Exhibition “where do I end and you begin?”

27 Jan – 03 Feb 2024
Le Ba Dang Art Foundation
15 Le Loi, Hue, Viet Nam

From the organizer:

“where do I end and you begin?” presents the works realized during Paszkowski’s four-month residency at New Space Arts Foundation.

Continuing the pursuit of her research interests previously carried out in Cologne, Germany through the project Fluid Circulations (2023), Paszkowski came to Huế with the intention to learn about the relationships that the people have with water here. In post-industrial Cologne, water is something to be managed and conquered. An enormous pumping system has long been installed to continue the mining of coal in the region and to keep the land from collapsing and being devoured by floods, as these long-term mining activities have created deep voids and opened up aquifers underground. Moving away from this context and coming into a different one – in terms of culture, politics, and economy, the way that people in Huế live through flooding seasons, with constant rainfall and a humidity that wears out concrete, paints a contrasting picture.

To Paszkowski, the way that we relate to water is a reflection of the way we position ourselves in relation to all things. During her time in Huế, she came to see relationships as neither assemblages of nor interactions between monolithic entities. Instead, relationships are a joining with of multiplicities. However, this does not imply constant ease. Tension is part and parcel of relationality, and the capability to hold tension correlates with strength. It is a process of moving along, pushing and pulling, giving rise to and letting collapse. Life energy, hence, pulsates and transforms, condenses and dissolves, through different coordinates of time-space.

Paszkowski’s forms come into being not as strategic, rational choices but through living and creating. They are connected to her via her act of creation, but sustain a life and energy of their own. Her aesthetics is revealed through her explorations in different media, from ink, to paper, cotton, and ceramics, and exemplified in her works: Love Guardians (2023), the Devouress (2022), Well (2022), and Punctum Stans (2021), to name a few.

The works that meet in “where do I end and you begin?”, in their turn, breathe new air and signal a new movement in Paszkowski’s perspective and practice.

Artist Bio

Nina Paszkowski (*1991) lives and works in Cologne, Germany. Her paper cut-outs, ceramics, and paintings explore relationships of desire, power and interdependence. She studied painting at Camberwell College of the Arts in London and at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. Her work was recently shown at Kunstmuseum Celle (2023), la felce gallery Cologne (2023), EFA Project Space New York (2022), HOS Gallery (2022), Galeria Monopol Warsaw (2022), Display Gallery Prague (2022), Cracow Art Week (2022, 2021), and KunstWerk Köln (2023, 2021), amongst others. She is a part of the ongoing project Fluid Circulations (2023) that explores the relationship humans have to other bodies of water in their environments. Funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North-Rhine Westphalia, she is currently continuing her research on this project as an artist-in-residence at the New Space Arts Foundation in Hue, Viet Nam.

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