Exhibition

Living Meshes

From October 31 to December 8, 2018

Exhibit Opening

October 31, 2018 at 6pm

Curator(s)

Siglinde Langholz

Artist(s)

Siglinde Langholz

Location

The Gallery at VCUarts Qatar

Acknowledgment

The artist is grateful to Laurence Le Bouhellec for her contribution to the exhibition catalog; and to Acero Sueco Palme de Puebla for generously providing the research funds; and to SenseLab.

The Gallery would like to thank Dr. Aspa D. Chatziefthimiou, Ecologist, Visiting Research Scientist, Weill Cornell Medicine University, Consultant, Richer Environments; Maryam Al-Homaid, Assistant Professor at VCUarts Qatar’s Graphic Design department for their support on this project.

The Embassy of Mexico in Qatar

2018, Artists, Exhibitions

Image caption: SiglindeLangholz, ‘Meshing Ecologies series’, 2016 ©SiglindeLangholz

Living Meshes is an interdisciplinary exhibition where lived experiences are in constant exploration. It is an experiment on how art, science and philosophy can co-compose collectively. The exhibition works as an incubator for the thinking in the act.

This exhibition activates new techniques for the invention of transversal expressions and how different modes of thought in an event can trigger ecologies of experience. Interdisciplinary creative life-living is seen as a relational field that activates mobility. It creates worlds across individuals, species and scales, and how they tend toward the flickering of interdisciplinary artistic processes. They also activate relational methods that will provoke the audience into looking at the living world in Mexico and Qatar in different ways.

Research-Creation

This exhibition is in relation to an emergent concept research-creation that manifests between social sciences and humanities, and that speaks to contemporary media experiences and modes of knowing. Research-Creation projects usually integrate a creative process, an experimental aesthetic component, and an artistic work, as a vital part of a study.

Creative movements co-compose the rhythm of the milieu that is hovering, wrapping, collecting, and unfolding together. These are new ways of interconnection between different interdisciplinary movements and languages. Every creative encounter at this exhibition will register the differentials, tensions, and intensities of the moment. Movements will cut in, cut out, fold around together, rising, falling, resonating, rolling in difference, and activate new art encounters which will intertwine with the exhibition, while interrupting the normal way of experimenting with an art show.

Art-Life. Life-Art.
Weave and Interweave.

Laurence Le Bouhellec

It has become clear that artistic production, as happens with any other type of production generated by humans, both in a material and immaterial level, cannot totally dispense with the socio-historical-cultural sphere in which it has its roots. It is determined, little or a lot, according to the capacity of its own producer to stick to its most immediate specificities, or not.

Thus, in general, art, generated during western modernity, has positioned itself as a field of objects with unique characteristics, often related to the narrow possibility of generating a certain sensory impact on the observer, giving it the sensation of having penetrated into a different world, completely removed from its routine existential reality; that of aesthetic beauty.

It should be noted that these specific objects with peculiar auratic potential required specific places for their placement, conservation and, obviously, their contemplation, therefore confusing the fact in the imagination of most of the population with the very condition of being art. For decades, however, artistic production has been going down other paths, gradually reinventing not only the fields of visibility of what Western modernity began to call art, but also the range of its techniques and materials, demanding consequently a radical transformation of attitude in the person who will interact with it, and, often, other spaces for its proper presentation.

The creative processes of Siglinde Langholz generate its own fields of representation, dispensing with the mastery of the anecdotal to focus on the tensions that materials + technique + production objective generate.

- Writer Laurence Le Bouhellec

Biography

siglindelangholz.com

Siglinde Langholz is an interdisciplinary artist from Puebla, Mexico. She attended the Universidad De Las Americas, where she earned a BA in Fine Arts. In 2010 she moved to Orono, Maine, in the United States to study her MFA in Intermedia. She is currently a candidate for an interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Maine.

Langholz’s work is about activating relational encounters. Her art process also explores the ramifications and intersections between biology, architecture, and philosophy and how these generate new approaches to her creative research. These explorations trigger new ways to encounter her installations, textile work, sculptures, and new media projects.

Langholz is the recipient of several grants and awards including the Immediations Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) research grant from the University of Concordia, Montreal, Canada; the University of Maine´s Ana Mendieta Art Fellowship; and a fellowship from the state government of Puebla, Mexico.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at exhibitions at Mexico City, Puebla, Yucatan, and Tijuana in Mexico, and also in Montreal, Canada, and Maine and Michigan in the United States.