How About This, curated by Raimundas Malasauskas

Judith Braun, Making My Bed, 2011 black photocopy on neon orange paper and Fingering, 2011


Some thoughts on some works at an exhibition curated by Raimundas Malasauskas


There is a retinal seduction that captures the visitor of How About This, an exhibition curated by Raimundas Malasauskas at Andreas Huber in Vienna. It seems as if there wouldn't be a better place than Viennese architecture to experience certain works of the show, like the drawing/installations of Judith Braun. Seeing her work, I remembered the following thought by Beatriz Colomina on the architecture of Adolf Loos, regarding his Viennese interiors: "Upon entering a Loos interior, one's body is continually turned around to face the space one just moved through, rather than the oncoming space or the space outside. With each turn, each return look, the body is arrested". If in spaces built by Loos one's gaze is kept within the interiors of the house, in Braun's finger drawings on walls (Fingering, 2011) and her bifurcated sensual flora made through photocopied flower compositions (Making my bed 2011) the gaze is dislocated towards the interior[ity] of the individual. In other words, the location and relation of the work with the space and the parcourse of visitors made one's body doubly 'arrested' within a sensorial affect (not effect) that created portals to introspective architectures.


Mariana Castillo Deball and Audrey Cotin, Glories 2011

Drawings on wall based on the Codex Borgia, a Mesoamerican ritual and divinatory manuscript. It is generally believed to have been written before the Spanish conquest of mexico somewhere within what is now today southern or western Puebla.




Benjamin Seror, Songs for Flowers and Jackets, 2011


At the back room of the gallery a rack of eccentric/campy jackets were hanging. They were part of a performance by Benjamin Seror whom the night before had warn them to sing Garageband made melancholic technopop songs he had written. Each song was dedicated to each jacket, and introduced by the artist with a personal emotive anecdote. for example the first flashy flowery tencho-tropical clothing, had been originally given to the artist by a door man of a bizarre night club from where Benjamin had just came out drunk and overwhelmed by such gift. The banal, yet sad and existentialist 4 minute song lyrics, sang by the artist at the exhibition, had been originally sang and hummed by the door man the time he gave away his jacket to the artist. During the night of the performance Benjamin's stories, songs, tone and personas continued and modify as he changed jackets.

Seeing these jackets hanging in a rack, it reminded me of the way in which Helio Oiticica's Parangoles 1964-1979 are sometimes 'displayed' in the white cube to invite visitors to wear them. As Oitician theoretician Victor Manuel Rodriguez has described, when one wears a Parangole, one performs an action of cross-dressing. Cross dressing is often used as 'trasvestism' to become a woman, but in this case it should be taken as to cross-dress into any possible identity, such us those multiple personas 'personified' through the work of Benjamin Seror.

Helio Oiticica, Parangoles, 1964-1979. Display at documenta X (1997)

Helio Oiticica, Parangole, (1964-1979) See from min 1.13


Joint drawing by M. Castillo de Ball, Judith Braun and Audrey Cottin, 2011





Inti Guerrero and Cosmin Costinas with Judith Braun [THIS IS THE ORIGINAL COLOR OF THE PIECE]


Exhibition text by Raimundas Malasauskas:

Judith Braun comes from New York City to apply patterns of the universe on the walls of the gallery. Audrey Cottin has drawn folds and knots exploring the convolutions (and distortions) of the human brain. Mariana Castillo Deball watches Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, spread its wings through time. Wings and knots cross each other on the wall. So far, Gintaras Didziapetris has released one issue of a magazine called Ninety. On the occasion of the exhibition, Ninety has commissioned Elena Narbutaite to make a series of pictures of an ancient ritual called smoking. Nicholas Matranga is writing a concept for the show and defines this as his artwork. Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita recently visited the World Forum of Spiritual Culture in Astana, Kazakhstan, where they shot a video about Noospheric economy and evolutionary algorithms. Benjamin Seror takes all this up and sings it – more or less as a Frenchman would do.


Until 18 June 2011 at:

Galerie Andreas Huber
Schleifmühlgasse 6-8, 2nd floor
A-1040 Vienna
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