Stuff for Every World/Dream, Baby, Dream
So look: the beauty in the most foul, the foulness in the most beautiful, and say: Hello.
People chase or hug their shadows. The mountains have mouths and eyes, the beach can also see. A fly leads you silently through Eva Pedroza's website like a transient breeze and rests where your gaze falls. Bitter faces on strange bodies act in ways you don't understand. The loving look of a woman falls on a face of mud ... is it really a woman? Nothing is what it appears, but the appearance catches your gaze, you cannot look away. To answer your questions, you will have to immerse yourself in worlds that only raise more questions - unless you acquire the ability to let contradictions exist, perhaps even to enjoy them. It takes courage, because your gaze will also inevitably fall on the darkest corners of existence, which society demands we displace into the deepest corners of our consciousness - sacrificing the richness of a diversity that, even beyond existing social structures, illuminates further worlds and world perceptions. Somewhere in all of us there must be a longing to accept all things without bias or prejudice, just as they stand to each other. This longing - paired with the reflexive urge for explanation and order - is, I suspect, the inherently contradictory reason why our gaze remains fixed on Eva Pedroza's worlds.
Can there be universally valid laws that contradict each other and yet exist simultaneously in peace and beauty? Why does the abysmally repulsive emanate a promising attraction - and why does the infinitely attractive repel us so abysmally?
A kind of paralysis of dualistic worldviews, of entrenched thought patterns, is triggered by Pedroza's imaginative, dreamlike images. Running macabrely, and at the same time lovingly, as the red thread throughout her works -which one looks for like a dog looking for a stick-, it turns them into an invitation to think differently, to feel differently, to question conventions, as Pedroza herself says in an interview with Beate Scheder.
In the animated video installations Vogelmenschen (2016) and Welten der Welt (2017), Eva Pedroza also unhinges dualistic thought structures. She creates a place detached from space and time, located somewhere beyond good and evil, beyond ugly and beautiful. It’s as if you have landed in the mysterious Red Room in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, like the lead investigator Special Agent Cooper. Pedroza’s world is both creepy and promising, irrational and, on a deeper level, so much more understandable than anything explicable. Human heads made of modelling clay are transformed into birds and reverted back again, by loops running forwards and backwards. Landscapes and living beings melt and emerge anew, like the phoenix from the ashes, from their own liquid. An animated plasticine bird whispers the words taken from my play Welt der Taumler (2015): Pssssst, ich hab Stoff für alle Welten der Welt, in welche willst du? (Pssssst, I have stuff for every world of this world, which one do you choose?) and eventually starts the soundtrack of it’s own transformation: Dream, Baby, Dream ... it sings, while it, like everything around it, liquifies within seconds.
In the animated video installation Wortgeschwader (2016) Pedroza plays the same game with space, time and language. From an interview by Julian Spaan and Daniel Sigge with Harry Hass, the founder of the Berlin bar Ex'n'Pop, where artists such as Nick Cave or Einstürzende Neubauten held court, Pedroza takes fragments of conversations and loops and repeats them in such a way that they become ambiguous or abstracted from their original meaning, revealing themselves as pure word shells: Politics! Politics! Politics! Politics! ... Politics is a difficult thing. We rarely talked about politics back then. Most of us were actually artists. Many are dead.
What is language? And to what extent do we create and control through it our own and thus a collective perception of place and time?
The questions raised by Pedroza's works through their grotesque world drawing and atmosphere make them highly political on a subtle level. They depict possibilities which some part of each of us long for, in a society that compulsively has to standardize everything - the body, the material, the soul. Worlds that are neither pure nor dirty, but both at the same time and therefore beyond both. Eva Pedroza's works exist in a realm where good and evil become irrelevant, they capture a state that simply is what it is, beyond judgement - and in this they are one thing above all: liberating.
Fanny Sorgo, 2020
Translation by Aisling Marnane
For her solo exhibition at Hilbertraum, Eva Pedroza is presenting 10 works from her new eponymously-titled series, Black hole, as well as watercolour paintings from her ongoing animation project Tako Tsubo—a collaboration with author Fanny Sorgo which started in 2017.
The Black hole works comprise a series of 10 ink drawings on paper, and one large-scale digital print. Dramatizing zoomed-in, intimate encounters, an interweaving of darkness and light reveals bodies engaged in sex as much as mutual strangulation. Pedroza’s handling of positive and negative space creates a sense of movement. These bodies are spilling past an event horizon—toward a singularity bereft of pain, where an intimate connection between living beings is nevertheless possible.
The paradoxes implied by singularity are intuitively recast by these ambiguous forms. The figures depicted intertwine, dissolve, and find their own autonomous rhythm at the cusp of drops of black ink. Pedroza’s chosen medium points back to the presence of the artist, whose subconscious and intuition filters into these swirling bodies.
Tako Tsubos also reflects on our instinctual need for darkness. These watercolor on paper works, with their striking color schemes and narrative qualities, became used as frames for a stop-motion animation video made in collaboration with Fanny Sorgo. Several scenes depict Ham, the protagonist of the series, holding his own heart, which he cuts out to lessen the burden of emotions. Despite undergoing this surgery intentionally, he finds himself frequenting a dark forest where a hole delineates where his heart once was. The mingling of stillness and vacuum-like tranquility that Ham seeks out corresponds to the fate of Pedroza’s ink figures, silently pushing past the limits of the known universe.
In both series, Pedroza deals with Nothingness not in a negative sense, but as a quiet place which is essential for growth: on every occasion when the state of a thing is altered, then the abyss of Nothingness is spanned and made visible for a mystic instant, for nothing can change without making contact with that region of absolute being which the oriental mystics call Nothingness (...) [1]. In this way, the works on view, whether colorful or black and white, encourage viewers to look past the limits of their perception toward what might exist outside our human condition. Past love, nobility, and magnanimity, but also beyond hostility, deception, and anxiety.
Text: Lotta Pick / Jeffrey Grunthaner, 2021
[1] J.E. Cirlot, Dictionary of Symbols, 2001, p. 229-230
Flora und Fauna
Sidsel Ladegaard und Eva Pedroza
Die Künstlerinnen Sidsel Ladegaard und Eva Pedroza gestalten in der Ausstellung “Flora und Fauna” einen wunderlichen Mikrokosmos, der sich in seiner Zusammensetzung zwischen Ordnung und unkontrollierten Zuständen bewegt. In diesem Universum verschränken sich glasierte Keramikskulpturen, aus unterschiedlich künstlerischen Ansätzen, sowohl inhaltlich als auch gestalterisch.
Die Skulpturen verkörpern die Verwandten ‘Flora und Fauna’, die sich dialogisch über ihre eigene Gegenständlichkeit austauschen. Sie erinnern sich an ihre Geburt aus Erde, Feuer, Luft und Wasser und diskutieren inwiefern sich alles im Fluss befindet. Das Verhalten der Glasur auf den Keramiken ist für die beiden Künstlerinnen eine zentrale inhaltliche und formale Untersuchung. Dabei wird die Bewegung der Flüssigkeit und ihr Erstarren in einem bestimmten Moment auf den Skulpturen erforscht. Es stellen sich Fragen wie: Ist eine Flüssigkeit immer noch in Bewegung auch wenn sie bereits fest ist? Können Bewegungen festgehalten werden? Wie kann dieser Prozess kontrolliert werden? Welche Rolle spielt dabei der Zufall?
Sidsel Ladegaards Arbeiten bewegen sich in einem skulptural, installativem Feld, das sich mit Alltagsgegenständen beschäftigt. Wirken die ausgestellten Objekte auf den ersten Blick sehr vertraut, erscheinen sie bei näherer Betrachtung allerdings fremd und unwirklich. Sie werden aus ihrem eigentlichen Kontext genommen und in Beziehung gesetzt, nicht nur zu anderen Dingen sondern auch in Bezug auf die Betrachter:innen. Inszeniert wird eine strenge Ordnung die sowohl Raum nimmt, als auch gibt und ein soziales Umfeld kreiert, in dem die Objekte miteinander korrespondieren.
Gegensätze schließen sich in Eva Pedrozas Arbeiten nicht per se aus, sondern die Reibung beider Zustände ist der Ausgangspunkt ihrer künstlerischen Praxis. ‘Weiche Wände’, ‘bunte Schatten’ oder ‚zerfaserte Linien’ fügen sich zu einer Gestalt wieder zusammen. Ein Spiel mit dem Unbekannten, bei dem Beginn und Ausgang meist unklar bleiben. Denkt man gerade ein lachendes Gesicht klar zu erkennen, ist es im nächsten Augenblick zu einer hässlichen Fratze verzogen. Die Arbeiten Pedrozas bewegen sich mäandernd zwischen den unterschiedlichen Polen und fangen einen ephemeren Zustand ein, der einfach nur ist.
Die Arbeiten der Künstlerinnen kommen augenscheinlich aus zwei unterschiedlichen Richtungen, teilen aber gemeinsame formale Aspekte die in dieser Ausstellung eine spannungsvolle Einheit eingehen. Material wird ausgetestet und an die Grenzen der Belastbarkeit gebracht. Sidsel Ladegaard und Eva Pedroza erforschen in diesem Kontext, in wie fern Kontrolle sowohl abgeben als auch wieder gewonnen werden kann.
Text: Ulrike Riebel, 2022
Stuff for Every World/Dream, Baby, Dream
So look: the beauty in the most foul, the foulness in the most beautiful, and say: Hello.
People chase or hug their shadows. The mountains have mouths and eyes, the beach can also see. A fly leads you silently through Eva Pedroza's website like a transient breeze and rests where your gaze falls. Bitter faces on strange bodies act in ways you don't understand. The loving look of a woman falls on a face of mud ... is it really a woman? Nothing is what it appears, but the appearance catches your gaze, you cannot look away. To answer your questions, you will have to immerse yourself in worlds that only raise more questions - unless you acquire the ability to let contradictions exist, perhaps even to enjoy them. It takes courage, because your gaze will also inevitably fall on the darkest corners of existence, which society demands we displace into the deepest corners of our consciousness - sacrificing the richness of a diversity that, even beyond existing social structures, illuminates further worlds and world perceptions. Somewhere in all of us there must be a longing to accept all things without bias or prejudice, just as they stand to each other. This longing - paired with the reflexive urge for explanation and order - is, I suspect, the inherently contradictory reason why our gaze remains fixed on Eva Pedroza's worlds.
Can there be universally valid laws that contradict each other and yet exist simultaneously in peace and beauty? Why does the abysmally repulsive emanate a promising attraction - and why does the infinitely attractive repel us so abysmally?
A kind of paralysis of dualistic worldviews, of entrenched thought patterns, is triggered by Pedroza's imaginative, dreamlike images. Running macabrely, and at the same time lovingly, as the red thread throughout her works -which one looks for like a dog looking for a stick-, it turns them into an invitation to think differently, to feel differently, to question conventions, as Pedroza herself says in an interview with Beate Scheder.
In the animated video installations Vogelmenschen (2016) and Welten der Welt (2017), Eva Pedroza also unhinges dualistic thought structures. She creates a place detached from space and time, located somewhere beyond good and evil, beyond ugly and beautiful. It’s as if you have landed in the mysterious Red Room in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, like the lead investigator Special Agent Cooper. Pedroza’s world is both creepy and promising, irrational and, on a deeper level, so much more understandable than anything explicable. Human heads made of modelling clay are transformed into birds and reverted back again, by loops running forwards and backwards. Landscapes and living beings melt and emerge anew, like the phoenix from the ashes, from their own liquid. An animated plasticine bird whispers the words taken from my play Welt der Taumler (2015): Pssssst, ich hab Stoff für alle Welten der Welt, in welche willst du? (Pssssst, I have stuff for every world of this world, which one do you choose?) and eventually starts the soundtrack of it’s own transformation: Dream, Baby, Dream ... it sings, while it, like everything around it, liquifies within seconds.
In the animated video installation Wortgeschwader (2016) Pedroza plays the same game with space, time and language. From an interview by Julian Spaan and Daniel Sigge with Harry Hass, the founder of the Berlin bar Ex'n'Pop, where artists such as Nick Cave or Einstürzende Neubauten held court, Pedroza takes fragments of conversations and loops and repeats them in such a way that they become ambiguous or abstracted from their original meaning, revealing themselves as pure word shells: Politics! Politics! Politics! Politics! ... Politics is a difficult thing. We rarely talked about politics back then. Most of us were actually artists. Many are dead.
What is language? And to what extent do we create and control through it our own and thus a collective perception of place and time?
The questions raised by Pedroza's works through their grotesque world drawing and atmosphere make them highly political on a subtle level. They depict possibilities which some part of each of us long for, in a society that compulsively has to standardize everything - the body, the material, the soul. Worlds that are neither pure nor dirty, but both at the same time and therefore beyond both. Eva Pedroza's works exist in a realm where good and evil become irrelevant, they capture a state that simply is what it is, beyond judgement - and in this they are one thing above all: liberating.
Fanny Sorgo, 2020
Translation by Aisling Marnane
For her solo exhibition at Hilbertraum, Eva Pedroza is presenting 10 works from her new eponymously-titled series, Black Hole, as well as watercolour paintings from her ongoing animation project Tako Tsubo—a collaboration with author Fanny Sorgo which started in 2017.
The Black Hole works comprise a series of 10 ink drawings on paper, and one large-scale digital print. Dramatizing zoomed-in, intimate encounters, an interweaving of darkness and light reveals bodies engaged in sex as much as mutual strangulation. Pedroza’s handling of positive and negative space creates a sense of movement. These bodies are spilling past an event horizon—toward a singularity bereft of pain, where an intimate connection between living beings is nevertheless possible.
The paradoxes implied by singularity are intuitively recast by these ambiguous forms. The figures depicted intertwine, dissolve, and find their own autonomous rhythm at the cusp of drops of black ink. Pedroza’s chosen medium points back to the presence of the artist, whose subconscious and intuition filters into these swirling bodies.
