Gili Tal at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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When it rains it pours, cruelly, the abject waste of capital. Rain as the whip. Hammering rain. Against windows, against Lichtenstein's mirrors, returned or exhumed from bin of pop trash. "One does win against rain or repetition," says Rancière about the unrelenting bleak of Bela Tarr films. "the incessant rain destroys all. It has not only stiffened the coat he no longer dares to unbutton. It has been transformed into an interior rain, which springs forth from the heart and floods all the organs." A rain that is mass produced, printed by the yard.

See too: Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Gili Tal at Cabinet

Steve Bishop at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Nostalgia a toxic substance used to preserve our memories in formaldehyde's rose tinted veil. New research shows that nostalgia is actually the brain's way of combating negative feelings and nihilism, it is basically the brain self-administering drugs in the form of a memory, recalling a time when one did feel comfortable, safe, happy, as a means to hopefully jumpstart its human and face whatever adversity. Nostalgia's "bittersweet" highlighting the person in a continuum of time and thus progress made.

“If you can recruit a memory to maintain physiological comfort, at least subjectively, that could be an amazing and complex adaptation,” he says. “It could contribute to survival by making you look for food and shelter that much longer.” -Dr. Wildschut, nytimes

 Bishop's seem like medical grade injections of nostalgia. Like leftover cake, nostalgia is an artificially sugary concoction we can bring with us, a souvenir that, like Gober's donuts, we desire forever. Nostalgia is how we laminate our heads to look like there's more precious substances inside. We coat chairs in plastic to think they're worth preserving. This will all be gone soon.

Jasmin Werner at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Conveyance. Ascension. Production, factory movement. The treadmill of life. The most addicting games create a continuous feeling of accelerating acquisition, slow steady rates of increase, of moving up in the world, and this little souvenirs of. Staircases like trophies to tomorrow.  The spiral staircase is just a hamster wheel over time.


Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff at Cabinet, Nora Schultz at dépendance , Nora Schultz at Reena Spaulings, Grayson Revoir at Frankfurt am Main

Leda Bourgogne, Ida Ekblad at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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The excess physicality in painting, the scabs one end and wall vents on the other, perhaps because we're so beholden to virtual environs that we need a new harder visceral materiality to reach across screens, so we can feel like we're feeling something other than glass.


see too: Ida Ekblad at Herald St (2) Ida Ekblad at Max Hetzler, Ida Ekblad at Herald St (1), Tony Conrad's Glass

Lena Henke at Kunstverein Braunschweig & Louise Bourgeois at Cheim and Read

(Louise Bourgeois , Lena Henke)

Bourgeois never gave up the latent content of physical depiction, sculpture, its materiality, even the virtual, the way so many, say minimalists, wished they could and instead drew out what those Greeks left implicit in the linea alba, their white soft marble line, of men, and these latent expressions in physicality crop up in her progeny, apparent in those like Henke for whom physical things act as moments of duplicity, locus for multiple apparencies, big black table eyes. There is too many things to say about these things, looking like too much, their genericsm becomes strength. A low poly mesh provides metaphorical possibility in its low resolution. The harder it is to define things the larger their aqueous potential, and physical material experience (of which CAD is no real good at imparting) is a real wet thing.

Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Charming post-Naumanian displacers of content, the work's emptiness as interest (fun or dark?™) maybe finds relevance to current political situations in that one must find interest elsewhere: the contents of speaking is beside itself - nonexistent - and we must look around corners, to the edges of whited out posters, build our own shoddy unstable platforms, find the non-content of its rhetoric and ham-handed demagoguery as a new type of poetry we can't ignore it has steamrolled itself into our vision, just like our political leaders.  "In the video work Nhite Woise (2015), Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist connect in a charming yet dilettante dance performance."



See too: Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

“Open House” at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Each installation shot of this exhibition as though cut from a different building entirely, of various architectures and at least 9 different flooring patterns, nearly one for every room. There is heavy disjuncture and little continuity between the spaces and these jarring cuts stand out against our growing predisposition for documentation that carefully establishes spatial relations of its installations. Like Kubrick intentionally breaking spatial continuity of the spooky hotel to create a viewer lost, there is unease in being disorientated, and in intaking a voluminous feed of disparate images the growing popularity for carefully sited images a way of avoiding the motion sickness of being in a sea.

See too:  Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, Brian Calvin at Le Consortium,  Jacob Kassay at Fitzpatrick-Leland House

Mandla Reuter at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Gallery interventionism, rearrangement to estrange the viewer from it. Setting a moral drama's stage, the viewers the figurants of its abandoned set, asking for the heightened attention to the space directed by Reuter. Attempting to alienate it, the gallery and our experience walking through, to forget the name of the thing one sees. We encounter the experience prior to the objects. Like Irwin phenomologic parables, or Turrel's temples to it, a moral lesson in experiential self-awareness packaged in a fun house arrangement. A Fun house in which perception is amplified through ascetic rather than psychedelic means. The critique of a "capitalist-realist adaptation of art to the experience economy" could be leveled at it, but its much more modernist than that.

Aware of our surroundings too : Gina Folly and Mandla Reuter at SALTS