II II // I

Nothings (and Somethings) by Christian Burnoski
1st-14th August, 2013

with opening performance To Be It by Andrea Jenni

with Martina Cesari & MariaGiulia Serontoni

A black bowler hat decorated with white buttons hiding a tennis ball... A white wall framed by two perpendicular paintings, mainly orange, except for a spot of white, where they meet the wall. Red stripes of the American flag in a round frame and some missing stars, like the title overtly states (Stripes without Stars, 2013). What you don't see and exactly what you see lie in front of your eyes... Playful and conceptual in the same time, Christian Burnoski's show in the attic of Hochstr. 45 involves seeing, imagining, making-believe, believing.

Tennis Ball Under Hat with White Buttons (2013) draws its inspiration from a scene in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966), in which the camera follows an imaginary tennis ball... The presence of the ball in Christian Burnoski's piece is a creation of both the artist's and the viewer's powers of imagination. Due to their round shape, the holes (like little nothings) in the canvases making up Vine St. (2012) dialogue with the buttons from the near-by magic hat. Playfulness is at the heart of this piece, too: the title refers to the artist's address as a child and the holes nostalgically encapsulate his “childhood phone number growing up” . 

 
Vine St. 2012
holes cut in canvases, acrylic

Some of the installations incorporate architectural elements of the exhibition space itself: White Wall between Two Paintings mentioned before and Echoes II, in which the window is being doubled by paralleled pieces of glass hanging on rope.

Echoes II, 2013
glass, rope, metal clasps, window

According to the artist's own confession, Between Two Infinite Voids (2013) encapsulates his view of life as a thin time span between two infinities (past and future), which makes it “the most existentialist piece in the exhibition”. When human life is a short, almost unsubstantial and invisible thing caught between before and after, the attempt to make it visible and to make it real resembles magic.

Andrea Jenni's performance TO BE IT brings different rhythms in the exhibition space. Alternating movement and stillness, dance and gesture, it echoes Burnoski's play with juxtapositions, repetitions, reflections. The opening of the performance installs a feeling of levitation and slowness. Hit against the wall, two black latex balloons return to the performers in a calm movement, almost floating. At the end of the performance they will become exhibited objects and keep still in a corner, between two wooden bearers (Inflatables in Space, 2013). 

Inflatables in Space, 2013
latex balloons

During the second part of the performance the two dancers, each of them in a different spot of the exhibition place, perform slow motion movements in connection with the black balloon. The last part involves dancing between Echoes I and Echoes II (2013). The dancers' movements are more rhythmical, they mirror and counterpoint each other, just like the neighbouring art pieces.

 

Christian Burnoski's exhibition and Andrea Jenni's accompanying performance engage in a dialogue with the space and with each other. Out of their collaboration the void and the Nothings became images of life and invitations to play. Something worth seeing and sharing...


Exhibition views and performance stills: ©Ioana Muntenescu
II II // I   Hochstraße 45, 13357 Berlin, www.hochstr45.com

Three Ideas in One

Review: Three Ideas in One
A SAVVY Contemporary Performance at AAA (Abteilung für Alles Andere) by Christian Burnoski (USA) and Andrea Jenni (CH)
Friday, 27 March 2012

The performance lasted about ten minutes. This text will take you less than five minutes to read. How long does it take to look at a painting? How long did it take Christain Burnoski and Andrea Jenni to look at a particular photograph by Ludwig Windstosser and get inspired by it?

It was dark when we entered the room and found our way to the improvised seats: e bench, some hard carton boxes, pillows lying on the floor. Then our eyes accommodated themselves to the environment. There was some dim light inside coming from a green-orange lamp on the stage, where one could also distinguish some blue paintings and two more lamps hanging low, close to the floor. And a woman's silhouette, back turned to the public, arranging her long hair.

Two more women appeared and went to the red wall, always with their back towards the viewer. When the music started they began to move and slowly approach the public without turning their face towards us. When it finally happened, we could see their colourful, glowing disco-pop make-up and their 80´s outfits. The music was also disco-like, the girls seemed to have a kind of a party.

The performance had a changing rhythm and also played with interruptions, moments when the music would stop and the girls would frieze in a certain pose, then repeat the same pose about three times in a row. Throughout the performance the girls´ movements varied from fluid, disco-like, to more linear, making me think of lines in an abstract painting. But I guess my association was triggered primarily not by their dancing, but by the blue painting on the right wall. By the overall setting of the room: a red wall, a blue canvas, an orange-green lamp. Just like in Windstosser´s image. One should not forget what one knew before attending the performance: namely that the piece is inspired by a photograph. This was the context set for our perception of the show, and the décor made you feel as if you were inside a painting. With moving figures, with music and energy filling the frame.

And this is where the performance reveals its challenge: in showing the interplay between stillness, characteristic to two-dimensional images such as paintings and photographs, and movement, between abstraction and dancing, between flatness and perspective. The artists' endeavour becomes one of translating a photograph (Windstosser's) into a performance.

Three Ideas in One can also be viewed as a variation on the theme of keeping still, with the three female dancers alternately embodying sitting, standing and lying down. Paradoxically, these forms of stillness prove to be necessary and inspiring phases in a complex process of transition and movement from numbness to dance, from passive to expressive. Another significant detail: when the piece started the performers had their backs turned to the audience; when they ended the show, they were standing, facing us. A decisive moment, when their gaze expanded the frames of the performance and the canvas-like stage opened up to the viewers...

Text and performance stills: Ioana Muntenescu


Three Ideas in One by Ioana Muntenescu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Germany License.