson Tour Majestic’ (2015) @ Artissima. Courtesy the artist.

 

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Abjects finissage @ Import Projects, Oct 24

23 October 2015

The Abjects group show, curated by Franziska Sophie Wildförster is closing with an event at Berlin’s Import Projects on October 24.

Running since September 18 and featuring work by Eloise BonneviotEmily JonesPaul KnealeYuri Pattison, and Andrew Norman Wilson, the exhibition explores how the word ‘abjection’ applies to specific circumstances and “poses the emergence of a new kind of abject lurking underneath contemporary experiences mediated by technology”.

The closing event will include a conversation between media theorist Paul Feigelfeld, artist and writer Boaz Levin and curator Wildförster.

See Import Projects website for details.**

Abjects (2015). Exhibition view. Photo by Ben Busch. Courtesy Import Projects, Berlin.
Abjects (2015) exhibition view. Photo by Ben Busch. Courtesy Import Projects, Berlin.
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Abjects @ Import Projects, Sep 18 – Oct 24

17 September 2015

Import Projects brings in a new group show titled Abjects, running at their Berlin space, opening September 18 and running to October 24.

The group exhibition, curated by Franziska Sophie Wildförster, brings together the works of five different artists: Eloïse BonneviotEmily JonesPaul KnealeYuri Pattison and Andrew Norman Wilson.

Inspired by Julia Kristeva’s 1980 essay “Powers of the Horrors: An essay on Abjection”, the show explores her notion of the abject and its “psychic origins and mechanisms of revulsion and disgust” emerging out of a confrontation with death, with violence, with vulnerability of decay. 

See the exhibition page for details. **

Emily Jones, The Hudson River (2014) @ Lima Zulu. Courtesy the artist.
Emily Jones, The Hudson River (2014) @ Lima Zulu. Courtesy the artist.
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Paul Kneale @ Import Projects, Aug 29

28 August 2015

London-based artist Paul Kneale is initiating his participation in the upcoming September group show Abjects at Import Projects and helping wrap up Berlin’s Project Space Festival with a performance and talk at the Berlin gallery on August 29.

The performance and talk, appropriately titled ‘Free Software’, has Kneale publishing a series of instructions for the performances on his website. “These systems are designated to be carried out ‘DIY’, and will enable numerous outsourced works in the gallery,” writes the event press release.

The directives—which include self-made “unboxing videos” and microwaved CDs—”explore the viral spread of information mediated by technology through manifold (human) bodies”, as well as modes of authorship and “the fate of authenticity within the distributed image and data form”. Amidst this publication, Kneale will join curator Franziska Sophie Wildförster for a discussion on the “new (digital) abject”.

See the event page for details. **

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Paul Kneale @ DRAF, Jun 27

26 June 2015

As part of their new +1 series, George Unsworth invites artist Paul Kneale to launch New Abject at DRAF this Saturday, June 27.

The +1 series is a new collaboration between DRAF and various London art spaces, collectives, and publications, inviting artists to present their latest projects in the DRAF library and engage in discussions about their practice with art world guests, like Unsworth.

For their third event, DRAF hosts Hackney-based gallery ANDOR, founded in 2010 by Unsworth, who in turn invites London-based artist Kneale to launch his new e-book, New Abject, done in collaboration with Swiss designer Dan Solbach. The book, which is one of the outcomes of ANDOR’s alternative publishing studio, Dreaming of Streaming, will be available for free at the launch and through Kneale’s one-day takeover of the DRAF website.

See the event page for details. **

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Nicolas Party + What’s Love Gotta Do With It @ S.A.L.T.S., Jun 18 – Jul 26

17 June 2015

Birsfelden’s S.A.L.T.S. is celebrating two new openings this week, with Nicolas Party’s PANORAMA and the performance exhibition What’s Love Gotta Do With It (WLGDWI) both launching tomorrow, June 18, and running until July 26.

With PANORAMA, the Brussels-based Swiss artist brings an installation that takes its inspiration from the historical art of panorama painting, transforming the S.A.L.T.S. outdoor exhibition box into one large-scale cube that takes on the shape of a four-sided canvas, allowing for a full 360-degree painting complete with figures.

