Antonia Hirsch, Julian Yi-Zhong Hou, Haleh Redjaian: Technē

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Julian Yi-Zhong Hou, "The Tunic Revolution," 2014

mixed media

Antonia Hirsch, Julian Yi-Zhong Hou, Haleh Redjaian: Technē

The Greek term Technē describes art, craft, craftsmanship, ability, and knowledge. Beyond expressing the mere ability to bring forth a thing, it emphasizes a knowledge of the nature and principles of the thing or the technique of its making.

What is it like to think with one’s hands? Can hands think abstractly? What value is assigned to the hand-made compared to the industrially produced? And what does this say about the time and place in which this judgement is made? These are some of the questions raised by the works in this exhibition. They suggest architecture and its plans, sightlines and geometries of vision, material and immaterial labour, the exaltation of technology and the culturally bastard forms it breeds. Just like in the now-famous duck-rabbit illusion, playing fore- and background against each other, these objects vex: which is the art, and which is merely its support? Or, in other words, which aspect is of value, deserving of attention, and what is to be neglected?

What is condensed in these works—all of which are concerned, in various ways, with surface, with what presents itself in an immediate way—is the very practical problem of today’s artistic practice. Everything is up for grabs, just like news and its fake siblings: they are of equal relevance, just because they’re equally circulating—as memes or whatever newfangled cultural forms. As artists, we go fishing in this semantic soup, attempting to forge something that resonates in this digital-analogue echo chamber that is contemporary everyday experience.

Antonia Hirsch is based in Berlin. Currently working primarily in sculpture and installation, her practice focuses on the affective charge of objects that mediate between digital and embodied experience. Her work has been featured at, among others, the Vancouver Art Gallery; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Salzburger Kunstverein; Taipei Fine Arts Museum ; Tramway, Glasgow; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe; and it is currently on view at the Museum für Kommunikation in Frankfurt am Main. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including, most recently, from the Stiftung Kunstfonds, Bonn, and the Cultural Foundation of Hesse.

Haleh Redjaian is based in Berlin. Her works on paper, textiles and site-specifc wall installations are grounded in geometry. She uses its rules to reshape and retrace the apparent order of angles and lines. She has participated in several group and solo exhibitions including Kunstverein Bregenz (A), Museum fur Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt (D) , Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai (UAE) among others. She has been a recent recipient of the Cultural Foundation of Hesse.

Julian Yi-Zhong Hou was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Treaty 6 territory, and currently resides between Vernon, on the unceded land of the Syilx peoples of the Okanagan Nation, and Vancouver, on the unceded land of the Coast Salish peoples– Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam Nations. His work has been the focus of solo and group exhibitions at Soon.tw,Toronto; 8-eleven,Toronto; Artspeak, Vancouver; and the Vancouver Art Gallery. His most recent work, Grass Drama, has been shown in parts at Malaspina Printmakers Society, Vancouver (2021), Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2020), Cassandra Cassandra, Toronto (2019); Unit 17, Vancouver (2018); and in Charcuterie 4 (2018). Hou holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art and Culture Studies from Simon Fraser University and a Masters in Architecture from the University of British Columbia. He has held residencies at Triangle, Marseilles; Western Front and 221A Vancouver, and in 2017 won the City of Vancouver’s Mayor’s Award for Emerging Visual Artist. He is one of the founding members of the art record label Second Spring.