JULIE FAVREAU
KASIA FUDAKOWSKI
MARIE VON HEYL
NEHA KUDCHADKAR
TOBIAS PREISIG
FETTE SANS

Love Letters: Stories of Distant Proximities

Intimate relationships are never just private but always also political. How and who we love influences the way we approach our own species, as well as the world as a whole.The work of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens serves as a starting point when thinking about sexual relationships as a form of healing. Entering into sensual relationships withmountains, waterfalls and trees, Sprinkle and Stephens challenge basic societal structures such as monogamy and heterosexuality, as well as our relationship to non-human species.

International careers and digitalization have further complicated modern love lives,increasing the number of long distance relationships substantially. The current healthcrisis accelerates this process further. Love letters, phone calls and virtual role-play make up for physical encounters, replacing hairy, sweaty skin with clean, smooth computer screens. While the visual and the aural senses are stimulated, touch, smell, taste andproprioception are being neglected.

Creating a place that smells, moves, touches and talks, Love Letters: Stories of Distant Proximities engages its visitors as sentient beings. Conceived as a series of solopresentations, the exhibition will grow over time. Seeking sensual, sexual and societal healing, the works on view explore the role of intimacy, individual freedom, and artisticpractice.

Proposals – Part 1
October 2020

Julie Favreau
Kasia Fudakowski
Marie von Heyl & Fette Sans

Translucent yet confining, Kasia Fudakowski’s pivoting screen at once divides, frames andguides the visitor. Part of the ongoing project Continuouslessness (since 2017), this part of the sculpture, with the working subtitle Spuckschutzer/Spit guards, consists of eightpanels of varying dimensions all made from the currently very present material vocabularyof pine wood profiles and transparent PET plastic sheeting. Working, as the artist points out, as ‘barrier, backdrop, or a vitrine’, the piece sets the stage for the remaining acts ofthe exhibition.

Marie von Heyl and Fette Sans have been collaborating on conversations — private and public — since 2017. On the opening day of Love Letters: Stories of Distant Proximitiesthe two artists will perform the excesses and exhaustions of language. A hole is being gnawed in my vitals (says Sappho) will discuss the redundancy of desire, the porous body,exorcisms and cravings of love and the leaking of words that cannot be taken back.

Julie Favreau’s work is about forms of intimacy and sensuality under the influence of new technological and telekinetic aptitudes. The body involved seems to elevate, float and connect by transcending its physical silhouette and entity, moving beyond notions of gender and unique identity. Exploring the erotic texture of the world, the way animate and inanimate things touch and influence one another, Julie Favreau integrates organic- technoid things in her scenarios. Accessories of close contact such as blobs, prosthesis, digital or sexual tools, these enter the interstices of the skin and the social fabric toaugment capacities.

October 25
Neha Kudchadkar

Pinch your thumb and three fingers, tip, scroll, double tap, smart zoom in and out, rotate, swipe, open, drag, spread. Neha Kudchadkar’s multi-touch manual will effectively teach you how to develop new fingertip abilities and adopt gestures or communication skills tonavigate the haptic system of our black screened devices. How formed or deformed are the digits and palms of our hands? Can human beings adapt to being in touch without touching? Hand Job grasps the tactile-kinesthetic relationship between bodies and objects, technological devices, that populate our daily life and intimate spheres.

October 31
Tobias Preisig