9 June 2018–31 August 2021 / Casco HQ
Exhibition with Falke Pisano & Riet Wijnen, new office design
Office Gallery is open from Monday to Friday, 12:00 to 18:00, and by appointment.
Statement One: Exchange Value includes work by Dutch artists and collaborators Falke Pisano and Riet Wijnen who were also commissioned to redesign the space. The exhibition brings together their newly designed office furniture with works from their respective serial projects The Value in Mathematics (2015–16) and Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction (2015–). The two bodies of work center the conversational mode to scrutinize modernity’s cultural dominance. Vis-à-vis conversation, mathematics, and abstraction, the series trouble the universalizing epistemology of the Western progressive lens.
In the ten chapters of The Value in Mathematics (2015–16) Pisano works through the cultural constructs of mathematics. It is a practice that is commonly regarded as a neutral universality, a foundational language of science and technology, and in the West as a value-free discipline. Led by discussions from people in the field of ethnomathematics (the study of the relationship between math and culture) the project unveils the different applications and methods of the discipline speaking to its subjectivity, plurality, and limited access, especially when it comes to determining its use and value. The Value in Mathematics’ initial exhibition at REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles facilitated a conversation between the artist, an anthropologist, and a mathematics education researcher and is represented in The Value in Mathematics (Language).
From a larger series of Pisano’s, Learning in Proximity (2018), is a new small sculpture iteration developed for and as a gift to Casco. It is composed of wood, paint, and string and its dimensions are based on body parts. The work’s placement brings attention to how built environments affect people’s thinking, perceiving, and relating to each other. Learning in Proximity is dedicated to the wisdom of women in the artist’s life.
Riet Wijnen’s Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction (2015–) is an ongoing cycle of works that encompass conversations and focus on terms related to abstraction. Wijnen antagonizes the canonised art movement and suspends temporality by pairing significant figures and subjects in unlikely fictional conversations. Table Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction: Category Characters maps the connection between the project’s different conversation partners, thereby working as a diagram or score for Wijnen’s subjective categorical process.
The publication Conversation Four: First Person Moving is the result of staged dialogue between two people and an artists movement. The three “protagonists” are German philosopher Thomas Metzinger, who uses neuroscience to examine the self, consciousness, and the relationship between mind and body in recent decades; Italian-American militant-feminist Silvia Federici, who is well-known for her role in the 1970s Wages for Housework movement; and the artist group Abstraction-Création, which was formed in 1931. The conversation is a formal choreography through which movement in the broadest sense of the word is examined: from movements in society and history, to movements in the brain.
The exhibition of Pisano and Wijnen’s works in the Office Gallery serves as a signifier to the long-term dialogue Casco is having with the artists about the redesign of our office environment. The collaborative tables are the first iteration and edition of that conversation, and will feature as gallery furniture during Pisano’s 2019 solo show at Ellen de Bruijne Projects.
Works on view:
Falke Pisano
The Value in Mathematics (Language), 2015
Video, 20 min.
Falke Pisano
Learning in Proximity, 2018
Wood, string, paint
21 x 52 x 29 cm. panel
New edition for Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons
€3800 ex. 6% vat
Riet Wijnen
Table Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction: Category Characters, 2018
Wood, metal, paint
58 × 69 × 114 cm.
€7000 ex. 6% vat
Riet Wijnen
Conversation Four: First Person Moving, 2016
Publication, 24 pages
42 × 29.7 cm.
€5
Riet Wijnen
Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction: Thought One, 2015–17
Photograms, wood
23.8 × 38 × 3,7 cm each.
€2100 ex. 6% vat
Falke Pisano and Riet Wijnen
Tables, 2018
Wood, hpl-plate, metal, paint
82 x 67 × 100 cm.
€3500 ex. 6% vat; €22,000 for the set of seven
The works are available for purchase by paying the allocated price, of which part of the profit will go towards supporting Casco/the Casco Ecosystem. Monetary/other donations are also welcome.
