Catalogue Open Studios // March 2021

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ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE PROGRAM

JANUARY - MARCH 2021

GlogauAIR


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INDEX

Chema Alvargonzalez

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GlogauAIR

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Open Studios

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Resident Artists

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Adi Oz-Ari

18

Julia Hannafin

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Lucas Ngo

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Yves Hänggi

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Berlin Guest Resident

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Mariona Berenguer

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Catalogue's Cover

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Chema Alvargonzalez Chema Alvargonzalez (Jerez de la Frontera, 1960 - Berlin, 2009) founded GlogauAIR in 2006. After studying Fine Arts at Escola Massana (Barcelona), he continued his studies at the HdK (Berlin) under the direction of Rebecca Horn obtaining a Master of Fine Arts and Multimedia. From that point on he worked and lived between Barcelona and Berlin. Alvargonzalez experienced the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the exciting period which followed. He became part of the Künstlerinitiative Tacheles where he introduced and welcomed incoming artists to Berlin and its new, flourishing art scene. His experiences over these years alongside his passion for collaboration and building artist networks led him to eventually found GlogauAIR. In 2006 Alvargonzalez starts the project of GlogauAIR in the same building that still hosts the residency today. GlogauAIR was created as a meeting point between artists from all disciplines where they could collaborate and expand their practice, explore and interact with the city of Berlin. Alvargonzalez is a representative of the generation of artists whose artistic work was highly influenced by globalisation and technology. As a consequence, Chema’s pieces, as well as GlogauAIR, were set as a breakthrough beyond geographical boundaries. After Alvargonzalez’s early death, his siblings Pablo and Columna took over Chema’s heritage, founding La Memoria Artistica Chema Alvargonzalez in order to preserve his artwork, also taking over the direction of GlogauAIR. Today GlogauAIR continues Chema’s mission to host and create with international artists from all disciplines. Memoria Artística Chema Alvargonzalez Copyright © All rights reserved Light Messages (2008) Es Baluard. Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma Palma de Mallorca (Spain)

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GlogauAIR GlogauAIR is nowadays a non-profit art space and residency, located in an historic building in Kreuzberg. Founded in 2006 by the Spanish artist Chema Alvargonzalez, it is supported by the foundation La Memoria Artística Chema Alvargonzalez. The word GlogauAIR comes from the phonetic combination of Glogauer Straße, the name of the street where it is located, and its purpose: an Artist in Residence program where artists can develop their own journey in the city of Berlin, which is a pioneering metropolis for contemporary global culture. The Residency Program offers 13 studios to international artists from all artistic fields. During their stay, they receive curatorial and technical support, as well as the possibility to take part in diverse activities such as workshops, exchanges and talks that aim to help them in their professional careers. Each artist develops an artistic work in one of the GlogauAIR studios in Berlin, which will then be showcased in our Open Studios event at the end of their stay. This past year GlogauAIR has faced many challenges, most of them originating from artists not being able to join the Residency due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Far from allowing this to stop us, we have developed our On-line Residency Program which is now available for artists who cannot join us physically in Berlin. This program includes most elements of the On-site Residency Program, including our personal monitoring, activities and final Open Studios exhibition. GlogauAIR aims to continue the project originally created by Chema Alvargonzalez: an openness and receptivity to new ideas and the support of local and international contemporary art practices.

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Open Studios Every three months, at the end of the Residency Program, GlogauAIR opens its door to the public with the events of the Open Studios exhibition. Visitors are invited to approach the final pieces that the artists have been working on. With that purpose, the On-site resident artists in Berlin transform their studios into an exhibition space. In addition, the works of the On-line resident artists come together in the physical exhibition, with their pieces spread throughout different parts of the building. Furthermore, since we established our on-line Residency Program, the Open Studios exhibition has also been expanded to a virtual edition, which is hosted on our website. These two complementary Open Studios allow our on-line and on-site artists to exhibit together the result of the work carried out in artistic dialogue during the quarter. Sharing the Open Studios event, the Project Space hosts an exhibition from an invited artist from Berlin - Berlin Guest Resident - or from collaboration with Institutions - which can curate either a collective or an individual exhibition- or Curators, adding value to GlogauAIR’s project by providing exchange and dialogue.

