ME, INC.

Juliette Bonneviot, Chloé Delarue, Aude Pariset, Helga Wretman

curated by Sabine Rusterholz Petko

Opening Friday, April 15, 2016, 6-8 pm
Performance by Helga Wretman „Anti Depressive Massage for Artists“ during the opening

Exhibition April 16 to May 21, 2016

Self-representation is a matter-of-fact aspect and creative obligation of life today. Images of optimization and efficiency, youth and freshness are ubiquitous, both online and offline. Eventually we embody it ourselves, commenting on it, or without any critical distance. Four young international and Swiss artists demonstrate how this game pulsates between naturalness and artificiality, but also appropriation and refusal—between the massage table and operation table, euphoria and depression, always close to hyperventilating and losing consciousness. The works are images of a society on overdrive, confronted with the contradictions of capitalism and hyper-digitization, an obsession with health but also with the ever-pressing issue of the environment. The artists Juliette Bonneviot, Chloé Delarue, Aude Pariset, and Helga Wretman—all digital natives—deal with concepts of contemporary physicality, interweaving the slogans and images of advertising and leisure time communication, ecology, and medicine. In so doing, the bright and dark sides of our mechanisms of efficiency and self- optimization are exposed, confronting the viewer with both seemingly limitless progress as well as the potential collapse.

Juliette Bonneviot (b. 1983, Paris, lives in Berlin) investigates with a series of monochrome paintings entitled Xenoestrogens (2015) the connection between ecology, body, and gender. She makes colors for her paintings out of the chemical ingredients of many versatile materials used today including silicones, plastic softeners, pesticides, shampoo and soaps, food dyes, oils and paints, PET, food cans, the contraceptive pill, as well as linen fabrics, plants and metals, all of which contain synthetic or natural hormones. These endocrine disruptors interfere with human and animal hormones and affect not only human and animal behavior, but also the natural cycles of nature. Bonneviot has conducted multifaceted experiments with materials, colors, and the appropriate combinations of surfaces, binders, and image support materials. She created the color red, for instance, from a combination of silicon rubber, copper, cadmium pigments from outdoor paints, and E127, a food color, and applied it to an image support made out of PVC. The artist mixed not only industrial but also natural substances on the canvas, thereby dissolving the borders between them. Even the body, represented as Pet Woman (2015), for instance, is subjected to transformations between nature and increasing artificiality. Bonneviot’s artistic practice is tied to the trend of the Post-Internet generation of the past several years, those artists born in the 1980s who create their subject matter and methods out of a digitally networked everyday experience, but which are manifest very concretely in materiality and whose interests are strongly linked to the natural sciences.

Chloé Delarue (b. 1986, lives in Geneva) also focuses on the cycles between the organic and inorganic in her works. For about a year she has been following the ongoing cycle TAFAA (Towards A Fully Automated appearance), in which she has developed a vocabulary of forms and materials required for the formation of a long-lasting ecosystem. Various materials and motifs such as disassembled, recycled LED-monitors, plants, latex, silicone, glass, mirrors, and monochromatic yellow sodium vapor light, which is often used for lighting public spaces at night or for cultivating plants indoors, form installative quasi-organisms. The energy cycles—indicated both by electrical circuits and acupuncture meridians, and at times by other (bodily) fluids integrated into the work, make clear that these are simulated body machines. An integrated video depicting a night time outing past the forbidding facades of large international corporations in Silicon Valley, the gated communities of the research elites and financial corporations, recalls the darkly apocalyptic atmosphere of Blade Runner. Here, Los Angeles in 2019 appears as a garbage-ridden, urban behemoth populated by multicultural, paranoid inhabitants and controlled by advertising and an authoritarian power structure: the Tyrell Corporation, which manufactures androids with artificial intelligence for populating an alternative planet. In her analogy, however, the artist doesn’t focus exclusively on the dystopian aspect, but also develops the materials and designs as an experimental game with contemporary ideologies and ideas about the present and future, progress, and decay.

Aude Pariset (b. 1983 Versailles, lives in Berlin) works with numerous digital-era image-reproduction methods in her works. For this, she adapts motifs primarily from consumer advertising such as cosmetics, technology, or fashion and their mechanisms of seduction. She collages these into her own compositions, marked by the rapid availability and equally rapid disintegration of images in online culture. In Bright Day Steering (2014) she prints windsurf sails with fragmented images from the realm of pharmaceutical companies. In this way, the artist interweaves images of corporate design and sport, subtly addressing how our daily life is shaped by the relevant aesthetics of youthfulness, health, perfection, and optimization, as well as individuality and freedom. Processes of disintegration repeatedly play an important role in Pariset’s artistic practice. Working together with Juliette Bonneviot, a larger work series entitled Last Spring / Summer was created. Here, image fragments from cosmetics advertising, and drawings applied on top of these, were exposed to a process of disintegration inside water tanks. Pariset and Bonneviot thus create their own unique aesthetic of dissolution and fleetingness.

Helga Wretman (b. 1985 Stockholm, lives in Berlin) is known for her Fitness for Artist Interviews produced by Arte Creative. Wretman is an artist, fitness freak, and stuntwoman all-in-one. She jumps into action as a personal trainer for fellow artists, who she asks questions of concerning their artistic practice during a workout personally tailored to their artistic work. For the opening of the exhibition she presents a new performance developed specially for the exhibition. With a touch of irony, she massages and interviews artists from the exhibition on a massage table. In a tongue-in-cheek approach, the bodies and minds of the artists are brought back into alignment, and, in meditative relaxation, creative energy flows freely. The conversations are recorded and visitors are then invited to lie down on the massage table and watch the interviews on a monitor through the face hole in the table.

Text Sabine Rusterholz Petko (Translation Eric Smith)