Image: Courtesy of Christian Kosmas Mayer
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to present the 22nd iteration of Garage Exchange Vienna—Los Angeles: and yet you grow featuring work by Vienna-based artist Christian Kosmas Mayer and Los Angeles-based artist Gala Porras-Kim at the Mackey Apartments Garage Top Gallery.
There is something growing in the gallery.
Nine years ago, Christian Kosmas Mayer planted a palm tree in the courtyard of the Mackey Apartments as part of MAK Center’s Artists and Architects-in-Residence Program. The residency ended and moved on to the subsequent groups of residents, but the palm tree remained, under the care of the institution, where it remains today.
In this exhibition, Christian Kosmas Mayer, joined by Los Angeles-based artist Gala Porras-Kim, revisits this living sculpture for an in-depth exploration of the functions and roles of the art institution. Both Mayer and Porras-Kim utilize the exhibition space as a site to foster discourse and critique how art institutions exercise forms of care within collecting practices. The MAK Center is a unique context as it is a non-collecting exhibition space, but it preserves and cares for three R. M. Schindler designed properties in Los Angeles. In this sense, the exhibition spaces are the collection.
This unique relationship between exhibition space and care practice forms the basis of and yet you grow. Porras-Kim's Forecasting Signal is a site-activated sculpture that extracts ambient water from the gallery environment and filters it through a hanging burlap sheet saturated with graphite, extended from the ceiling. As the water accumulates, it drips through the material onto a panel where it makes an image. This process occurs repeatedly through the duration of the exhibition, and turns the exhibition space itself into what could be considered a process-based drawing.
In dialogue with Forecasting Signal is Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, which also utilizes the environmental conditions of the space, introducing spores from the British Museum storage onto muslin fabric, encased within an acrylic shell. Over the course of the exhibition, a mold grows from these spores and becomes increasingly visible. While the spores originate from the British Museum, an institution with a long and fraught history of collecting practices, the mold grows in the exhibition at the MAK Center’s Mackey Apartment Garage Top Gallery, raising questions about the interconnectedness of art institutions.
Along with the palm tree, Mayer brings another tree into this exhibition, a sapling he grew in 2016 from the acorn of a majestic oak tree that lives in the yard of a small family house in Los Angeles’s Koreatown. This oak, one of the renowned 'Olympic Oaks' presented to all gold medal winners at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, was planted by African American high jump champion Cornelius Johnson upon his return home. Over time, the historical significance of this tree was lost until Mayer uncovered this hidden history through his research.
Over the course of two years, Mayer worked in collaboration with the MAK Center and the California African American Museum for the preservation of this tree, resulting in its designation as a Historic Cultural Monument by the City of Los Angeles in 2022. However, despite this achievement, the destiny of the Olympic oak remains uncertain as the tree has declined in health due to neglect from a new property owner. Now, the young potted oak included in this exhibition, may soon be the solitary living ancestor to this historic legacy.
In and yet you grow, Mayer and Porras-Kim work to reposition the roles of the artist as life givers, and question the traditional role of the curator as collection caretaker safeguarding inanimate objects. Both of these works by Porras-Kim have been exhibited before in other institutions, but each retain a site specificity based on the environmental conditions in which they are shown. Complementing these pieces, Mayer’s site-specific interventions continue his investigation of institutional responsibility and break down the traditional roles of artist practice, curatorship, and architectural intervention. In the context of the palm tree, which now has become a part of the Mackey Apartments, Mayer inverts the Modern critique of museums being places where art dies, and situates the art institution as a site for continued life. In this exhibition, the MAK Center becomes a nursery—birthing, feeding, and parenting artworks with a life of their own.
ABOUT GARAGE EXCHANGE
Garage Exchange Vienna—Los Angeles seeks to foster relationships, conversations and collaborations in the arts between Los Angeles and Austria. In order to expand the cultural exchange at the core of the Artists and Architects-in-Residence program, the Austrian Federal Chancellery and the MAK Center invite Austrian and Vienna-based alumni residents to collaborate with L.A. artists and architects of their choosing at the Garage Top at the Mackey Apartments for the Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles exhibition series.
Artists
Christian kosmas mayer
Christian Kosmas Mayer (b. 1976, Sigmaringen, Germany) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. His work produces and preserves a constellation of narratives about historical remains and representations that are often on the verge of disappearing, or have already been rendered imperceptible. Mayer’s projects, which are the outcome of extensive artistic research and close collaborations with specialists across various disciplines, transform the minor, forgotten, and obsolescent into material artifacts, discursive objects, multi-media installations, and performances. Linking technology to memory and care, his practice explores the methods by which important issues can be approached in conceptually and aesthetically surprising ways: techniques of reversal, of compressing and stretching time, of looking at things from both ends at once.
He has had solo exhibitions at Vienna’s mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria ; Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria; Austrian Cultural Forum New York, USA; MAK Center, Los Angeles, USA; University Gallery of the Custody, Dresden, Germany; Zamek Culture Center, Poznan, Poland; Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, Germany; Austrian Cultural Forum Warsaw, Poland; Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, Germany; Galerie Mezzanin, Geneva, Switzerland and participated in biennales and group exhibitions such as the 26th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; Manifesta 7, Rovereto, Italy; Vienna Biennale 2019, Austria; Biennale Gherdëina 2016, Italy; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany; Marta Herford, Germany; Leopoldmuseum, Vienna, Austria; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles, USA; ZKM I Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria; Secession, Vienna, Austria; and numerous other venues.
Gala Porras-Kim
Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, Bogotá) lives and works in Los Angeles and London. Her work is about the social and political contexts that influence how intangible things, such as sounds, language and history, have been framed through the fields of linguistics, history and conservation. The work considers the way institutions shape inherited codes and forms and conversely, how objects can shape the contexts in which they are placed.
Porras-Kim received an MFA from CalArts and an MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA. She has had solo exhibitions at Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, The Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville, Kadist, Amant Foundation, Gasworks, London, and CAMSTL, and upcoming at Leeum Museum of Art and MMCA, Seoul, MCA Denver, and Carnegie Museum of Art. Her work has been included in the Whitney Biennial and Ural Industrial Biennial (2019), and Gwangju and Sao Paulo Biennales (2021) and Liverpool Biennial (2023). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019), the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-22), and currently a fellow at Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.
Related event
Thursday, October 19, 2024
6–8 pm
This exhibition series is made possible by The Austrian Federal Chancellery.
Installation images: Tag Christof.