CRIP TIME / THE RIGHT TO STAY
Akademie der Bildenden Kunste Wien, 19.06.'26 - 21.06.'26
Emerging from research into the architecture and materiality of the archive, Crip Time / The Right to Stay intersects A. Kafer & E. Samuels’ concept of crip time - how disabled bodies disrupt linear, normative temporality - with the legal terminology of “the right to stay,” defining conditions for non-citizen residency. I locate myself at this crossroads to question how displacement and crip time materially inform one another.
The exhibition comprises 4 UV prints on exterior canvas, a metal bench, a shelf, tin casts of batteries, coins, and screws, three tin ingots, and balduque ribbon. The works originate from photos shot on my father’s 50s Lubitel camera, capturing friends staying in my bed during a period of chronic illness. Depicted as reclining female nudes, one, a doctor, is hooked to a medical device; another, an artist and former face of a Photoshop product, rests after having recently given birth.
The images materialize in 3 different formats : 2 superimposed scanned negative film strips of S. playing with her TENS machine; M. maintaining her right to opacity, surrounded by overexposed frames. The third format uses home scanning to force the scanner to overexpose their negatives : as the machine fails to function - its lens encountering dust and dirt – it redirects its gaze to organize space in vertical bands in response.
Using institutional, modernistic display templates, the violet print sits beside a domestic shelf hosting tin casts of screws, coins, and batteries, stand-ins for different forms of energy and acting as ghostly "inbetweeners", noticed only when missing. The IKEA shelf hosting them is smudged with purple pigment, and a few bent tin ingots are resting on the bench wrapped in balduque - the ribbon historically used in Dutch and Belgian bureaucracy.
The exhibition operates through a dialectic of two primary methodologies : scanning and contaminating. The scanner functions as a diagnostic medical apparatus, here malfunctioning through contamination : organizing time by moving between different moments in the production process, and space with marks of pigment and stripes, contamination brings up how “matter out of place” (as M. Douglas defines dirt) defies institutional order.
Furthermore, the pigment serves as an indexical trace, evoking Isabelle Graw’s notion of ‘vitalistic fantasies’ regarding the ghost-like presence of the artist, and the ‘vitalistic fantasies’ projected upon inanimate objects (such as paintings) as a key driver of their economic value. But what happens when the artist themselves, or the object, or the artwork, is a ghost ?
For Mark Fisher, the ghostly state isnt a ‘life force’ fetishized into a luxury commodity but a sign of lost futures caught in a haunted repetition : “The future we were promised didn’t arrive, and we are stuck re-enacting the past”. In that sense, sickness, but also immobility, become here political by-products.
UPWARDS
Akademie der Bildenden Kunste Wien, Rundgang, January 2014
Upwards is a group of four works discussing the concept of elevation : a large landscape canvas carries candle smoke marks on its – previously prepared with clay - surface, the plaster cast of a broken right arm lays on a clay slab on the floor, a column of Flying Power energy drink cans is stacked to the brink of collapsing and an A4 paper, previously soaked in the same energy drink is framed on the wall.
Elevation is explored here as a vertical process, a metaphysical imperative as well as the Humanist vision of progress and the late-capitalist ideal of acceleration and ascent. The works each produce a failure – or negation – of its achievement. In the large canvas, the candle smoke – borrowing a ritual from the Christian Orthodox tradition of drawing crosses on the thresholds of houses with the Holy Light after Ressurection Eve – covers the entirety of the canvas’ surface, producing complete obscurity – and soot - in meander-like labyrinthine wanderings. The Brancusi-like column of energy drinks approaches levity from a biochemical angle : accumulated to the threshold of collapse, a stack of - Low-Brow - “Flying Power” cans subvert Modernism’s aspirations to the infinite - substituting them with precarity and mass-produced optimization supplements. The same material has been used to ‘energize’ – in a substitute or fantasy of vitalism – the A4 paper framed behind the glass frame, rendering it with subjectivity. On the floor the plaster cast of a right hand, the instrument of the ideal of Reason in its technological specificity, lays on a clay slab on the floor as a collective symptom of an exhausted subject and an Ideal that did not reach its potential.
In all its manifestations, elevation appears as a failure – of the Metaphysical, Humanist and Late-capitalist projects of the Western subject and its ideals of perfection, progress and acceleration inevitably leading towards its systematic exhaustion : of ressources, energy and meaning. As a prerequisite to building, the works also question the nature of the artwork itself, and the conditions under which its building can take shape.