In forever more, Inga Danysz's second solo exhibition at Good Weather (and first solo exhibition in Tokyo, co-hosted by Lavender Opener Chair), the artist presents three new works. The first is a stainless steel sculpture designed to accommodate up to eight guests for dinner at Tohmei Diner (a restaurant operated by Lavender Opener Chair co-founder and artist/chef Tatsushiko Togashi). This work is a modular series with four parts present in the exhibition—each individually and collectively titled Esophagus.

Each part—unique in their patina, but standard in their form—can be mounted on the wall when not in use, converting it from a functional dining surface into a sculptural tombstone. In contrast to Danysz's previous work—like Sarcophagus or Ladder—Esophagus emphasizes themes of sustenance and communion adjacent with the artist's consistent concerns with labor, consumption, and control.

Another work, titled Kyuodai, is a transformative action. Danysz has relocated tatami mats from a typical Japanese room into the gallery, altering the ritual of dining at Tohmei Diner: shifting the experience from the counter to the floor of the gallery space with traditional Japanese restaurant zashiki style seating.

Additionally, a third work—a photograph documenting the original location of the tatami mats—stands as evidence of the artist's action: the space, now emptied, invokes a sense of absence; or a serene release. The installation is further enriched by the soundtrack Regarding Films compiled by John Roberts (Brunette Editions).

With Giulia Crețulescu, Inga Danysz, Katja Novitskova, Natalia Domínguez Rangel, Emir Šehanović, Aleksandra Sidor, Anastasia Sosunova

I think the most traumatic scene in Tim Burton's 'Sleepy Hollow', is a scene where juvenile Ichabod Crane sees his mother, condemned as a witch, burst out of an iron maiden drenched in blood, her fresh corpse covered in flies.

When I worked in a torture museum, this horrific device was undoubtedly my favourite. Its questionable authenticity shrouds it in mystery. I can't resist the comparison to Danysz's totemic sculptures. Resembling ancient sarcophagi or some nameless cosmonauts' casket, the works pull me towards the immutable question: what we do in life, does it count in eternity?

The Pharaohs decorated their mighty tombs with magic spells to protect their souls in the afterlife. The difference between a baker's corpse and the royal architect's is the quality of the sarcophagus; is it stone or wood, built to last or eventually degrade? Danysz's anachronistic sculptures unite us with these genderless, anonymous shapes. Rendering our bodies equal and cooperative, in an almost communist aesthetic.

Life extension is today's medical pursuit; I want to escape this posthumous labor a little longer until they find a cure for dying. But unlike cryo-chambers, Danysz's sarcophagi are minimalist, no spell engravings or high-tech air filtration. Claustrophobic yet open, the presence of the object resonates in a physical and psychic way, similar to her previous works that question the agency of the individual within capitalist systemic infrastructure.

'In Ancient Rome' is a playground for associative contradictions. Are they macabre devices or some armoured shield for the body, protecting us from the horrors of the outside world. I see the sculptures as transformational spaces for latent interaction.

Mary Furniss, 2022
Production Assistance & 3D Modelling: Christoph

In 'Remedies for Vertigo' infrastructure is characterised as an idealised system of control, where water and bodies and thoughts all run in the designated direction. But that's not how I feel. I am the scum in the pipe. An artist that pays low taxes, gets fired for drinking on the job, lives off benefits sometimes and I go backwards more often than forwards. I'm hard for this immaculate tube to digest. Perhaps I should censor myself, be pristine and clean and go along with the current...

Although the glass drain pipe gracefully, and almost imperceptibly, weaves itself around the exhibition space, it feels like a spatio-temporal contraction, slowly tightening itself around me. The pipes subtly dominate the space and slowly I begin to internalise the direction it has laid out before me. I want to know where it ends. Maybe it never ends. Perhaps it is designed to keep me going forward, prescribe me the right choice to make and give me function and stability when the world outside is spinning out of control.

Mary Furniss, 2021

With contributions by Michael Annoff, BARarchitekten (Antje Buchholz, Jürgen Patzak-Poor), Elke Beyer, Sabine Bitter, Antje Buchholz, Arne Bunk, Evan Calder Williams, Fraser McCallum, Filipa César, Nuray Demir, Christopher Falbe, Dina Dorothea Falbe, Guests & Hosts, Gregor Harbusch, Marshall Henrichs, Claudia Hummel, Ana Hušman, Jakob Jakobsen, Ana Paula Koury, Monika Mattes, Larry Miller, Maria Helena Paiva da Costa, Silke Schatz, Dubravka Sekulić, Lisa Schmidt-Colinet, Alexander Schmoeger, STREET COLLEGE in cooperation with Käthe Wenzel, Maurice Stein, Alexander Stumm, Oliver Sukrow, Ola Uduku, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Sónia Vaz Borges, Helmut Weber, Florian Zeyfang, Francesco Zuddas

