FUNKTIONIEREN

Private View:

Friday 25 November, 6pm - 9pm

Performance hours:

Every Saturday from 26 November

(except 24 & 31 December), 1pm - 5pm

For his latest show at Blain|Southern, Berlin-based artist Nasan Tur will transform the ground floor of the 40 metre long gallery space into a performative installation of a live printmaking studio.

The process will involve the conceptual artist working on-site, making visible every stage in the production of an exhibition. The artist, supported by a team of artisan printmakers, will be carving statements and slogans into large woodblocks, which he will then use to produce a collection of several different prints. These will be hung within the installation, increasingly filling the space. The woodblocks, prints and the performance that created them each become individual artworks as part of this self-referential exhibition.

Tur references the history of the gallery building that formerly housed a different type of printing press, producing Berlin’s daily newspaper, Tagesspiegel. Through this link with high-speed, yet already out-dated, media production and the subsequent contrast with woodblock printing - the oldest and slowest printing technique - the artist reflects on the rapidly increasing ease with which information is circulated.

The installation will contain tables, shelves, carving tools, computer equipment, printing devices and racks for drying the prints. With endless reproduction of works enabled by the woodblock format, the resulting collection of text-based prints will feature Tur’s highly contentious aphorismsand philosophical statements, which have in the past included ‘KNOWLEDGE IS DANGEROUS’ and ‘CONTROL IS NECESSARY’.

As workers industriously produce artworks on the ground level, new work by the artist will be displayed on the upper floor of the gallery. This includes a powerful new body of work about action and reaction; using appropriated imagery from the internet, the artist examines the anguish and ecstasy manifest in the faces of political supporters as they respond to the results of elections.

The work will also be shown at Tur’s solo museum exhibition, which opens a week earlier at the Kunst Haus Wien, Vienna on 15 November 2016.