Futile Formality
23-25 June, 2023 at Officina Neukölln, Berlin
— part of 48 Stunden Neukölln 2023
Isabella Chydenius, Martyna Lebryk, Andrea Mikyska, Billie Posters, and Maja Lindberg Schwaner
Melding mutations and playful portrayals — ‘Futile Formality’ manipulates form to mess with perception. Finding freedom in disembodying people, places, and things; exhibited artists in ‘Futile Formality’ highlight the absurdities of common comprehension. United by their fluid approaches to form, Isabella Chydenius, Martyna Lebryk, Andrea Mikyska, Billie Posters, and Maja Lindberg Schwaner present curious versions of commonplace realities.
Dropping the viewer into the dystopian setting of a “crypto amusement park”, Maja Lindberg Schwaner’s triptych Right behind you mutates concurrent digital realms to question the cost of a universe that relies on the marketability of the self. Captured from the artist’s animated mini-series in progress, ‘NFTasia’, the work illuminates the crossover between NTFs, cryptocurrencies, and influencer culture. Right behind you stages a behind-the-scenes film set, within which familiar crypto and social media paraphernalia are mutated and personified: a camera and stage lights balance on long spider-like legs, a shiny and physicalized NFT store sells “Exclusive Art”, the pictured character fixates on their reflection in a warped mirror. Right behind you constructs an otherworldly version of a familiar (albeit frightening) reality to parody these online worlds, interrogating the risk to personal privacy when positioning the self as the product.
Isabella Chydenius’ Infinite rollercoaster nods to the cognitive calisthenics of jolting between ups and downs, challenges and triumphs, risks and opportunities. Composed of two elements, coloured light and sculptural shapes made of bent iron and ripped second-hand clothes, the installation curls around and hinges off its surroundings — emerging through concrete like persistent weeds. This meadow of sturdy yet softened roller coaster bends exemplifies the artists’ mental pendulum swinging between the desire to create something meaningful and the urge to give up and find liberation in making something humorous. Sitting somewhere between the two, Infinite rollercoaster depicts the ever-developing amusement park we frequent in our minds — and in doing so, rejects any commitment to a final form or conclusion.
Mutating flora and fauna, Andrea Mikyska’s Ceremonies, Godlessmilieu, depicts earthly organisms in an entanglement of mythical, digital, and man-made worlds. The exhibited prints on acrylic form part of an ongoing series of botanical portraits, each created through a personalised process of 'reverse archaeology' — involving the digital manipulation of natural materials captured by 3D scanning. Through this practice, Mikyska preserves traces of our natural environment within these otherworldly landscapes. Ceremonies, Godlessmilieu constructs a collision of the organic and inorganic, living and inanimate, familiar and the unknown — blending binaries to create a kinship of opposites and an optimistic outlook on the future of the Anthropocene.
To produce untitled (Tiles), Billie Posters employs the once popular ceramic practice of ‘agate ware’, historically used for the mass production of middle-class ceramics. The popularity of this industry was ultimately trumped by the emergence of plastics and metal, thus positioning ‘agate ware’ ceramics as high art through their contemporaneous disuse. Posters’ employs this now rarified process to point to the evolving value of the handmade — the title itself likening the works to the classification of archaeological objects in a museum context. These tiles are inlaid with contemporary imagery that more closely resemble pictograms, messing further with this collision of former and emerging practices. Posters’ untitled (Tiles) reject consistency, manipulate form, and embrace complication to evade definition.
Martyna Lebryk’s depiction of the human body in her work embraces formlessness through a humorous lens. Spanning drawing, painting, and sculpture Lebryk’s works portray legs and other body parts as dismembered characters inhabiting the world of their own volition. Using vibrant colours and inviting imagery, Lebryk’s works present disconcerting displays through a cheerful lens. This oscillation between gore and delight flirts with the absurdity of the human body itself.
- Written by Nicole Beck
