present:
Knuckle
Ruairiadh O'Connell
Opening:
Saturday 21 May 2011, from 7 pm
In “Gate Control Theory of Pain Reduction” (1965), Melzack and Wall suggested that the experience of pain could be reduced by competing stimuli such as pressure or cold, as these stimuli travel along faster nervous system pathways than pain. In this way, massage therapy (MT), performed with sufficient pressure, would create a stimulus that interferes with the transmission of the pain stimuli to the brain, effectively “closing the gate” to the reception of pain before it can be processed.
Ruairiadh O’Connell applies this purported theory of MT to the psychological function of casino carpet design. Instrumental in keeping the gambler more awake, the aggressive nature of these carpet patterns are used as strategies to encourage more spending and to stimulate the desire to play further. With this in mind, KNUCKLE presents a series of wax paintings derived from casino carpet patterns, punctured by the artist’s hands via different MT techniques: rubbed, kneaded or tapped to positively encourage relaxation… a relief from an ache; an MC in a boxing match; a tool to heat up the audience.
For more information please contact:
info@markandkyoko.com
past shows:
Garbage World
Nicolas Ceccaldi & Morag Keil
Opening:
Saturday 17 April 2011, 6 - 11 pm
You have to pay for everything in this world. From death comes the poisoned adder and there nature overcomes a moral code and Satan projects, a wacky serum. He has no arms, no legs, no feet, no hands but he does have teeth, tongue and eyes. A provocation of 1 plus one and the blindness and incomprehension of the overpowering consequences. The profiteering of young lives and you must loose flesh, for this sum. It is that if you kill you will too be killed. For every up there is a down, for every two there is a fro, for every right there is a wrong and for every moral there is a song. Inhabiting some kind of on going contradiction, insides showing externally and feeding off the confusion created. To dodge the cars and break the line, to counter balance the code. You exist internally and on this lawn. Filmmaking is not a crime. Feed’er- trapped in here because its outsides are inside here. For every up there is a down, for every two there is a fro, for every right there is a wrong and for every moral there is a song. L.I.B.E.R.T.Y. Environment: the birds make it outside, the situation becomes a dream world, a disnature, eating too much urban space and falling ill and dying from it, and eating this for its own digestion. Offsite work is the inverses, cages the outside in an interior - confirms it, concludes it and then leaves it outside, yet inside - right next to it. The outside is brought inside. Humanity domesticates itself. Tanked up, its over, individualism, the free world, ashtray.= Aschenbecher.
Custom Interior
Timur Si-Qin
Opening:
Friday 25 May 2011
26 May - 9 April 2011
(by appointment)
Shanghai Gesture
Juliette Bonneviot
Opening:
Thursday 24 February 2011, 7-10 PM
25 February – 14 March 2011
(by appointment)
4 Films by Sophie Hamacher
16 January 2011, 8PM
Mark & Kyoko is proud to present a screening of four new and recent films by Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Sophie Hamacher.
Der Nebel (The Fog), 2009
11 minutes
In this intimate narrative, which takes as its premise the Little Ice Age at the end
of the 18th century, the film Der Nebel extends the genre of found-footage-film to
question its own clarity. Examining the act of seeing as an act of transmission, the
film merges footage from Youtube with an extended shot of a ferry ride through the
fog. The fog, a metaphor for capitalism, remains ultimately opaque, revolving around
obscure allusions to the world’s financial crash.
Good Things Happen to Machines
Maxwell Simmer & Martin Thacker
Opening:
Friday, 17 December 2010
18 December - 9 January 2011
(by appointment)
REGALOS ANCESTRALES
(Ancestral Gifts)
Sol Calero & Christopher Kline
Opening & Performance:
Sunday, 14 November 2010
15 November - 5 December 2010
(by appointment)
Meet at the Alexandrinenstr. Bridge at 5:45pm
Performance begins at 6:00pm (sharp)
http://solcalero.blogspot.com
http://www.christopher-kline.com
"colpoesne" BOOK LAUNCH
Sunday 5 September 2010
5:00 - 9:00pm
Photographs by Hanayo
Art Direction by Rupert Smyth
Coordination by Naoko Higashi
Published by Utrecht
New Book, Photo Installation, Green Tea & Songs by Dan Bodan
Google Search: Beards of Persian Kings
hosted by Mirak JamalOpening 25 July 2010 6-11:30 PM
26 July - 8 August 2010 by appointment
We herewith invite you to a presentation of new drawings by Mirak Jamal, set in the domestic dwellings of a Persian parlor. This barbershop-as-sitting room is furnished with the garnished eccentricities familiar to an Iranian house, where the collective social musings of forefathers are conversed upon textile rugs and absorbed between each sip of tea.
