Writing, drawing, documenting, reflecting - [ ] - the medium notebook serves as a precious store or archive for daily experiences, thoughts and memories. Keeping them tight to our moving bodies, they create an intimate, yet mobile space that builds a calming counterpart to the often brief and fleeting atmosphere of life — furthermore, they can become an unlimited source of growth and self-reflection. Especially regarding the processuality of individual artistic practice, the notebook serves as a multifunctional medium of realization, examination and development. Various artists — such as Isabella Fürnkäs — exploit their very own fields of creation through extensive collections of daily notes, sketches and pencil drawings that form a delicate mosaic of their artistic work and play a relevant key-role in their oeuvre: What seems unconscious in the beginning, like the écriture automatique (automatic writing), transforms into an intentional tool of growth and introspection — the invisible appears tangible, the captured like a manifest.
Isabella Fürnkäs’ multi-faceted The Red Drawings tie on this tradition of autopoiesis and self-mirroring. After waiting for almost a decade, she decided to re-/overwork the notebook in 2021 as a whole, erase the pages and bring every single trace and drawing of this archived past into her present. Re- leasing the drawings to the public sphere (again) revealed the potential of letting go, starting new as well as a gain of meaning. Following the tender, yet expressive gestures of lead pencil and red ink on the small-sized japan-paper sheets, the accumulation of thin lines unfolds a charade of symbols, myths and personifications: Here and there, a word appears between fragmented body parts and reduced figurations on the faded paper — like „hold“ or „sad king“ — indicating the artistic interweaving of subjectivity, historically charged narratives and forms of storytelling. As the motives oscillate between the abstract and the familiar, they sometimes do refer to certain mythologies like the story of a sad king, the Medusa or Janus. Then again, unspecified body parts and open corpora raise questions about the vulnerability and subjectivity of being human — floated by red ink, they evoke a non-specific, ultimate desire that negates the idea of a one dimensional meaning and entity. In the endless re-/combination of drawings, the highly symbolic interplay between the intimate and the omnipresent creates an almost mysterious atmosphere of a constantly changing riddle or insoluble puzzle.
Bringing representations and powerful narratives side by side with the cycle of the longing, wounded and maybe at some point healing body, Isabella Fürnkäs’ The Red Drawings spin a multidimensional web between the inside and the outside. They formulate an archive of gestures and visual memories that involve the corporal experience directly with the stories that we are told. In the end, it seems to be precisely the look into the outside, that leads back to our self. While being at odds with what we see, hear and experience, the examination of the perceived becomes inevitable. Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, the myth — especially in relation to the artistic practice of a woman — speaks of much more than a projecting subject. Outlining the mythology of the eternal female as a tool of power and repression, the myth itself is revealed as an instrument of creating reality that contains the ambivalence of the inner truth and the outside world.1
At the same time, the careful inspection of a mythology like the Medusa can function as a process of appropriation and self-determination. As Roland Barthes puts it: The myth is the speech.2 Therefore, The Red Drawings re-/formulate, reflect and document while working through the layers of masks and tales to a first hand experience. What evolves can be read as a sensitive inventory of impressions, that do not seek to retell, but function as a symbolic carrier of something fragmented, reduced or removed — a glance at our every-day perception.
(1) Simone de Bauvoir, The Other Sex, 1949.
(2) Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957.
Anna K. Wlach for The Red Drawings
Isabella Fürnkäs’ drawings of Untitled (Israel) I Schön, Sexy, Leise (beautiful, sexy, silent) oscillate between concrete meaning and abstraction — the literal and the nonliteral. They seem to formulate an ultimate encounter that is in every sense as multilayered as its artistic construction. Sheet by sheet, the drawings mutually appear as a complex cross-over of media, significance and material: Black and white forms meet thick lines, symbolizing dualisms with no grey area, imposed by oily chalk in red and blue. Fine pencil drawings intertwine with sometimes fading words on the transparent paper, meshing the visual with the textual in an endless layering of dimensions. Here, in the very intimate sphere of reflection and self-observation, the human body is being carefully examined — an open, uncovered corpus with shifting boundaries and broken contours. What is revealed, is as tender as it is explosive: The lived body experience falling into unity with the mind…and dismembering again — a moment of „i“ and „you“ — the clash of the covered and the leaking, the applied and the discharged.
“ego me — ego you“
“disobey“ “anonymous fuck“
The series of several hundred paper drawings describe an expressive interplay between the lived body and the artists mind. As they all belong to a 25 x 35,3 cm format notebook that Isabella Fürnkäs started in 2018 and continued during her Bronner Residency in Tel-Aviv, Israel, they do follow traces of constructed identity, an infinite search of meaning as well as a feeling of constantly being in-between — a floating body in a very literal, yet twisted world. While some of the drawings depict the dissolution of the human body, others seem like a systematic inventory of thoughts and imagination, responding to each other within their touch or sheer contact on the blank and faded paper. Turning the body inside-out while leaving its contours open, Isabella Fürnkäs localizes her work on a delicate interface of encountering the „I“ and „the other“, operating carefully on the gap of subjectivity, established social and cultural constructions and their inscribed contradictions. What evolves, can be read as a trial of strength between the deeply subjective and the public discourse.