Launching on the same night as Party’s opening of PANORAMA is the performance exhibition What’s Love Gotta Do With It, bringing together a dozen artists and friends, including Megan Rooney, Paul KnealeClémence de La Tour du Pin, and Antoine Renard.

See the PANORAMA exhibition page and the WLGDWI event page for (minimal) details. **

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Paul Kneale @ Evelyn Yard, Jan 27 – Feb 27

26 January 2015

Artist Paul Kneale is opening a new solo show at Evelyn Yard, titled (or perhaps just explaining) 4 or 5 self portraits for free-form natural language descriptions of image regions, and running at the London space from January 27 to February 27.

The show stems from SEO and Co., Kneale’s October project at tank.tv that had him re-purposing algorithmically generated text from a Lunch Bytes panel in which he participated to create a screenplay of sorts filmed in his South London studio.

Similarly to his use of YouTube’s algorithmically generated text in SEO and Co., Kneale uses an informal research partnership with Google through automated textual descriptors derived from image files “that render as of yet impossible nuances of action and time”.

Focusing on sculptures that “activate light, time, and ontological transfer between medium states”, the installation images will be fed back into Google for analysis, thereby replacing (or questioning) the very role of the art critic.

The Evelyn Project exhibition comes simultaneously with and builds upon a new essay Kneale is collaborating on with ANDOR‘s Dreaming of Streaming project titled New Abject.

See the FB exhibition page for details. **

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Paul Kneale, SEO and Co. (2014) exhibition photos + vid

3 November 2014

The first of a two-part exhibition to culminate at London’s Evelyn Yard in January 2015, Paul Kneale‘s SEO and Co., running at tank.tv from October 13 to November 21, reclaims and reconstitutes the work of the speech-to-text transcription that’s applying Search Engine Optimisation to video. With the internet being essentially a text-based medium, the difficulties of uploading films online while making them accessible, or more appropriately, ‘rank-able’ by search engines means that Google and YouTube have developed a new approach to inscribing the ephemeral image through auto captioning software. That means some laughably off-point transcripts of recorded events to follow, including the highly theoretical Lunch Bytes Structures and Textures panel discussion in May this year – where Kneale spoke along with Ben Vickers, Wendy Chun and Boris Groys – only to be translated automatically into an absurd collation of phrases like, “nothing series your working, additional culture, %uh gutenberg!” and “sweetie what happened to you?”.

While the text doesn’t necessarily relate to content specifics, somehow it’s been interpreted into the right subject of art with a ‘Warhol’ dropping in from nowhere and leading nicely to becoming a piece of it (as in art) with Kneale’s resulting SEO and Co. exhibition. The artist transformed the transcript into a screenplay, split into four ‘scenes’ and read by five London-based creatives including himself, Harry Burke, Melika Ngombe Kolongo, Nina Cristante and Oscar Khan -as ‘FRAMER’, ‘INTERJECTOR’, ‘ELABORATOR’, ‘STUDENT’, ‘DISTURBER’ (not necessarily in that order). The performances were filmed inside and on the roof of Kneale’s current home and muse, the disused Rotherhithe Library (occassionally known as the Library + project space), before being projected on to parts pulled from the condemned building and reinstalled in the tank.tv downstairs space.

The result is various makeshift ‘screens’ made up of material crossing ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ space. A part of a flourescent light that undulates in the background of Kolongo’s reading on-screen is nailed to the back of the board where its showing. There’s a hole roughly cut through a perpendicular panel with a view to the metal framed tarp projecting an image of that same substance. Speakers playing the sound of the SEO mash-up hang in branded bags or the plastic that they came in. A microwave, brown from burnt CDs cooked inside it, is on the floor behind a suspended film of dazzling chameleon-coloured bubbles of polycarbonate plastic; their digital data lost with the melted material.

Paul Kneale, SEO and Co. (2014) @ tank.tv installation view. Courtesy the artist.
Paul Kneale, SEO and Co. (2014) @ tank.tv installation view. Courtesy the artist.

