Timur Si-Qin

Young Americans (2015) exhibition photos

26 May 2016

Organized by Irene Gludowacz and curated by Cornelis van Almsick, Young Americans was on at Vienna’s Franz Josefs Kai 3, running from Nov 17 until Nov 30, 2015. Bringing together eight young artists from the US whose work is intimately connected to digital technologies —including Petra CortrightLuis GispertAlex ItoKen OkiishiTimur Si-QinCarter MullRyan Trecartin and Kaari Upson — the exhibition responds to the feeling of rapid change as a result of the internet and new media.

Alex Ito, 'No Title' (2015) Install view. Courtesy the artist and Franz Josefs Kai 3, Wien.
Alex Ito, ‘No Title’ (2015) Install view. Courtesy the artist and Franz Josefs Kai 3, Vienna.

Through installation, photography and video art, the works focus on the underbelly of digital narrative and the alienation that lies beneath the confident branding and flashy aesthetics. The show is accompanied with a text written by Arielle Bier that unpacks the capitalist facade, framing the artists work within the “realities of rising poverty rates, institutionalized violence, and impending environmental collapse.”

An object-heavy exhibition, the materiality has a strong relationship with the digital. Ito’s ‘No Title’ (2015) series of taxidermy mice feel inspired by memes and the humanization of animals on the net, but their physical presence looks nightmarish. Cortright’s 29-second ‘sssss//////^^^^^^^‘ (2011) video is taken from her YouTube channel, a silent video where her face slowly slips across the screen; a recognition of her own face holds more importance than dialogue. The works of Young Americans look at the space between emptiness and wholeness, and the destabilizing ground our identities are fixed to.**

Exhibition photos, top right.

The Young Americans group exhibition was on at Vienna’s Franz Josefs Kai 3, running November 17 to 30, 2015.

Header image: Ryan Trecartin (2015) Install view. Photo by Simon Veres.Courtesy the artist and Franz Josefs Kai 3, Vienna.

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Pure Disclosure (2015) exhibition photos

25 August 2015

Milan-based artistic production label, Siliqoon curated and produced Pure Disclosure at Marsèlleria permanent exhibition, a group show of new works by artists Alessandro Agudio, Daniel Keller, Andrea Magnani, and Timur Si-Qin that ran May 10 to April 10. The four artists were selected based on their individual research and aesthetic approach to work alongside thirteen Italian companies dedicated to artisan excellence. Hosted by Casa Natali/MAMbo, and Spazio RAUM in a residence in Bologna, the artists set out to create post-capitalist works –or products –that follow “commercial promotional logics, thus creating a friction with their spiritual, critical, [and] ironic nature”. The outcomes were produced by companies such as Aida Bertozzi, Bikun, BIOTEX, Euromec di Archenti Mauro, and Fabric Division.

Daniel Keller + Ella Plevin, Seastead, 'Figures (Polypool)' (2015). Install view. Courtesy Marsèlleria.
Daniel Keller + Ella Plevin, Seastead, ‘Figures (Polypool)’ (2015). Install view. Courtesy Marsèlleria.

The exhibition is filled with a disorienting consideration to visual and marketing culture. Timur Si-Qin’s new work, ‘Display (Peace)’ (2015) is a backlit digital print of a mountain top with the word “peace” written on the bottom right-hand corner, just underneath a spherical yin-yang symbol as teh artist’s logo. Mimicking sleek advertising displays, the work is made of UV coating on micro-perforated mesh, anodized steel tube, and plexiglass.

Agudio turns a shower base into a delicate yet desolate landscape in ‘FOREVER – Dead in the Bathroom (feat. Summer Katie Fox)’ (2015) using ceramic sculptures, micro shot peening on stainless steel, wood, plastic laminate, plant, and a short sound piece that loops on speakers. A large installation entitled ‘In the Vast Infinity of Life, All is Perfect, Whole, and Complete’ (2015), made by Magnani, attunes itself to the water bottle and water as a nourishing element that perpetuates life. As the title suggests, three silk-screened prints on ice packs filled with gel surround a water bottle that entertains notions of ‘oneness’ by labelling it with an infinity symbol. A second container is showcased in a small refrigerator, resting on top of carefully produced icicles.

