Andrea Geyer: On this day
Hales is proud to present Andrea Geyer: On this day. This is Geyer’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.
Geyer’s critically-oriented work ranges across media, incorporating text, photography, painting, sculpture, video, and performance. It explores the complex politics of lived time, its absence and presence in the context of specific social and political situations, cultural institutions, and historical events. From her early investigations into notions of citizenship, and the role of photography in the colonization of North America, to more recent research into the structures that render women’s central contributions to modernism invisible, Geyer’s work continuously seeks to create spaces of critical, collective reflection on the politics of histories that allow for the formation of new memories of that which is marginalized or obscured. Uniting all of Geyer’s ambitious work is the belief that “art should be a site to offer the possibility of re-orientation(s) towards a current moment.”
The exhibition at Hales New York premiers two of Geyer’s most recent works: a multi-media installation, Feeding the Ghost and a series of silkscreens titled On this day.
A complex installation of furniture, slide projections and voice recordings, Feeding the Ghost continues Geyer’s investigation into the inextricable links between art and politics, past and present. Specifically, it reflects on the integral relations of the personal and the political within an artist’s work. Based on a live performance lecture Geyer gave at the Dia Art Foundation in September 2018, Feeding the Ghost takes its lead from a work by the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman titled A Family in Brussels. Akerman, who was born in Brussels in 1950 to Polish Holocaust survivors, is renowned for her significant contributions to avant-garde art and feminist filmmaking and was influential to Geyer as a young artist. A Family in Brussels is a one hour reading by Akerman that Geyer experienced live at the Dia Art Foundation in October 2001. Observing the life of a woman during the time her husband is dying - it is Akerman’s mother’s story that inevitably involves the artist - the piece shares similarities with her seminal work Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Feeding the Ghost observes Akerman doing the reading, in which she works through her feeling of the loss of her father and weaves the experience of her family into the larger histories of erasures in Europe. Geyer, in turn, addresses her own experience of loss: on the one hand that of elder artists, but also that of a post 9/11 New York. She combines Akerman’s story with her own viewing of it, weaving together their respective autobiographical details. Other sources that Geyer uses are Akerman’s writings, proposals and interviews. The resulting text evokes a striking intimacy, constantly shifting subject position from Geyer to Akerman, layering the predecessor over the present artist—and in turn reviving the often-repressed histories addressed in both their work. In Feeding the Ghost, presence and absence exist side by side in the liminal space between the personal and the political, between past and present. “You cannot un-invite the ghosts,” Geyer reminds us, and proposes art as a site where they can co-exist.
On this day, developed during a Rauschenberg Residency in the summer of 2018, offers a different form of storytelling in which both artist and viewers are called out as protagonists. Responding directly to the current political climate, this work materializes how (violent) histories resonate in our contemporary bodies. Driven by Geyer’s upbringing in Germany, this work reflects on the role of the “bystander,” informed by history in the current volatile and precarious times. Geyer layers news imagery and text in silver iridescent and white paints on rag paper. The resulting works – large and flag-like - curve towards the viewer in a gentle, yet persistent fashion, proposing an inevitable proximity of the receding yet present image to a viewing body. Geyer asks us to envision multiple moments in time and a viewer’s relationship to it. To by-stand, to view art, to witness, are all put forward as related actions, as possibly parallel, as lastingly impactful.
Across both bodies of work, the patterns that emerge are haunting: “Repetition bloodshed, repetition silence.” By centering unsung histories in their perpetuation and pointing to processes of active concealment in the present, Geyer urges viewers to look and to listen again, reminding us of our own agency and capacity to break through any questionable silence.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Andrea Geyer (b. 1971, Freiburg, Germany) studied photography at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld and fine art at the Braunschweig University of Art, both in Germany. She is a 2000 graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Geyer lives and works in New York.
Geyer’s work has been exhibited widely at institutions including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California; The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Artists Space and White Columns, in New York City; Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Houston, Texas; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, A Space Gallery, Toronto, Canada; KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Red Cat and LACE, in Los Angeles; Tate Modern and Serpentine Gallery, London; Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, Switzerland; Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden; Generali Foundation and Secession, Vienna; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand; the Turin Biennale; the São Paulo Biennial; and dOCUMENTA (12), Kassel, Germany. International public collections with Geyer’s work include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, Neue Galerie, MHK, Kassel, the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg and the Federal Collection of Germany.
“Andrea Geyer: Dance In A Future With All Present” is an illustrated monograph forthcoming in 2019. Published by Dancing Foxes Press and the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, it is edited by Alhena Katsof with Karen Kelly and Barbara Schroeder. Text contributions are by Matthew Abrams, Andrianna Campbell, Juli Carson, Barbara Clausen, Lynne Cooke, Dean Daderko, Saisha Grayson, Sharon Hayes, Megan Heuer, Danielle Jackson, Kristan Kennedy, Alhena Katsof, Thomas J. Lax, Ralph Lemon, André Lepecki, Renate Lorenz, Josiah McElheny, Fred Moten, Kristin Poor, Yvonne Rainer, Jeannine Tang, and Soyoung Yoon.
