IMPORT EXPORT & Galerie Mehdi Chouakri are excited to present ‘Holding Tight’ - a collaborative exhibition between Lena Marie Emrich and Estate of Charlotte Posenenske - in Warsaw.
‘Holding Tight’ is the fruit of Emrich’s vigorous study of the Berlin-based archive and her homage to the late Minimalist Posenenske.
Presented alongside the iconic cardboard DW series and red metal B series by Posenenske, Emrich’s sculptures of engraved airplane windows and tram handles are simultaneously occurrences of sculpture and poetry – activating space with tender gestures and emotive language. While following Posenenske's principles, Emrich gives Minimalism a Millennial lift.
‘Holding Tight’ opens on Friday 11 April and will be on view until 29 May.
„Airspaces” by Julia Marchand
on Lena Marie Emrich & Charlotte Posenenske
Lena Marie Emrich has nurtured a longstanding relationship with the work of Charlotte Posenenske. She first dove into her work while working at the artist’s archive at the Mehdi Chouakri gallery [1]. She entered in a secret, one-sided correspondence with her, even writing “Dear Charlotte” in one of the displayed, yet semi-concealed, documents of her current exhibition Holding Tight, presented in conjunction with Posenenske’s estate, at Import Export in Warsaw. It is barely visible, but I rapidly spotted it—it reminded me of the conversations I had with contemporary artists ushering a dialogue with Vincent van Gogh, one of whom entitled his solo exhibition “Mon cher.” It struck a nerve [3]. With Emrich, it prompted a fruitful debate over self-proclaimed archival practices. Emrich has a thorough understanding of all of Posenenske’s papers, some of which I could myself access for the purpose of this text .
A note dated 29.11.1966 contains a few unintended pieces of information, such as the letter “o” being punctured due to a faulty typewriter. The pierced “o” lets through the light and opens it to another spatial dimension. That’s all it took for me to plunge back into my memories of Nancy Holt’s sun tunnel photo studies of 1975, and more broadly, to the relationship of minimalism with sun, light, and wind. The holes in Holt’s photographs were punctured in the concrete, using the light emanating from the sun and moon to cast projections of star pattern constellations along the tunnel interiors. By doing so, the motion of the stars was duplicated on the surface of the object. Other examples that came to my mind come from the practice of Michael Asher. In one of his 1970s exhibitions, Asher removed the partition wall separating the gallery from the office in order to redistribute the rules of the lighting whilst also revealing to the public the “working body” (i.e. those of the gallerist and assistants). In another infamous installation of his, the artist orchestrated the repositioning of all the museum radiators into a single ensemble that greeted visitors in the foyer—suggesting that only hot water was granted free access through the museum. Posenenske is known to be one of the few Europeans who adopted the principles of American Minimalism—such as seriality and delegation of production and installation—but very little is said about her relationship to immaterial elements such as air and light [3].
By bringing her works in a close dialogue with Posensenske, Lena Marie Emrich puts forward this immaterial dimension and more precisely the airspace. In the very same letter from 29.11.1966, Posensenske mentions the “Lichtwirkungen, schnelles Fahren, sich verengende, sich vor - oder zurückwölbende Strassen - und Lufträume” (the effects of light, fast driving, narrowing roads and air spaces that curve forwards or backwards) triggered by the problem of space in painting, reminiscent of impressions of “our technical environment” (the narrowing roads, the air spaces). When asked about what “technical environment” means for her, Emrich highlighted generational factors, which, undoubtedly, would lead to approaching the technical differently. In our exchanges, Emrich commented on Posensenske “digesting the impact of industrialization and the impact on the collective.” On the contrary, Emrich draws upon a certain form of individualism that was, at the same time, re-evaluated with the advent of the Object-Oriented Ontology [4]. No wonder, then, that Eos Series conveys the function of both a mirror and a window that opens to “a conscious experience from the observer to mirror aspects of society.” In sum, it departs from the individual(ism) to reflect upon a materiality that takes us within the speculative realm of a “technical environment” that comprises elements such as Plexiglas, sun protection Foil, Oracal 8300, as well as the particles of everyone’s body and traces of consciousness. Recalling airplane tray tables, Back Seat Series – LOT Edition follows the same logic of speculative thinking applied here more straightforwardly to the realm of airspace.
Born in 1991, Lena Marie Emrich was entering into her early twenties when the “Generation Easyjet” advertising campaign was launched. Low-cost travel became an attitude and a place for daydreaming while clinging to the possibility of catastrophe. From that doubled-sided experience (the pilgrim-day-dreaming moment as well as the action of grasping an item in case of emergency), Lena Marie created a journey which goes from Back Seat Series – Lot Edition to a photograph, in which the artist staged her friend Bianca Lee Vasquez clutching at her ankles as an act of choreography-driven-by-catastrophe. Between these works lies an iconic Charlotte Posenenske work—a cardboard DW series (1967) that acts as a transmission belt between Lena’s different works, the exhibition rooms themselves and, perhaps, the air itself.
Posenenske brings horizontality in a space traversed by verticality and the possibility of falling: the plane, but also our bodies when we take the bus, another “technical environment” updated by Emrich. Holding Tight Series demonstrates how bus handle straps hold us in semi-suspension, therefore redefining the choreography of our bodies. We are no longer in airspace, yet something shivers. The strap is made of recycled materials. It is about transformation as much as it is about narration. For Emrich, the beauty of creating artworks using waste material from a family company lies in elevating the artwork to grant it a lifelong purpose as an activator of stories. I associated it with the new ethics behind our vision of airspace: a “technical environment” that becomes the site of ecological concerns. As a matter of fact, the Easyjet Generation (the Millennials, such as Emrich or myself) has given rise to the #nextGen Easyjet (the Gen Z). Ecological concerns are being bounced back from space to earth, from earth to space, through the new consciousness of a generation that, perhaps, does not want to hold tight anymore.
Julia Marchand is a curator, researcher and broadcaster based in Venice, working on illegal astronomy as well as on adolescences with her curatorial platform Extramentale. She recently curated the Georgian Pavilion of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. She was a curator at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles from 2015 to 2023.
1. Lena Marie Emrich was assisting at the gallery between 2019 and 2021 before setting off on her own journey as a rather “full- time artist,” a decision about which much can be discussed in relation to the world of the “inside job” (means of subsistence) versus the artistic practice, following the legacy of artists such as John Baldessari (with his “Six Colorful Inside Jobs, 1977”) or Christopher D’Arcangelo with Peter Nadin, in 1978.
2. Urs Fisher’s exhibition at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles in 2017 was also hinting at the correspondence between Vincent van Gogh and his peers and brothers. The title “Mon cher” was not translated in the English version and highlighted a sense of proximity. In the case of Lena Marie Emrich, that intimate address was partly concealed since this “intimate imaginary dialogue” wasn’t done to be mediated to a large audience. Unluckily for her, I spotted it.
3. Charlotte Posensenske allows the person installing the works is to hang them autonomously, without any given instructions – as in the case of Series B Reliefs (1967) currently in the show at Import Export.
4. After Graham Harman, author of the term Object-Oriented-Ontology and the 2016 book „Speculative Realism”, summarising the 2007 workshop held at Goldsmiths, University of London.
