Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Nils Alix-Tabeling at the Dortmunder Kunstverein in Germany in 2023, titled But who is Ulrike Mandrake ? This support follows a series of artist encounters organised for the Kunstverein’s director Rebekka Seubert, through Trampoline’s professional invitation programme in 2020-22.

 

In his multimedia performances and installations Nils Alix-Tabeling (*1991 in Paris) moves on the threshold between fiction and reality. His works quote from science fiction, fashion, historical objects and furniture, shamanism and drag – critically reflecting the history of institutional violence against female and queer bodies.

But who is Ulrike Mandrake ? reconsiders the legacy of 1970s terrorism. The title evokes the name of a fictional character and suggests a semantic connection between the journalist and RAF terrorist Ulrike Meinhof (1934-1976) and the poisonous medicinal and ritual plant mandrake, which visually resembles human figures. It also refers to the human longing to penetrate to a supposed root of evil through scientific understanding. With an extensive new group of works as well as a performance, the artist navigates between the times, worlds, ambivalences and wounds that this topic opens up.

 

Nils Alix-Tabeling studied fine arts at the Academy La Cambre, Brussels and at the Royal College of Art, London. His works have been shown internationally, including at Palazzo Bollani, Venice (2022), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019) and Kunstraum, London (2019). The Kunstverein presents his first institutional exhibition in Germany.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Tarik Kiswanson at Museo Tamayo in Mexico in 2023, titled Nido. This support follows a series of artist encounters organised for the Museo Tamayo’s director Magalí Arriola, through Trampoline’s professional invitation programme in 2021-22.

 

The work of Tarik Kiswanson (Halmstad, Sweden, 1986) explores moments and spaces of transition that often become milestones in human lives : the passage from childhood to adolescence, the displacement from one context to another, the fluctuation of territories and geopolitical borders, as well as transformative phenomena such as nomadism, diaspora and migration.

 

A child of emigrants from Palestine, the Paris-based artist addresses concepts such as otherness, transparency and opacity, drawing from Édouard Glissant’s postcolonial writings and his poetics of miscegenation. Like the silhouettes of children in his drawings that seem to fumble for the edges of the spaces that contain them, Kiswanson’s work emerges from one place to another, in an attempt to expand the uncertain boundaries between identity and difference.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Atiéna R. Kilfa, The Unhomely, at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin in 2022 following the visit to France of its curator Anna Gritz, through Trampoline’s professional invitation program in 2021. The exhibition is co-produced in partnership with Camden Art Centre in London, where an iteration of the exhibition will be staged from 27 January to 26 March 2023.

 

The exhibition The Unhomely at KW Institute for Contemporary Art marks the first institutional solo presentation by Atiéna R. Kilfa (b.1990, FR). Kilfa uses photography, sculpture, video, and installations to explore how personal and cultural memories tend to conflict and overlap. Her most recent work draws on her interest in the composition of models, dioramas, still lives, and tableaux vivants, which she sees as sites loaded with inherited narratives and social codes, opening them up for collective review.

 

The Unhomely stages a new video work alongside architectural fragments, transactional sound, and miniature sculpture, probing the memory of “home” as an impossible “virtual” architecture. Amidst an all-consuming installation that plays with scale and proportion, the eponymous video work, presented on an architectural stage, places the viewer behind the camera. The narrative of the video unfolds inside a staircase that is perceived as a Huis Clos, a never-ending loop, in which the viewer encounters “architectural ghosts”. These ghosts deviate from the stand-in human silhouettes that oftentimes populate contemporary architectural models, providing us with a sense of depth and scale. The figures in The Unhomely thus become actors themselves, pointing towards the daily lives of their imagined inhabitants, whether real or fictional, and uniting the past and the present.