Tako Tsubos also reflects on our instinctual need for darkness. These watercolor on paper works, with their striking color schemes and narrative qualities, became used as frames for a stop-motion animation video made in collaboration with Fanny Sorgo. Several scenes depict Ham, the protagonist of the series, holding his own heart, which he cuts out to lessen the burden of emotions. Despite undergoing this surgery intentionally, he finds himself frequenting a dark forest where a hole delineates where his heart once was. The mingling of stillness and vacuum-like tranquility that Ham seeks out corresponds to the fate of Pedroza’s ink figures, silently pushing past the limits of the known universe.
In both series, Pedroza deals with Nothingness not in a negative sense, but as a quiet place which is essential for growth: “on every occasion when the state of a thing is altered, then the abyss of Nothingness is spanned and made visible for a mystic instant, for nothing can change without making contact with that region of absolute being which the oriental mystics call Nothingness (...)”[1]. In this way, the works on view, whether colorful or black and white, encourage viewers to look past the limits of their perception toward what might exist outside our human condition. Past love, nobility, and magnanimity, but also beyond hostility, deception, and anxiety.
Text: Lotta Pick / Jeffrey Grunthaner, 2021
[1] J.E. Cirlot, Dictionary of Symbols, 2001, p. 229-230
Flora und Fauna
Sidsel Ladegaard und Eva Pedroza
Die Künstlerinnen Sidsel Ladegaard und Eva Pedroza gestalten in der Ausstellung “Flora und Fauna” einen wunderlichen Mikrokosmos, der sich in seiner Zusammensetzung zwischen Ordnung und unkontrollierten Zuständen bewegt. In diesem Universum verschränken sich glasierte Keramikskulpturen, aus unterschiedlich künstlerischen Ansätzen, sowohl inhaltlich als auch gestalterisch.
Die Skulpturen verkörpern die Verwandten ‘Flora und Fauna’, die sich dialogisch über ihre eigene Gegenständlichkeit austauschen. Sie erinnern sich an ihre Geburt aus Erde, Feuer, Luft und Wasser und diskutieren inwiefern sich alles im Fluss befindet. Das Verhalten der Glasur auf den Keramiken ist für die beiden Künstlerinnen eine zentrale inhaltliche und formale Untersuchung. Dabei wird die Bewegung der Flüssigkeit und ihr Erstarren in einem bestimmten Moment auf den Skulpturen erforscht. Es stellen sich Fragen wie: Ist eine Flüssigkeit immer noch in Bewegung auch wenn sie bereits fest ist? Können Bewegungen festgehalten werden? Wie kann dieser Prozess kontrolliert werden? Welche Rolle spielt dabei der Zufall?
Sidsel Ladegaards Arbeiten bewegen sich in einem skulptural, installativem Feld, das sich mit Alltagsgegenständen beschäftigt. Wirken die ausgestellten Objekte auf den ersten Blick sehr vertraut, erscheinen sie bei näherer Betrachtung allerdings fremd und unwirklich. Sie werden aus ihrem eigentlichen Kontext genommen und in Beziehung gesetzt, nicht nur zu anderen Dingen sondern auch in Bezug auf die Betrachter:innen. Inszeniert wird eine strenge Ordnung die sowohl Raum nimmt, als auch gibt und ein soziales Umfeld kreiert, in dem die Objekte miteinander korrespondieren.
Gegensätze schließen sich in Eva Pedrozas Arbeiten nicht per se aus, sondern die Reibung beider Zustände ist der Ausgangspunkt ihrer künstlerischen Praxis. ‘Weiche Wände’, ‘bunte Schatten’ oder ‚zerfaserte Linien’ fügen sich zu einer Gestalt wieder zusammen. Ein Spiel mit dem Unbekannten, bei dem Beginn und Ausgang meist unklar bleiben. Denkt man gerade ein lachendes Gesicht klar zu erkennen, ist es im nächsten Augenblick zu einer hässlichen Fratze verzogen. Die Arbeiten Pedrozas bewegen sich mäandernd zwischen den unterschiedlichen Polen und fangen einen ephemeren Zustand ein, der einfach nur ist.
Die Arbeiten der Künstlerinnen kommen augenscheinlich aus zwei unterschiedlichen Richtungen, teilen aber gemeinsame formale Aspekte die in dieser Ausstellung eine spannungsvolle Einheit eingehen. Material wird ausgetestet und an die Grenzen der Belastbarkeit gebracht. Sidsel Ladegaard und Eva Pedroza erforschen in diesem Kontext, in wie fern Kontrolle sowohl abgeben als auch wieder gewonnen werden kann.
Text: Ulrike Riebel, 2022