Mathias Lempart is a Polish-German artist and graphic designer born in 1990 in Ozimek, Poland. He received his Diplom in Kommunikationsdesign from the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Germany, with minors in Art Research and Product Design. He has conducted seminars, workshops, and artist talks at various universities and institutions in Germany, France, and the UK. Together with his design partner Sascia Reibel, he co-founded Shortnotice Studio, Berlin in 2020. With a focus on contemporary art and visual culture, Shortnotice Studio celebrates a speculative and open-ended approach to graphic design, creating a space for collaboration with professionals from other fields of thought. Their list of clients ranges from NIKE to Kunsthalle Basel. Mathias has exhibited internationally in non-commercial contemporary art spaces such as Künstlerhaus Bremen, Germany, the Museum of Humor and Satire Gabrovo, Bulgaria and Nida Art Colony, Lithuania. Currently Mathias is exhibiting in the group show The Art of The Palliative Turn at the Bauhaus Museum Dessau. He is included in the 100 Best Posters from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in 2019 and 2021. In 2020 he was a German Design Award Newcomer nominee. This year, together with Sascia Reibel, Mathias has been awarded the Peter Jacobi Foundation stipend, which includes an exhibition and a one-term teaching position at the Pforzheim University, Germany.
The Art of The Palliative Turn, Intermezzo
30 Mar 2023 – 7 Jan 2024
Bauhaus Museum Dessau
Black Box
In 2020, the artist Olav Westphalen (born 1963) initiated the Association for the Palliative Turn, a loosely connected group of international artists. Since then, its members have focused on the artistic potentials of dealing with death, palliation, and leave-taking in a range of media and event formats that make use of humour, generosity, delight, and reflection. In the practice of life, the human body is inevitably awarded the role of a medium. The various limitations that bodies impose on people are as much a part of this as all singular sensory perceptions and experiences.
—Bauhaus Museum Dessau, 2023
The Palliative Turn
Die Palliative Wende – wie würden Sie gern Abschied nehmen?
19. August – 7. Oktober 2021
„Es ist einige Zeit her, dass sich Künstler widerspruchslos mit Schneidern und Maurern vergleichen ließen. Damals zählte die Medizin noch zu den praktischen Künsten und umgekehrt galten Malerei und Bildhauerei als respektables Handwerk mit handfestem Nutzen. Heute, ein halbes Jahrtausend später, lässt Kunst sich lieber als Gegenbild zu den Zielen und Zwängen der Gesellschaft feiern. In einer Welt voller Abhängigkeiten ist sie eine Fata Morgana der Freiheit und kümmert sich nicht um Regeln. Niemand verlangt ihr einen anderen praktischen Nutzen ab, als unser Bewusstsein und unsere Aufmerksamkeit zu schärfen. Doch was, wenn die Wirtschafts- und Ökosysteme zu kollabieren beginnen und ein Rekorde brechender Kunstbetrieb so zukunftsweisend erscheint wie ein Dieselmotor?“
Künstler*innen: Simon Blanck, Kasia Fudakowski, Anna Gohmert, Annemarie Goldschmidt, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Lars-Erik Hjertström Lappalainen, Per Hüttner, Alex Kwartler, Karin Kytökangas, Keith Larson, Mathias Lempart, Dafna Maimon, Nala Tessloff, Carima Neusser, Nina Katchadourian, Michael Norton, Rattelschneck, John-Luke Roberts, Xavier Robles de Medina, Lydia Roeder, Carola Uehlken, Olav Westphalen
—Brandenburgischer Kunstverein, Potsdam, Germany, 2021
Bad Readings features manifestations of affective and bodily modes of experiencing an exhibition. They emerged in a workshop, convened by Diane Hillebrand, that took place at the Badischer Kunstverein in August of 2020. Dissenting from standardized and normalizing patterns of reception, the Bad Reading Group approached the exhibition If It’s For The People, It Needs To Be Beautiful, She Said by the artist Jeremiah Day, on view at the Kunstverein during the first half of the year.
A stuttering, a far-fetched interpretation, the sensation of boredom while reading a canonical text–“At one time or another, everyone has been a bad reader,” writes Tyler Bradway. The exhibition project adapts his affect–and queer-theoretical approach based on literary theory and understands exhibits, the bodies of visitors, building, rooms, texts, and graphics as components of a curatorial ‘text’. Using this concept, exhibitions can be interrogated with regard to their legibility, and new, illegitimate modes of reading are tried out. It is a question of reinterpreting these transgressions as insights, of generating apposite misunderstandings and performative omissions, and of manifesting these spatially, conceptually, and bodily, thereby propelling the grammar of curatorial practice into a productive crisis.