 

Two further elements of the installation implicate the presence of the viewer in the production of the work. A scaled miniature of the film’s staircase represents an impossible replica, leaving the viewer with a confusing desire to compare their own position to that in the film and the model. A quotation from both the film and the model, the architectural stage used by Kilfa functions as a Foley instrument that reacts and reverberates to the movement of the audience, adding a sonic and spatial dimension to the experience of the work. Traditionally, Foley is a postproduction technique used to enhance the audio quality in moving images by overlaying synchronized studio recordings of everyday sounds. In Kilfa’s work, however, it serves to further heighten the viewer’s sense of complicity in the production of the work.

Originally planned for 2021 and postponed due to the pandemic, the 16th edition of the Biennale de Lyon titled manifesto of fragility opened after two and a half years of extensive research and preparation with 40 diverse institutional partners in Lyon and abroad.

 

The exhibition curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, Directors of the Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery for contemporary Art in Berlin, presented the exhibitions at 12 venues in Lyon, including several of the city’s museums, as well as abandoned sites such as the former Fagor Factory of 29.000 sqm, and the building of the former Guimet Museum, opening again to the public after 15 years. In total, 87 contemporary artists of over 36 nationalities were invited to participate in this edition, including 26 % who live in France.

 

Trampoline participated in discussions with curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath during their research and contributed to this significant project on an exceptional basis in order to support artists of the French art scene, particularly the works presented by four artists :

 

Mali Arun • Sarah del Pino • Léo Fourdrinier • Sara Sadik

Trampoline is pleased to support the participation of artist Anna Solal in the group exhibition Wet Resistance held in 2022 at the Dortmunder Kunstverein in Germany. This support follows the encounters organised for the Kunstverein’s director Rebekka Seubert, through Trampoline’s professional invitation program in 2020.

 

The exhibition Wet Resistance begins its narration with a dystopia : in a dried-out world dominated by moisture-repelling technology and artificial intelligence, wet resistance emerges in defence of natural, humid, human qualities, and celebrates moisture as exchange, humour and life. A large-scale installation of tiles and metal plants by José Montealegre becomes a landscape in which the works of eight international artists are embedded. Wet Resistance contrasts the wet, mossy, growing, overgrown and irrational with the dry, clean, rational, technical and broken. The human body, with its high water content, is conceived as an organism entangled with the world in which it lives and which it constantly co-creates.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Eva Barto, Sharp Smile, at MACRO in 2022 following the visit to France of its director Luca Lo Pinto, through Trampoline’s professional invitation program in 2018.

 

Sharp Smile is an exhibition project conceived for MACRO by artist Eva Barto (1987) to unfold with and in contrast to its counterpart in Paris, the show Weak Tongue at Le Plateau – Frac île-de-France. Both exhibitions, which take place one after the other, continue and expand Barto’s research into the relationships that govern the codes of property and production, and in particular into the legal and economic infrastructures that regulate liaisons of philanthropy and patronage in the contemporary artworld.

The artist Bady Dalloul participates in the group exhibition The Equality of Possibility, held at the Kunstverein Bielefeld in 2021, following the artist meetings organised for its director, Nadine Droste, as part of the professional invitation programs of Trampoline.

 

The group exhibition The Equality of Possibility, featuring the work of Bady Dalloul, Flint Jamison, Lia Perjovschi, Lorenza Longhi, Ramaya Tegegne, and Rindon Johnson, frames questions of political equality in terms of aesthetic thought. It takes equality not to be a given, but rather a preconditioning act, one which does not refer to individual capacities, whether natural or socially or culturally acquired. Going back to the early Kunstvereine (art associations) of the nineteenth century, we find that they too followed the ideal of making art public and thus accessible to everyone. In the present day, questioning our own structures of representation – and the associated conditions of accessibility – remains a highly relevant task.

 

The exhibition is based on a number of questions, which we cordially invite you to reflect on with us. How can we conceive of different forms of equality from the perspective of art ? In what ways can we critically question the prevailing mechanisms of the art field ? What does this specifically mean for artistic production in today’s circumstances ? What role do spectators have in all of this ? The Equality of Possibility features an extensive program of accompanying events, including artists’ talks, lectures, and workshops held in cooperation with Bielefeld University and the Bethel Theater Workshop. We also offer inclusive tours particularly aimed at people with visual impairments.

