Duo show with Jakob Forster
(all works in the show were produced collaboratively during our four week residency)
23. Sept. – 10. Oct
at Yellow Brick Studio, Athens
curated by Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki
Text by Manolis Tsipas
glazed porcelain, bricks, candles, wax, market baskets, kiln stilts
documentation by Jakob Forster
The Fate, the Future and the Plate
by Manolis Tsipas
The Fate, the Future, and the Plate: Already within the name Anna and Jakob chose for their residency, lies their work’s capacity to produce a multiplicity of meaning. What kind of promise do Anna and Jakob make to us? The exact nature of this seems to be initially cryptic; are they offering an omen? A divination? Is this a message from the future, produced in the here and now, while they gaze into memories built in the past? If so, whose memories do they gaze into?
Anna and Jakob offer us a set of plates, which they meticulously produced during their residency. Made out of clay, fired and glazed with patience, their plates bear peculiar signs on them, scraped or otherwise, all created with porcelain. Their signs are sometimes letters, sometimes images, sometimes curving lines produced by a pendulum that drips liquid porcelain. The pendulum serves Anna and Jakob well as a fitting metaphor of their persisting ideas: the irresistible attraction felt towards the enigmatic relation between chaos and order in the Cosmos. They insist on asking themselves: When is a sign a clear sign? And they avoid to directly answer this question by applying their instinct of when a sign is clear enough, an instinct that echoes the eluding functions of faith.
In their first-ever collaboration, Anna and Jakob combine their beautiful crafts as her being primarily the ceramist and him being mainly the painter. Together, through a devised system of intuitive feedback between them, they produced their divinations on their plates. Piece by piece, plate after plate, Anna and Jakob built the imagery for their own intra-personal mythology. Throughout the creative process, they have been each other’s oracle: By sharing time together and by offering their work to each other, they offer back to us what may be a divination deck. The plates become a means of offering glimpses of possible fates, all based on our own interpretations of the signs fired with porcelain. Messages of tomorrow or messages of yesterday? The porcelain opens the space to misunderstandings, and in this way allows us to become the witness of our preferred future, and the historian who will write our past memories in the most desirable way. This miraculous intersection between the future and the past, takes place in the present time, in the here and now, while we look at the plates and the signs on them. Anna and Jakob offer us a very rare nutrition: they invite us into becoming the fortune-tellers of our own past and present lives. This is food many of us long for, and a journey certainly worth realising.