DThe creation of fantasy prepares to become practical as commercial art. Literature submits to montage in the feuilleton. All these products are on the point of entering the market as commodities. But they linger on the threshold. From this epoch derive the arcades and interieurs, the exhibition halls and panoramas. They are residues of a dream world. .[1]
For a while, Antonia Breme has been working and thinking about the elements of showcase design over sculptural aspects and abstracting them through new forms. Supporting units in showcases that are often invisible to the viewers; some hanging apparatus, heightenings on eye level, or visual plays with the aid of light, are reinterpreted by the artist through the fundamentals of sculpture. In doing so, she always enacts her way of keeping it natural, and ordinary and the materials at a minimum.
.[1] Benjamin, W. (1969). Paris: Capital of the nineteenth century. Perspecta, 165-172.
Through the exhibition, Bremeoffers an unusual experience activating the infinitive, fluid, sensory, and emotional tendencies that the commercial world attempts to reach but usually falls short of due to its own defined and rigid boundaries. Her choice of bringing in an advertisement display to promote a product or a service, is a wink to the space itself,the İttihad ve Sigortalar Passageway, where all the commercial shops are located and their various promotion strategies for consumption are implemented. Thus, on the one side of Yaya the barber shop calls to its clients: “Do not make it longer, come over!”, while on the other side shops’ piles stacks of clothes, wearying eyes with excessive and even dysfunctional arrangements, Breme applies her method to attract Yaya’s own customers to its showcase. Contrary to what has been displayed on showcases so far, here she uses neither slogans nor attractive images on the advertisement display but rather smooth, playful surfaces on a loop inviting the gaze of passersby to the windows. The undefined surface brings one’s mind to the question of what sort of product is being displayed. The display panel that formerly was only a detail exhibiting a commodity, a carrier unit standing in the background, now stands prominent, surrounded by its electric cables, its motor that makes the movement visible, the gaps between the moving papers apparent. Here, one can not overlook the pure but incisive attempt by Breme who is passionate about the details and eager to show them to the visitors as well.
The glimmering papers placed inside the panel are in fact papers for wrapping which wind on their own although their physical limitations incline them to a certain form. These are the same wrapping papers that catch Breme’s eye at the corner of her studio building that, as she found out upon inquiry, used to be a chocolate factory in Berlin before her settling there, and that the papers were most likely chocolate wrappings. Metallic on one side and golden on the other, the glittering papers bestow to showcase the allure it requires, while bridging the physicality of the panel and the conceptuality of the exhibition.
The work _Untitled_(hooked)_* consists of two separate pieces, one standing alone as a whole and the other a reduced version hung on the wall. The first one implements a cyclical movement, while the other flows down for a while before rewinding and spiraling upwards into the machine. Both motions emphasize a soothing, sensual, and plain attitude in the face of the fast and aggressive nature of consumption. Through the nuances of those movements, the artist once again draws attention to the details. The wrapping paper creates different piles each time, enabling us to watch diverse sculptures at each glance. Thus, Breme detaches us from the traditional approach to sculpture and introduces a new, eternal flow. While reinterpreting the desire for consumption through daily and ordinary action, she manifests her special brand of soothing calmness, as if she were whispering to us to “slow down a little”.
Behind her appeals to the senses and desires and all her criticisms** of the marketing world’s roughness and ruthless attitude, Breme’s main concern appears to be the sculpture itself. To her, such aspects as material, texture, mass or shadow in sculpture are impossible to disregard. Stripping an industrial product of its rough and strong material appearance and transforming it until a delicate and elegant entity emerges is a prominent feature in her works. Chains, rings, and thick aluminum pieces that seem impossible to bend; move away from their nature by the artist’s hands and almost magically become curled, hanging, and floating pieces. Yet, a visuality emerges that is distant from the roughness of the material and where simplicity but aesthetics come to the forefront, so much so that sculptures begin to have some qualities nearing the definition of decorative. The preoccupation with presenting the showcase along with the items it contains to appeal to the eye, demarcates and deepens the fine line of the sculptures that hover between design and art, turning the works site-specific.
Although Breme seems to obscure many of the elements pointed out above by disguising them within detail, she nonetheless reveals the conceptual, technical, and formal elements in the exhibition in all their transparency. Just as when the fluid material is unwrapped and the liquid is spilled over revealing all the secrets it has kept until that moment, so Breme unwraps poetically the objective, functional, and intellectual fluidity embedded in the packaging papers for all of us to see.
T. Melis Golar
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*I consider the selection of the words “untitled” and “hooked” along with all their connotations as a continuation of the artists’ incisive approach.
**With the aid of Chat Gpt I translated the text on the exhibition poster, resorting to the persistent enticement of marketing and thus turning it into a stereotypical advertisement language.
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Courtery of the artist: Antonia Breme and Viable, Fluidity Unwrapped, Viable, Yaya, İstanbul, 2023
With the support of Goethe Institute
Photo credit: Zeynep Fırat
Exhibition poster design: Eline Tsvetkova
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