The works in the exhibition elegantly present a crossover between artistic and consumer production, giving consumer goods and the language they’re spoken in, a more soulful, or perhaps slick, new identity. **

Exhibition photos, top right.

Pure Disclosure was on at Milano’s Marselleria from April 10 to May 10, 2015.

Header image: Timur Si-Qin, ‘Display (Peace)’ (2015). Detail. Courtesy Marsèlleria.

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Fulfilment Centre @ The Sunday Painter reviewed

14 March 2014

Welcome to 2014, where ‘Fulfilment Centres’ are places that help you sell stuff. As Amazon puts it, you just have to send your items to them and they “[deliver] the products to your customers from our network of Fulfilment centres.” In a month-long exhibition for The Sunday Painter, London collective N/V_PROJECTS trace a link between the hyperbolic name for these warehouses and the literature on “Wellness” and “New Age” lifestyles that “occupies a surprisingly large portion of storage racks” within them. We live in an age where enterprise uses signifiers of spiritual betterment to sell you things that detract from it; where many try to buy access to self-realisation, to their own centres, by dropping The Power of Now or Reiki for Dummies into their virtual baskets.

Fulfilment Centre is an exhibition with its focus on this friction between ‘self-improvement’ according to Capitalism and the Eastern philosophies it borrows from to meet its own ends. The first work to be seen in the space, Lewis Teague Wright’s ‘Suspicions In, For, Without Paradise’, embodies this contrast sharply with its thin twists of copper plated bronze entwined around a pillar of corrugated galvanised steel. These copper rings set off a theme of adornment and appropriation, like “healing” copper bracelets bolstered onto Western wrists, making it even more affecting to realise that the sturdy, industrial pillar they’re attached to is of course a sheet of metal: completely hollow.

12.Lewis teague Wright, Suspicions In, For, Without Paradise, 2014, Corrugated galvanised steel sheet and copper plated bronze, 244 x 29 Ø (detail2) email
Lewis Teague Wright, ‘Suspicions In, For, Without Paradise’ (2014). Detail. Courtesy The Sunday Painter.

Appropriation is explored even more explicitly in two pieces that sit in conversation with one another, Timur Si-Qin’s ‘Deliver me from dipolar spirits’ and Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ re-contextualisation of Prageeth Manohansa’s painting ‘Ganesh XI’ in an extract from his When platitudes become form series. With this ongoing work, Kulendran Thomas explains, “I reconfigure, for the Western art market, artworks by some of Sri Lanka’s most celebrated young artists. This radical re-marketing of the island’s contemporary art raises funds to resist the oppression of communities displaced by civil war, channelling resources that are not under government control to the formerly Tamil-occupied territories of the North and East of the country.” The result of that mission in Fulfilment Centre is a somewhat phallic painting of the Hindu elephant-headed god Ganesh placed over a Nike t-shirt canvas, the iconic tick set jarringly off-kilter in a way emphasising its masculine shape.

The t-shirt’s positioning suggests the exact outline of the “perfect” male torso, sculpted in seams; opposite, Si-Qin’s ‘Deliver me from dipolar spirits’ counter-acts with an extreme close-up of a man’s chest and stomach, all muscly and hair-free. In Si-Qin’s work, the torso (which is displayed on his staple aluminium X-banner stand that could have been taken straight from the conference room) is next to a mirror-image of a woman’s face, airbrushed into the uncanny valley and framed by her delicately manicured hands. In Si-Qin’s installation, “dipolar” qualities are both separate from and inherent to one another, and so these gender ideals are presented together, both propping prop up the flipside of a display promoting “PEACE” with the star and crescent and crucifix of a Chinese yin and yang symbol. The fusion is crude, as is the commodification of Eastern and religious philosophies. This piece more than any other walks the “fine line between cynicism and sincerity” referred to in the Fulfilment Centre press release, directly appropriating its object of critique to form the crux of the space, the other pieces orbiting.

