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.

This exhibition series is made possible by The Austrian Federal Chancellery.

Installation images: Tag Christof.

Sagadin and Kiyomi Gork engage in a collaborative-method of work-creation and installation, presenting new responsive sculptural and sound works for Garage Exchange.

Sagadin produces a new series of wall-hung architectural paper works testing the spatial and symbolic relationship between two-and three-dimensional urbanism. Advertising posters are overpainted, glued and reinforced with aluminum foil. Paper is weathered and folded and hung into fixed shapes referencing elements of the city—blinds, curtains, air conditioning units, railings, rain gutters, or fountains. The shiny aluminum juxtaposed the old and weathered painted posters, mirroring the colors to amplify past visions of the future and rays of light for warmth. These text-less color fields obfuscate the poster’s informational function, drawing attention instead to recirculation, recycling, and impermanence. Small objects playfully emphasize the surrounding context.

Kiyomi Gork continues their attenuator series of soft sculptures, designed to absorb unwanted sound in a space. Previously the attenuator sculptures have taken the form of figurative and geological large scale objects. The new works take an architectural focus in the form of tall wool columns stretching from the floor to ceiling. 

The sculptures’ material properties complement a responsive sound work Kiyomi Gork fabricated on-site for the exhibition. Microphones in the Garage Top’s stairwell record noises made by the outdoor environment and visitors entering the space. The sound is then projected and echoed into the shared gallery, further activating the site and interacting with both of the artist’s sculptural works– amplified and softened at the same time. 

ABOUT GARAGE EXCHANGE

Garage Exchange 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

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (born: 1982, Long Beach, CA) has been working with the intersection of sound, sculpture and performance since 2002. She studied sound art, photography and new genres at the San Francisco Art Institute and researched the history of communication technologies, acoustics and computer music at Stanford University where she received an MFA. 

Kiyomi Gork has had solo exhibitions at François Ghebaly, New York; Empty Gallery in Hong Kong; The Lab and Queens Nails Projects in San Francisco and 356 Mission Rd in Los Angeles. She has been a part of group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, GES-VAC in Moscow, SFMOMA and Sculpture Center, New York. Kiyomi Gork has participated in residencies at Skowhegan, EMPAC, Mills College and Schloss Solitude in addition to receiving multiple grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Center for Cultural Innovation, Joan Mitchell Foundation and LACMA Art+Tech Grant. 

Performances have included multiple collaborations with Laetitia Sonami, the collective 0th and solo projects. 

Kiyomi Gork identifies as a mixed race queer fem (she/they) whose family came to the US, four generations ago from Okinawa (Ryukyu Islands), Japan and Eastern Europe. She was born and raised in Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Maruša Sagadin

Maruša Sagadin was born in 1978 in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and is based in Vienna (Austria). She studied architecture at TU Graz before transitioning to performative arts and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In 2015/2016, she participated in the ISCP Grant in New York City (USA), and in 2010, she was awarded the Schindler Grant at the MAK – Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (USA). From 2011 – 2017 she was Assistant Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, in the department for Performative Arts and Sculpture.

Her recent and upcoming exhibitions include Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, Germany), Museum of Applied Arts (Vienna, Austria), Cukrarna Galleries (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Christine König Gallery in Vienna, Vestjyllands Kunstpavillon (Videbæk, Denmark), SPACE London (London, United Kingdom), NADA (NYC, USA), Austrian Cultural Forum New York (NYC, USA, Warsaw), Syndicate (Cologne, Germany), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, Austria), Neue Galerie (Innsbruck, Austria), Museum of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Belvedere21 (Vienna, Austria), Grazer Kunstverein (Graz, Austria), and Room of Requirement/Horse & Pony Fine Arts (Berlin, Germany). Her both monographs „Maruša Sagadin - ©MMXV“ (Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Vienna), 2016 and „A Happy Hippie“ (Spector Books, Leipzig), 2021 were finalist for Schönste Bücher Österreichs, a prize for books made in Austria from any discipline.

Maruša Sagadin's work is built on the connections and collisions between sculpture, architecture, urban space, gender and language. 

Maruša Sagadins sculptures touch on playfulness, imagination, and the pop-cultural accessibility of postmodern art, while working with the motif of the body, its form, its needs, and the care it requires – both the body of the particular viewer they are concerned about (and whom they provide with seating), and the human body as the universal measure of all sculpture. The nature of Maruša Sagadin’s work is neither typical nor unusual for feminist aesthetics – it is one of its many forms. (Vit Havránek)

Maruša Sagadin roams through a pop-cultural canon of urban countercultures, feminist and queer theory and modernist architecture. The compact materiality of her sculptures might be anchored in the visual language of a macho legacy of 20th-century modernism, yet she casually juggles around with these seemingly heavyweight concepts as if they were weightless, not unlike DC Comics’ Wonder Woman. Her critical reappraisal of slacker and skater cultures in correlation to a feminist artistic identity seeks for visual representation within these urban constructs, visualizing the city as a container of architectural memory – a map formed of concrete that only fully reveals its meaning when read in direct relation to its respective communities. (Hannes Ribarits)

This exhibition series is made possible by The Austrian Federal Chancellery.

Header image: Courtesy of the artists, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Empty Gallery HK, and Maruša Sagadin Christine König Galerie, Vienna, 2022.

Photography: Gabriel Bruce, 2022.