What is artistic material? And how do we encounter it?
Matter means three different things to us: Substance, soil, issue.
Our practices combine different disciplines such as live sound, installation, performance
and sculpture.
The exhibition Chatty Matter is a reunion of three artists (Elena Greta Falcini, Francisca Markus and Jo De Hulsters) at Hundred Years Gallery in London.
We plan to exhibit material in process as material to be processed, investigated, shared and argued for through a chat with the exhibition visitors. We are curious to start conversations with the audience via our artistic materials triggering and guiding them. The installation of the exhibition is an improvisation of its own happening while we are gathering our matter with the audience. Therefore we want to involve and be involved in the actual space, and make thoughts visible.
Following the principles of improvisation and experimentation, we want to work with the incomplete. The incomplete as an invitation to the audience to follow the process and maybe even to create new paths for the work.
The incomplete and raw material, deliberately chosen for this occasion out of our pool of artistic materials we usually work with, proposes an eye to eye relationship with the audience, inviting for taking place and part of it. The playful and experimental approach of improvisation challenges to act on a never visited cosmos.
Chatty Matter celebrates the moment and the unplanned encounter rather than handicraft or technique. It explores what potential artistic material has when discovered and brought about in direct conversation with the artist.
We need no knowledge, only intuition for the material and the sharing.
– This concept was collectively written by Elena Greta Falcini, Francisca Markus, Franziska Windolf and Jo De Hulsters –
Artists:
Elena Greta Falcini (*1986, DE)
Elena Greta Falcini studied sculpture at the Hochschule für bildende Künste, HFBK Hamburg, with professors Pia Stadtbäumer, Martin Boyce and Ceal Floyer, as well as at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna.
In her sculptural practice, she proceeds transformatively in alchemical processes and has made it her task to invent the supposed realities of a material herself in her search for them.
Since 2015, she has exhibited her work at numerous national and international institutions, including Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, Künstlerhaus Sootbörn, Hamburg, Last Frontier NYC in New York City, Vienna Art Week, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, and Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin.
Francisca Markus (*1995, Münster, DE)
The works of Francisca Markus deal with everyday situations that reveal an invisible, perhaps inner world. Collected moments and situations become material, the Issue, and are placed in new contexts, experiences and corporealities. The multi-media works with sound, object, performance, text and photography, shape a poetic attempt to grasp something that might otherwise go unnoticed.
She shows her work internationally, and graduated in 2020 with a BfA from the Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg within which she also studied at Wimbledon College of Art in 2019. Currently she is finishing her MfA, and studies therefor temporarily in Oslo, Academy of Fine Art.
Jo De Hulsters (*1991, Sint Truiden, BE)
Jo De Hulsters is a Belgian double bassist, alto saxophonist and improviser currently living in Hamburg. Self-taught, he sees no limitations or boundaries in his approach to the instrument and is always looking for new sounds, new ways of playing and pushing things further and harder, quieter and louder.
Jo works with Francisca Markus (GER), Teru Koike (JAP), Edward Jason Gibbs (USA), Emily Shapiro (UK/CAN), Elisa Nessler (GER), among others, and since 2020 at Hundred Years Gallery, London.
Since arriving in Hamburg, he has been very active performing outdoors, exploring new spaces, acoustics and recitals, and is currently working on an album of solo pieces recorded at various venues in Hamburg, on both alto saxophone and double bass. Jo has been part of the Lonely Impulse Collective, London since 2021.