Timur Si-Qin, 'Deliver me from dipolar spirits' (2014); Neil Beloufa, 'Kempinski' video (2007). Fulfilment Centre installation view at The Sunday Painter (2014). Image courtesy the gallery.
Left-right: Timur Si-Qin, ‘Deliver me from dipolar spirits’ (2014); Neil Beloufa, ‘Kempinski’ video (2007). Fulfilment Centre installation view at The Sunday Painter (2014). Image courtesy the gallery.

The most dynamic, immediate work, though, is that of Julie Born-Schwartz, whose mixed media installation ‘I had an expectation that it would fade’ creeps off the wall and across the space, its disembodied arm taking agency as it claws out of nothingness. Formed of hard unfeeling gold and peculiarly skinless, the arm is presented on a backdrop of what looks like skin cells under a microscope, digitally rendered and printed on paper that spills from wall to floor. The fingertips touch lightly on a pyramid; the hand reaching for spirituality, or at least a symbol of it.

Elsewhere along this cycnical-hopeful spectrum of belief and self-improvement are Tyra Tingleff’s painting on raw linen, ‘Respect pop but we’re broken up’, the rough and dense quality of which reveals its shapes slowly, and Neil Beloufa’s award-winning 2007 film ‘Kempinski’. Seemingly named for the luxury hotel chain, the film sees actors in a variety of suburban and rural spaces in Mali talk about their ideas of the future under the buzz of artificial light. “Once you think about something, you have it in front of you,” says one of Beloufa’s subjects. That future is now: think of anything you desire, and it’s probably waiting to fulfil you in a centre not too far away. It’s a hollow, steely promise. Be careful what you wish for. **

N/V_PROJECTS’ Fulfilment Centre is showing at The Sunday Painter, running March 1 to 30, 2014.

Header image: Julie Born Schwartz, ‘I had an expectation that it would fade II’ (2013). Mixed media installation. Detail. Image courtesy The Sunday Painter.

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Société @ ALAC, Jan 30 – Feb 2

30 January 2014

Berlin’s Société is one of the exhibitors at the fifth year of Art Los Angeles Contemporary (ALAC) this year, running January 30 to February 2.

The gallery will be presenting work by Josh Kolbo, Sean Raspet, Timur Si-Qin and Ned Vena, along with 70 other international blue chip and emerging galleries at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica. Tabor Robak and Cory Arcangel representative team (gallery, inc.) will also be there with a selection of its other artists, while Jonathan Viner will present work from George Henry Longly, and Brenna Murphy represented by Portland’s Upfor gallery.

Read our interview with Timur Si-Qin and see the ALAC website for details. **

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An interview with Timur Si-Qin

18 November 2013

In an article for DIS Magazine, ‘Stock Photography as Evolutionary Attractor‘, artist Timur Si-Qin writes about the predominance of particular conventions in commercial imagery; “the perspiring beverage bottle crashing through ice” or “the porcelain-skinned woman splashing water on her face”. Rather than giving the usual critical theory-laden account of why certain image conventions proliferate, Si-Qin looks to a range of possible factors, including human physiology and evolution. “For example, humans can see clearer and in color in the center of our vision”, he writes, “contributing to the compositional convention of central placement.” The article is telling of Si-Qin’s visual interest in everyday materials, one that seeks to situate them in an expanded context of human history and the natural world.

One of a growing number of post-internet artists associated with the contemporary philosophical movements of “New Materialism” and “Speculative Realism”, Si-Qin’s works frequently seek to detract from the aura of human self-importance. Exploring materials that range from Axe body wash, to Yoga mats, to stock photography, Si-Qin’s objects manage to both gently mock our preoccupations with health, appearance, virility, luxury, while linking such predilections to a pre-cultural era. When I ask (over email) why he thinks New Materialism resonates so strongly with visual artists, he responds, “I think, growing up, I was always enchanted by the natural world. New materialism is a philosophy that for the first time seems up to the task of acknowledging the myriad forms and shapes, animals and subjectivities, that seem to populate our contemporary experience.”

