SKIN IN THE GAME
Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Rosemarie Trockel, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Andrea Zittel

At age five, Joëlle Tuerlinckx tossed balls of mud against a house and watched them slide down its clean white surface, leaving traces that dried in the sun. She continued to experiment with spots and stains, and then, while preparing one of her first public exhibitions at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, she made a blotch on the wall. The spot, which she elected not to paint over, went on to become a signifier in her practice, a constant provocation, and deconstruction of the canon. For Otobong Nkanga, all key elements in her work can be traced back to Fattening Room (1999), a performance, installation, and digital photograph that reconfigures the traditions of female body sculpting from her homeland in southern Nigeria and links them to vernacular architecture. With her early meat works made from knitted wool, Ruth Buchanan, from Aotearoa New Zealand, consciously references Rosemarie Trockel, whose own contribution to the exhibition includes her first knitted paintings (1984–85), early drawings and book covers (1978–88), and Prototype for a Chicken House (1993). Documentary material from Andrea Zittel’s personal archive illustrates the artist’s initial experiments in breeding birds as an expression of modernist design that led her to produce self-contained living units for humans. Collier Schorr juxtaposes photographic collages from her first book, Jens F. (1991/2005), with recent assemblages from Akerman Ballet (2023), a new work in which she dances the scenes of Je, tu, il, elle, Chantal Akerman’s breakthrough film from 1974. All of these works are prototypes, situated midway between the precision of a blueprint and the symbolism of poetry.

A unifying thread running through the exhibition is the ability of these early prototype works to remain alive for the artist, to multiply and shape-shift into endless versions of an original. Schorr traces her past photographs in pencil, an act of transcription that renews her emotive and visual relationship to the original model. Tuerlinckx presents generations of images, such as the Paleolithic Hand, an iconic archaeological diagram that she stretches and deforms using a photocopier. Zittel’s letters, photographs, and drawings shows the gradual design process from cages for bantam breeding to forms of human domestic furniture. And Ruth Buchanan’s text-works range from essays written for no one, to beginnings of scripts for performances, audio, and video works. Highly generative, these prototypes blur the divide between original and documentation, artwork and archive.

The exhibition also speaks of the presence—and absence—of emblematic positions that led the way for women artists between the 1970s and 1990s. In Work-Titles (1978–88), Trockel evokes her ambivalence toward the art context of the time with headings like Theoriephobie, 1983, Collectors Voice, 1985, Master-Pieces and copies (My way), 1987, and Vanishing Ideals, 1988. Buchanan expresses her admiration and kinship with artists from Aotearoa New Zealand, such as Jacqueline Fraser, and et al. Nkanga’s journey takes her from art studies in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, to the Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she enters the studios of Jean-Jacques Lebel, Giuseppe Penone, and Jean-Luc Vilmouth. Her figureheads include Rebecca Horn, Sokari Douglas Camp, and the late feminist writer bell hooks. Tuerlinckx, in turn, references to Carl Andre with a new floor piece made for SKIN IN THE GAME. In addition, Nkanga and Tuerlinckx produce their first collaborative work on site at KW specially for this exhibition.

SKIN IN THE GAME fuses the environment of the exhibition with the studio, and offers a modus-operandi for future exhibitions and further prototypes. The spatial choreography is a collaboration between the curator and Joëlle Tuerlinckx. Throughout her practice as an artist, Tuerlinckx’s central question has been how to translocate the privacy of her studio, with its freedom of unresolved composition, into the hermetic framework of the gallery. In response, she configures spatial situations, cutting sections out of walls, working with natural and artificial lighting, and building arrangements following her system of the Magnetic Studio Wall. From the curatorial side, the concept of SKIN IN THE GAME is conveyed through a method of “transgressive adjacency,” placing artworks and artifacts from different origins and disciplines near each other to generate both collusions and moments of “neighborly dislike.” Like an intruder or squatter, Skin in the Game takes over the pale pink and black walls of the previous exhibition at KW. By making do with what is there, the show points to questions of sustainability and economic stringency in exhibition making today.

Visitors are offered “Metabolic Chairs” to settle for a while, and read interviews with the artists. The public program NERVES, BREATH, MUSCLES, BLOOD shall be run online by the Metabolic Museum–University (www.mm-u.online), a research and educational platform supported by KW to be launched in October 2023. The publication SKIN IN THE GAME. Conversations on Risk and Contention (Hatje Cantz/KW) will be published in November 2023 and follows on from The Metabolic Museum (2020, Hatje Cantz/KW).

Works in the exhibition have been generously lent by the artists, and from the following galleries: Coastal Signs, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (Ruth Buchanan); Lisson Gallery, London (Otobong Nkanga); 303 Gallery, New York, (Collier Schorr); Sprüth Magers Berlin, Cologne, (Rosemarie Trockel, Andrea Zittel); Nagel Draxler, Berlin, Cologne, and Munich and Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna (Joëlle Tuerlinckx).

Ruth Buchanan (*1980) lives in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Buchanan studied at the Elam School of Fine Arts, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland and at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Between 2008-2009, she was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. In 2018 she was awarded Aoteaora New Zealand’s preeminent art award, the Walters Prize. She has realized commissions with, amongst others, Neue Auftrageber/The New Patrons and Museum Abteiberg (2023); Kunstmuseum Basel (2022); Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Ngāmotu/New Plymouth, (2019); MASP, São Paulo (2019); Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland,(2018); Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Poneke/Wellington; and the 8th Gwangju Biennale (2016). Buchanan is currently director of Artspace Aotearoa, a non-profit contemporary art gallery. She is represented by Coastal Signs, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland.