Architectural Details of GlogauAIR's Stairway

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Resident Artists GlogauAIR seemed quiet during these first months of 2021. If one paid close attention however, a rumor could be heard through the walls: the resident artists who kept on creating despite these odd winter times. Lockdown and current adversities have led all of us to develop and embrace new methodologies. In relation to art, some people have been able to acquire more detailed, profound and deep investigations in materials, texts and techniques. Others have experienced a multiplication of references, their nodes and points of interest have grown and are now connecting dots in order to create unique compositions. Most of us could not carry out our hopes and plans for these last months; pieces and projects had to be changed and we had to find new ways to create. A common ground in these strange experiences has been the change of rhythm and the resignification of spaces. The reclusion has become a frame in time to integrate the process of creation in a more intimate and individualized way. During this term, these changes have been specially present at GlogauAIR, and every day we looked for new ways to stay connected, to keep on creating and to share the gap in space and time that is GlogauAIR. In a context where everything seems to be either black or white, the team and artists have been working on finding the grey areas in between. Adi Oz-Ari played and experimented with a range of new mediums: working with printing, collage and superposition of image techniques, both analogue and digitally. Using color to work around the concept of pain and illness she has been able to develop a body of work on two dimensions full of material and deepness. The unique combination of colours and textures results in a perfect match for screen-tired eyes. 14 12


Yves Hänggi, the author of this catalogue cover, has brought the streets of the Berlin we all knew inside GlogauAIR’s walls. He combines colours, materials and inspirations which he gathers from the city and then transforms into striking illustrations. His works show maze forms, humanly figures and bizarre scenarios full of layers of meaning. The abstraction ambiguity and undefinition of the ink works by Lucas Ngo can also be seen in his pencil drawings that represent the body and human forms. He uses both techniques to come up with fluid images that represent his imagination. We will have the pleasure to have Ngo continue his residency program and research process in GlogauAIR during the next residency term. The recent incorporation of our on-line residency program has allowed us to reach artists who could not join us in Berlin. We had the pleasure of having Julia Hannafin, a writer based in Los Angeles, as this term’s online resident. During this time she has been able to connect with Berlin and the onsite residents through a creative writing process in which their words have travelled to Hannafin’s interpretation. The result is a compelling of pseudo-fiction imaginaries that allow her to feel closer to the shared experience that is an artist residency. At the same time, she has continued to work on her “Novella in progress”. Mariona Berenguer, the Berlin Guest Resident, is a multidisciplinary artist with a wide body of work that connects with emotions, perceptions and thoughts of the contemporary world experience. From an individual and intimate perspective, she presents at GlogauAIR's Project Space a three-part show that travels from light to darkness. Her installations, videos and paintings get deeper in the relationship between the human and the animal, the culture and the biology: our need for light, soil and fresh air just like the animals we are.


The projects we had the pleasure to discover, follow and curate during these last three months are individual paths of creation that have been materialized in many different formats and ways of expression: from sculpture installations to illustration and collage our resident artists found a way to express themselves and keep on researching and developing their projects. In an effort to support our resident artists, GlogauAIR gave all it has to facilitate different platforms in which those projects could be shown. Our already established Virtual Open Studios welcomes people from around the world to get in contact with the resident artist and their work. The physical installations in the artist studios we have been offering since the beginning of the residency and the Showcase that passers-by have been enjoying weekly, are some of the resources GlogauAIR had the satisfaction to share with the artists who were part of the program this term. In these physical and cyber-spaces what was created in the intimacy of a studio gets revealed and opened up to the world to be discovered, enjoyed and questioned.

Curatorial Team Laura Olea López, Maria G. Latorre, Ana Ferrand

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Resident Artists

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Adi Oz-Ari

p. 18

Israel Julia Hannafin

p. 20

United States

Lucas Ngo

p. 22

France

Yves Hänggi Switzerland

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Adi Oz-Ari Israel https://www.adiozari.com/

