The Trapped Lullabies isbuilt from a letter addressed to the artist’s mother evoking a history repeating itself in the country but also the traces that it leaves today for each individual: fear of being locked up in a prison in Paris or in communal life in Berlin; the anguish of reliving police and domestic violence; guilt of being far away, of not being in the right place in a time of social crisis.; the need to give voice and presence to those who have been humiliated and destroyed on abandoned canvas or paper.

Majd Abdel Hamid’s exhibition seeks to construct a personal, intimate and collective memory of a particular day. 800 meters and a corridor projects different fictions to evoke this moment.

The first one is built from a postulate after the deadly explosion of August 4, 2020 in Beirut: If we add it all up, how long was the thread that was used to stitch people up? The exhibition unrolls the meters of thread needed for the artist and the population to stitch up, to repair bodies and minds, to regain sanity after the unthinkable. Whether it is the thread of Greek mythology, the Moirai weaving life, or surgical threads that heal wounds, the artist, in constant movement, confronts time in its duration, over hundreds of meters of stitching. Artistic categories no longer exist; only experimentation and transformation count.

Solo show
gb agency, Paris
Nov 27, 2021 – Jan 15, 2022

gb agency is thrilled to present Journey to Dystopia, Roman Ondak’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Works appear in the space as elements of a peculiar archeology. Objects of the everyday – typically coming from domestic settings close to the artist’s context – have been disjointed, turned inside out, upside down or irrevocably dismantled. Their insides appear now geometrically complex, almost cosmic, their initial functions as handrails or wardrobes barely recognisable in the resulting sculptures. The expedition proposed by the artist turns paradoxical as we explore the gallery space, as it seems to dwell more on a close observation of the present than in a reverie of the future, like encountering the debris of a time simultaneously distant but already obsolete.

As if referencing the Vermillion Sands of Ballardian literature, red dust covering the top of a plant pot evokes powerfully the image of a planet, more precisely, the surface of Mars, vivid in our imaginations through its multiple expressions in popular culture and a recent space race that seems oblivious to our most critical problems on the planet Earth. Throughout the exhibition, titles seem to act as code words, or perhaps, episodes: Message, Infinity, Life on Mars, Anarchy, Solar System, Dystopia. In the Message series, the words written in postcards from the past have been bluntly covered with black paint. While the specificity of their messages has been erased, the works are loaded with the history inherent in the paper and every single trace of humanity these objects hold.

Humanity is indeed the center of gravity of an exhibition that deceivingly looks at the most faraway through the most common and humble of objects, one that turns our eyes towards the universe in order to call our attention subtly, but powerfully, to humanity’s ongoing, and still unwritten journey.

gb agency is thrilled to present Wrong Time Paradigm, Ryan Gander’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring new works inspired by the artist’s reduced geographical mobility over the last year and anchored in his philosophical and semiotic explorations around time.

The titles of the presented works are revealing, illustrative both of Gander’s practice and our shared human experiences during recent months. For instance, in Fractured Natural Sign (Some stood silently mesmerised by the moon, while others were incensed to make signs), 2021 we can imagine the moment when, after contemplating full moon after full moon, Gander was moved to transform isolation into raw material.

In the artist’s words, “we live in the middle of nowhere really, in the countryside close to the coast. During the last year there was a drought of inspiration. There is nothing out here at night but the moon and the fire, and although it was hard to navigate working with these two such cliché and overly sensationalised signifiers, there was something in the excess of time and the endless silence that drew me to them. Something weirdly primal and existential. I couldn’t get prehistory out of my head. Images of how the world would have looked without language, that arrived with the invention of fire, consumed me.When I stared at the moon each night I was overcome by the the idea that ancient civilisations based on notions of balance and stasis would be the only way forward for us.”

Back in the gallery, the moon that once mesmerised appears immense, but fragmented and rearranged, creating a composition in which the romantic nightscape has been recreated using ordinary objects (a trash can from the artist’ studio, among other everyday objects that become tools), and rearranged into an abstract composition that seems to have suffered from a digital glitch, a tiny error with colossal consequences.

At the center of the room, elements of wood and stone suggest a fire, built each time by the curator, seemingly waiting to be lit. However, the blackness of the logs suggest they have burned before while magically retaining their original shape. Fire played a central role in human evolution by what is known as the ‘colonisation of time’, a notion around which the presented works gravitate.

On the other side of the gallery, what at first glance appears to be a wall clock, reveals the discrepancy at the center of our current paradigm crisis. In the sculpture Chronos Kairos 14.58, 2021 two clocks clash, symbolising with the visual cacophony they produce, the discordance between the measurement of time that in western societies (Chronos) we have imposed on natural rhythms or our instinctive readiness (Kairos), with ruinous consequences for all of nature, including humanity.

As explained by Gander, “our accelerated capitalist growth economies are based in a chronos world, where we do things when we are told, as opposed to a Kairos world where we do things when the eco systems we live in suggests its time. We live by a clock and suppress our instinctive readiness.”