Timur Si-Qin, Basin Of Attraction exhibition view. Image courtesy of the artist.
Timur Si-Qin, Basin Of Attraction exhibition view. Image courtesy of the artist.

In Basin of Attraction, his first institutional solo show in Germany at the Bonner Kunstverein, Si-Qin created large-format digital images drawn from stock photography, as well as arrangements of bones (replicas of a hominid fossil) with patterned surfaces. It has long been the case in found-object art that materials be largely understood in the context of their recent social history. For Si-Qin, this is only one of multiple concerns regarding the way we make sense of materials, a view that incorporates form and structure as well knowledge from a range of disciplines. A stock image of “storied farmer’s hands sifting through bags of freshly roasted, aromatic coffee beans”, blown-up and mounted on a lightweight free-standing frame, comes straight from any advertising display in a suburban shopping centre. But Si-Qin does not draw attention to an object’s ubiquity to create kitsch, but rather to interrogate the broader question of why patterns reoccur so persistently. Chatting with Si-Qin over Skype, he is every bit as precise and theoretically focused as I have come to expect from his exhibition texts, easily traversing the various concepts and systems of knowledge that loosely fall under the rubric of new materialism.

Basin of Attraction explored your interest in stock and commercial photography, particularly in the recurring patterns we see in these images and their evolutionary genesis.

TS: Right, I’m interested in the deep chains of causality underlying the patterns we see in contemporary image culture. As well as the actual ways by which images are consumed and processed. The hyper-commercial aesthetic is a reflection of the contingent nature by which these recurring patterns arise. Patterns created by the interaction of instinctual and associated affects, as well as economic and political contingencies that manifest this whole global, cross-cultural aesthetic.

As someone from a generation where cultural studies and visual culture studies have been so dominant, it’s interesting to think about these other factors, evolutionary and biological for example. Do you think these get overlooked most of the time?

TS: I think they do often get overlooked. Because there’s little way of making sense of evolutionary or pre-cultural factors in a post-modern framework. But I think their introduction marks a turn away from the post-modern emphasis on language and cultural construction and towards a renewed emphasis on the objective and the material (without sacrificing subject and identity), like that found in philosophy in recent years under the banners of ‘new materialism’ or ‘speculative realism.’ I think the important thing to keep in mind, is that culture is an extension of biology, that it is a powerful adaptation in and of itself, but represents only a part of the spectrum of the full human/animal experience.

Which of your works were included in the Bonn exhibition? I understand you made 3D prints from fossils.

TS: Yeah, there are these three constellations, each consisting of a strain of commercial pop-up display and a vitrine with the 3D printed remains of a hominid teenager that lived in South Africa 1.5 – 2 million years ago. Each vitrine has different versions of the same individual, the same person that once lived. I was able to retrieve the digitalisation of his remains and make copies. I think what interests me about it is this causal history of shape and pattern, that the shapes of this person are echoing through time in varying guises; first before he was alive, through his ancestors, then after his death, the shapes were stored in fossilised rock, and now they’ve been scanned, digitized and 3d printed, but it’s still the same echo, the same shapes. In some ways I think the same thing goes for stock photos.

This idea reminds me of your work with ergonomic products. They are both about a trace of the human body.

TS: True, but I think the human part is arbitrary. I’m fascinated by animal bodies and nature in general, humans being is what we contingently connect with the most because we happen to be humans. Morphogenesis and vestigiality are the topics I’m really interested in.

Are you especially interested in these things as they relate to commodity culture? Commodity culture is a realm where we might least expect to find traces of our ancestry, it seems to come so directly from the here and now.

TS: I guess what I try to reflect is that there are these deeper older forces at play in the construction of the contemporary experience. That even though things are getting more sci-fi by the year, we owe the makeup of our reality in large part to the self organizing behaviour of matter (including human organization), which is the oldest story of all. However, I think that by acknowledging this causal history, it in no way results in any sort of determinism. In fact, I think it provides access to an ever greater flexibility of the future.