Using (sceno)graphic, artistic, and performative resources, Bad Readings engages in a multi-voiced critique and citational repetition of the exhibition by Jeremiah Day, the exhibited artistic praxis, and its curatorial mediation. The most diverse experiences of reading the exhibition are expressed in letters and artworks composed by the Bad Reading Group during their perusal of the exhibition. On the one hand, the letters thematize structural problems of exhibition-making, while on the other addressing concrete details of the experienced exhibition. The letter form encompasses personal experiences, preempts critical distance, and may be irreverent, intimate, or aggressive.
With contributions by Jandra Böttger, Elio J Carranza, Severin Geißler, Diane Hillebrand, Bruno Jacoby, Cécile Kobel, Mathias Lempart, Arootin Mirzakhani, Moritz Nebenführ, Esther Poppe, Johanna Schäfer, Tatjana Stürmer, Yana Tsegay.
—Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2020
Are we able to represent human feelings? How might we communicate them and ultimately, turn them into a visual experience? In regards to the representation and transmission of subjective perception, popular conceptions of an ostensibly objective design practice quickly reach their limit. The immense interest in the topic, as in the transgression of prevailing norms of representation, brings to mind the current hype for immersive production, where an immediate experience is created by means of physical and psychological immersion. Drawing on these unconventional strategies, Mathias Lempart’s Proto Migraine Buildings overcome the limits of an objective design practice. He uses the example of migraine in order to test the ways one might visualize pain. The exhibition is the final step in an extensive research and production process that spanned an entire year. His research cleverly incorporates his findings and expeditions around the archives and museum displays of the Wellcome Collection, London (UK), Teylers Museum, Haarlem (NL) and the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles (USA). The resulting “buildings” read as characters, or strange anthropomorphic structures that have been animated through audio and video, and in the case of Severin even provokes the viewer to activate the sound sensitive red traffic light, so that many viewers could be seen clapping and even screaming before the work. These animated bodies are rooted in real accounts, of five patients who suffer from severe migraine. There is an apparent subversion of exhibition design and museum codes, and symbols—while Lempart might appear to be celebrating the provisional or naïve form, he seems particularly astute at activating the complex data he obtained from his migraine interviewees and his own experience.
—Anna Schanowski, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2018
Mathias Lempart is a Polish-German artist and graphic designer born in 1990 in Ozimek, Poland. He received his Diplom in Kommunikationsdesign from the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Germany, with minors in Art Research and Product Design. He has conducted seminars, workshops, and artist talks at various universities and institutions in Germany, France, and the UK. Together with his design partner Sascia Reibel, he co-founded Shortnotice Studio, Berlin in 2020. With a focus on contemporary art and visual culture, Shortnotice Studio celebrates a speculative and open-ended approach to graphic design, creating a space for collaboration with professionals from other fields of thought. Their list of clients ranges from NIKE to Kunsthalle Basel. Mathias has exhibited internationally in non-commercial contemporary art spaces such as Künstlerhaus Bremen, Germany, the Museum of Humor and Satire Gabrovo, Bulgaria and Nida Art Colony, Lithuania. Currently Mathias is exhibiting in the group show The Art of The Palliative Turn at the Bauhaus Museum Dessau. He is included in the 100 Best Posters from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in 2019 and 2021. In 2020 he was a German Design Award Newcomer nominee. This year, together with Sascia Reibel, Mathias has been awarded the Peter Jacobi Foundation stipend, which includes an exhibition and a one-term teaching position at the Pforzheim University, Germany.
The Art of The Palliative Turn, Intermezzo
30 Mar 2023 – 7 Jan 2024
Bauhaus Museum Dessau
Black Box
In 2020, the artist Olav Westphalen (born 1963) initiated the Association for the Palliative Turn, a loosely connected group of international artists. Since then, its members have focused on the artistic potentials of dealing with death, palliation, and leave-taking in a range of media and event formats that make use of humour, generosity, delight, and reflection. In the practice of life, the human body is inevitably awarded the role of a medium. The various limitations that bodies impose on people are as much a part of this as all singular sensory perceptions and experiences.
—Bauhaus Museum Dessau, 2023
The Palliative Turn
Die Palliative Wende – wie würden Sie gern Abschied nehmen?
