www.julyaugustseptember.net

July, August, September – Sommerausstellung 2021
St. Apernstraße 13, Cologne
23 Juli 14 August – 24 September 2021

Öffnungszeiten: Donnerstag – Samstag 14-18h, oder per Verabredung +4915122191240

Nähern wir uns einer defekten Rolltreppe so fühlen wir einen leichten Schwindel. Selbst Irritation oder Unsicherheit treten auf, möchte unser Körper doch tun was die Maschine verweigert. Die Beine werden schwer, ebenso die Zeit – es öffnet sich ein eigentümlich gedehntes wie kurzes Moment der Mühseligkeit welches eine normale Treppe niemals hervorbringt.

Über die letzten anderthalb Jahre hat sich unsere Wahrnehmung von Zeit gewandelt, von einer immer bodenloseren Beschleunigung hin zu einer dicken, fast physisch spürbaren Masse aus Hürden, Verzögerungen und Verspätungen jedweder Art durch die unsere Leben gequetscht zu werden scheinen – unerwartete Überraschungen inklusiv.

Um hierüber und weiteres nachzudenken, haben wie das ehemalige Ladenlokal eines Herrenschneiders während seiner Präparierung zu einem Kunsthandwerk-Geschäft zwischengemietet. Außerdem haben wir eine Website erstellt. An beiden dieser Orte dient die Ausstellungsperiode als Initiator wie als Brutzeit für weitere Beiträge – Performances und Aktionen können ebenso auftauchen.

July, August, September ist eine Ausstellung über gescheiterte Übertragungen, zerbrechliche Identitäten und andere Halbzustände in einer verlangsamten automatisierten Welt. Von hier aus schöpft sie ihr produktives Potenzial um, neben anderen Dingen, zu fragen: was ist eine Ausstellung, was ist ein Ort, und wie können wie in der Zukunft zusammenarbeiten.

Der Titel stammt von einem gleichnamigen Projekt des niederländischen Kurators Seth Siegelaub, der 1969 elf Künstlerinnen und Künstler eingeladen hat, um an elf unterschiedlichen Orten dieser Welt ein Werk zu produzieren, wo immer sie zu diesem Zeitpunkt waren.

While climbing up a malfunctioning escalator one feels swindled. One might even feel some

insecurity or irritation while striving to do what the machine unexpectedly won’t. Legs get heavy,

and time as well. There is great effort with a broken escalator, an effort that stairs don’t ever

seem to require, however ridiculous the admission may be.

Within the last one and a half years, time has undoubtedly changed from being a dragging

vacuum to a thick, almost physical mass of obstacles, thresholds, and delays, through which our

lives seem to be squeezed – surprising epiphanies included.

To remark upon this and more, we are subletting a former tailoring store in the process of its

redesign to a handicraft shop in St. Apernstraße Nr. 13 in Cologne. We also created a website.

At both of these venues, the exhibition period serves as incubator and hatching time for further

contributions – performances and actions might appear as well.

July, August, September is an exhibition about failed transmissions, crumbling identities and

other half-states within a slowed down automatized world. From here it gains its productive

potentials to ask, amongst other things: what is an exhibition, what is place, and how we might

work together in a future. It takes its title from a project of the same name, conducted during the summer of 1969 by Seth

Siegelaub, who invited 10 artists and one group to produce work on 11 different sites in the

world, wherever the invited artists were at that moment.

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

EVERYWHERE

Latecomer’s-Overtimes (2019/21) by Eva Barto extends the opening times of the exhibition for

one minute per day. It consists of a wristwatch, borrowed from goldsmith Rudolf Klein, whose

store is opposite the space, and adapted by Atelier Suché in Köln Buchforst, for the duration of

the exhibition period. After its presentation at Max Mayer Gallery in Dusseldorf last year, this is

the second iteration of the work. Another project on the local real-estate market went into

production and might be ready for the end of the exhibition period. For Minor Touch (2021), Ko

Sin Tung has asked the exhibition makers, or the respective person present in the room, to drill

one hole per day in the spaces, in an area decided by the artist herself. The diameters of the

holes will be between 1-16mm.

