Installation

2024

Psychic Topographies
Laura Gozlan, Hadrien Jacquelet, Alix Marie, Philipp Timischl
Curated by Andrew Hodgson & Sini Rinne-Kanto
31.05 – 23.06/2024
Profil Galerie
11 rue des Arquebusiers 75003 Paris

Unwavering in their vision, though originally designed to be exhibited in Kunsthalle Bielefeld, upon finding that this city and this Kunsthalle do not exist, curators Andrew Hodgson & Sini Rinne-Kanto now install the group show ‘Psychic Topographies’ unchanged; in the Kunsthalle of this Le Marais apartment. Artists Laura Gozlan, Hadrien Jacquelet, Alix Marie, and Philipp Timischl are invited to engage their variegated artistic practices of, in turn; video, painting, sculpture, and mural, as a process of dredging obscure corners of the internal human self and bringing what they find there out into the light of day. With their works presented here, they look into the complex and shadowy features of interior human life, and map the difficult to approach forms they glimpse there on external space through the objects presented in this exhibition.

‘Psychic Topographies’ is the second product of Andrew Hodgson & Sini Rinne-Kanto’s curatorial collaboration. The first of which, in the guise of editors, was a book. They have therefore chosen to continue within the structures of that genre. As a part of that, a little like an autofiction novel, they write here in the third-person about themselves. On a more fundamental scale, the exhibition you have just entered, or perhaps just left, takes the form of a book overlaid across physical space. It follows from preface, to four distinct though interacting chapters, to some form of reconciliation or conclusion, at the end. As such, the works in the exhibition warp and glitch the domestic architecture of this T2 apartment, finding their place along the walls and ceiling, across the iron fireplace, and reposing over the windows and doorways, coming to an ending in the toilet. There, murmuring confessions can be heard echoing in the multiple voices of the show’s participants. This exhibition text, its opening letters and syllables at least, welcomes the visitor at the door. It is installed on the wall in a manner that reorients text as, rather than a basic tool for the communication of straitjacketed meaning, a visual two-dimensional sculpting of curves and shapes meaning nothing at all, or something else entirely. You the visitor assuredly find yourself craning and stretching your own body into distorted positions in any attempt to decipher the text as it there appears.

The exhibition’s queries are deeply rooted in 19th and 20th-century histories of scientific and medical attempts to decode artworks’ representative and communicative processes. These attempts have a tendency to re-emerge during moments of vast shift in the status quo of human being-in-the-world. From French psychiatric doctor Jean-Martin Charcot and sculptor Paul Richer in the late 19th-century and their comparative diagnoses of artworks at the advent of photography – among the wider experiential accelerations of technological modernity –, to efforts to analyse the artworks of patients at the Bedlam psychiatric hospital in London in the same era. And further still, in the post-Second World War, post-atomic bomb era, with Jean Dubuffet’s collections of art brut and écrits bruts, as well as Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing’s experimentations with narrative forms and definitional parallels in psychological processes, as well as his exhibitions of patient art alongside grand works of pre-war Surrealism. The theme of art-medical interpretations of artistic objects have repeatedly resurfaced at moments when society has undergone fundamental epistemic ruptures from the reality norms that preceded them. ‘Psychic Topographies’ seeks to provide a re-reading of these reflections in introducing these themes to the 21st-century contemporary art context. The show asks questions around forms of self-making and exterior materialisations of our inner projections, here at the beginning of a new millennium. An era where we find ourselves confronted with the impending moment of technological singularity, with new forms of human and mechanical being emerging, and, in tandem, new and vast global socio-political upheavals alongside the early signs of climatic dissolution of the world as humans have known it.

Through the sculptural practice of Alix Marie presenting prosthesis-like limbs and Philipp Timischl’s work with exaggerated and invasive bodily formations, a series of different perspectives on interpretative presentations of the bodily human as a conduit for experiential questions are presented. The figurative painting of Hadrien Jacquelet presents portraits of the inner self as if trapped within cramped cells they struggle to claw their way out of. In the work of Laura Gozlan, the questions of splitting internal selves and multiple flows of consciousness are explored through the praxis of moving images. Through these varied artistic practices, a bridge is formed from the differing ways these artistic voices find exterior expression and become here in this apartment intertwined with daily human living. Though each artist was invited here independently to engage these themes, it is perhaps a telling tendency in the works presented, that the forms they have each chosen to map this theme across is a warping, distended re-representation of the human body itself. Together, they look to spur a questioning exploration of the vastness of internal and external unknowability, that can read from the mythic to the minutiae. Concluding the presentation, in the toilet, a looped recording details the inner lives of the authors of the exhibition as confessed to the curators, Andrew Hodgson & Sini Rinne-Kanto, through the medium of a faux-psychoanalytical tarot reading. The collective audio piece functions as a sort of operating table of psychism, providing a symbolic reading of the participants that further obscures the deliverance of the inner selves with arduous pasts and unknown futures, detailing memories, desires and repressions. Together, the installation of ‘Psychic Topographies’ prompts you the viewer, the curators so assume, to consider the role of the rational and the irrational, and the interaction of these two human drives in the plotting of human inner projections across fleeting time, and in diminishing space.
Andrew Hodgson & Sini Rinne-Kanto

‘Psychic Topographies’ documentation on Contemporary Art Library.

2023

A Story in Three Acts by Andrew Hodgson 23H03, 29/03/2023, at Le Grand Show, Glassbox, Paris, May 2023

‘On the Visual Poetics of Kinetic Prosody: Stasis and Motion in the Narrative Walls of Philipp Timischl,’ in Philipp Timischl’s yes i’m an academic, how could you tell?, January 2023

2021

Managing Editor for art catalogue with Sini Rinne-Kanto: A I S T I T – coming to our senses, Finnish Cultural Institutes in France, Benelux, UK, Germany, and Finland, for Helsinki Festival, 2021

This Voice

Audio-visual work for Humber Mouth – Hull Literature Festival

2020

PRAXIS at Haus Wien, Vienna

PRAXIS, 2020.
Wallpaper and recording.
Andrew Hodgson with Derek Beaulieu, Guy Bennett, Kimberly Campanello, Spencer Campbell, Shane Jesse Christmass, Chris Clarke, Emily Critchley, James Goodwin, Bhanu Kapil, Jake Kennedy, Robert Kiely, Kevin McPherson Eckhoff, Sawako Nakayasu, Vanessa Onwuemezi, Outranspo, Imogen Reid, Shola von Reynolds, Rosie Šnajdr, Isabel Waidner, Joanna Walsh and Eley Williams

The installation PRAXIS is an aesthetic development of a book project entitled Experimental Praxis that will be published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe in 2021. The book includes work by 22 international contributors, ranging from text art and concrete poetry, to spatial poetry and experimental prose. PRAXIS interrogates the ways in which an audience engages with the illusory realities of language, and how that is guided by textual, and physical, movement. It centers abstractions, or minimalizations of coherent narrative structure. It works to deconstruct the book object, and reformulate its contents into new interactions with the curated space of language art. Made up of walls and sound, the engagements with narrative, language and story are joined by the audience by chance and circumstance. They enter and leave the room at whatever point within the room’s narrative arcs that they might, they approach the text on the walls in whichever ordering is dictated by their movement around the room, and the placement of text. In doing so the curated group work of the book object becomes a series of recalibrated interactions, that resists the linear impulse driven by bound paper. The audience interaction with language is transposed from the isolated internal readerly voice, to bodily movement, the aural, and group dynamic. Consisting of printed paper on walls, and a looped recording, PRAXIS explodes the book object, and reconstitutes writerly and readerly poetics as a series of physicalized engagements.

Confinement. in 3:AM Magazine
Video work in collaboration with Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz

Still Life at A Table for 50, GaleriePCP, Paris (France)

Directed by: Philipp Timischl, Gina Folly

Written by: Adam Cruces & Louisa Gagliardi, Agathe Zaerpour, Ali Hasanzadeh, Amalie Eybie Brandt, Anna Solal, Andrew Hodgson, Anina Troesch,Anna-Sophie Berger, Benjamin Hirte, Cecilia Bengolea, Clement Delpine, Daphne Ahlers, Edin Zenun, Edouard Montassut, Elodie Cazes,Emanuel Layr, Emilie Pitoiset, Evelyn Plaschg, Florian Pfaffenberger, Gina Folly, Gregory Sugnaux, Guiles Jacot, Guillaume Denervaud, Hannah Weinberger,Henning Strassburger, Ida Thorrud, Ivan Perard, Jon Rafman, Judith Kakon, Julian Göthe,Julie Boukobza, Kevin Blinderman – masternantes, Laurence Sturla,Lilli Thieben,Ludovica Parenti, Mads Westrup, Malak Varichon El Zanaty, Marielle Chabal, Marina Faust, Marina Sula, Martyn Reynolds, Maude Rose Reynolds, Matthew Billings, Mathias Renner, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Mona Varichon, Nicolas Nahab, Nhu Duong & Octave Peraultt, One Star Press, Patricio Lima, Patrick Julien, Peter Cybulski, Philipp Timischl, PierreAlexandre Mateos & Charles Teyssou, Rasmus Myrup, Ruiz Stephinson, Goswell Road, Signe Rose, Solomon Rose Reynolds, Thomas Jeppe, Tobias Kaspar, Tobias Spichtig, Victor Lizana, Will Benedict.

