Zyrland Zoiropa, Berlin x The Horse, Dublin
Kesewa Aboah, Inigo Batterham, Siri Black, Alistair Frost, Robert Lakomczyk, Elizabeth Ravn
Zyrland Zoiropa x The Horse presents a group of artists working across themes of cross-pollination, lived experience, archivization, cosmopolitanism, image science and early digital culture. The artists have diverse artistic approaches and image-making processes, presenting contrasting visions of subjecthood, labour, production, value, and cultural inquiry.The paintings by Elizabeth Ravn are scenes from her life in the city of Berlin. Figures occupy the ground of each painting, and the atmosphere oscillates between the quaint and the countercultural. In these impressionistic scenes, the viewer is offered a glimpse into the day-to-day experiences of youthful living in the metropolis.The painterly works of Kesewa Aboah are inherently bodily. The Ghanaian-British artist literally incorporates her body into her work, coating her skin in pigment or ink. She presses her body onto paper, creating visceral imprints that become the starting point for richly textured compositions. Around these impressions, she works meticulously with embroidery, dry pigment, walnut oil, and thread, creating layered surfaces that sit somewhere between figuration and abstraction, evoking skin, fabric, and organic forms.Inigo Batterham’s paintings construct a private symbolic universe shaped by spirituality, psychological fragility, and the Burren, a karst landscape on the west coast of Ireland. His paintings combine sacred geometry, ambiguous figures, and contemplative colour fields, which, in reference to the intentions of early Modernism, explore loss, ecstasy, and transcendence. Resisting art-world fashion, the paintings feel intimate and reverent, yet rebellious in their old-school nature.Robert Lakomczyk’s archival paintings depict stolen jewels, painted from photographs from the Interpol archive of Stolen Works of Art. Born in the former East Germany, where he spent his early childhood before the fall of the Berlin Wall, his work explores the storage of monetary value and its enduring power within the contemporary world. How and why value is assigned to objects, and what happens when they change hands, properly or illicitly, are questioned in these paintings.The quirky paintings of Alistair Frost appear to draw from different areas of culture – office life, clip art, 80s music videos, cocktail parties and shirts fit for sun holidays. Serious in their playfulness, although not too serious, the cleverly constructed artworks are both mixed-media works with sculptural elements and paintings. That is to say, they are paintings, although not just paintings. Returning to exhibiting after a decade of happily laying low, Frost presents painted shirts made from folded paper, covered in, for want of a better term, funky designs.The work of Siri Black, who will also exhibit as part of the ‘Immaterial Salon’, uses film and mixed media to examine specific moments in the histories of science, image-making, and animation. Her work ‘500NM’ was filmed at the James Watt Nanofabrication Lab in Glasgow and examines the limits of Moore’s Law. In the film, a disembodied voice narrates measures taken to remove all human traces and dust from the nano-scale imaging processes. On a palm-sized monitor, the film is encoded onto a Raspberry Pi mini-computer, itself a consequence of the computational advances in the miniaturisation of machines predicted by Moore’s Law 50 years ago.
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