• –1, plus One

    Tanja Widmann Johannes Porsch Produced by

    05.06.2025 — 10.08.2025
    Opening: Thursday 5th June, 6-9pm
    6th June 2025 - 10th August 2025
    12-6pm, Thursday - Sunday
     
    Cell Project Space presents -1, plus One, the first solo exhibition by artist Tanja Widmann in the United Kingdom. The exhibition is conceived as a site of negotiation - material, social, affective - where authorship is ‘beside itself’, as in the collaboration with Johannes Porsch | Produced by Johannes Porsch. Read together as Tanja Widmann Johannes Porsch Produced by -1, plus One, the title suggests a conceptual machine of addition and subtraction, of lack and desire, and of the conceptual structure producing subjects as much as subjects producing the structure.
     
    Tanja Widmann’s practice navigates the material constraints and social fictions that regulate contemporary life, tracing the symbolic and economic circuits through which value is produced and circulated. Scripts - readymade objects, images, texts - serve as source code: for reception, (re)production, and deviation. Working with the everyday tech of the home office, laptop, printer, cell phone, etc. – and materials from the hardware store, Widmann’s works function as coded feedback loops: degraded, recomposed. Drawing on the Pictures Generation and Charles Baudelaire, the cliché becomes preferred data. 
     
    Johannes Porsch develops displays that operate as performative sets – objects that articulate the conditions of their own visibility. In dialogue with post-minimal and post-conceptual strategies, they foreground use-value and destabilise autonomy by rendering its heteronomous supports. These structures sustain positions and enable relations, anticipating events while modulating presence. Abstraction does not generalise; it fractures reflexivity, revealing labour as both structural and obscured. What appears autonomous is revealed as contingent, on holding, showing, connecting. Status – objectal or relational – is the effect of ongoing negotiation.
     
    Curator Adomas Narkevičius

    Tanja Widmann lives and works in Vienna and Munich. Recent exhibitions: ‘Echo’s Hunger, Schiefe Zähne’, Berlin (2025); 15th Baltic Triennial: ‘Same Day’, CAC, Vilnius (2024); ‘dysfunctional malappropriation’, University Gallery of the Angewandte, Vienna (2024); ‘Lying Daughters. Produced by Johannes Porsch’, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna (2023); ‘Since 1884. Produced by Johannes Porsch’, New Toni, Berlin (2022); ‘Cybernetics of the Poor’, Kunsthalle Wien (2020), ‘V’, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna (2020). Her practice also takes shape in text, publication, workshop, and curatorial formats, often in dialogue with others. Exhibitions: ‘Industry / Against Nature’, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna (2022), and ‘Post-Apocalyptic Realism’, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2017). Publications: ‘Post-Apocalyptic Realism’ (Tonio Kröner, Laura Preston, Tanja Widmann, eds., Walther König, 2019); ‘Postapocalyptic Self-Reflection’ (Laura Preston, Tanja Widmann, eds., Westphalie Verlag, 2018); ‘To Make Oneself Similar in This Sense’ (artist’s book, Westphalie Verlag, 2012). A new artist’s book will be published by New Toni Press in summer 2025.
     
    Johannes Porsch lives and works in Vienna, selected exhibitions include: ‘Rehearsals of Metabolism’, Kunstverein Kevin Space Vienna (2025); ‘Peche Pop’, Museum of applied arts Vienna (2024); ‘Key Operators. Weaving and coding as languages of feminist historiography’, Kunstverein Munich (2024); ‘to care, to display, to support’, Universitätsgalerie der University of applied arts Vienna (2024); ‘currently not available’ ,Julius Koller Society, Bratislava (2019); ‘tropology’, Kunstraum Lakeside Klagenfurt (2018); ‘Tropology’, Tiroler Künstlerschaft Innsbruck (2017); ‘Julius Koller. One Man Anti Show’, mumok, Wien (2016); Kyiv Biennal (2015); ‘Unrest of Form. Imagining the Political Subject’, Secession Vienna, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2013); ‘Aa’, Salzburger Kunstverein (2012); ‘Counter-Production’, Generali Foundation Vienna (2012); ‘Moments. A History of Performance in 10 Acts’, ZKM (2012); ‘Troubling Research’, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2011). Johannes Porsch studied at the University of applied Arts Vienna and the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.
     
    For all press and access related inquiries, please contact Annabelle Mödlinger, annabelle[at]cellprojects[dot]org.
     
    With generous support from Phileas, The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art, and Cockayne Foundation