Trampoline is pleased to support the participation of artist Anita Molinero in the group exhibition Nimmersatt ? Imagining Society without Growth held in three institutions of Münster – Kunsthalle Münster, LWL Museum für Kunst und Kultur and Westfälischer Kunstverein. This support follows the visit to France of the Kunstverein’s director Kristina Scepanski, through Trampoline’s professional invitation program earlier that year.

 

Human activity has a decisive influence on the environment. The economically privileged global North is largely of the opinion that there is no other option than that of growth. Yet growth is finite, processes have got out of balance, are developed on the basis of social inequality and the exploitation of nature/the environment. This makes it imperative for us diverge from existing paths, to deliberately abandon customary maxims regarded as self-evident, and to engage in a discussion about the dogma of more and more, further and further. Wealth and the constant growth of capital alone cannot deliver on the promise of happiness. What is necessary is to reconsider what has been valid to date and to act in a spirit of community. What can take the place of the economic and social models that have prevailed to date ? How can renunciation become a matter of future-oriented routine ? What regional and global measures can provide a new resource and climate-friendly definition of consumption, and what new ideas in the sense of creative resourcefulness can be introduced into society ? Can we imagine new objectives concerning to communal life, can we change our habits and act individually and jointly ? The group exhibition “Nimmersatt ? Imagining Society without Growth” takes as its point of departure the current state of our environment and the prevailing social conditions. In the face of mutually determining events and developments, such as social inequality, climate changes, illness, war, flight and xenophobia, the exhibition uses the widespread lack of orientation and helplessness so as to highlight and explore by artistic means concrete visions and also utopias of a society beyond growth maxims.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Mohamed Bourouissa, “HARa ! ! ! ! !!hAaaRAAAAA ! ! ! !!hHAaA ! ! !” at Goldsmiths CCA in 2021 following the visit to France of its director Sarah McCrory, through Trampoline’s professional invitation program in 2018.

 

Artist Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978, Blida, Algeria) is known for confronting complex socio-economic issues and for seeking out tensions between different social contexts. In-depth research, including long periods of engagement with specific locales and groups, inform works that question collective histories, uses of public space, and representational identities. This solo survey show features new and existing works by Bourouissa across photography, sound, installation and moving image made since 2003, in what will be his first solo show with a UK public institution.

 

His celebrated work Horse Day (2014-15) is included in the exhibition, and saw the artist live for eight months among a low-income community in North Philadelphia to create an event and film with the horse riders of its urban stables – making, as he terms it, a contemporary American cowboy movie. The charged legacies of colonialism, and contemporary realities of racial and socioeconomic inequality, are present throughout Bourouissa’s work ; including the recent Brutal Family Roots (2020), which fuses hip-hop with installation to track patterns of exchange between Britain, Australia, France and Algeria, through the spread of the Acacia tree species.

 

Throughout his work, Bourouissa builds poetics by examining contemporary society ; often documenting disenfranchised groups and individuals who have been “left behind at the crossroads of integration and exclusion”, but who use the tools at their disposal to navigate their situation. For example, a new work HARA ! ! ! ! !!hAAARAAAAA ! ! ! !!hHARAAA ! ! ! (2020) abstracts the invented word ‘hara’ used by young lookouts to alert drug dealers of approaching police in Marseilles. The distorted word becomes a sound installation in the vein of concrete poetry.

