In line with its annual theme Heartbeats Rising, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich sets out to explore the relationship between feelings of ecstasy and the fear of catastrophe through its first exhibition of the year, “Bliss, bliss, bliss.” In collaboration with artists James Bantone, Laura Gozlan, Leon Höllhumer, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, P. Staff, and Chin Tsao, Bliss, bliss, bliss addresses the impact that the experience of a world in decline has on our ability to feel and to desire.
It is an open secret that the world is currently undergoing a process that can be described as catastrophic without exaggeration: an unimpeded climate crisis that is only escalating further; wars that have claimed thousands of lives, of which nobody knows how and when they will end; an ongoing global shift towards the far-right; AI technology over which we risk losing control, etc.—many more horrors could be added to this list. What are the effects of this lived experience (perhaps certainty?) of a world in decline on how we feel, desire, and relate to ourselves as well as to others?
In order to evade desperation, many consciously or subconsciously choose the path of excess, with its ambivalent effects. In their ecstasy, they search for ways to escape the world, for emotional respites from catastrophic reality. But does this make feeling ecstasy an escapist act in itself? Is the promise of happiness with which it entices us—“bliss, bliss, bliss”—always merely a deception? Can’t it also be a source of confidence and resilience under certain circumstances?
What about those people to whom experiences of uncertainty and powerlessness—of a loss of world—are not only familiar, but a part of everyday life? For many of those who experience discrimination and exclusion, temporarily disconnecting from reality may constitute a vital act of self-empowerment, and a way to ensure one’s autonomy and agency. Their experiences show that this supposed escape from the world can also serve as a strategy for (re)appropriating it.
The group exhibition “Bliss, bliss, bliss” addresses the potential and limitations of this strategy. In collaboration with artists James Bantone, Laura Gozlan, Leon Höllhumer, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, P. Staff, and Chin Tsao, “Bliss, bliss, bliss” shines a light on the dialectical relationship between fear of catastrophe and feelings of ecstasy, investigating instances where the joy of excess turns into resistance.
The works
The literal meaning of ecstasy is “to be beside of oneself,” or “to step outside oneself”—but what if you get stuck halfway? Such a question might arise at the sight of James Bantone’s work Terminal Irony (2021): It depicts a figure whose head is stuck in an oversized mirror. Trapped in a no man’s land between reality and transcendence, the figure is faced with the option to either refuse “passing through the looking glass” or to forcibly squeeze through the narrow opening to get to the other side.
Laura Gozlan’s film installation Foulplay (2022) demonstrates what one might encounter there. A nocturnal, placeless, and nameless city—its infrastructure has broken down—serves as the film’s setting. The air is filled with unrest. Such are the best conditions for the film’s protagonist, Gozlan’s alter ego “Mum,” to explore her sexual superpowers, including experiments in the field of scatology. Foulplay documents a transgression, a grotesque and post-apocalyptic horror trip as well as a challenge to “good (patriarchal) taste“.
Similar references to horror are developed in Leon Höllhumer’s works. His series of ceramics and objects from different work series include bizarre, biomorphic forms that grow nails, a viscous dark mass oozing out of various spots of the exhibition’s walls, masks covered in spikes, etc.—a quirky ensemble of fetishes reminiscent of Mad Max and Alien that nonchalantly reveals the continuities that exist between archaism and pop.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s paintings featured in her work series NEVER LET ME GO (2023–ongoing) adopt an even more serious tone, representing the difficult relationship between independence and attachment—in its most literal form: Bondage ropes around three panels (covered with black cowhides), a reference to the Japanese practice of Kinbaku. Kinbaku was originally employed in police and military contexts as a method of torture, though today it is mainly practiced with the goal of inducing a range of (sexual) states of ecstasy in those who are bound.
For the artist P. Staff, the question of what goes on inside of us when we are immobilized, weak and vulnerable is just as interesting. Staff’s film Hevn (2022) is an exploration of the tender and vulnerable moments of ecstasy that occur in situations of exhaustion and weakness. In combining different materials and techniques (analog and digital film footage, animation, writing, sounds), Staff’s Hevn unfolds a multi-layered cinematic reflection on the (im)possibility of queer happiness in a cisheteronormative world.
Through Chin Tsao’s installation Foreign fine girls, how low you can go? (2019), “Bliss, bliss, bliss” returns to the very special case of ecstasy that is obsession. Here, a lavishly decorated panel with archaic ornaments reads “I’m obsessed with you.” Whether this represents a declaration of love or a threat—or perhaps both—remains an open question in Tsao’s work.
Participating artist:
James Bantone, Laura Gozlan, Leon Höllhumer, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, P. Staff, Chin Tsao
Curated by
Frederike Sperling
at Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Wien
until May 4, 2024