Meeting Point - Axel Lapp Projects, Berlin

Apartment are currently in Berlin at Axel Lapp Projects. We are showing a selection of Apartment’s previous exhibitors at the space (Invalidenstraße 161, D-10115 Berlin); so if you happen to be in Berlin; do come to see us we will be there hosting the gallery until the show ends on June 23rd. Entitled ‘Meeting Point’ the exhibition features; Dave Gledhill, Paul Harfleet, Hilary Jack, Naomi Kashiwagi, Lisa Penny, Maeve Rendle, Cherry Tenneson, Martine Myrup, David Wilkinson and Beáta Veszely; more details below:

Twice a year Axel Lapp Projects invites and showcases the work of artist-run spaces based outside Berlin in a programme entitled INTERLUDE. For the first of this programme Axel Lapp has selected Apartment, a project and exhibition space, run from a sixth floor one bedroom council flat in central Manchester, UK, co-directed by Hilary Jack and Paul Harfleet. For INTERLUDE 1, Hilary Jack and Paul Harfleet have brought together the work of ten artists from Manchester, Budapest, London and Glasgow in a show entitled ‘Meeting Point’. The work offers an insight into the breadth of activity that Apartment has facilitated over the last three years and reflects Lapp’s own interest and commitment to this Manchester based exhibition space.

Above; visitors to the preview,

Apartment is based in a flat, and unlike many artist led spaces that operate in this way, the curators choose to present the work alongside the possessions that Paul Harfleet lives amongst. This curatorial decision enables the artwork to position itself in contrast to the objects or to hide within them, camouflaged by the everyday detritus. Each artist presented here, at Axel Lapp Projects, has exhibited at Apartment and has dealt with this reality in a variety of interesting ways.

When artwork is shown at Apartment the interior of the flat frames the work. At Axel Lapp Projects, Apartment itself is an absent participant, no longer available as a supporting framework for the presentation of the art work. Therefore the works are able to be re-seen without the context of Apartment, revealing to the curators, the complex relationships that have been formed between the artists and their practices over the three years that Apartment has existed. For the audience the various works are seen within the gallery context and with the knowledge that these relationships were forged in a domestic location; here the artists come together creating a meeting point where the work can be seen in a group show and in a totally new context.

David Gledhill

David Gledhill is a painter based in Manchester UK. Central to David Gledhill's painting is the adaptation of imagery produced through other media. Working with found photographs, he locates and magnifies formalstrategies and agendas, in order to 'de-naturalise' them. For this exhibition he has produced a multi-panel transcription from an early documentary about Berlin. The resulting 'stills' are part of a sequence filmed from a train. Gledhill has shown frequently in the UK, most recently at Phillips Gallery, Manchester and The Storey Gallery, Lancaster. David Gledhill, Film Transcriptions, 1,2,3,4, oil on canvas

Paul Harfleet

Paul Harfleet plants pansies where homophobic abuse has been experienced in the streets he entitles the location after the abuse received then posts it on his website www.thepansyproject.com. Based in Manchester and co-curator of Apartment, Harfleet has exhibited internationally, in 2006 at Conflux, New York and recently at the BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. Here the artist presents 200 posters of a pansy entitled; “Heh! Queer Boy!” The artist has named and signed each poster referencing the repeated homophobia the work marks, in inviting visitors to take a poster the work acts as a cipher enabling news of the project to spread through anecdote.

“Heh! Queer Boy!” - 200 signed posters.

Hilary Jack

Hilary Jack works across media focusing on the repair and re-use of discarded material found on city streets. In doing so she references the excesses of an economy based on built-in-obsolescence. Co-curator of Apartment she has exhibited internationally, most recently in Conflux 06, New York and at Transition Gallery, London. For ‘Meeting Point’ Hilary Jack uses Axel Lapp projects as studio, workplace and exhibition space to focus on themes of loss and separation. Throughout the duration of the exhibition Jack will create a new partner for a single, lost, black glove, found and photographed, on waste land at the site of the Berlin Wall on a previous research trip to Berlin.

‘Glove’ - found glove and knitting

Naomi Kashiwagi

Naomi Kashiwagi’s interest lies with the utilitarian and conceptual function of objects and technologies. For ‘Meeting Point’ Kashiwagi responds to the exhibition setting of Axel Lapp projects by introducing a series of paradoxical re-appropriations of archaic and obsolete equipment, such as a type writer, a barometer and hand typed index system uses references from new technology. Kashiwagi is a recent MA graduate living in Manchester.
‘Araichment’, - found objects.

Martine Myrup

Martine Myrup is a Danish artist living in Glasgow, Scotland. “It is far more illuminating to let the animal’s behaviour determine one’s words, but certainly often more difficult, as there are often no appropriate words in any human language, known to us.” From ‘The Mentality of Apes’ by Wolfgang Köhler (1925) Myrup is interested in the ideas of melancholia and nostalgia. Her work explores the frailness and brevity of human life, while balancing in between melancholy and a subtle humour, seeking to point out the preciousness of gentle gestures. Myrup is currently working on a series of animations and will be exhibiting new work at Intermedia in Glasgow in August Myrup was selected from open submission for a solo show at Apartment entitled “Domestic Disturbances” earlier this year. She has exhibited internationally with recent shows at Sidekick, Nottingham and The Market Gallery, Glasgow. Peculiar Flight; her first artist book was published in April last year

‘Robin’ - animation on laptop, and ‘Act 3’ – cut black and white photograph.

Lisa Penny

Lisa Penny works with drawing, collage and found material from factual publications such ‘Life World Library’ and National Geographic. Penny uses found images and visual information which is subverted to tell a different narrative, for ‘Meeting Point’ Penny shows a diptych collage constructed from found magazine pages of two iconic male figures. Lisa Penny is based in London and has exhibited internationally she currently has a solo show at Galerie Inges, Stubbenkammerstr. 4, 10437 Berlin

‘The Passengers’ - collaged found images

Maeve Rendle

Maeve Rendle’s practice focuses on ways in which art works come into being and take on life through the process of being created. For ‘Meeting Point’ Rendle exhibits a set of twelve photographs which have been reduced to eight by her defective Pentax camera. Rendle is based in Manchester and was recently an Artist in Residence at Apartment culminated in her first solo show earlier this year.
‘Notch’ – 6” x 4” photographs

Cherry Tenneson

Cherry Tenneson is both an artist and a trained sign maker. ‘Slider Sign” installed on a sliding door in the gallery reflects Tenneson’s preoccupation with the authority that the artist has over an audience and general public. The work consists of a black anodised aluminium frame housing a black slider text panel which moves across two sections, one green and one red. Users of the slider sign can move the black slider panel to reveal their applicable message from either one of the two sections.

'Door Slider’ - door mounted sign

Beáta Veszely

Beáta Veszely continues her exploration into the symbiotic relationship between horse and human as a paradigm for being-in-the-world. Veszely is based in Budapest and has exhibited on a wide scale internationally, most recently in solo shows at Modern Art, Oxford, UK and Galerija Balen Zagreb, Croatia. Veszely shows her video work; ‘On the Way to Heaven 2’displaying the spiritual and physical connection between horse and rider.

‘On the Way to Heaven 2’ - video projection

David Wilkinson

David Wilkinson’s work is based in the iconography of the sausage as a rediscovered archetype. Also to an extent a form of autobiography, as he is involved in producing and supplying sausages in Budapest, Hungary. Another attempt to link art with life. For ‘Meeting Point’ David presents ‘The Birth of Consciousness’ a sculptural work depicting two plaster sausages in a nest of dust made from the contents of the vacuum cleaner bag at Gagosian Gallery, London . David is based in London and Budapest and has exhibited internationally, recently at Ormeau Baths, Belfast, Northern Ireland and in solo show at The Dorottya Galleria Budapest.

‘The Birth of Consciousness’ - sculpture and found objects