LODGERS #7 lonelyfingers
Image: (c) M HKA
The LODGERS programme is a collaboration between AIR Antwerpen and M HKA . We welcome imaginative artistic initiatives to come and occupy the 6th floor at M HKA. The programme offers a unique opportunity for public interface, to organisations and initiatives who focus specifically on producing and commissioning, and who do not have their own public space. These LODGERS might be publishers, commissioning agencies, research initiatives, labels, collectives, discussion platforms and other initiatives experimenting with artistic practice who would be interested to live, work and perform in Antwerp.
LODGERS are welcomed from "Eurocore" – the combined region of Benelux and the Rheinland. Free entrance to visit our LODGERS. Come and say hello!
The LODGERS programme is co-curated by Nav Haq, Senior Curator at M HKA, and Alan Quireyns, Artistic Director at AIR Antwerpen.
Based in Düsseldorf, lonelyfingers are a platform created in 2012 by visual artists Diango Hernández and Anne Pöhlmann. Lonelyfingers’ interest focuses on the artefacts and documents that accompany and inspire artists while developing their practice. They look to give access to these enigmatic items that have inspired contemporary artists to create their works. For lonelyfingers, the story that lies behind each artwork has a remarkable value. Lonelyfingers showcase multiple collections online as well as organise special interventions into collections by artists. Simultaneously they present curatorial projects at different spaces, inviting collaborations with artists from diverse backgrounds and practices. Perhaps their most ambitious being their project lonelyfingers-Konversationsstücke for Museum Abteiburg in Mönchengladbach, which won the AICA-Germany Best Special Exhibition of 2013.
As our LODGERS, lonelyfingers are interested to collaborate with other artists to find out about how biography shapes and informs the creative process of artists, particularly when you have arrived in a different place, whether to live or to undertake for instance a residency. For their project entitled Maps of You, they will collaborate with numerous artists, authors and other thinkers working in the artistic field, to produce maps of their experiences and how they relate to the trajectory of their artistic practices.
Maps of You
by lonelyfingers
Antwerp
26/Sept/2016
Tickets, passports, a folder with printouts, mainly of maps. It is late at night. We’ve packed our bags and all seems to be ready for an early departure. For many people, traveling is related with pleasure and holidays; for others with business, and for artists with something usually called experience. As visual artists we often connect emotionally to places, we make particular bonds with things, people, situations and surroundings, and sometimes these bonds are very hard to break. Temporary living and working environments and short encounters with people may result in an abundant artistic production or even in a permanent move to another country, and sometimes these experiences can change our work unexpectedly in a definitive way.
Today when someone asks artists for a biography or CV, we submit without hesitation chronologically ordered lists of exhibitions, publications and awards. This is a routine, a sort of agreement that like any other format tries to simplify the reading and somehow it grants standardisation. But can this standard tell us how time spent in certain places has affected our work? Can we understand the transformative power of traveling from reading our CV?
Some months ago, Nav Haq and Alan Quireyns invited lonelyfingers to be part of the LODGERS residence programme. At that moment we were spending some time in Paris participating in another artist residency. It was back then that we found the book Wilfredo and Helena: My Life with Wilfredo Lam, 1939-1950 written by Helena Benítez. While reading this little book we realised how embedded Lam’s biography is in his works. Somehow his own syncretic nature became magnified, enlarged while traveling and living in different countries. His works are a fantastical mixture of cultural experiences ancient and modern, they are the testament of a man that travelled both voluntarily and involuntary through cultures and religions. Lam’s biography, his Cuban mixed-race family background and his long periods living abroad in countries like Spain and France made us see Wilfredo Lam’s paintings as complex maps of the world.
Maps of You is the beginning of a new group of works made by ourselves and our collaborators. We are starting to ‘draw’ our biographies in a different way; visualising the transitions and raptures in one’s work which can appear when we change work-life settings and when we are facing different cultural inspirations. Loneyfingers are thinking of drawing our biographies as maps. Maybe with the help of this abstract language we could get closer to a different understanding of artistic work, which states that artworks register specific points on a personal voyage.
Maps of You begins with a presentation of Anne Pöhlmann’s and Diango Hernández’s new works for LODGERS. This first stage, a presentation in the LODGERS space of the museum, is an invitation to a group of artists and authors to contribute with their own reflections, drawings and descriptions of their professional travel and evolution. Maps of You will eventually be gathered in a new lonelyfingers publication.