lukas hofmann / saliva

Retrospective at National Gallery, Prague

December 3, 2016

Within the light, archival embrace of the National Gallery in Prague, a new type of history is emerging: a history that looks back only as far as Now.

At the age of 23, and after consulting various signs and traces found in nature, underground car-parks, scrappy annotations and angry, bee-stung flesh, Lukas Hofmann is organizing his Retrospective, since he knows that he will never be a 13 year old Ukrainian girl model crying to her mother from Paris via Skype, again.

Soft leathers and the crisp bulk of cotton enveloped silk-slipped limps and topstitched denim constructions; reined in and belted against the gravity that tugs to reveal a bare shoulder, assemblies pulled together with the easy confidence of revellers finding them- selves thrust suddenly back into the bright world.

Torsos twisted rhythmically, shoulders rising and falling, each rotation forcing breath to travel out from within the chest. They passed through the crowd as if in the grip of a reverie, the audience only half-present to them.

As they reformed, now into a makeshift choir around the periphery of the atrium, their voices joined together in renditions of Disney songs’ curious, populist magic, a plaster bust unexpectedly fell to the floor in the background and shattered; its percussive note punctuated a digression from assumed stability, pronouncing instead the absolute quality of the lived moment.

Upon reaching ground level, a circle formed. One, separated from the rest as the designated master of ceremonies, marked out with intermittent, primal cries progressively longer periods of time, while he tended to an array of bowls containing dry ice, maintaining their spreading vapours by watering them from one vessel to another and once, notably, with a stream of piss.

Performers: Coco Kate, Eva Che, Thiago Dias, Katrice Dustin, Elizabeth Hinojos, Lukas Hofmann / Saliva, Scott Hopper, Kateřina Konvalinová, Roman Ole, Markéta Strnadelová, Bianca Tanchay

Garments from Anne Sophie Madsen, collections of 2015 and 2016

Text by Ari Nielsson

Photos by Johana Posova and India Ray

Footnotes on Art i-D Germany (translated) kubaparis AQNB

Retrospective at National Gallery, Prague

December 3, 2016

Mouths out of breath began, instead, to lick their way along the knotted installations of red thread that had been spun around the room. Bodies crouched, crawled and limboed awkwardly around one another, whetting their mutual ties to the building, before scooting down to a lower level by means of the main staircase’s handrails, the childlike irreverence of their movement dressed with impassive expressions.

Structured both as a descent and a perambulation, the performance drew on a progression of past elements of Hofmann’s oeuvre, magnifying and multiplying them to the institutional scale of the Functionalist palace. Its interiors were framed one minute as the superficial stage décor for the performers’ catwalk-like march through its collections, in the next they functioned as an echo-chamber not only for their occasional shouts which broke through the dust of gallery etiquette, but for the erotics of their movement and the moments in which those movements stopped, abruptly.

Performers: Coco Kate, Eva Che, Thiago Dias, Katrice Dustin, Elizabeth Hinojos, Lukas Hofmann / Saliva, Scott Hopper, Kateřina Konvalinová, Roman Ole, Markéta Strnadelová, Bianca Tanchay

Garments from Anne Sophie Madsen, collections of 2015 and 2016

Text by Ari Nielsson

Photos by Johana Posova and India Ray

Footnotes on Art i-D Germany (translated) kubaparis AQNB