Tolia Astakhishvili at Bonner Kunstverein

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Honestly just fun to scroll through. Its got that early Christoph Buchel en-abyme labyrinth without all the movie-set theater. Or Simon Fujiwara without the tradeshow pedagogy. It's replaced with a recursive shifting of scales. Models and images and cutouts make for a loss of footing in endless virtual passe-partout all existing concurrently in the digital, works incredibly well in digital images. The Synecdoche New York of exhibition space, deteriorating separations between imagery and reality. Architecture, white gallery space, the virtual plane, they have always only been metaphors for your skull.

artistic turns to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense: an expression of a need for control over a world we increasingly do not. There is a dissonance between our interior worlds which we find virtual and beholden to our godlike control of a drag/drop materiality conjuring sex in our glass or Christmas from its depths. Digital desires that the physical world increasingly doesn't reflect. The model allows the physical world marionette to an invisible hand in which we trust. 

The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. "Housing" replaces "houses," which replaces "house" distinct from "home," which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday... 

See too: Simon Fujiwara, The Model, Anna Zacharoff at Kantine, Ghislaine Leung at Reading International

Guan Xiao at Bonner Kunstverein

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In a world governed by the cartoon, its virtuality, all things are exchangeable and appear similar enough. You can throw them all together. (and Fair symptoms that such a world in cartoon mode, accelerating homogenization would also see an equal rise in identity politics bristle against this mayonnaising.) But so it's artist's naughty fun to accelerate cultural flatenning, run impishly through borders, tie everything together, steam roll the whole thing into one vast of cultural whateverness, throw it overboard into the soup.

"The hipster too was a semionaut; whose careful balance of fashion’s signs were an additive and appropriative construction of appearance and identity, a careful facade of references, and so the concurrent rise of Rachel Harrison makes symptomatic sense for its ability to thematize semio-collapse short-circuits in a way that was jokey, pranksterish and light relief against undeconstructable-tuber confusion of “the real” having really ascended into code that both Harrison and Hipsters were obviously responding. But artists now live it, take for granted the serial construction of references fashioning artistic identity whose appropriations need make little sense, that juxtaposition is enough capable of producing all the double-binds, oxymorons, and paradoxes that the artworld prefers in a the-more-the-merrier type campaign, creating perfect mires filled with loads of interpretive juice whose glossy surface reflected the world well."

see too: Nina Beier at Metro Pictures, Henning Bohl at What Pipeline, Henning Bohl at Karin Guenther, Max Brand at Off Vendome, Goshka Macuga at Rüdiger Schöttle

Phung-Tien Phan at Bonner Kunstverein

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The art meme of placing a thing on another thing. Foregrounding the ghost who've arranged the space, the artist's hand, both magnifying their leave while highlighting the staging of the encounter. Like Broodthaers' potted palms casting the scene in its artifice, it makes the ghosts come out, those who constructed its object for you, tombs where flowers have been left.


See too: Ulla von Brandenberg at Pilar Corrias

Josh Smith at Bonner Kunstverein

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Adopts the cripplingly tasteful resignation of palatable colors in oyster-like forms and the champagne popped for the final internment of distinction between critical and sellout, subversiveness actually always tasteful or tastefulness now subversive.

See too: Josh Smith at at Eva Presenhuber

Jana Euler at Bonner Kunstverein

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Painters lagging behind the speed of digital distribution, the same paintings appear again, lapped in the circuit complete, back where began: CAD’s displaying them once again but different, an addition of a cruddy sculpture and sprinkled Emoticons intersecting icons into physical space, winking.
But so the same writ still applicable, Euler’s paintings set their content precariously, awaiting the avalanche of writers spewing to keep up with each’s “content”’s ostensible 10k words worth, a spring trap set of neurosis for writers afraid of images void of language, and requisite dealing with “content”’s representation as though it were a leak to be stuffed, holes to be filled in a system manically working to deluge reference in line, proboscises awaiting their aesthetic surgery at the hands of those who would wish to set everything straight, tasteful, and they instead wink, waiting to be dealt with.

See too : Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zurich , Allison Katz at BFA Boatos , Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi