![](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Screen-Shot-2016-07-14-at-19.24.16-833x600.png\")
Stefanie Hessler shot by Christopher Hunt | Ahaha (2016) by Priscila Fernandes<\/p>\n
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Stefanie Hessler shot by Christopher Hunt | Ahaha (2016) by Priscila Fernandes<\/p>\n
The international Art Contemporary (ARCO) fair taking place in Madrid opened its gates to the public today. With 200 galleries from 26 countries exhibiting, the fair has grown to be one of the most important events in the contemporary art world.\u00a0While the fair’s general programme features works from established galleries representing well-known names such as Anish Kapoor<\/a>, Louise Bourgeois<\/a> und Jenny Holzer<\/a>, its curated section grants young and innovative galleries from all over the world a chance to enter the public eye. There’s\u00a0Argentina Plataforma \/ ARCO,<\/em>\u00a0which will feature 12 carefully selected galleries from this year’s host country Argentina,\u00a0Opening<\/em>, a platform for up-and-coming galleries that have\u00a0have been around for less than 8 years, and\u00a0Di\u00e1logos,\u00a0<\/em>a format in which each gallery presents works from two artists created in dialogue with one another.\u00a0Amidst all of this is Stefanie Hessler. The curator of this year’s Opening<\/em> section runs an exhibition space herself and is a firm believer in interdisciplinary, collaboration and network theory. We asked her some questions about her curatorial approach, her opinions on the Latin-American art scene and the driving forces behind her work. I am extremely curious and constantly learning from different contexts<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Using the example of ARCO, tell us a bit about your working process and your approach to putting together an exhibition.<\/strong> \nI strongly believe in collaborations and that the result becomes better when you work with others. In the end, no matter if you curate exhibitions, work with galleries or edit books, you always depend on others and their contributions. For ARCO, Juan and I worked closely together, shared notes, made suggestions for artists and galleries, discussed on Skype, met up\u2026 When putting together an exhibition, I like to delve deeply into the subject matter, work very closely with the artists, and think through how the project will be perceived by the audience and how it could contribute to an ongoing artistic or other discourse. The great thing about making exhibitions is that you work spatially. In the end that\u2019s what exhibitions do. They propose investigations within specific spatial-temporal relations that the audience navigates when visiting a show. I love it when different layers meet, considering cognitive approaches as much as sensorial experiences. The presentations at ARCO cover both spheres and offer many different points of entry. International events like ARCO are great because they put a focus on a region, and bring many people to the city at the same time<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Having lived in Brazil and Chile, you have a strong connection to South America and its art scene, and with Argentina named as ARCO\u2019s host country for this year and many Latin-American galleries exhibiting at the fair, you and Juan are going to bring the South American and the European art systems closer together. Are there any differences between them and if so, what can they learn from each other?<\/strong> \nTwo of my favourite things in the world are to travel and to connect people and ideas from different places. You learn so much and understand what unites the art scenes across the globe. In the end, we are all in it for the same reason: art. That connects immensely! Themes that are urgent in one place may not seem as relevant in another. But the more you dig, the more confluences you discover. For instance, many artists from Chile left the country in the 1970s and ’80s for exile in Sweden. One of them is Juan Castillo of the Colectivo Acciones de Arte<\/em> (C.A.D.A.) who is still active in Stockholm today and bridges the two contexts. Mail art is another beautiful example: Beginning with Fluxus in the mid-twentieth century, artists sent letters with drawings and poems to each other around the world, often because they could not travel themselves but wanted to find ways for their oppositional messages to reach others. Some projects are a bit too wacky for most galleries or museums… for us, Andquestionmark<\/em> is like a factory for experiments and ideas that cannot be tried anywhere else<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Together with Carsten H\u00f6ller, you run Andquestionmark<\/em>, an exhibition space that regularly and exclusively organises one-night performances and events such as The First Swedish Normcore Convention. On your website, you describe Andquestionmark<\/em> as “not so many objects, not so much kunsthalle\u201d. How is the reception of a performative work of art and maybe even the piece itself altered by taking place in an informal surrounding rather than within a gallery or a museum? You completed your bachelor\u2019s degree at Zeppelin University, which is known for its interdisciplinary approach, and in your work, you often address complex scientific topics such as global warming and system theory. What can be gained by breaking down the borders between science and arts?<\/strong> \nThe convergence between science and arts is only interesting to me if a real dialogue takes place, and if the two co-affect each other rather than exist next to each other. Tom\u00e1s Saraceno is an artist who masters the convergence between disciplines. He works closely with researchers from various fields, from arachnologists to musicians to balloon engineers, and his projects don\u2019t illustrate science or scientific curiosa but actually create something new. With his Aerocene<\/em> project, he and his web of collaborators try to devise flying entities using no fossil fuels but only solar energy \u2013 it is an artwork and a tool for change at the same time. Systems theory is interesting to me because it allows to think the relations between different spheres that are often presented as being separate. These separations don\u2019t need to be that way, nor are they as strong as we may think. A Q&A with ARCO’s new interdisciplinary curator, Stefanie Hessler<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47119,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139],"tags":[7951,38,1095,13,7952,7953,7954],"class_list":["post-46466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","tag-arco-madrid","tag-art","tag-art-fair","tag-interview","tag-madrid","tag-qa","tag-stefanie-hessler"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\n
\nTogether with Juan Canela, you have invited 18 young contemporary art galleries to exhibit at the Opening<\/em> section of ARCO. Which criteria did you take into consideration during the selection process?<\/strong> \nFor this year\u2019s edition of Opening, Juan and I invited artists and galleries whose work we follow closely and strongly feel we want to share with the audience! Even though a fair by definition gathers a wide variety of different practices, we show booths of one, maximum two artists per gallery, and the presentations are focused on one specific project or a particular aspect of their work. Some recurring themes are performative practices or works resulting from a mode of action, for example Priscila Fernandes\u2019s films and paintings investigating labour and inactivity at Cinnamon gallery. Other artists explore painting in the expanded realm, like Mel O\u2019Callaghan\u2019s acrylic on glass works at Allen, or conceptually, like Lucie Fontaine\u2019s piece from her The Guardian<\/em> series at Sabot. And others look at the social relations in installations and sculptural spaces, like Eleanor Wright at Drop City. What\u2019s most important to us is the quality of the works and the consistency of the galleries\u2019 programmes. Another criterion is to have focused presentations that allow exploring the artists\u2019 practices in depth. And hopefully there will be discovery and surprise for visitors. I think the idiosyncratic sound and performance collective von Calhau! <\/em>at Pedro Alfacinha is a good candidate!<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/001-gozolandia-900x506.jpg\")
Priscila Fernandes – Cuckoo-Land, 2016 (video still)<\/p>\n
\nAside from Opening, Juan and I are co-curating the exhibition \u201cSomething halfway between the typical atmosphere I breathe and the tip of my reality\u201d at Tabacalera on the occasion of ARCO. The exhibition takes place inside the bathrooms of the former tobacco factory that has been turned into a post-Fordist cultural machine. The space really defined the theme of the show, which investigates the factory as a workspace, the bathroom as environment where the disciplining of bodies begins, normalised beauty ideals and standardised repetitive modes of production, and how bodies are related, moulded and controlled. The artists\u2019 projects for the show react to these questions and open up new ones, while connecting closely with the space.<\/p>\n![\"Radu](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Screen-Shot-2017-02-02-at-16.21.14-copy-777x600.png\")
Radu Comsa – Transcription (dada rhapsody on gray), 2014 | Eleanor Wright – ‘Ro\u00dfstra\u00dfe 68 (learning from Ella Steigelman)’, 2016<\/p>\n
\nInternational events like ARCO are great in that respect because they put a focus on a region, and bring many people to the city at the same time. Occasions like these allow for meeting new people, inciting discussions and generating new ideas and collaborations. Latin America moves extremely fast, and I am always fascinated to discover new artists and learn about themes that are relevant to them. Many of the Latin American institutions are relatively young and flexible. They are run with great passion \u2013 I am thinking for example of the non-profit initiative FLORA in Bogot\u00e1 that offers residencies and has developed an alternative model of education, or the newly founded Bienal Internacional de Arte Contempor\u00e1neo de Am\u00e9rica del Sur that takes place in several Latin American cities, from S\u00e3o Paulo to Lima to Buenos Aires and C\u00f3rdoba. I am extremely curious and constantly learning from different contexts, both about art and about different organisational models.<\/p>\n![\"Lucie](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/lucie-fontaine-1-638x600.jpg\")
Lucie Fontaine – The Guardian, 2011<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong> \nAndquestionmark<\/em> is not your typical art space\u00a0\u2013\u00a0we don\u2019t do exhibitions and we don\u2019t really show art objects either. The one-night events we organise take place at Carsten\u2019s studio, and they are centred around what we refer to as \u201cunsaturated\u201d artworks. They require the presence of the audience to be complete, in order to work or not work. In a sense, we commission artists to create situations that do not exist without the public. This doesn\u2019t mean that the works are necessarily relational, but all of them are open and open-ended. For instance, for her work 4X4<\/em>, deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim used super low frequencies that were inaudible but made the building and bodies shake, creating a third space between hearing and non-hearing. Artist duo Gideonsson\/Londr\u00e9 created a 26-hour performance during which visitors could experiment with sensations we sometimes feel during the early morning hours when our pulse and body functions are reduced. People could drop in at any time and were asked to stay for two hours. They were asked to lie down on the floor and were being pulled through the space while heavy wet dough was placed on their extremities, accompanied by the ticking sound of metronomes. Some of these projects are a bit too wacky for most galleries or museums and the success of them depends on informal interactions between artists, organisers and audience. For us, Andquestionmark<\/em> is like a factory for experiments and ideas that cannot be tried anywhere else, and the results are always influenced by our visitors and different to what we thought they would be.
\n <\/p>\n![\"Super](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/9012107194101537465493134176125085054684339859n-900x600.jpg\")
Super Gibraltar II, 2015<\/p>\n
\nI think we need to understand the connection between things, even if they seem disparate and disconnected at first. Nothing exists in a vacuum and what happens in marine biology can influence art, just as much as what happens in Argentina will have some reverberation in Spain, and vice versa. At times these convergences are felt more than at others, and I think by making them more palpable, we can learn to see, feel and do things differently. This is also my aspiration for art.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"