Yes, I think actually talking about these things might help to shift some of the older myths about evolution and biology that persist today, that are more essentialist.

TS: Yes, totally, it’s a pity how much these myths about evolution persist, especially in the humanities. Some equate an evolutionary lens with social-darwinism or genetic determinism. Both of which are based on false understandings of the radically flexible and non-teleological nature of evolution. Nature by way of evolution is inherently queer, generated only through variation and difference.

Timur Si-Qin, 'TM1517 (Paranthropus Robustus)- Dressed in Space' (2013). Image courtesy of the artist.
Timur Si-Qin, ‘TM1517 (Paranthropus Robustus)- Dressed in Space’ (2013). Image courtesy of the artist.

Was this a consideration in your works using Axe products? The Axe brand plays so much on these outdated ideas of scent and pheromones being able to trigger a response in the opposite sex. At the same time, the products also exploit very real evolution-based desires.

TS:  I think what interested me was not so much the truth of the claims of the product, which is obviously over the top teenage boy catnip, but that a campaign and product like that can be as effective today as it is, which is again evidence of the power of the vestigial.

It must be! Axe is such an object of ridicule but remains so popular.

TS: Right, it’s a fossil. The bottles themselves look like fossils too. I think those pieces were successful in being a joke and being serious and enchanted by its subject at the same time, which is something I strive for. Like the stock cosmetics style portraits of females, which to me represents the opposite side of the spectrum of over-expressed male/female duality.

In both instances, I was fascinated by your ability to make these objects even more extreme in a way, piercing the Axe bottles with swords, blowing up the stock images.

TS: Yeah, I suppose it’s a way of creating some distance, but I’m also interested in riding this thin line between being critical of something and being complicit with it. I think because ultimately the distinction is maybe not there, or rather, that things are always more complicated than any simple duality.

Timur Si-Qin, 'Axe Effect' (2011). Image courtesy of the artist.
Timur Si-Qin, ‘Axe Effect’ (2011). Image courtesy of the artist.

You’re currently in a group show in Kassel at the Fridericianum; Speculations on Anonymous Materials. I thought the press text for this was interesting, it seemed to link the artists involved by the way they approach materials, instead of say, under the banner of post-internet art.

TS: Yeah I’m happy that for the first time there is a major exhibition of this generation that is moving beyond the post-Internet label. I think maybe the topics of medium-specificity and network technologies, subject matters that post-Internet seems to embody, are not sufficient in capturing a deeper generational shift. I think, ironically enough, what that label obfuscates is the true extent to which the internet and computers in general have changed our perception of the world.

The digital age has taught us that digital materials behave and are as real as physical materials, and vice versa, and that matter and reality is programmable, i.e. ‘the hackability of everything’. So what it comes down to, what’s really happening to our generation is maybe an expansion of the idea of materiality, one that counts everything, from Spanish to aluminum to Samsung as a material, each with its own manipulable properties and capacities.

There also seems to be a different, less formal attitude towards materials, in letting materials speak for themselves, rather than reflect the process of the artist.

TS: Yeah, I think you’re right; letting materials do what they want as a reflection of their contingent nature. One interesting thing is the repeated manifestations of certain things in this show and amongst the work of our generation, for example heads and hands. In a realist-materialist framework one can explain why images of faces and hands are especially able to connect to the viewer: we have special neural structures designed to process faces, and mirror neurons to feel the posture of hands which are a part of the body very densely populated with nerves. So in art as well as advertisement, we have come to understand that these images have an affectual weight. Their repeated use can therefore be thought of as an expression of the material properties and tendencies of our social/image world. I think our generation is intuiting this shift. **

Speculations on Anonymous Materials is running at Kassel Fridericianum until January 26, 2013. Timur Si-Qin is a Berlin-based artist.

Header Image: Timur Si-Qin, ‘Axe Aftermath’ at Speculations on Anonymous Materials, Kassel Fridericianum.

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