Wednesday 28. February. Arkhiv Plastik: an experimental art history of the plastic bag with Kandis Friesen

Date: Wednesday, February 28th

Time: 19:00-21:00

This encounter is a visit to the portable archive of plastic bags that artist Kandis Friesen has been collecting over the last twenty years. Amidst an accessible archival display, the artist will speak about three distinct plastic bags: her recent artist multiple DAUT DINTJ DAUT HELT, grafted onto the ubiquitous knock-off Ukrainian BMW plastic bag; a sequence from Ukrainian director Kira Muratova’s 1989 film The Asthenic Syndrome; and the plastic practice of Kazakh artist Saule Suleimenova, who will join us by video from Almaty. 

In Friesen’s archive and practice, the plastic bag is approached as container, landscape, figure, textile, and text, both producing and archiving these forms in the neoliberal present. Like the particalization and flexibility of neoliberal structures, plastic shapeshifts its materiality (into wood, metal, clay, textile, glass) and is now ubiquitously resident within our bodies, waters, soil, and air. Friesen approaches diasporic formations in relation to plastic materialities, through portability, translation, and transposition; her experimental art history of the plastic bag is a history of the present. 

Friesen will bring a portion of her archive to TIER for public perusal, and drinks and snacks including kozinak, halva, and pickles will be served. 

 

BIO

Kandis Friesen works with diasporic language and disintegrating archival forms. Her recent work in video, sculpture, writing, and sound is anchored in the dispersed monumental, composing between the solidity of official memory and the dispersal of intimate, unofficial forms. She often draws on modes of grafting and re-publication (making something public, again), amplifying specific histories and the structures which hold and transmit them.

 

Her work has been exhibited and screened at the CAFKA Biennial of Contemporary Art in Public Space (Six Nations Haldimand Tract territory / Waterloo, CA), Galerie im Turm (Berlin, DE), Chicago Architecture Biennial (Zhigaagong / Chicago, US), Plug In ICA (Winnipeg, Treaty 1 territory, CA), Le Festival International du Film sur l’Art (Tiohtià:ke / Montreal, CA), MIX NYC (NYC, Lenapehoking territory, US), and Jihlava International Film Festival (Jihlava, CZ), among others. 

No RSVP required

Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin