Newsletter 3 from All all all 25th Feb 2022
On the occasion of the 3nd residency exhibition and its closing:
Julie Falk: No Core, January 13th - February 18th, 2023
Funding received for No Core before taxes, (distributed from year program grant):
26.886kr
(100.000kr *fee given by Gl. Strand for the year with the open call, along with paid housing expenses. Original fee has been spent partly on paying the curators, partly saved for production.)
Funding distributed in No Core:
Resident artist fee, Julie Falk 12.000kr
Collaborating artist Fee, Zahna Siham Benamor 4.500kr
Designer fee, Alexis Mark 7.000kr
Curator fee, Klara Li 6.500kr
Hello,
On Saturday last we closed down artist Julie Falk’s exhibition No Core. Julie’s project started last summer in July 2022, when she wrote to us pitching her idea for an exhibition in All all all. She had just become a mother, and two days later was diagnosed with cancer in the form of ALL - Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia. The two life changing events led then to Falk’s turn towards what was constant and still, something that continued across these moments. When we spoke about her project back then we agreed that even though her exhibition would not take place until the beginning of the new year, her residency in All in a sense then had already begun: Her work - which dealt with what that constant of being an artist now meant, while also having been diagnosed, having become a mother.
Challenging the firm idea of a curatorial strategy
This way Julie’s project from the beginning differed fundamentally from the previous two residency exhibitions we had hosted, and pointed All all all in a direction that challenged what we had thought of as essential to its format. How would a processual format look in a show like this? Could the collaboration facilitate a ‘growing’ strategy that was both meaningful to Julie’s works and the show, while being meaningful and accommodating to the life around it? And also, unlike our previous residents, she wasn’t going to spend time working in the space, this work she had already done in the months leading up to the opening, and the residency therefore relied more on the collaborative effort, continued dialogue, meetings in the space and around the city.
The two fundamental pillars when starting All all all had been 1. caring, anti-hierarchical collaboration between artworkers, and 2. its curatorial strategy to carry them out; processual exhibition formats that challenged the idea of a finished art product and forced people to slow down and come back. Julie Falk’s exhibition stood sharply finished the day we opened, clean cut and precise. A project like this represented an opportunity to contest some of the founding ideas of a space like All and the strategies it initially put in place to activate them. In order to do caring art practices the curatorial work must be flexible, and able to adapt around principle, to be thorough.
Structures as both care and conflict
The focal point of Falk’s work for the show is precisely summed up in her title No Core. In her sculptural works–which both in material and expression was very much an extension of her already defined practice–emphasis was on the constructions with which we build, contain and support life. The supportive structure was centered and laid bare in the sculptures that she had created. This meant artworks that seemed emptied, were perforated or stood as residue of a process of melting away, like in her piece Medusa’s Revenge. Here, Falk used the method ’Cire Perdue’ meaning ’lost wax’, a classic technique where wax is the element normally lost in the molding process, when creating bronze sculpture. The element of the wax can be traded with other materials that melt, and she had traded it with hair from her wigs that was transformed into a small pointy bronze weapon, hung under glass like in an ethnological museum - do not touch.
In her first video piece ever, debuting in the back room of No Core, Falk walks on top of Rigshospitalet’s helipad, in a sense conquering the building that had entered her body, putting herself literally above the structure that also held her.
No Core Growing Library
To accommodate works that investegated these themes of supportive structures in such literal ways through actually and simply being them, we wanted to find a way to have a processual format complement and support them. Throughout Falk’s process in treatment and in working, she had turned to literature of all kinds, to find kinship and recognition. She suggested that her reading list, containing names such as Susan Sontag, Hu Fang, Anne boyer, CTM and Melanie Kitti, became a growing library that was available for guests to read and get perspectives on the show. Each week she added new titles to it, each week an understanding could be expanded for the audience. Reading had been a supportive structure for Falk and it now became a supportive structure of No Core, for us who worked with her and for the people engaging with the project throughout its period. In this way the construction of support, which is essentially a way of providing care, was the core of the project. Even though the exhibition was characterized by the holes that an exposed structure necessarily reveal, the void that a lack of a core is, the rooms in All were very very much full.
Thank you to everyone who came by, read, watched and stayed with the work,
All the best,
On behalf of All all all,
Klara Li