Time is at the center of a show in which both beginnings and ends are expressed in sculptures, paintings and breathing installations, suspended in an undetermined space where the future is an open possibility yet to be ignited.

Building on his experience and his years spent studying in London, Hassan Sharif developed intellectual relationships upon his return to Dubai in 1984, where he created a platform for art, discussion and engaged teaching. He obtained a space from the Sharjah government, which he named the Al Mureijah Art Atelier. Together with other artists, poets and playwrights, they gave birth to a new discourse on art that would produce a generation of artists. In 1987, the Ministry of Education approved Hassan Sharif’s new art studio project at the Youth Theatre and Arts in Dubai. Later, his house in Satwa became home to journalists, writers and artists.

Faced with the bitter observation that the region’s artists were almost totally ignored abroad and sometimes even in the Emirates, his brother Abdulraheem (an early supporter who documented and archived all the works of his brothers and their friends), proposed in 2007 to transform his house into a permanent exhibition space in order to show and share the ideas and art of Emirati artists. From the beginning he chose a museum-like approach to tell and present the contemporary art of the Emirates.

The Flying House was not conceived as a manifesto but rather as a laboratory exploring contemporary art practices, with workshops and meetings. An exhibition space (around 2500 works), was also a place of production and life for some. Abdulraheem Sharif secured the infrastructure to ensure daylight throughout the house, while an archive and preservation section provided access for art professionals and younger people.
Around personalities such as Hassan Sharif, his brother Hussein, Mohammed Kazem, Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim and Joos Clevers, art lovers came from all over the world to discover the latest artistic achievements.

Until 2012, the Flying House was recognised in the region but also internationally as a place that presented and promoted a rich and singular culture,well beyond the skyscrapers of Dubai.

Firmly grounded in philosophical training, Spooner’s work is generated through writing, unfolds as performance and arrives as installation, sculpture, drawing, film and sound. Considering the effects of performance on the contemporary condition, her work responds by incorporating duration and rehearsal as modes of resistance to corporate, digital and performative climates. Born in 1983 in the UK, Spooner is based between Turin (IT)  and London (UK).

Fifty Billion Hectares of Time includes dancing by Magdalyn Segale; cinematography by Charles Billot; sound editing and mixing by Tom Sedgwick and a special thank you to Laura Mclean-Ferris, for her writing on still life that underpins all.

Collective Exhibition for a Single Body – The Private Score – Vienna 2019
A score written by Pierre Bal-Blanc

With the works by:
Milan Adamčiak, Geta Brătescu, Anna Daučíková, VALIE EXPORT, Stano Filko, Tomislav Gotovac, Sanja Iveković, Anna Jermolaewa, Július Koller, Jiří Kovanda, Katalin Ladik, Simon Leung, Karel Miler, Paul Neagu, Manuel Pelmuş, Petr Štembera, Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Slaven Tolj, Goran Trbuljak.

The score “Collective Exhibition for a Single Body” was written in 2015 in Athens. An arrangement was performed for the first time at documenta 14 (The “documenta 14 Score”), and Kontakt Collection of Vienna commissioned a second arrangement. Work from the Konkakt collection by the East European avant-garde movements of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia eluded the commercial marketing of their time yet nonetheless also resisted the communist ideological conformity characteristic of that era. The performance of the new arrangement in a Lidl supermarket inVienna in June marks a contemporary form of reconnection to the social environment which had originally been held at bay.

The exhibition at gb agency presents the master plan for a limited license authorizing the performance of “The private score ». The transfer of rights granted to the collector effectively concerns the form of the performance of the original works constituting the score, the works themselves remain the property of their authors.

Pierre Bal-Blanc is an independent curator and essayist based in Athens and Paris. He has developed « Collective Exhibition for a Single Body-The documenta 14 Score » (catalog Museumcultuur Strombeek Gent, 2019) of which he recently presented a new version « The Private Score » in Vienna at Haus Wittgenstein and Lidl supermarket in a co-production by Kontakt Collection andTanzquartierWien. A new performance of « The Private Score » (M Museum catalog to be published) will take place in November 2019 during the Playground Festival organized in Leuven, Belgium with the M Museum preceded by the exhibition « Collective Exhibition for a Single Body, The Private Score » at gb agency in Paris in October 2019.
He was curator for documenta 14 from 2015 to 2017 in Athens and Kassel under the artistic directorship of Adam Szymczyk. « Der Canaletto Blick-The Canaletto View » (Walther König catalog to be published) is an art commission program on the relations between art and capital produced for the Bank Erste Group Bank AG and the Kontakt collection, Vienna. « Soleil Politique », is a collective exhibition produced for the Museion in Bolzano, Italy. He has been director of the CAC Brétigny in the Paris suburb where he developed from 2003 to 2014 « Project Phalanstère » (catalog Sternberg Press, 2017), a series of art works designed according to this environment and the bene t of his activity that proposes to rethink the logic of accumulation proper to the collection.

Commissioned and supported by Kontakt Collection Vienna