Adi Oz-Ari (1968) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tel Aviv. Oz-Ari engages with manipulated photography, photographic installations, and the impact of transitions through various media on the image. She holds an MFA, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem (2015); BFA, Hamidrasha (2012); BDes (2001); and BPT, Tel Aviv University (1993). Illness and pain are the raw materials of her personal alchemy. Oz-Ari had a previous professional background dealing with body and chronic pain and now she includes these topics into her artistic research. She works with inert and organic materials originating in her own and foreign bodies. During her residency at GlogauAIR the city of Berlin went into lockdown. This led her to compose a new archive of dictionary images, mostly from newspaper, books and medical publications she found on the streets. The studio became a laboratory in which she converted images into abstractions. From collage to experimental printing techniques the material lost its original function as it was used to create a singular, unique, poetic new world. Her piece “Look at me, I am sick of it” it’s a reflection of this. Oz-Ari's residency at GlogauAIR provided her with the opportunity to deep into a more flexible thinking, generating new ways of working she will continue to develop in the future. Next June, Oz-Ari will take part in a group exhibition at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien.

Look at me, I'm sick of it (2021) Photograph and scanning 42x60 cm

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Julia Hannafin United States https://www.juliahannafin.com/

Julia Hannafin is a writer from a family of women in Berkeley, California. She received her BA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in 2015. Since graduating, she has worked in the film industry in Los Angeles. Hannafin’s first novel, ‘Rosie’, follows a teenage girl in a two-mom family. She attempts to stop time within her home, but accelerate it with her friends. The sensual world does not stop for Rosie as one of her moms dies; it warps. Hannafin’s next novel explores an obsessive relationship between a curious young woman, a shark researcher, and the remote landscape that surrounds them. Inspired by Georges Perec’s studies of spaces, Hannafin created a questionnaire that asked her other residents and GlogauAIR’s curators to describe their sensory experience of their studios and living spaces. She wanted to know what their lives were like, and as an online resident, could not do that well from Los Angeles. This process draws from the research Hannafin does for the worlds of her novels, but uses subjective description as its source material instead of scientific fact. With each response, she had an image where before she could only see bits and pieces. How much of that constructed image is theirs and how much is Hannafin’s? How much, in either, is true? In fictionalizing versions of the artists' spaces without ever having visited herself, Hannafin hopes to create something both surreal and mundane, that tells the truth while it lies. Mariona's view (2021) Pen, sharpie and colored pencil

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Lucas Ngo France https://lucas-ngo.format.com/

Lucas Ngo is a French artist who lives between Berlin and Paris. Working from a documentary base made in photographic and video formats, he extrapolates from this base to trigger his imagination, creating a “flash” in his mind, a spontaneous lexicon of imagery. Obsession is very present in his work, his tendency is to work on a certain subject until the point of exhaustion. His visual vocabulary frequently combines elements of transparency, mist and blur as tools of expression. He discovered this vocabulary through oil painting, a media which in his hands was used similar to ink, emphasizing its native transparency. Based on this observation, he began to include ink in his process and experiment with different types of ink. Ink is now the basis for most of his experimentation. He had no access to ink for a period of time during lockdown, but he didn’t want to stop his research so he produced with the only tool he had: graphite pencils. It has been an opportunity for him to reintroduce the sketchbook into his practice, a more intimate mode of expression, something he had previously abandoned. His current obsession is focussed on the notion of a “chrysalis”, a theme he is developing at GlogauAIR. The chrysalis represents what is perceptible, yet unsure, through a veil. This is the intermediary between visible and invisible, the inside and the outside. The body turns into landscape, a hybrid form that hesitates between figuration and abstraction. In progress (2021) Ink on paper 25x37 cm

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Yves Hä Hä nggi Switzerland www.yveshanggi.ch

Yves Hänggi is a Swiss painter and illustrator. His artistic universe is nourished by contemporary drawing, independent comics, free figuration and Pop Art, influences he mixes through various formats, materials and techniques. His work has been exhibited in Switzerland, France, Belgium, USA and Madagascar and published by several Swiss and French publishers. His publications are available in Berlin at Motto Bookstore and Staalplaat. Yves Hänggi likes to surprise by mixing styles and references to create an offbeat and teeming universe, playing with the notions of accumulation, multiplication and overlapping. The urban environment, the crowds and the agitation of the city are his main sources of inspiration. This urban iconography influences his imagination, which through his personal artistic expression he reinvents into a singular language. In Berlin, Yves Hänggi was interested in the atmospheres of the different districts of the city he walked, looking for visual elements that his drawings could integrate. He recovered old ripped posters, bits of text and magazines he incorporated into a new series of illustrations, mixing collage, ink and painting. Parallel to the GlogauAIR Open Studios, he is exhibiting at Staalplaat gallery in Berlin from March 11th to April 10th. After obtaining a scholarship, he will reside from July to December 2021 at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. He is also preparing a new publication for Le Dernier Cri editions in Marseille. Hurrah for the green, yellow and red (2021) Acrylic, ink and collage on old poster recovered from the street 70x50 cm