It was a triumph of Soviet space flight: On October 4, 1957, Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite, orbited the Earth. In the middle of the Cold War, the ensuing "Sputnik crisis" caused deep insecurity, especially in the USA, but also in large parts of the rest of the world. How should the ostensible "technological gap" be closed? At the same time, the perceived crisis sparked the next wave of modernization. Governments adopted large-scale investment programs for research and education in series, whereupon the spaces and hours made available for learning literally exploded. Comprehensive schools and educational centers were built, reform universities were founded, and language laboratories were set up. The "city as classroom" was discovered and "lifelong learning" was invented.

These and many other measures can also be read as attempts to prevent an impending "future shock," as the title of a 1970 bestseller put it in a nutshell. The research and exhibition project Education Shock: Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s questions this unique epoch against the background of current debates on the relationship between education and space. On the one hand, the term education shock refers to the shock metaphors of the time; on the other, it refers to the shocks to which education was subjected in the process of reform and modernization. Last, but not least, the concepts and practices of education— and this includes its spaces and architectures—can have a shock-like, traumatizing effect on all those involved.

Education Shock is made up of several interlocking components: the exhibition at HKW, which is communicated and expanded via guided tours, lectures, and workshops; contributions from eight Berlin schools; an extensive film program at Arsenal—Institute for Film and Video Art; as well as two publications.

With Eva Barto, Tyler Coburn, Marie Cool Fabio Balducci and Adriana Lara.

With Srijon Chowdhury, Inga Danysz, Eva Gold, Marie Matusz, Marina Sula.

Barely Furtive Pleasures can be experienced as a 'psychological theatre', a play in which each act shifts from submission to control, invisible to (hyper)visible and from desire to disgust – continuously affecting: explicitly and subconsciously.

Inhabiting conflicting positions at once, each of the works toy with the implicit and the explicit, the subject and the object. Carrying with them beauty, horror, disagreement and dissolution, they illuminate fluid demarcations, unstable territories and the unconscious. It is here in the spaces of repression, where power, control and agency are flipped, spun and recast, it is here that the psyche is split open, revealed.

While the works are presented static in the space, they each provoke a specific choreography, a gesture, a liaison – a scene possibly yet to unfold. Ambivalent in its own chronology, the exhibition exists in a moment far gone and yet still to take place, asking questions around the relapse of time and history, and our memory of how things came to be. The works' shifting positions, often covert whilst in plain sight, reveal the transitory nature of power, control and agency: who is looking, who is in control, what is at stake? Both unsettling and alluring, they stage a psychological and emotional break up – psychosis as a form of catharsis.

The exhibition explores both presence and negation, with works that are suggestive of a body but refuse its spectacle – unconsumed, ghostly and lingering. It is in this haunting space, of push and pull, of duality and multiplicity, where the disentanglement and dissolution of the self might begin.

With Inga Danysz, Ron Ewert, Amy Garofano, and Matt Siegle.

That which cannot be seen—either intrinsically, extraneously by societal biases, or by self volition, for whatever reason—creates a disguised state where the collective mind perceives an absence. The tool of observation is warped when the observed is invisible, but the work in "Desolation Row" contains a material layer, a facade that serves as a tangible link to this absence. Furthermore, the crisp facture of each of these artworks gives contour to their subjective furl: layers and recesses that orchestrate a dramatization of the contemporary d.rive.

In Siegle's work, imagery is sourced from advertisements that use coded language to point to concealed spaces and "alternative" communities from the 1980s and 90s. The corporeality of these calling cards (their texture and slight misregistration) is adroitly recreated with a tactile treatment of paint, each detail precisely enlarged to emphasize a necessary indirectness.

Garofano's upholstered velvet paintings draw their imagery from the architectural designs of gates, with subtle material shifts that rely on light and shadow to reveal their image. This fluctuating space creates an unstable positioning experienced literally in passing: only through the physical movement of the viewer can every detail of the image be apprehended in relation to the ambient light direction.

Ewert's paintings use a variety of indexical makeshift printing processes that fix objects and actions into a graphic visual language, opening up and confusing the pathology of painting. Like Dylan's lyrical folk-Dada mashup (from which this exhibition co-opts its title), these works speak to an accelerated pace of physical and psychic change, finding emptiness in a surplus of cultural noise.

