Unruly Relations

Friendships are determined by their ambiguous nature. In the context of art, they form social frameworks, are theme of the artworks themselves, are an (un)productive factor of artistic work and a determining element for models of community authorship. At the same time as they are invested with romantic notions of a bond freed of purpose, the possibility of failure is always inherent; they are fractious, uncontrollable, hardly calculable from scratch. This essential ambiguity of friendship also determines the relationship between objects, materials and narratives that encounter each other in any group exhibition and that are, at best, engaged in a dialogue. Unruly relations are self-willed social constellations that play completely different roles in the works displayed.

The group exhibition Unruly Relations addresses the ambivalent nature of friendship as a social construction but also as part of artistic practices. Invested with romantic notions, the concept of friendship is a much discussed social model of the present, a principle that is both co-opted economically as well as publicly. The exhibition is not based on any specific theories of friendship but instead poses questions: What are the productive and unproductive possibilities of failure and success that friendship or more general social constellations and communication provides? What is the relationship between friendship and authorship?

The two figures Protagonist From the Learning Movie (2016) and Fat Frog (Phantom Twin) (2016) by Stefan Tcherepnin (born 1977 in Boston, lives and works in New York) also make an attempt at socializing and retreating while traveling. The Cookie Monsters rise from his film Learning Movie (2014), where the Sesame Street protagonists wander through deserted landscapes and an equally empty restaurant in the form of a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome in order to become, in the exhibition space, monumental, monstrous sculptures whose communication is monitored by the Committee (2016).

Allusions to the Buckminster Fuller Dome are present in the lamps, which cast large shadows on the walls. The installation is a continuation of Hypocrisy Ladders (2014), an installation whose title is a reference to the Stendahl novel Black and Red (1830), which describes hypocrisy as an ambivalent social practice that contributes to identity formation in a highly productive manner.The works of Stefan Tcherepnin refer loosely to literary or other linguistic and cultural references. The artist moves between different communities of collaborators as a musician and artist and deals not least with the question of how forms of collaboration or the eschewing of such influence their own authorship.