Daphne Ahlers, Rosa Rendl, Lilli Thiessen

Rosen im Dezember

Introversion and extroversion are equivalent distortions. 
Rocking gently. 
All is muted, dimmed. 

Rosa Rendl, Daphne Ahlers and Lilli Thiessen offer a soft surface for the overstimulated. Numb but on high alert, nothing seems placid. Yet somehow, not all has gone flaccid. Ripped sixpacks, tight packages are still available on the dropdown menu, now with complimentary orthopedic care.

Sculpture emancipates itself from landscape and architecture to become nomadic, concentrating on its make-up, routine and performance within a set of cultural terms.[1]

Artists emancipate themselves from their cocooned brains and let them go to seed to become porous bodies[2] that autotune to the environment,[3] dress to match the furniture. 

Critics deprecate the mediocrity, naïvety, and soft-mindedness,[4] but one could as well seek roses in December – ice in June, as expect merit from a certain set.[5]

The current show is not a collaboration as such, but there is something communal in the harmonious and productive discord. Molecules have been resonating for years between Rendl, Ahlers and Thiessen.[6] A mutual celebration of the citational. Knowledge shared episodically through whatever each of them saw, heard, or read. By spontaneous telepathy resistant to capitalist technologies and patriarchal patterns.[7] Making things and offering them to the world, not for utility or future capital gains, but to cast memory in physical form.[8]

Sculpture is frozen music: the observer is the pickup on the record player whose movement realises the temporal sequence.[9] Im Zweifelsfall keep dancing. We see more clearly when we are moving than when we stand still.[10]Bei welcher Auswahl soll ich bloß anläuten? Egal. Shoot blank. Have courage. Absolve the need to determine everything. Your selection will be custom-gift-wrapped to match your current mood.

- Signe Rose
 

[1] Rosalind Krauss: “Modernist sculpture declare[s] its status, […] meaning and function, as essentially nomadic […] through the representation of its own materials or the process of its construction, the sculpture depicts its own autonomy. […] Within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium – sculpture – but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms.” Sculpture in the Expanded Field, 1979.

[2] Laura Edbrook: “We are porous bodies, not cocooned brains,” ‘You’re the Least Important Person in the Room and Don’t Forget It’: The Intimate Relations of Subjectivity and the Illegitimate Everyday, 2017.

[3] Efrosini Charalambous & Zakaria Djebbara: “The ability of the brain to selectively engage with or self-tune to the environmental variables.” On natural attunement: Shared rhythms between the brain and the environment, 2023.

[4] Rosalind Krauss: “Mediocre, naïve and soft-minded,” on Jane Gallop’s work about motherhood, love, and use of her personal situation as subject matter. As cited in Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts, 2015.

[5] Lord Byron: “Care not for feeling—pass your proper jest, And stand a Critic, hated yet caressed. And shall we own such judgment? no—as soon; Seek roses in December—ice in June…” English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 1809

[6] Lonely Boys, Rosa Rendl & Daphne Ahlers, 2010-present; Hulfe, Daphne Ahlers & Lilli Thiessen, 2019-present; HHDM, various configurations involving Ahlers, Thiessen & Rendl, 2012-2016.

[7] Laura Edbrook: “An illegitimate epistemological rupture that comes in a flash – perhaps even a phenomena of the quotidian. […] an enlightening space of telepathic dissonance acting as a resistance to the technologies of capital and patterns of patriarchy that colonize reality,” about Catherine Clément’s philosophy of rapture. Laura Edbrook, ibid

[8] Marcel Broodthaers: “Collecting is a form of practical memory and, among the profane manifestations of ‘proximity’, the most convincing one.” Ma Collection, 1974.

[9] Philip Thiel: “Architecture may well be ‘frozen music’, like a phonograph record; but man is the pickup whose movement realizes the experience.” Processional Architecture, 1964.

[10] J.J. Gibson: “People do in fact see the environment during locomotion, not just in the pauses between movements. They probably see better when moving than when stationary.” The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 1979.