2017

Cabinet d’Amateur at Kingston Art Group Gallery, Kingston-upon-Hull (UK)

Kingston Art Group is pleased to present Cabinet d’Amateur, a solo exhibition by Andrew Robert Hodgson for the KAG Hoc space on Humber Street, Hull.

The phrase ‘cabinet d’amateur’, in French, is archaic. It refers to a collector; a ‘lover of objects’ from the 18th century, pre-public galleries (Hull’s older schools, assumedly, still own these; Hull’s museums developed from these). A curiosity cabinet; a room lined from floor to ceiling with paintings and objects collected. When read as if in English, it evokes not a ‘lover’ of something, but something illegitimate, out of place, ‘amateur’. It is a duality from which this installation draws meaning. It is a collection of authentic works, forgeries and copies collected by varied means. These objects were gifted by the widows of long dead Parisian surrealists, with their fading memories of provenance; collected from the greyer side of Ebay, and dollar bins. Akin the cabinet d’amateur of the Georges Perec novel of the same name it is a fictive construct, or is it?

For this exhibition Hodgson opens a space to explore the interactions of viewer, object and context within the gallery environment. In doing so, he problematises the relation of truth to the empirical. The installation raises questions regarding the relation of artistic expression > object aesthetic > viewer reception. No distinction is made between that which is ‘authentic’, and that which is ‘forged’. In this space, these labels are difficult to clearly ascribe; ‘authenticity’ becomes an open value. As such, this installation explores the power in the interrelation of object and text; context. Each object is accompanied by its descriptive card mimetic of the owner guiding their guests vocally through the cabinet. Just as the owner would point out pieces around the room and describe them by a varied scale of context (supposed creation context, apparent historical context, context of appropriation, context of the fallible human (lies and memory)). Thus, the objects’ facticity becomes reliant on layers of re-presentation. At what layer of presentation does the context itself perhaps overpower the object, or fall apart in anecdote? Raised is a crisis of authenticity of both object, and context, both of which must be considered, accepted or rejected. Indeed, in the cabinet d’amateur, what here is ‘real’, and what is ‘false’? Does the aesthetic communication, or artistic meaning of the object emanate from the object itself, its narration, or the room? And where within this ambiguity does the viewer reside? Where in the interaction of viewer with object and narrative does this ‘authenticity’ become? Upon entering the cabinet, these are questions the viewer is confronted with and perhaps overwhelmed by.

2015

A Visitor in the Night at 9800 S. Sepulveda, Los Angeles (US)

October 29 – November 15, 2015 

9800 transforms the entirety of the vacant, historically emblematic 9800 S. Sepulveda building into a generative space of multiple exhibitions and events, all of which take the particular location as their orienting force, their impetus. The show, massive in scale, is neither a biennial, symposium nor performance space, but somewhere in between, perhaps more in the realm of the experimental, temperamental, fleeting, emerging.

PLAYTIME

Curated by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou (4th Floor)

Reading the building as a playful labyrinth, Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou asked each of their invited artists to create an invention, game, experiment, instruction, or non-classified activity invoking the mental labyrinths meticulously built by writers such as Raymond Roussel, Georges Perec or Jorge Luis Borges and by Jacques Tati in his 1967 film, Playtime.

Artists: Anna-Sophie Berger, Body by Body, Francisco Cordero, Oceguera Adam Cruces, Kate Durbin, Oscar Enberg, Olivia Erlanger, Cédric Fargues, Louisa Gagliard, Andrew Robert Hodgson, item idem, Nik Jaffe & Luke Frith,-powell, Mattew Linde, Sam Lipp, Tobias Madison, Emanuele Marcucci, Luis Miguel Bendana, Joseph Mosconi, Mohamed Namou, Christian Odlham, Sarah Ortmeyer, Lydia Ourahmane, Emilie Pitoiset, Puppies Puppies, Phillip Reitsam, Martin Reynolds, Halvor Ronning, Fabio Santacroce, Anna Solal, Jasper Spicero, Sstmrt, Philipp Timischl & Min Yoon Sinae, Yoo Seyoung Yoon