KW

Ruins of Rooms looks at the notion of portraiture through the lens of Jimmy DeSana (b. 1949, d. 1990, US) and Paul P. (b. 1977, CA). With their works set in a range of different interiors, the artists are brought into dialogue for the first time.

Jimmy DeSana was a photographer whose portfolio spans works from the late 1960s until 1990 when he died of an AIDS-related illness. Growing up queer in postwar suburban Atlanta informed his early black-and-white series 101 Nudes (1972/1991), for which he arranged his and his friends’ naked bodies in middle-class domestic environments. Moving to New York in 1973, he distributed his work through local mail art networks and became a frequent contributor to General Idea’s File magazine. A fixture in New York’s punk and no-wave scene and queer fetish subculture in the late 1970s and early 1980s, DeSana was known for taking portraits among the city’s avant-garde. He returned to staging nude models in mundane settings for his colorfully lit Suburban series (1979-85), continuing his explorations of consumerism and S-M aesthetics. Contracting HIV in the mid 1980s led to changes in his body that shifted his artistry towards more abstract and experimental imagery, often capturing everyday objects, as seen in Grill (1987) and Chair (1988).

Paul P. has been known for his melancholy drawings and paintings since the early 2000s. His mostly untitled portraits of young men are inspired by photographs from gay erotic magazines found in the LGBTQ2+ archives in Toronto, specifically, those from the years between the onset of gay liberation in the late 1960s and the nascent AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. With an interest in the historical methodologies of representing homosexual desire, P. appropriates this explicit archival material, employing the coded visual language of late 19th-century painters. His fragile works remove his subjects from their original context and reimagine their faces to hold both the memory of ancient queer innuendo and the premonition of future tragedies. More recently, Paul P. began creating sculptures in the form of furniture. The delicate wooden folding screens, desks and stools move between the functional and the sculptural, inspired by Edward William Godwin, a Victorian design reformer, Eyre de Lanux, Art Deco designer-decorator, and artist Scott Burton who was contemporaneous with DeSana.

Ruins of Rooms functions like a matryoshka doll. It expands our understanding of portraiture through an overlapping conversation between artists of different generations and is dedicated to those lost. KW, in collaboration with John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (UK), presents the first solo exhibition of works by artist Pia Arke (b. 1958, GL – d. 2007, DK) to be shown outside of Kalaallit Nunaat, also known as Greenland, and the Nordic countries.

From the late 1980s until the beginning of the 2000s, Pia Arke mapped the intricate relations between time, memory, space, identity, and myth in pictures of and from Greenland. Born to a Greenlandic Inuk mother and a Danish father, she wove biographical components of her own complex history into her work. Rendered in Arke’s own words, her images are about the silence that envelopes the ties between Greenland and Denmark, and how she herself was born into that silence. Arke consciously slips between the roles of artist, ethnographer, and explorer, while drawing on different historical, vernacular and archival sources. She is considered a pioneering voice in the decolonial discourses in the Nordic and Arctic regions and continues to influence them today.

Arctic Hysteria takes its title from an influential work series by Pia Arke and brings together her photographic, sculptural, performative and written work, as well as her work on paper. It aims to shed light on the narratives enclosing the colonial relations between Greenland and Denmark, as seen through Arke’s works, and to open it up to a discussion of continuing colonial structures at large. While Arke’s practice is born from the bind between the two countries, it unfolds as a struc-tural feminist critique. Arctic Hysteria revolves around her methods as projected through the body, in particular Arke’s use of performative strategies—montage, staging, re-enactment—with which she attempted to create a sense of belonging and critical self-reflection.

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive publication with newly commissioned texts by contemporary feminist scholars, to discuss different aspects of Arke’s practice within an international discourse, with an emphasis on voices of contemporary feminist researchers. Estufa is the first mid-career survey of the artist Luiz Roque (b. 1979, BR). Roque’s practice inhabits a space between expanded cinema, visual art, and critical theory. His artistic methodology fuses an interest in the legacies of modernism, pop culture, queer (bio-)politics, and science fiction. This anachronistic approach culminates in timeless montages and environments while often disclosing the urgency of pressing socio-political issues of specific communities and subcultures. His open-ended, short videos are speculative, leaving the viewer wondering about the array of possibilities within alternative realities. The past, present, and future coalesce in each video, resulting in captivating trans-temporal amalgams.

Roque’s sculptural video installations explore a fine line between form, color, and content, with filming techniques and methods of screening and presentation reinforcing the subject matter. This expanded methodology towards the medium of video seamlessly extends to the architectural spaces in which his work is presented. Roque pushes for a thoughtful exchange between architecture and artwork, and, yet, they remain singular, their respective boundaries never dissolving entirely.

Estufa is Portuguese for greenhouse. The exhibition takes its title from an eponymous artwork that Roque created with the artist Letícia Ramos in 2004. A large greenhouse filled with tropical plants and flowers is both the subject and setting of the video. This is the earliest work featured in the show, framing an exhibition that looks back on exactly 20 years of Roque’s artistic experimentation, production, development, growth, and (con-)fused temporalities. The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s first monograph.