NO MIND NO MATTER, 2024
The collaboratory exhibition NO MIND NO MATTER explored aspects of self perception through a partly perceivable communication network between works that mimic, echoe and activate each other.
The works were developed by interpreting the foundational material to highlight its consistency and agency. This approach seeks to provoke a heightened awareness in visitors of their own distinctive, imperfect corporeality, while simultaneously drawing attention to the intertwined temporalities—past, present, and future—of physical existence.
text by: Malene Hagen
concept for: Kunstarkaden München
photos: Dirk Tacke
Cloudy Vision (second skin) (2024)
digital print on silk, fan, mounted on aluminium poles
140 x 210 x 40 cm
Using found storylines and images, partially color-distorted and transferred onto silk, has recently become Vall’s method of encoding algorithmic footprints into a permanent medium that attracts the human body. The “second skins”- silk works are a series that refer to the idea of invisibility cloaks, which give their owners the privilege to hide in other people’s lives, thoughts, and interests for their own benefit.
The image of a shark eye hosting a parasite was taken out of an online science journal, digitally color adjusted and printed on silk. The report about a recent scientific method to determine the age of sharks through radiocarbon dating of eye lens nuclei that replaced the former bone growth analysis, raised Valls attention. This new mode of age determination points to the Anthropocene drama marked by atomic bomb residues sedimented in the earth‘s matter.
Though the old shark’s story is not a secret to Vall, she liked to display this extract of her intuitively liberated research in the form of a second skin that could be worn (or possessed) by anybody.
heavy bones within (2024)
aluminium poles, computer housing, bookstand, weight, first edition of „A journey in other worlds” by J.J. Astor, „1979“ digital print on silk
60 x 60 x 60 cm
Bordered by a cube of aluminum poles, this work introduces the idea of permeability within time and material. Using a plain computer housing for questioning conventional memory through the form of an exoskeleton, the first edition of John Jacob Astor’s “a journey in other worlds” proves late nineteenth century’s understanding of a future with alternative energy sources. As a supporter of Nikola Tesla’s ideas on alternative electrification infrastructures and member of the ASTOR family, John Jacob Astor died on the Titanic as one of the few first class passengers and remained mainly unknown as a writer.
An effect of reversed forces occurs in shallow depths under water when light weights tend to ‘fall’ towards the surface – caging and adding weights helps to remain them in position.
text: in collaboration with Malene Hagen
Aging Chamber (2024)
Tatjana Vall and Johannes Kiel
non-accessible cabin, laser engraved auxetic octahedral structures into natural rubber, fans, infra red lamps, small engines;
size variable
The architectural intervention by Vall and Kiel features a non-accessible cabin, rendering the interior visible solely from the outside through two diagonally opposite glass panes. A sewing pattern made from natural rubber fabric with laser engraved auxetic octahedral structures was designed with a custom-built software program to retain its stretch and body memory, ensuring a certain latency and the ability to maintain its shape. Resembling a flayed animal skin, the fabric is clamped to two motors with cooling ventilators, each exerting force in an automated repetition of stretching and relaxing, striving to maintain its form. “Aging Chamber” materializes the wear and tear of the sewing pattern resulting from the exposure to mechanical stress. Eluding instant recognition by the naked eye, its effects only become apparent over the course of the exhibition.
text: in collaboration with Malene Hagen
self aware and swimming (2024)
customized skin care product cardboard packages piled
quantity variable
A scattered pile of custom-made eye cream packages, featuring a distorted and color-inverted design copied from the skincare brand “La Roche-Posay”, confronts its surface with its actual core. These packages are literally without content, spotlighting the obsessive reproducibility and by this, the inversion of the invisible towards its outer appearance and what remains from the (brand) idea when the object within becomes obsolete. The UV printed and laser engraved granite plate „swimmer“ depicts such a container in a related context.
text: in collaboration with Malene Hagen
DIN universe flower (2024)
handpainted light sensitive iron emulsion on -watercolor paper, aluminium poles
30 x 30 x 170
Pointing diagonally towards the corners of an imaginary square, four arrows create a balanced, modular and universal symbol that can represent various messages (appears for this reason also as Off White-logo, following Virgil Abloh’s interest in a maximally adaptable and modular signé). Surfaced at the front side of aluminum profiles, Vall mimics and reinterprets many times the constructed figure. Longing for an balanced composition of forces in which stability and position remain, Novalis‘ blue flower and its yearning for a metaphysical understanding are transferred into a norm-oriented, hypothetically constructed context.
Showing only one of the many flowers, the work as the only one ‘hand’made within the show, is installed in a timid corner in which it can blossom carefully.
text: in collaboration with Malene Hagen
gatekeepers (2024)
light -reflexions on the wall caused by waves in a water basin, daylight lamp;
size variable
In a pool of water generated waves are re-directed onto the wall. Pointing towards gates that are yet to be opened, this work transforms imperceptible data streams coming from Johannes Kiel’s wave operators into an enchanting dance of light, giving material body to the obscure mechanisms re-configuring our perceptible scenes of life.
text: in collaboration with Malene Hagen
empty shell (2024)
Tatjana Vall and Justin Urbach
saved monitors from a department store video wall, live stream “Nautilus Exploration Program”, -(https://nautiluslive.org/), aluminium poles, blue laser light, aquarium, laser engraving on watercolor paper
size variable
In this collaboration between Vall and Urbach, a gridded assemblage of recycled TV screens opens a window to a live-streamed ocean exploration conducted by the
“Nautilus Exploration Program” (https://nautiluslive.org/). Through live video and data feeds, you remotely experience the perspective of Nautilus, a robotic exploration vessel, exposing new vistas of yet unsurveyed and yet unmapped sea-floors. The rear side of the installation – consisting of visible cables, a connected computer, an engraved technical drawing, a blue laser beam, and a waterless aquarium without filters – references the perceived presence of underwater cables and invisible infrastructure in their function in the globalized world since the 19th century.
text: in collaboration with Malene Hagen
