Paratext #78 with The Symbiotic Approach / Carmen Westermeier y Julia Hainz, Vesna Hetzel, Paula Vilageliu, Mariam Kvirikashvili and Manbo Key (Yang Teng Chi)

This name, Paratext, hides a monthly program of performances by artists in residence at Hangar as well as artists on exchange grants. They present, in different formats, specific projects or parts of their work. The sessions are always open to the public with the purpose of enabling interaction with the artists themselves.

The next Paratext session will take place on Wednesday, October 16th, at 7 p.m. in Hangar’s Sala Ricson.

Projects will be presented by:

The Symbiotic Approach / Carmen Westermeier y Julia Hainz (Baden Württemberg – Catalunya Exchange Grant)
The Symbiotic Approach, which is the artist duo Julia Hainz and Carmen Westermeier, started working together already in 2014. At a very early stage, they started working with different media to challenge social questions with a feminist approach. Over the last 10 years, they have refined their practice in multiple exhibitions and performances, residencies, and through continuous joint research.

As transdisciplinary artists, their practice covers a wide range of media, including photography, performance art, video, sound, and virtual reality. They often work with site-specific installations to create an immersive experience. Their installations can be read as temporary societies in which visitors can act as performers, and in terms of content, they primarily investigate the interweaving of different social, cultural, and political discourses and how these interact to shape our understanding of identity, physicality, and society. They are particularly interested in how these discourses are shaped in the present and history and how it can be reinterpreted and deconstructed. Through their artistic research, they are able to integrate different perspectives and forms of knowledge and gain new insights that are relevant not only to their own work but also to society as a whole.

Vesna Hetzel (Baden Württemberg – Catalunya Exchange Grant)
Vesna Hetzel is an artist, art mediator and somatic movement facilitator. Her practice is inspired by the intersection of these fields, intertwining the politics and poetics of the body, space and narration.

The artistic inquiries manifest in various forms and mediums, including audio-visual work / video, performance, drawing, writing and sculpture. Participatory ways of sharing artistic research and methodologies are often integral to the artistic practice.

Her work explores the experience of liminality and the potential of the in-between from a feminist perspective. It oscillates between form and process, lived experience and the medium, immediacy and reflection, intimacy and the nation-state, inside and outside, virtuality and flesh, proximity, connection and rejection.
It seeks the potential for holding complexity, the emergence of overlaps, movements between binaries, meeting points, and the dissolution of territorialities. This encompasses both the geographical and the somatic body, critiquing the territorial violence and axes of power that are intruding both.

Manbo Key (Yang Teng Chi) (Institutional residence in collaboration with the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office and the Taiwanese Ministry of Culture)
Yang Teng Chi, known professionally as Manbo Key, was born into a large Hakka family in the Dongshi district of Taichung. Despite growing up in a small conservative town, his maverick father helped shape a relatively free and liberal environment, one where his intergenerational upbringing enabled him to develop a sense of individual agency at a young age. This background has naturally influenced Yang’s practice and research, with thematic explorations that draw parallels to the ever-changing world.

His practice is driven by an examination of desire and a constant investigation of the self. In seeking to expand on understandings of identity and by engaging with contemporary discourse, Yang hopes to create spaces that allow for the coexistence of the body and soul.

As a queer artist, Yang actively challenges the boundaries of social dichotomies and contributes to the evolving discussions on sex and gender in Asia.

Paula Vilageliu (Baden Württemberg – Catalunya Exchange Grant)
Based in Barcelona, she situates her artistic practice in the field of sculpture and the visual arts, where the relationship between body, material and space is the basic equation from which she constructs her proposals. This has to do with the gesture and action of the body during the artistic process, the different materials with which it relates and where it is located. In the same way, she understands sculpture as an expanded form in which different types of formalisation coexist, converging from action, photography, video and writing.

Her recent projects are marked by an interest in exploring issues of an intimate and vulnerable nature. There is a movement in the work that goes from inside to outside; that is, what happens in the intimacy of the process, behind closed doors, with an emphasis on the spontaneous, opens up to the outside, translating these recondite and everyday concerns into gestures that configure sculptures or material and audiovisual records.

Mariam Kvirikashvili (Baden Württemberg – Catalunya Exchange Grant)
Mariam Kvirikashvili (Tbilisi, 1993) is a visual artist who divides her time between Frankfurt and Barcelona. She holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Universitat de Barcelona and a master’s degree from the Städelschule in Frankfurt. She recently completed a Master’s degree in Contemporary Philosophy at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Her artistic practice, which includes various media such as sculpture, installation and video, establishes a dialogue with the multiple layers of contemporary reality from a situated experience, addressing issues such as the migratory experience and the politics of care. She pays particular attention to the relationship of the body to notions of belonging, foreignness and sense of place, critically and carefully examining how bodies interact with the immediate space they inhabit and the complex dynamics of hospitality and hostility that are generated.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including recent exhibitions at Cas Batumi, Nassauischer Kunstverein in Wiesbaden, Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, Opelvillen in Rüsselsheim, Lo Mon Contemporary in Val d’Echo and Von und Von Galerie in Nuremberg.

Entrada libre.

Imagen: Vesna Hetzel