Can you imagine yourself with a tail on top of your head, or can you imagine yourself with just a head and a tail? We take for granted things we involuntarily accept as truth, such as notions, history, science, stereotypes, and social order – all of which are defined by the mainstream. This is often different from the truth. “Me,” “my body,” “my thoughts,” and “everything around me” can’t be simply categorized as true or false or defined by a single point of view. Heads and tails are furthest from the centre of the body, yet they can still intersect, traversing understandings of reality and the periphery based on pluralism.

The seven artists in the exhibition “Your Tails on Your Heads” strive to move beyond the visible aspects of anthropocentric perspectives that originated from notions of dominant centres to embrace intangible possibilities, ideas, and phenomena. The artists present new perspectives on the familiar physical world through various mediums, including performance, video, installation, and sound. They allow audiences to see into the lives of non-human beings: animals, nature, the universe, socio-political structures, capitalism, and hierarchies. At the same time, it allows them to immerse themselves in the experience of becoming a multidimensional being.

Jessica Arseneau‘s exploration of light and darkness, both artificial and natural, manifests itself in video projection installations accompanied by sound, texts, lights, and photographs. Her installations utilize the atmospheric nature of the exhibition space and acquire a temporality of their own. Her light installation “Orange, Blue!“ 2022 oscillates between blue and orange in slow transitions to white. The cool tones of a Martian sunset contrast with the warm tones of an Earth sunset. It is also spectra of light that have opposing effects on the rhythms of biological beings. She intervenes in the natural circadian rhythm.

jessarseneau.github.io 

Juan Pablo Gaviria Bedoya‘s artistic practice explores intra-tropical phenomenology and questions notions of geographical hegemony, simultaneously penetrating multiple intersections of audiovisual language, performance, and writing. His performance piece “Como los soles“, 2023, whose title includes the double entendre of being like the suns and eating the suns, is presented in this exhibition as an installation that includes wall drawings. Through metaphors and paradoxes, he reveals a multi-layered scenario of a thermokinetic understanding of the tropics, a region located at the center of the map but historically perceived as the periphery.

juanpablogaviria.xyz 

Heyon Han‘s research and studio practice are assembled into installations that function as models of our cultural studies belief systems, where contemporary desires and oppression become physical. Han’s work “Proof of Mother”, 2021, a project that proposes a cultural methodology for realizing anti-capitalist desires, is presented as a reconfigured installation in this exhibition. From her observations of the process of overcoming situations and problem-solutions in didactic fables that sometimes follow cruel but rational laws, she approached the term mother as the only concept that overcomes the cruelty of capitalism and decommodifies the bodily object.

heyonhan.com 

Working with installation and film, Leniko Sennoma creates aggressive yet gentle hypnotic environments with audiovisual and metaphorical materials and language. In their installation “Society Of The Snake“, 2019, they envision the snake as a symbol of society’s control that defenceless and threatening materiality gradually wraps around and tightens around individuality and freedom. The insidious practice that purports to be liberating but actually stifles freedom replaces anxiety about an uncertain future with a plausible visible security and closes off further possibilities. In the societies of control, emotions and sensations of freedom and safety run counter to the original concepts.

lenikosennoma.wixsite.com/filmart

Based on research and fieldwork, Bea Targosz‘s sound installations provoke spatial and sonic experiences and elicit situations. Her project “By the stream, 63° 53′ 54.9″ N 19° 9’ 56.13″ W”, 2023, is a sonic exploration of possible local feedback loops between nature- and human-related processes. It is based on field recordings of a small mountain stream in Landmannalaugar, Iceland, which intensifies in the springtime when the snow cover begins to melt. She thinks of water as a still largely unexplored compound, a vivid matrix whose circulation and melting patterns are altered by human activities. She searches for sonic features that refer to human presence and activity with the use of ML-based and notch filters.

beatargosz.com

I-Chieh Tsai explores the alienated identities and collective experiences of Asian women in Western society, as well as the role of women in Taiwanese socio-political conditions and related gender issues through field research. She works with video, installation, 3D modelling, collage, and her own body as the medium. In the video installation “小埃<3Iris”, 2021-2022, Tsai reveals a cross-section of an industry where service providers are predominantly women in a society where everything is a commodity through the voices of female workers’ experiences and emotions. The many anonymous women of society exist as vocal avatars providing telephone services in the industry that is maintained by people who believe that moments of new love and intimacy can be purchased.

ichiehtsai.tumblr.com

Lisa Wintermantel develops audiovisual installations, site-specific performances, and sculptures in the landscape, observing and inventing habitats between our environment and what we know. In “I wanna carry you all on my back”, 2023, her performance shows a forest covered with the reciprocal relationships of living things between humans and other beings. The sounds of the forest mingling with the performer’s breathing, the movement of the camera as if looking at the forest through the eyes of the different beings in the forest, and the aspects of the forest captured by the camera provide the viewer with moments of immersion in an audiovisual experience of the lives there.

www.youcaneatthepaper.de 

Hara Shin, Curator of Your Tails on Your Heads

Live performance: I-Chieh Tsai

Title: 小埃<3 Iris, Live: Join Me for a Shower

Iris exists as a voice beyond the phone, only by those who believe they can buy the intimacy of new love. This is a live audio stream of Iris taking a shower, one of the many “she’s” in this industry.

For media inquiries and interviews, please contact:

Jung Me Chai
info@discursus.info