 

The presentation of Bourouissa’s work in the context of the gallery brings into relief different circulations of images and their economies. These circuits, their violence and corruptibility, are exploited and disrupted in works such as ALL IN (2012) and Shoplifters (2014). In these, as with all his works, Bourouissa moves between different modes of photographic and filmic techniques with irreverence and instinct. From grainy smartphone images in works like Temps Mort (2008-9) – in which the artist exchanged images, videos and messages with an incarcerated friend – to street photography in Nous Sommes Halles (2003-5), and canonical art historical framings of Parisian street life via Delacroix in the series Périphéries (2006-8) ; each mode and medium is exploited for its ability to conceptually articulate incisive statements on contemporary image culture and a racialised social fabric of inequality.

 

BIOGRAPHY

Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978, Blida, Algeria) currently lives and works in Paris, France. He has exhibited at institutions and biennials including : Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, FR ; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR ; Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, US ; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NE ; basis, Frankfurt, DE ; Le Bal, Paris, FR ; Haus der Kunst, Munich, DE ; FRAC Franche-Comté, Besançon, FR ; Sharjah, Havana, Lyon, Venice, Algiers, Liverpool and Berlin Biennales ; Milan Triennial, Milan, IT.

Trampoline is pleased to support the participation of artists Louidgi Beltrame (France) and Minia Biabiany (Guadeloupe) in the group exhibition A Natural History of Ruins taking place at Pivô, São Paulo in 2021.

 

A Natural History of Ruins is a group exhibition that explores different forms of resistance to the ways in which the hegemonic modern colonial imagery has captured our imagination. Drawing from diverse artistic practices, this exhibition seeks to offer opportunities to think about healing in what author Anna Tsing calls a “precarious survival”. It also attempts to address the implications of representation outside of language in order to explore other-than-human technologies and forms of intelligence.

 

• exhibition booklet

 

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Gaëlle Choisne, “Temple of Love – Agony” at Hamidrasha Gallery – Hayarkon 19, Tel Aviv.

 

Temple of Love – Agony is the new chapter in Gaëlle Choisne’s ongoing exploration of the concept of love. Following Roland Barthes’ book “A Lover’s Discourse : Fragments,” she focuses in the current exhibition on the idea of agony, on “the fear of a breakdown which has already been experienced,” to quote from Barthes. Choisne’s installation explores the idea of love as a social and political matter, an attitude and form of resistance and a catalyst for courage and transgression. Love in this ongoing project becomes a social and spiritual issue, a channeling source of profoundly political actions. Choisne created a space for dialogue and conversation that invites people to collaborate and take part in the exhibition.

 

The exhibition was created in collaboration with My Luvs : Roxanne Maillet, Marie-Carmel Brouard, Crystell Mess, Agnes Noel, Euvonie Reynald and Megg Rayara Gomes de Oliveira. Previous chapters took place at Bétonsalon in Paris, The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, and Zachęta Project Room in Warsaw.

 

The exhibition is supported by Trampoline Association and The French Institute in Tel Aviv.

Trampoline is pleased to announce its support to Mimosa Echard’s new project for the second Macfarlane Commissions at ACCA, Melbourne in 2020.

 

The Macfarlane Commissions is a biennial series of exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art featuring new commissions by emerging and mid-career Australian and international artists. The second iteration of this biennial series, Overlapping Magisteria, considers the role of biology, ecology, archaeology and site, as well as ideas of material transformation and alchemy, through artists who engage organic materials, laws of nature, deep time, ideas of growth and shapeshifting, as well as formlessness, entropy and abjection. It is intended that ACCA’s galleries will be transformed through intense sensory and material effect, with works encompassing living and artificial organisms and processes, and installations and assemblages of narrative and material significance.

Trampoline supported the participation of artists Pierre Joseph and Claude Closky in the group exhibition Time is Thirsty at Kunsthalle Wien.

 

Time Is Thirsty is a journey through time and space in the form of an exhibition : A complex ensemble of contemporary artworks and artefacts from the early 90s – more precisely from 1992, the founding year of the Kunsthalle Wien. The exhibition presents an immersive time-space in which the boundaries between the decades become unstable : Whether we are dealing with a relic from the 90s, a present-day phenomenon, what we encounter remains uncertain.

• exhibition booklet