Danysz's glass sculptures are transparent demarcations, barely visible and easily broken, citing the fragility and conditionality of visual experience. These inadequacies are highlighted through the multiplied, anachronistic forms, shifting the transience of the physical object into the false objectivity of language. Down the hallway, Danysz's sound piece rattles through the empty chambers of the building, revealing an uncanny link to the physicality of her other work and the current body (building) in which it resides.

Ultimately, what inhabits these spaces wants to be disguised—or rather left alone, found only by the key holder. "Desolation Row" conjures the tension between conditions of passive observation (scrolling) and active sociality (strolling), wherein the flaneur is invited to take a garden-path, a rambling detour in lieu of a direct route, towards the abyss.

(Ron Ewert and Haynes Riley)

In her artistic practice, Inga Danysz focuses on the radical changes of power structures. While earlier disciplinary mechanisms aimed at the apparent influence on the body, the post-disciplinary society is confronted with the appropriation of the entire social space. Danysz questions the paradoxes of the control society, its denial of repressive power structures and examines the signs of post-democratic reversal.

For the exhibition Impostures at VIS, Danysz deals with the notion of invisible yet internalised impositions. The installation focuses on control systems that regulate human flows in transit and public spaces, as well as control mechanisms monitoring access and boundaries. Danysz envisions prescribed motion sequences, defined interaction patterns and targeted behaviours by implementing an enclosed structure in the exhibition space. Chains, stanchions and attachments made of glass pervade the VIS, manifesting a waiting lock that is freed of concrete purposes.

Danysz transfers control mechanisms that appear ubiquitous yet imperceptible, into visible forms that examine the extensive functionalization of public space. In emphasising the massive restrictions enforced upon society, the artist questions the superiority of economic principles. "But are there any limits to this will to codify, reproduce, establish, and maintain control over the most singular manifestations of humanity? (Éve Chiapello) Danysz addresses this question by opening up a space that allows us to experience our individual involvement within the systematic mechanisms of prevailing power.

With Elif Erkan, Bianca Baldi, Marina Pinsky, Inga Danysz, Lennart Lahuis, Simon Starling
Curated by Inga Danysz & Conor O'Shea

Slow works brings together the works of various artists dealing with migration and memory. The act of travel, and the ease with which we now can change our location, creates different possibilities for global markets and workforces, and has made it so we need to be flexible and mobile at all times. The traditional idea of traveling, wandering or migrating, sometimes without a destination in mind, has become an abstract concept in the context of time-perception and time-value. Through the materialisation of memory, either by documentation, archiving data, energy or personal memories, the consequences of this abstraction have never had as much impact as they do today. It has become a necessity that we either declare or are imposed upon by.

The exhibition has been made possible with generous support by the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Sydney.

Pictures: Inga Danysz, Nadja Angermann (2017–2018)

With Patrick Armstrong, Trisha Baga, Benjamin Carlson, Ian Cheng, Caleb Considine, Verena Dengler, Inga Danysz, Tim Eastman, Genoveva Filipovic, Wade Guyton, Rachel Harrison, Lena Henke, Anne Imhof, Lisa Jo, Marie Karlberg, Gavin Kenyon, Andrei Koschmieder, Caitlin MacBride, Mathieu Malouf, Ben Morgan-Cleveland, Sam Pulitzer, George Rippon, Julia Rommel, Avery Singer, Koki Tanaka, Anina Trösch, Stewart Uoo, Andra Ursuta, Alterazioni Video, Antek Walczak, Colin Whitaker, Phillip Zach, Anna Zacharoff

Greene Naftali Gallery is pleased to present Freak Out. This dynamic exhibition of 34 artists offers an expansive view of contemporary practices: from sculptures whose abject aesthetic challenges commodity, to sleek animations with aggressive undertones; from painting that elegantly combines invention and an embrace of art history, to performances that occupy advanced reaches of current technology and flirt at the edge of comfort.

Exhibiting artists range from recent graduates of the Städelschule in Frankfurt, many of whom will be showing for the first time in New York; to Koki Tanaka, the representing artist of Japan in the 55th Venice Biennale. Also on view are works by established artists whose practices are either reflected in or denied by the emergent generation. The opening reception will feature a performance to evolve into a product by Marie Karlberg, a muse of the downtown New York scene, in collaboration with artist Lena Henke. Additional performances to take place throughout the course of the exhibition will be by Stefan Tcherepnin and Anne Imhof.

Freak Out aims to demonstrate the broad array of strategies that contemporary artists develop in relation to art historical legacies, as well as the operations of the art world they inhabit.

Directed by Marc von Schlegell, Michael Krebber, presenting work by Susan Ciancialo and ephemera by Jack Smith. Performance by the Pure Fiction Seminar, Portikus, Frankfurt (2012)