As was the SEO and Co. script, so too is said CD melting fetish directly inspired by nonsensical algorithmic associations. It’s from one of the recommendations following a viewing of the same YouTube upload of the Lynch Bytes #2 discussion video that inspired the screenplay. As an artist interested in the “rerouting and transference of meaning”, Kneale siezes on Harold Bloom’s idea of “poetic misprision” – where one wilfully misinterprets their inspiration in order to open up the imaginative space – and presents an exhibition that recognises the potential of technology’s ludicrous lack of intentionality in broadening our perspective. **

Exhibition photos, top right.

Paul Kneale’s SEO and Co. is on at London’s tank.tv, running October 13 to November 21, 2014.

Header image: Paul Kneale, SEO and Co. (2014) @ tank.tv installation view. Courtesy the artist.

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Salon Talks @ Art Basel, Jun 19 – Jun 22

12 June 2014

Art Basel is hosting a series of salon-style discussions running as part of the larger art fair from June 19 to June 22.

Exploring a range of topics spanning the contemporary art scene, the Salon programme features dozens of prominent artists, gallerists, curators, art historians, publishers, poets, architects, collectors, and critics taking part in the often informal presentations.

The first of the Salon talks, scheduled for June 19, includes discussions of art markets with Josh Baer and art collector David Mugrabi, artist talks with Sam Falls and Nick Mauss among others, as well as a group poetry reading featuring Harry Burke, Deanna Havas, Karl Holmqvist, Paul Kneale, Quinn Latimer, and Megan Rooney.

On the same day there’ll be Serpentine Gallery co-director and curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist talking ‘Living Sculptures’, while on June 20 there’ll be discussion from artists involved in last year’s Speculations on Anonymous Materials. They’ll be Ed Atkins, Alisa Baremboym, Josh Kline and Katja Novitskova before a Xu Zhen book presentation with Philip Tinari of UCCA.

June 21 will feature Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Andrew Norman Wilson in conversation with Lunch Bytes director Melanie Bühler on ‘Art & Commerce’. That’s before ‘Art Practices Beyond the Contextual Narrative in the Middle East’ with Umer Butt of Dubai’s Grey Noise as well as artists Gregory Buchakjian, Pascal Hachem and Basim Magdy.

Finally on June 22 there’s a talk on ‘Revolt of Language with Marcel Broodthaers’ that includes writer behind ‘Faith Money Love’ and the recent COOKIE! publication Jan Verwoert.

See the Art Basel Salon programme for details. **

0% Promise by Megan Rooney. Image courtesy artist.
0% Promise by Megan Rooney. Image courtesy artist.
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read the room/you’ve got to @ SALTS, Jun 19 – Jul 21

11 June 2014

The read the room / you’ve got to group show is taking place at Birsfelden, Switzerland’s SALTS space, running June 19 to July 21.

Drawing inspiration from the artists-architects-poets group the Reversible Destiny Foundation and pulling a quote from founders Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ The Mechanism of Meaning, the exhibition comes as part of curator and poet Quinn Latimer‘s The Printed Room begun in 2013.

As a program based on “changing exhibitions of printed material and a series of literary-minded readings, lectures, concerts, and performances” this instalment will feature the work of a number of prominent artists and writers, including Etel Adnan, John Kelsey of Bernadette Corporation, and Karl Holmqvist, as well as Sophie Jung, Paul Kneale, Harry Burke and Megan Rooney.

See the SALTS Facebook event page for details. **

 

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June Snow @ Evelyn Yard, Jun 6 – Jul 4

5 June 2014

London’s Evelyn Yard is presenting a new group project, titled June Snow, that will run at the gallery from June 6 to July 4.

The gallery –founded by Oliver Robb as a collective project and aiming to engage with critical young artists –will feature a host of  young artists, including Paul Kneale, Jamie Jenkinson, Amalia Ulman, and Holly White, among others, as well as a special book presentation by Charles Veyron

See the Evelyn Yard website for details. **

Piece by Jamie Jenkinson. Image courtesy Evelyn Yard.
Piece by Jamie Jenkinson. Image courtesy Evelyn Yard.

 

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