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Berlin Guest Resident

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Mariona Berenguer Spain

p. 28


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Mariona Berenguer Spain https://www.instagram.com/mariona.anoiram/

Mariona Berenger is a multidisciplinary Spanish artist based in Berlin. Coming from a sculpture background, she mainly works with objects and installations that may incorporate a number of diverse elements: sound, light, image, movement... Berenguer’s artistic practice takes the notion of conflict as a starting point, she traces metaphors that originate in emotion and within the human condition. This line of thinking explores the inherent contradictions of the primordial states of transition such as desire, loss, love, life or death. The exhibition presented at GlogauAIR, “The empty nest” is part of an ongoing research around the subject of desire. Taking into account a diversity of perspectives -from the deeply personal or psychological to the dynamics of the physical world-, the presence of both natural and technological elements act as a conductive thread throughout the exhibition. The representation of animals or plants is presented as a symbolic resource to address the most basic needs: emotions and instincts in its most essential state, with no other pretension other than survival. Technology, on the other hand, appears as a substitute tool that forces processes, creates rhythms and palliates impossibility. With those elements Berenguer proposes an intimate reflection on life in the city, strategies for solitude and an inherent melancholy connected to lack of light.

The empty nest (2021) video-installation 6’,33''


Catalogue's Cover Every three months GlogauAIR releases a new catalogue collecting the work and projects by the artists in residence. The catalogue in your hands not only showcases this term’s projects but becomes an archive of the collaborations and experiences of welcoming artists from around the world to connect and experiment. Our first catalogue edition was released in 2006, and we have made a lot of changes since then. Starting with this edition, we are giving our resident artists the opportunity to design the cover of the catalogue. Making this publication a canvas in which our artists in residence can intervene results in a more personal object to each residency term. Participating in the cover of the catalogue also allows the artists to create out of their comfort zone, translating their work into a different medium and collaborating with graphic disciplines. The GlogauAIR team could not be prouder of the result. After receiving various proposals from the artists in residency, a jury formed by every team member at GlogauAIR selected “Raw Material” by Yves Hänggi. Hänggi’s universe reflected in his work is nourished by contemporary drawing, independent comics, free figuration and Pop Art, influences he mixes through various formats, materials and techniques. For this particular piece he incorporates old ripped posters, bits of text and magazines he finds whilst wandering the streets of Berlin. By intervening these fragments with ink and illustration he creates links with our city’s context and art scene. Berlin can be found in “Raw Material”. The harsh colours and the anonymous body painted on an old poster are a reminder of the always-changing visual landscape of Berlin: its graffiti and murals that add continuously to the scenery of the city where GlogauAIR has been 32 30


living, developing and welcoming artists for fifteen years. The figure in the piece emerges from the background, but never truly separates from it. Like Berlin, it is made of its architecture but also of its people. The masked figure brings to mind the current situation of the city, present but obscured, living but suppressed - ready to jump back into action as soon as it is allowed. GlogauAIR’s team


Memoria Artística Chema Alvargonzalez Founders Honorary President Studio Assistant

Columna Alvargonzález Ramos Pablo Alvargonzález Ramos Mª Pilar Ramos Angueira Mariona Benaiges Pecanins

+34 (93) 415 12 93 C/Martínez de la Rosa, 48 Bajos Barcelona 08012, Spain www.chemaalvargonzalez.com

GlogauAIR gGmbH Founders

Program Coordinator Program Coordinator Assistant Program Curator Curator Assistant Communication, Graphic Design & Media Technical Support Internship Program

Chema Alvargonzalez Pablo Alvargonzález Ramos Columna Alvargonzález Mariona Benaiges Pecanins

Laura Olea Maria G. Latorre Beatrice Lezzi

Sergei Kurek Ana Ferrand Hanna Bargheer Hang Nguyen

+ 49 (0) 30 61 222 75 Glogauer Str. 16 10999 Berlin, Germany www.glogauair.net

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