New Viewings #25

Curated by Octavio Zaya

INTERIORS. An Intimate Immensity

Isolation, loneliness, and depression are constantly fed by the insecurities and uncertainties that are not products of our imagination and fantasies but of the realities of our lockdown and confinement. We have never yearned for the touch of others, their embraces, their kisses, more than in these days. And those oppositions between “the private space and the public space, between the family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work”* have been eroded or blurred, and they seem to have lost their old sacred clarity… to become desolated scenes of nightmares, intimate immensities, solitude and alienation…

Under the cataclysms of our current conditions worldwide, there remains a connection between the individual psyche and memory, but also between the newly discovered personal space and the reality of the city and the world. Bachelard is still relevant for a reflexion on the imaginary of interiority and interior space. These days, the house is the center of our universe and the scenario of our imagination. The objects of our daily routines and delights find their way into social and political dimensions. Our memories are confounded with the realities of an unexpected world of systemic hate and violence. Each one of its rooms irradiates what we are, what we have been. And little domestic things, forgotten colors and smells, transport us to that immensity of the intimacy that we have lost. We try to give cohesion to such immensity, perhaps to formulate a theorem. In the long tunnel of our imagination, we are always trying to make sure that we are not banished from the realm of possibility. O.Z

María Magdalena Campos-Pons

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, *1959 in Matanzas, Cuba,
lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee

Interiors are small notations on the events of the path month.

I juxtapose moments of contemplation of the space within the house with a layer of outside information upon the secrecy of the intimacy of home. Where the disturbances of the daily news brake any sense of harmony, quietness or predictability, the conformity of the arrangements of flowers is assaulted by the awakening of a staggering pain.

Interiority of the mind, of the body, of the house.

No place to hide.

Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #25
Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #25
Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #25
New Viewings \ New Viewings #25

Fernando Bryce

Fernando Bryce, *1965 in Lima, Peru,
lives and works in Berlin and New York

The triptych „Friend Appollinaire“ is made up of drawings based formally on the „Calligrams, Poems of Peace and War“ by Guillaume Apollinaire. Protected by the evocation of the epic figure of the modernist poet and his use of the old form of the calligram, phrases taken from my work notebooks, personal notes and occurrences of the moment are introduced. A resource of modest fantasy and expectant groping, on the threshold of our 20s.

The triptych „Antifa“ consists of three different logos of the contemporary antifascist movement but which originally go back to the historical antifascist movement of the 30s in its communist, socialist / social democratic and anarchist versions. What in recent decades has been a radical activism, in a certain way detached from the institutional left, today takes on a particular urgency and relevance in the face of the reactionary and far-right onslaught throughout the world.

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Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #25
New Viewings \ New Viewings #25

Claudia Padrón

“Before and After Everything Series”

There are things that seem to have never changed their essence, even though we can perceived physical mutations forced by time. Isolation prompted me to apprehend moments of my life, my environment and my city, that I never saw while I lived in them. I never conceived of granting them their space within my memory and their necessary visual narrative. Before and after everything represents what I now conceive as sacred; the corners, the ephemeral silhouettes, the domestic traditions, the rituals, the silences and their compasses, the storehouse of memories…

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Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #25
Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #25
Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #25
Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #25
New Viewings \ New Viewings #25

Marlena Kudlicka

Marlena Kudlicka, *1973 in Tomaszów Lubelski, Poland,
lives and works in Berlin

Interiors of Gentleness

In the project Interiors of Gentleness works are based on subtle interplay of counterpoints and arguments, and when combined, they recall the vocabulary of gentleness. The inner interior is created by these works and their titles which „adjunct“ to each other.

Gentleness who becomes support.

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Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #25
Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #25
Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #25
Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #25

Dagoberto Rodríguez

Dagoberto Rodríguez, *1969 in Havanna, Cuba,
lives and works in Madrid

Excerpt by Jérôme Sans
“In the heart of the corridor, we are between two indistinct spaces, as in transit, with no possibility to escape. While they may seem unlimited, these tunnels still hold us prisoners.

Are those tunnels embodying the prison of our knowledge or of our certitudes? They have a false horizon. Wandering towards the light at the end of the tunnel as in Plato’s cave, we do not know if we will come across the exit or if it is only the light towards the next corridor that guides us. It appears that those tunnels generate feelings of claustrophobia, stagnation, uncertainty and perhaps also frustration. They represent the emblem of the contemporary world where all our dogmas have been overthrown and where we do not know where we are going.“

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