GROUND FLOOR AND OUTSIDE

David Horvitz has shifted his garden from his LA home to the zone in front of the shop. It will

grow slowly within the next coming weeks, in and between the cobblestones, flowerpots and

cracks in the street. Shimabuku presents July, August, September 1969 (2021), a new piece

consisting of both local and international newspaper front pages from 1969 on the storefront

window. Also, Onion Orion (2008) is on display, a representation of the Orion constellation made

of onions. Yuki Okumura visited Cologne between 5-7 July, where he took the 22 photographs

shown on the first floor. They were taken according to a shape, which represents the connection

of the 11 places in the world where Seth Siegelaub’s exhibition July, August, September took

place in 1969. This form is represented in Exhibition Diagram Shape, 2021. Patricia L. Boyd

made Ceiling Analysis (2021), a frottage on tracing paper made from her memory of the ceiling of

her psychoanalyst’s office in New York. This index of a memory attempts to make materially

present something that is absent. It is a second iteration; the first was lost by Fedex at Charles

de Gaulle airport in Paris. Michail Pirgelis’s Show Low (2021) is a sculpture made with a

reworked part of an airplane: the section on which the passenger seats are fixed under the

carpet has been remodeled to become an architectural display. Marc De Blieck has retired as a

teacher, and with that his ambition of being an “author”. He is using the exhibition runtime as

production period for a new project: Reading Piece, where he works on portraits for the needs of

others, here for the mothers of the exhibition makers. Image representing another Image (2021)

is shown as long as the new project starts to materialize.

Relics Wanted (2021) by Moyra Davey consists of four different mailings, of which only three

parts have arrived so far. One has been lost in the mail, but we hope it will arrive soon. Nairy

Baghramian’s Breathing Spell (2018) is a discrete sculpture, smoothly blending into the visual

and technical infrastructure of the future handicraft store. It seems to provide pressure relief to a

stressed architecture which obviously collapses under today’s neoliberal economic pressures on

individuals and their surroundings.

Phung Tien Phan shows two new sculptures reflecting implications of her everyday life in

relation to labor, office work and praying: a miniature playing kitchen for children in a sort of

Modernist design, using basic material, as well as an altar piece made from logistic trash and

leftover material. With Sieben gegen Theben/apotropäischer Versuch, 2021 Jan Paul Evers

premiers a new body of work departing from one human genome sequence. Michael E. Smith’s

untitled video sculpture uses surveillance camera footage in an anonymous teaching/disciplinary

institution. Its soundtrack consists of a 16.000 Hz tone, which is usually only perceivable by kids

and dogs. Another work of the artist will be in the exhibition in the last week before the closing.

Phyllida Barlow has produced her Nightworks in 1982-83 – meanwhile destroyed,

they speak of maintaining artistic production in the spare time during active motherhood. The

author Heike Geissler has written a fairy-tale on obstacles, entitled Einige Märchen von guten

und schlechten Hindernissen, which can be listened to on the iPod in the corridor.

BASEMENT

Jean-Marie Perdrix’s first sculptural proposition from 1987 is entitled Insaisissable-2. Originally

drafted in two versions, the second version has arrived in Cologne September 1st and is on view in the entrance area.

been executed yet. Terry Fox`s sound work The Labyrinth Scored For the Purrs of 11 Different Cats (1977), is on

display, which is a translation of the floor labyrinth in the Chartres Cathedral into a sequence of purring cats.

Flint Jamison shows Applicate 4.0 (2009/21), an artefact in half-state right before it’s becoming a real work of art.

An egg shaped work by Sarah Ortmayer appeared during the last two weeks of the show.

FIRST FLOOR

One of Yuji Agematsu’s zips is presented upstairs, small sculptures the artist generates from

trash collected during daily walks, erected in the cellophane from his cigarette boxes. This

calendar-like presentation covers a period between mid-January to mid-February 2013. Yuki

Okumura’s new production is entitled 11 Locations and 11 Intersections in Cologne from the 5th

to the 7th of July 2021, 2021, and was realized in the respective period. Gust Duchateau has

painted his immediate surroundings in Brussels in oil. He has been doing this against the advice

of Marcel Broodthaers, whom he met in 1968. His participation in July, August, September is his

second international exhibition, after he just opened a group show together with Harald Thys

and Jos De Gruyter at Duflon/Racz in Bern/CH. Oksana Pasaiko has improved technical

deficits of the ground-breaking design lamp L 25 by Gerrit Rietveld, entitled Correction d’une

lumière (2019-2020).