« Vaste de mille-et-mille mailles »
Six artists (frontviews / Berlin) in residence at ODRADEK are collaborating with five artists from Brussels. Following their individual practice and shared online meetings they continue their exchange about drawing.
Their works will be shown in the exhibition “Vaste de mille-et-mille mailles“ starting on September 5th. Performances, video screenings and talks will take place during the exhibition.
This project is process-orientated and will be documented on an ongoing basis. A second exhibition will take place at frontviews in Berlin in 2025.
info: https://www.frontviews.de
‘Vaste de mille et mille mailles’
At the initiative of Katja Pudor for the Berlin collective Frontviews and Kiran Katara for ODRADEK, an intense collaborative project has come into being.
Starting with Katja Pudor’s residency in the summer of 2023, we agreed to set up a process for exchanging the different artistic practices of 6 artists from the Frontviews collective with 5 artists represented by ODRADEK. So it was that in February 2024 the Brussels nucleus made up of Kiran Katara, Natalia Blanch, Atinka Di Muro, Ulla hase and Philip Wittmann took part in the first exchanges in Berlin with Frontviews represented by Katja Pudor, Alice Dittmar, Timo Herbst , Ulrike Mohr, Oliver Thie and Nicole Wendel.
Since then, once a month, the artists have drawn together for over an hour via online sessions. The idea, with a view to a joint exhibition in Brussels and then Berlin, is to develop a process of intercultural exchange around the practice of line art as a universal means of communication.
In mid-August this summer, the Berlin artists embarked on a two-week residency to collaborate on a joint project and mount the ‘Vaste de mille et mille mailles’ exhibition at ODRADEK XL from 6 September to 5 October 2024. Taken from Else Lasker-Schüler’s German poem ‘Un vieux tapis-Tibet’ (An Old Tibetan Carpet), for our artists, an assemblage of meshes refers to their desire to interweave the different paths of their designs. The choice of the weaving process for the September exhibition, which will be followed by the one in Berlin in January 2025, reflects the desire for encounters.
This project of collective practice of the art of the line is based on the development of the elementary structure of the encounter. Through drawing, the eleven artists find a common ground that makes them favorable to a sensitive, non-verbal confrontation, the aim of which is to be able to express themselves in the most direct, affective and authentic way possible. This means that for them, giving themselves over to each other in the expression of signs, gestures and rhythms traced with various materials creates an aesthetic or alchemical atmosphere devoid of any competition or commercial value.
We believe that these exchanges around drawing are essential to enable the public to share in this need for sensitive encounters in which the artist reveals herself in all generosity.
For the opening, Katja Pudor and Nicole Wendel are organising a performance around four tables, in the spirit of assembling and combining common features.