Especially with the extended title “beautiful, sexy, silent“ the works conspicuously raise doubt on common allocations of what is being associated with “femininity“ or “feminism“, insisting on contradictions and dissent as closely linked to a loud and expressive inventory of the lived body and its very own encounters. Textual interventions like “disobey“ or “ugliness“ next to “anonymous fuck“ openly disagree with their own title. Instead, they resonate with the act of a visual display of intimacy, desire and corporeality: When the factual becomes inevitable, are we allowed to find acceptance? Thinking about the core ideas of feminist theory with authors like Julia Kristeva and the concept of abjection, the deconstruction of the fetishist view and the abject body with their connotations becomes a tool to reveal and analyze cultural and social narratives of discrimination. As the moving bodies in Isabella Fürnkäs’ works constantly find themselves in a process of constructing and deconstructing again, they seem to remain in the moment of setting and overcoming boundaries. Intensified by notes and textual shifts of meaning — “lie“ (lying body/telling a lie) or “what does it mean to be a feminist?“ — a never-ending cycle seeks to be intruded, stressing the bodies into a state of action and reaction.
“what does it mean to be a feminist?“
“lie“ “lie“ “lie“ “lie“ “lie“ “lie“
Closely connected to the ground-lines of Isabella Fürnkäs’ artistic practice, the challenged materials open up to a pure and intimate expression that speaks of the body as the imminent, the overlapping and the inscribed. This layering — as a mode of production as well as a modus of thinking and communicating — unfolds the abrupt encounter of mind and body, the person opposite and the self as well as the ability to form a fragile, yet sensitive relationship. In this atmosphere, the question of what it takes to be satisfied in a sometimes sharp and sometimes nebulous construct of thought and longing, persistently reverberates.
Anna K. Wlach for Untitled (Israel) | Schön, Sexy, Leise
“hi.howareyou?“-“idon’tknow“-“oh.what’sup?doyouwanttotalkaboutit?“ —a bed—a body — a voice — a stream of countless fluttering images. Imminently before we fall asleep, we seem to take a bath in a flood of visual memories, passing thoughts, remote feelings and emotions. The bed becomes a fragile threshold, an interspace between the subconscious and conscious re- flection. Images function as archived fragments of a distant (yet close) time and place, carried into sleep by our minds and glowing social devices. What characterises the perceptible tension of being in-between in this very moment of intimacy and solitude?
With their multi-media installation Vice Versa Reversed (2021), Isabella Fürnkäs and Jasmin Truong raise questions about inner surveillance and the continuous re-reconstruction of encounters, memories and narratives through new technologies and media devices in intimate, self-created spaces: Two flat screens are framing a big white bed with a colourful patchwork blanket and a performer interacting with a phone and wearing a patchwork pyjama made from the same material as the bed-cover, creating a familiar yet strange atmosphere. The patchwork fabric of the pyjama and the blanket visually connect with the overlapping, scattered moving images on the video screens, that seem intangible — a cross-over of the haptic and the corporal alongside the virtual. While the performer, who is constantly moving on the bed, consumes their own “infotainment“ before falling asleep, both body and mind are constantly being suffused with internal and external stimuli. They seem permeable. Even though they do not look uncomfortable surrounded by the passing multi-channel-videos, the installation appears as a situation with no way out, sym- bolising a self-constructed net of mutual dependence in social networks and virtual relationships. Especially the recurring voices — invisible, non-corporal counterparts of the performer — creating a dialogue between the two flickering screens, remain far off but too persistent and contribute to the ambivalent scenery that casts doubt on ideas of freedom and autonomy in modern societies today. Referring to connotations of the prevailing dualism fe-/male, the two voices can be read as male (active) and female (passive), representing the inter-play of dominant gender constructs in contrast to the silent, visual and androgynous embodiment of their subconscious processing by the performing body.
“come. trust me. you can trust me“ - “I’m confused“ - “ why?“ - “ i’m not sure“
Vice Versa Reversed (2021) by Isabella Fürnkäs and Jasmin Truong depicts the corporal and sensual experience right in the middle of the digital dimension. Performed for the first time at strike a pose at the K21 Kunstsammlung NRW directly next to Julia Scher’s Surveillance Bed III installation from 1994, the interdisciplinary art work focusses on the contemporary overlapping and fragmented relations of time and space that culminate in the intimate sphere of the individual. The side- by-side of the installation next to Julia Scher’s, which has been created in very different period of time, appears to be an interesting combination: While Julia Scher’s work of the 1990s deals with the ubiquitous surveillance from the outside, Isabella Fürnkäs and Jasmin Truong locate a new level of self-monitoring in the supervision of our time. Materiality and intimacy, narration formats and circular clouds enter into relation with each other and meet a pouring and perspective-building layering of imagery in the constructed video-works. With this multi-media installation, the artistic duo takes up the fragmented in an interdisciplinary way and reflects on narrative factors that come together to form a whole.
Anna K. Wlach for Vice Versa Reversed