19. August – 7. Oktober 2021
„Es ist einige Zeit her, dass sich Künstler widerspruchslos mit Schneidern und Maurern vergleichen ließen. Damals zählte die Medizin noch zu den praktischen Künsten und umgekehrt galten Malerei und Bildhauerei als respektables Handwerk mit handfestem Nutzen. Heute, ein halbes Jahrtausend später, lässt Kunst sich lieber als Gegenbild zu den Zielen und Zwängen der Gesellschaft feiern. In einer Welt voller Abhängigkeiten ist sie eine Fata Morgana der Freiheit und kümmert sich nicht um Regeln. Niemand verlangt ihr einen anderen praktischen Nutzen ab, als unser Bewusstsein und unsere Aufmerksamkeit zu schärfen. Doch was, wenn die Wirtschafts- und Ökosysteme zu kollabieren beginnen und ein Rekorde brechender Kunstbetrieb so zukunftsweisend erscheint wie ein Dieselmotor?“
Künstler*innen: Simon Blanck, Kasia Fudakowski, Anna Gohmert, Annemarie Goldschmidt, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Lars-Erik Hjertström Lappalainen, Per Hüttner, Alex Kwartler, Karin Kytökangas, Keith Larson, Mathias Lempart, Dafna Maimon, Nala Tessloff, Carima Neusser, Nina Katchadourian, Michael Norton, Rattelschneck, John-Luke Roberts, Xavier Robles de Medina, Lydia Roeder, Carola Uehlken, Olav Westphalen
—Brandenburgischer Kunstverein, Potsdam, Germany, 2021
Bad Readings features manifestations of affective and bodily modes of experiencing an exhibition. They emerged in a workshop, convened by Diane Hillebrand, that took place at the Badischer Kunstverein in August of 2020. Dissenting from standardized and normalizing patterns of reception, the Bad Reading Group approached the exhibition If It’s For The People, It Needs To Be Beautiful, She Said by the artist Jeremiah Day, on view at the Kunstverein during the first half of the year.
A stuttering, a far-fetched interpretation, the sensation of boredom while reading a canonical text–“At one time or another, everyone has been a bad reader,” writes Tyler Bradway. The exhibition project adapts his affect–and queer-theoretical approach based on literary theory and understands exhibits, the bodies of visitors, building, rooms, texts, and graphics as components of a curatorial ‘text’. Using this concept, exhibitions can be interrogated with regard to their legibility, and new, illegitimate modes of reading are tried out. It is a question of reinterpreting these transgressions as insights, of generating apposite misunderstandings and performative omissions, and of manifesting these spatially, conceptually, and bodily, thereby propelling the grammar of curatorial practice into a productive crisis.
Using (sceno)graphic, artistic, and performative resources, Bad Readings engages in a multi-voiced critique and citational repetition of the exhibition by Jeremiah Day, the exhibited artistic praxis, and its curatorial mediation. The most diverse experiences of reading the exhibition are expressed in letters and artworks composed by the Bad Reading Group during their perusal of the exhibition. On the one hand, the letters thematize structural problems of exhibition-making, while on the other addressing concrete details of the experienced exhibition. The letter form encompasses personal experiences, preempts critical distance, and may be irreverent, intimate, or aggressive.
With contributions by Jandra Böttger, Elio J Carranza, Severin Geißler, Diane Hillebrand, Bruno Jacoby, Cécile Kobel, Mathias Lempart, Arootin Mirzakhani, Moritz Nebenführ, Esther Poppe, Johanna Schäfer, Tatjana Stürmer, Yana Tsegay.
—Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2020
Are we able to represent human feelings? How might we communicate them and ultimately, turn them into a visual experience? In regards to the representation and transmission of subjective perception, popular conceptions of an ostensibly objective design practice quickly reach their limit. The immense interest in the topic, as in the transgression of prevailing norms of representation, brings to mind the current hype for immersive production, where an immediate experience is created by means of physical and psychological immersion. Drawing on these unconventional strategies, Mathias Lempart’s Proto Migraine Buildings overcome the limits of an objective design practice. He uses the example of migraine in order to test the ways one might visualize pain. The exhibition is the final step in an extensive research and production process that spanned an entire year. His research cleverly incorporates his findings and expeditions around the archives and museum displays of the Wellcome Collection, London (UK), Teylers Museum, Haarlem (NL) and the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles (USA). The resulting “buildings” read as characters, or strange anthropomorphic structures that have been animated through audio and video, and in the case of Severin even provokes the viewer to activate the sound sensitive red traffic light, so that many viewers could be seen clapping and even screaming before the work. These animated bodies are rooted in real accounts, of five patients who suffer from severe migraine. There is an apparent subversion of exhibition design and museum codes, and symbols—while Lempart might appear to be celebrating the provisional or naïve form, he seems particularly astute at activating the complex data he obtained from his migraine interviewees and his own experience.
—Anna Schanowski, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2018