Sleeping In

CONNY (Tanja Nis-Hansen & Niclas Riepshoff)

Antonia Nannt

Tanja Nis-Hansen

Jessy Razafimandimby

Alison Yip

curated by Christina Gigliotti, Sigrid Hermann & Catherine Wang

March 11, 2022 — March 26, 2022

opening Thursday, March 10, 2022, 6–9pm

Sleeping In examines notions of safety and rest, and their inextricable relationship to an individual's most intimate space of a home—a site of shelter, coziness, and domesticity. The artists in this exhibition, CONNY (Tanja Nis-Hansen and Niclas Riepshoff), Antonia Nannt, Tanja Nis-Hansen, Jessy Razafimandimby, and Alison Yip navigate the ideas of comfort and tease out the individual that exists at the contentious bounds of productivity and rest, and wakefulness and slumber.

Tanja Nis-Hansen's Untitled lends bubbling words to address the inevitable coexistence of labor and rest. The balancing act between exhaustion and regeneration as a necessary condition for an individual to be politically effective was emphatically articulated by Hannah Arendt. The private sphere of regeneration, Arendt explains, has to be distinct from the individual pursuit of material happiness in which the self is defined through acquisitiveness, and by what one consumes. This boundary is, unfortunately, often not so clear.

Works made in rye straw and linen buttons by Jessy Razafimandimby hang as symbolic objects, like harvest wreaths. Harvest wreaths were customarily not intended to be publicly displayed, but rather they function in a domestic setting in which a family ritualistically marked an end of a cycle of toiling labor. Razafimandimby’s work Untitled quietly dozes off nearby. The main motif of Sunshine Plaza (Hubcap) by Antonia Nannt is the sun that rises each day to wake us up, like an ineluctable reminder of the functionalist logic of how we perceive our time and work throughout the day. The sun highlights the conundrum surrounding sleep—its profound uselessness and passivity collide with the immeasurable losses it causes in the time of production, circulation, and consumption.

The paradox of being in want of rest and the oppression of constant exposure through the means of consumption opens the video sequence in CONNY's work Find Me in the Filling. Locked in a seemingly endless conversation that ebbs and flows as one or the other dozes off, the artist duo finds themselves spiraling through space and infinite television channels from their respective corners of a comfy sofa. This vertigo-like, destabilized state is echoed in Alison Yip's painting, Most of the Story. In one’s most intimate setting of a bathroom, a robed moon figure gazes into a multi-faceted mirror. As the reflection fails to materialize, one gets the sense that even in the intimate sphere of the home, a defenseless state of ennui persists.

A sleeping person may be in one's most vulnerable state. This sense of vulnerability extends further when we think about times when restfulness cannot be taken for granted. From Kafka's The Castle to Tarkovsky's Solaris, modern awareness of compulsory watchfulness and insomnia has been reiterated to represent the lack of social security that allows safe and sound respite. In such a state of affairs, the wish to rest to one's heart's content, to sleep in, may not be such a self-indulgent act despite its idyllic impression. Against the onrushing demands for productivity or consumption, perhaps Sleeping In is an act of defiance.

CONNY is a collaborative formation that started in 2017, consisting of Niclas Riepshoff (born in 1992, Germany) and Tanja Nis-Hansen (born in 1988, Denmark). Through an additive and collaborative process, they create short amateurish theater plays within installative setups, consisting of self-made costumes, music, and text as well as paintings and sculptural props. These installations host whimsical dialogues of facialized non-human or part-human characters, whose stories unfold in multilayered narratives. The duo has exhibited and performed at Galerie Melike Bilir, Hamburg (2021), and at Münchner Kammerspiele (2018), among others.

Antonia Nannt (born in 1995, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. By taking architectural structures as a starting point and ornamenting them with symbols connected to emotional and natural concepts, Nannt empties out these signifiers and encourages the viewer to meditate on the shapes and materiality of her works. Drawing inspiration from postmodernist architectural theory, Nannt points to the objecthood of her works through the intricate use of materials such as metal and tin and techniques such as welding and fusing glass. Nannt studied art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and graduated in 2021 at the Universität der Künste zu Berlin in the class of Manfred Pernice. Her work has been exhibited at Galerie Anton Janiszewski, Berlin (2021), Haus&Freunde, Vienna (2020), Spoiler Projektraum, Berlin (2020) among others.

Tanja Nis-Hansen lives and works in Berlin. Withdrawn from any traces of contemporary life, Tanja Nis-Hansen’s paintings present a scenery that reveals the painter’s sensibility towards what could be described as an unconventional synthesis of historical styles. The artist holds a tremendous fascination for theatre and stage design, which in the paintings does not only surface through the inner logic of space on the canvas, but also through an all-over “theatrical” mode of representation. Nis-Hansen studied in Copenhagen and Vienna before her BFA (2016) and MFA (2018) at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg under the supervision of professor Jutta Koether. Nis-Hansen has had solo exhibitions at Sans titre (2016), Paris (2022 and 2019) and at Udstillingsstedet Sydhavn Station, Copenhagen (2019). The artist will have solo shows in 2022 at Vestjyllands Kunstpavillon, Videbæk, and at L’INCONNUE, New York.

Jessy Razafimandimby (born in 1995, Madagascar) lives and works in Geneva. His multidisciplinary production encompasses painting, drawing, installation, and performance. Razafimandimby draws upon baroque imagery traversed by organic forms in which chimeric figures appear, producing simultaneously “dystopian and utopian” hallucinations. Through his systematic study of decorative motives, he develops a critical discourse on the bourgeois, class-based system of taste and social conventions. Razafimandimby received his Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from the Geneva University of Art & Design (HEAD) in 2018 and is the recipient of the 2021 Kiefer Hablitzel Prize in Switzerland. He has had solo shows at Art au Centre Genève (2021); 13 vitrine, Rennes (2021); Espace HIT, Geneva (2021); Arsenic, Lausanne (2020); 1.1., Basel (2020). In 2022, the artist has upcoming solo exhibitions at Sans titre (2016), Paris, and at A. ROMY, Zurich.

Alison Yip lives and works in Berlin and Cologne. Yip works through painting, wall treatments, and sometimes writing and objects to find ways of speaking to the dissociative and dispersed nature of our cognitive apparatus and the psycho-phenomenal origins of figuration. Recurring actors and everyday objects charged with unabashed animism appear in her pictures, occupying banal and transitional sites. Sensorial complexity is evoked through the playful use of various pictorial and perspectival modes. Recent solo, collaborative and group exhibitions include Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2022), Mauer, Cologne (2021), Mécènes du Sud, Montpellier (2021), Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund (2020), Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver (2020), ACUD, Berlin (2020), Beursschouwburg, Brussels (2019), L’Inconnue, Montreal (2019), Plat, Amsterdam (2019).

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