These tributes to ancestors are depicted as large-scale graphite renditions of kings of past, serving as iconic symbols of bearded styles from each period of great Iranian dynasties: from the imperial mustache of the Qajar age, and the triumphant beard of the Achaemenid empire, to a Fu-Manchu that recalls the Mongol invasions from the East. Collected from online image sources, the works hint to an unresolved Iranian history and the general perplexed state of human identity. A visual medley is displayed as a bygone heritage set against the backdrop of Photoshop aesthetics in the digital age.
Although connoting a familiar history, the cultural signifiers within this body of work highlight a dilemma of authenticity and appropriation. This hub of nostalgia from our host’s Iranian disposition serves as a place to ponder over that which makes our history your history, and our house your house.
FITNESS FOR ARTISTS
with Helga Wretman19 July 2010
PART 1: WARM-UP
The class begins with an organic warm-up of the joints, focusing on major muscle groups and activating the cardiac functions of the body.
PART 2: SPARRING & AEROBICS
Thereafter we will start with some fun sparring in couples and move on to a classic aerobic exercise, ending with an intensive Jump-style tutorial.
PART 3: MUSCLE TRAINING
We are now ready to move on to the muscle training portion of the lesson, beginning with a floor-work routine, some yoga, and classic body toning and strengthening exercises.
PART 4: STRETCHING
Next we will do a thorough stretching session, focusing on both small and large muscle groups.
PART 5: DANCE
To end the fitness class, we will learn a dance combination from a current piece choreographed by Helga.
ENTER GHOST
09 July 2010
Screening at 9 PM
To appear as a ghost is necessarily a reappearance. A ghost comes back to the world of the living for a second round - it leaves the party only to return because it has forgotten its keys. The Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is already dead before the play begins so it has never been to the party as far as the play is concerned and yet here it is, searching for keys between the couch cushions and convincing Prince Hamlet to avenge the King’s death.
The play begins as Bernardo takes over the night guard and is later joined by Marcellus. They have seen the apparition twice before and in anticipation of spotting it again, Marcellus invited the scholar Horatio along to confirm their sightings and speak to it. The complicating factor is that it has appeared already before its initial entrance onstage (i.e. before the play has begun), making its third appearance as if it is the first. The limbo state of the ghost’s existence is doubled by this slippage of time. It has appeared twice outside the time delineated by the play, in a time when there is no ghost, only an actor waiting offstage behind a curtain. So what kind of time could exist for a ghost that is waiting to appear?
Enter Ghost presents a rehearsal of Hamlet in which the actors seem incapable of progressing beyond the first scene. Bad acting, technical problems, and eventually mutiny are to blame. The Ghost must wait to appear, but when it finally does something predictably goes wrong and the scene must be done again. For now, for the Ghost, time is kept at bay only to cycle again and again.
"I read this in high school... and I'm reading it again. And I think I understand a lot of stuff." – The Ghost
THE SUBLETTERS
26 April - 17 May 2010
Preview Sunday 25 April 5 PM
Open Mondays 1-6 PM
Our anthropocentric, causal-linear view of reality suggests that we, as human actors, use our agency to manipulate objects to our will.
But what if objects have agency too? What if they are using us as means in their own agendas?
What if a piece of wood wanted to be cut into a table? What if a piece of wood wanted to be burned and have its ashes ground into pigment and binded with a medium to make black paint? What if that paint wanted to be brushed onto the table's top?
What if what we think of as painting is merely a portrait, of us, made by a canvas conspiring with some paint and some brushes? You get the idea...
Inspired by readings in object-oriented, pan-psychic and anti-correlationist philosophy, Matt Goerzen pursues these lines of thinking into realms of action... giving a table a medium (a thin layer of black paint) and an unwitting subject to record (a pair of Christmas holiday subletters).
What results is a table's abstract gestural rendition of a month of human movements, a book deciphering the table's (possible) intentions and a letter from the subletters ignoring, understandably, any perspective the table might have in the whole thing.
Duchamp said every person can be an artist.
Beuys, that every person is an artist.
But what if every thing is an artist, generally?
Does it ever get too ridiculous?
For more information please contact:
info@markandkyoko.com