Underskog

When:
Friday Aug 30th 18:00-22:00- Vernissage and Scent Conversation
Saturday Aug 31th 12:00-15:00- Counter-Transcendental Grounding Ceremony

Where:
HER Studios Lankwitzer Str. 14, 12107 Berlin

Artists:
Marius Presterud, Chaveli Sifre

We cordially invite you to the two part exposition of Man Falls – Preparations for a Wake, occurring as part of Lose Ties’ event and publication series, as hosted by Exgirlfriend gallery. The exposition will occur over the course of two days. Friday August 30th will feature a vernissage and scent conversation and Saturday August 31st a group counter-transcendental grounding ceremony will be conducted.

There is a saying among beekeepers, Una apis, nulla apis, translated One bee, no bees. Man Falls – Preparations for a Wake is a mixed media installation and visceral happening that uses a story of geological movements to talk about dying worlds. Ecological collapse will influence different communities and individuals in different ways, surely, however the end of the livable Earth entails an inclusive end for and of all. A bee who believes itself to be a singular subject, is doomed to stop being (a honey bee)

The man in question is Mannen (transl.: the Man), a mountain in the municipality in Møre og Romsdal county, Norway. The mountain range has shown signs of collapse since 2009, and its rate of disintegration was measured to 80 cm a day in October, 2018. Underneath Mannen lies the European highway route E-136 and the small town of Rauma, which has been regularly evacuated over the years. Avalanches have also been frequently observed in a lower area of the mountain-range, named Lille-Mannen (transl.: the Little Man).

In a time and a city which invites fluid identity formation, the ‘man’ in Man Falls also refers to the fall of ‘men’ as the generalized subject—a looming figure that transforms everyone and everything into a backdrop—while parrying this with a sober reference to our common materiality in a time of climate crisis.

In a period of earthly degradation, holding a ritual observance for a falling mountain invites to sympoiesis, a becoming with immanent processes like erosion, corrosion, and decomposition.

Exhibition Elements:
Man Falls is a preparatory wake and exhibition, inspired by the emerging field of Queer Death Studies (QDS). It consists of several sculptural elements as well as two happenings.

Man on Stone (2019) is a video installation featuring a live-feed from Mannen, Rauma, Norway. Work Relief (2018) is a series of wax reliefs, previously showed at Norway’s 131th National Art Exhibition. In conjunction to these two visual elements, Presterud will produce a ‘grave-mead’ (No: ‘grav-mjød’) to be sold with Mead Openers (2019), a series of functional ceramic sculptures inspired by the top-bar beehive honeycomb.

Scent Conversation
For the opening reception, Chaveli Sifre will lead a talk on the destructive and assimilative aspects of smells and smell production, while actively distilling beeswax derived from Presterud’s wax reliefs – destroyed for the occasion.

Counter-Transcendental Grounding Ceremony
Mind–body therapies have been gaining ground in recent years, with a growing acknowledgment of the indivisibility our mental and physical well-being. At the same time, these practices show little or no criticality of the transcendental-humanistic model of subjecthood the therapies build on and recreate. On the last day of the exhibition, Presterud will lead a small group through a short grounding ceremony which includes beeswax-oil tasting.

Man Falls is produced with the support of the Norwegian Association for Arts & Crafts.

Artist Bios:
Marius Presterud (born 1980, Drammen) is a Norwegian artist and psychologist based in Oslo and Berlin. He works across a variety of media, including performance, poetry, sculpture, installations and ecoventions. He has toured Europe and been a featured poet at venues in Paris, Berlin and Istanbul, as well as performed in established galleries, such as Henie Onstad Art Center, Norway, and Hamburger Bahnhof, Germany. In 2018 he was a debutant at Norway’s 131. National Art Exhibition. With the practice Oslo Apiary & Aviary he inspects arts didactic and remedial potential, as well as a repository for non-commodifiable knowledge. Common themes throughout his work are a focus on selfhood, significant otherness and societal health.

Chaveli Sifre (1987) was born in Germany, to Puerto Rican parents. Sifre has participated in a variety of exhibitions including “Welt ohne Außen” in Gropius Bau “Perspektive Wechseln” in Hamburger Bahnhof and her recent solo show, “Personal Attention” at La Estacion Espacial in Puerto Rico. Her work is Informed by alternative forms of healing and inspired by belief systems while reimagining the exhibition arena as a space where contemporary subjects can regain access to sensorial, spiritual experiences. In its most revolutionary form, Sifre proposes the radical idea that artistic experiences and spaces may abolish religious ones. In Berlin Sifre co-founded Scent Club Berlin, a community of artists, designers, and scientists focusing on scent and olfaction as a medium.