Cell Project Space

When a page freezes on the syncopated browser of a web user, there is a moment of change in the landscape marked as a reduced distinction of it’s natural other, when it has been manipulated by technology. With a desktop tidy approach to the outdoors the exhibition reflects the increasingly conflated physical spaces of retail, business, and leisure. Often based on the criteria that these forms are highly evolved from nature through corporate and commercial branding, this streamlining allows for more efficient circulation.

Curator Milika Muritu

Santiago Taccetti’s interest in high performance and compact portability introduces human modes of behavior making reference to the temporal characteristics of the natural environment and its potential risks. Set against digitally born raw fragments of mountain terrain Taccetti’s informational compression of geological form serves up a franchise of the earth’s hostile topography and the great outdoors. Eastern philosophy merges with digital flatness in the clean ergonomic hi-tec constructs of Alice Khalilova. Her use of amorphous form and streamline technology both imitate nature and celebrate the technology mediating it, creating a synthesised infiltration of the physical world and the virtual other. Khalilova highlights the potential for the computer to replace the objectified symbols, which we may rely on for comfort or well-being. Typical of Marte Eknæs’ strategy, is to choose fragments of product design and architecture that carry specific meaning particularly in controlled public space, where leisure and health have become the new re-territorialized domain for corporate profit and potential exploitation. Eknæs repurposes its function– she takes apart, combines and returns objects to what was almost there.

Included in the exhibition and central to the poster image is a supersized version of an orthopedic neck rest by Eknæs, a dumb body-tec punctuation of today’s mobilization of the body where the horizon changes as technology competes with the natural order of things. The rebooted horizon is the global traveller’s view conjuring up the exhibition’s intentions to make sense of the impact of speed, fossil fuel burning and deforestation and its uncomfortable physical implications and our complicit relationship with it.

With kind support from Office for Contemporary Art Norway   

Norwegian artist Marte Eknæs has been living and working in Berlin since 2011. Selected solo presentations include: ‘Escalate’, at Between Bridges, London in 2011, ‘Arranged for Effect’, Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Trondheim, Norway, 2013, ’Scrapscape, Exilo’ (with Nicolau Vergueiro), Los Angeles, USA, 2013, ’Deflecto, Kunstnerforbundet’, Oslo, Norway, 2013, ‘Insert’, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany, 2010. Selected group exhibitions include:’Dlectricity’ - exhibition of light and art, Detroit, USA, 2012, ‘Used Photocopier’, Hotel Gallery, London, UK, 2012, ’Nordic section’, The Horizon Behind Us’, Kaleidoscope project space, Milan, Italy, 2011, ‘Favoured Nations’, Momentum –, 5th Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moss, Norway, 2010.

Recently graduated from Chelsea College Of Art, Anglo-Russian artist Alice Khalilova lives and works in London.  her work was recently been included in ‘The Limited Collection’, Arcadia Missa and La Scatola Gallery //Online, 2014, ‘$_Bash’, Eade Road, London, UK, 2014, ‘Translations. Cook House, London, UK 2014,  ’Stone House’, Haringey Arts Walk, London, UK, 2013, ’Fabric[ate]’, and  Acava Show Room,  London, UK, 2013, and ’SELFiNDULGENT666’, Online. Khalilova is shortlisted for MFI Flat Time House award, 2014

Born in Argentina, Santiago Taccetti lives and works in Berlin. His solo exhibitions include: ‘Bear Tries To Beat Heat’, Club Midnight Gallery, Berlin, Germany, 2013,’Favela Minimalism’, Sculpture Fields OMI, Ghent, New York, USA, 2012, Fractal Philosophy (and the small matter of learning how to listen)’, TWAIN, Sant Andreu Contemporarni, Barcelona, Spain, 2010. Selected group exhibitions include: ‘Sunbathers 2’, 1857 Oslo, Norway, 2014, ’Fight’, Julliette Bonneviot and Santiago Taccetti, Center Gallery, Berlin, Germany, 2014, D, Berlin, Germany, 2013, ‘Mutant Porcelain’, SWS, New York, USA, 2013, ’Berlin Art Prize’, Berlin, Germany, 2013.