Otobong Nkanga (*1974) lives and works in Antwerp. Nkanga studied art at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 2011, Clémentine Deliss invited Nkanga to participate in the post-ethnographic exhibition Object Atlas – Fieldwork in the Museum at Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt/Main. Otobong Nkanga was artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in 2002 and DAAD Berlin Artist Exchange Program in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Tate St. Ives (2019), Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2021), Castello di Rivoli in Turin (2021) Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges (2022) and IVAM Valencia (2023). She is represented by Lisson Gallery, London, In Situ – Fabienne Leclerc, Paris and Lumen Travo Gallery Amsterdam.

Collier Schorr (*1963) lives and works in New York. She studied journalism at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and worked as an art critic in the eighties and nineties writing for Artforum, Frieze, and other journals. Schorr has had solo exhibitions at Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2007), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2007), and Villa Romana, Florence (2008), and taken part in group exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1998), the International Center for Photography Triennial (2003), MoMA New York (2009, 2010, 2015), the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2008), the Consortium in Dijon (2014), Luma Foundation in Arles (2015) and at C/O Berlin (2022) in the exhibition Orlando . Curated by Tilda Swinton. Six monographs of Schorr’s work have been published to date by MACK. In 2014, her practice shifted into fashion photography with her work appearing in mainstream magazines as well as Purple and i-D. She is represented by 303 Gallery, New York. 

Rosemarie Trockel (*1952) lives and works in Potsdam. She studied painting at the Kölner Werkschulen (1974-78). Her first solo exhibitions took place at gallery Monika Sprüth in Cologne, gallery Philomene Magers in Bonn (both 1983) and the MoMA in New York (1988). In 1999, she was the first woman artist to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale. Her work has been honored with numerous prizes, among others the Kaisering from the city of Goslar (2011) and the Roswitha Haftmann Prize (2014). Her works can be found in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris, Tate Gallery, London and The Art Institute of Chicago as well as several private and public collections in Germany. Major solo exhibitions include the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2005), the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015) and more recently at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, MMK, in Frankfurt (2023). Trockel was Professor for Fine Art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1998 to 2016.  She is represented by Sprüth Magers.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx (*1958) lives and works in Brussels. Her first solo exhibitions took place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1987, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1993, and Witte de With (now Kunstinstituut Melly) in Rotterdam in 1994. Recent solo exhibitions include Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2012), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2013), Kunstmuseum Basel (2016) and Dia Art Foundation, NY, USA (2018). Tuerlinckx participated in numerous major exhibitions including Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht, (2001) Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002), Manifesta 14, St. Petersburg (2014), Bozar Brussels (2005), and Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017). She taught for several years at l’ERG in Brussels and in 2018, received a Doctor Honoris Causa from the Faculty of Architecture and Arts of Hasselt University. The artist is represented by Nagel Draxler, Berlin, Köln, München and Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna. 

Andrea Zittel (*1965) lives and works in Joshua Tree National Park, California. Zittel studied Fine Art at San Diego State University and graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 1990. In the early 1990s, she moved to Brooklyn, New York, where she began working under the name A-Z Administrative Services which evolved into the A-Z enterprise. In 1992 Zittel designed her first Living Unit, a set of experimental structures for living. In 2000 she moved back to California and established A-Z West on an 80 acre site in Joshua Tree in the Mojave Desert, which also incorporates the High Desert Test Sites (HDTS). Her work was exhibited at the 45th Venice Biennale, documenta X in Kassel, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2022 she developed a permanent site-specific installation for the Kunstmuseum Krefeld, and designed furniture sculptures for the garden house of the Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau. She is represented by Sprüth Magers, Massimo DeCarlo, Milan, Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Sadie Coles, London.

Dr. Clémentine Deliss (*1960) is an independent, interdisciplinary curator and publisher. She is Global Humanities Professor in History of Art at the University of Cambridge and was a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). She studied contemporary art and semantic anthropology in Vienna, London, and Paris.  Between 2010–2015, she was Director of the Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt/Main. Selected exhibitions include Portable Homelands. From Field to Factory for Hello World at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin (2018); Object Atlas – Fieldwork in the Museum (2011), and Foreign Exchange (or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger) (2013), both at Weltkulturen Museum. Earlier exhibitions include Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, Whitechapel Gallery (1995); and Lotte or the transformation of the object, Styrian Autumn (1990). Her independent artists’ and writers’ publication Metronome was twice presented at documenta in Kassel (1997, 2007). She has taught at leading art academies, and is the director of the Metabolic Museum-University (www.mm-u.online). 

Diane Hillebrand (*1993) lives and works in Leipzig. They studied visual communication at the University of the Arts Kassel from 2013 to 2017 and exhibition design at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design from 2017 to 2020. Since then, they have set up an independent practice as a scenographer with clients including Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Black Forest Institute of Art, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, Fluid Circulations Research Group, 15th Triennial of Small Sculpture Fellbach, Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe, and 33rd Biennale of Graphic Art, Ljubljana. Hillebrand has developed “Metabolic Chairs” for the Metabolic Museum-University, which they have been associated with since 2018.

Christina Scheib (*1990) is a curator who lives in Berlin. She studied cultural studies and aesthetic practice at the University of Hildesheim, and exhibition design, scenography and curatorial studies at the University of Art and Design, Karlsruhe. Scheib has worked for the Gropius Bau, Berlin, the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, and State of Concept, Athens. Since January 2023 she is the curator of the University of the Arts, Bremen and is in charge of the exhibition ship Dauerwelle and Speicher XI A. She has been part of the Metabolic Museum-University since 2018.