Like the deserts miss the rain
28.04 – 28.05.2017
Opening
Friday 28 April, 6-8pm
The exhibition’s title, borrowed from the 1993 song ‘Missing’ by Everything But the Girl, points to the feeling of heartbreak and yearning projected onto distant, anthropomorphized ecologies. Just as the desert in this case is supposed to miss the rain that is unknown to it, the human and nonhuman protagonists found throughout the different works in the exhibition are encountered in liminal spaces, straddling incommensurate states of being. The sense of loss is for something unknown and intangible, just beyond articulation, and yet the processes of production continue to expand and grow undisturbed.
In Wagner’s practice, there often exists a lacuna; a gap is opened up between the work-in-itself and work-as-idea, that addresses and activates the viewer with an imperative to build, creating a circuitous relationship in which the boundaries between external and internal, between form, content and corporality are dissolved.
‘Like the deserts miss the rain’, curated by Judith Vrancken, brings together several recent works by Beny Wagner (print, video) as well as newly commissioned work within an installation environment designed for the space.
Beny Wagner is an artist working in moving image, installation, lectures and text. He was born in West Berlin and grew up moving between the U.S., Israel and Germany. Growing up between different cultures and languages initially drew his practice towards abstraction as a way to bridge the cultural gaps of his experience. Over time this shifted towards the urge to tell stories and particularly, to find modes of storytelling that reflect the fractured and fragmented modes of perception inherent in a global infrastructure. He is currently based between Amsterdam and Berlin and exhibits his work internationally.
Judith Vrancken is a writer, editor and occasional curator. After having danced for 14 years, she left for New York at age 17 to take classes at the Broadway Dance Center only to discover she would be much better off at writing about dance, then actually putting the physical sweat in herself. A career in journalism, visual art, and performance followed, initially rooted in Berlin, the city where for her the performance of life is collectively understood to be an everyday phenomenon. She now works with dancers at NDT on a daily basis - the same company she went to go see annually ever since she was eight years old - and regularly contributes to (inter)national art publications.
RELATED EVENTS AT RW:
May 6, 17.00-19.00
Graham Kelly: Skull Island Part II
&
Beny Wagner: The "I" Eye
May 27, 17.00-19.00
Sasha Litvintseva: haptics/optics inside/outside
&
Wietske Maas: The Vegetal Grotesque: How Plants Metabolize our Gaze
May 6, 17.00-19.00
Graham Kelly: Skull Island Part II
&
Beny Wagner: The "I" Eye
May 27, 17.00-19.00
Sasha Litvintseva: haptics/optics inside/outside
&
Wietske Maas: The Vegetal Grotesque: How Plants Metabolize our Gaze
\ Made possible with the generous support of the Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst \
