KIN

Monia Ben Hamouda, Michele Gabriele, Andrew Birk

5 Oct · 5 Dec 2024

KIN

Weave a safety net

Throw it in the murky water

       to a shimmery mass of fish

       all going in one direction

Catch some, only a few

Stick together

Slip through everyone’s fingers

Be slippery together

Become a cause and fight for it

Be only in a state of extreme determination

                                        rally

Commit to abstract ambition

Stretch decisions to their ultimate consequences

Find the point of no return and make it comfortable there

Build convictions to break convictions

Walk the line

Use your taste buds to make up rules

       so rigid and so loose

Coerce yourself to live by them

Do all the things you can’t afford to

Sweep and shovel

Refine your spider senses

Embrace radical devotion to incessant speculation

Raise expectation

Absorb margin of error

Be permeable and bulletproof

 resolve, resolve, resolve

Wake up earlier than your enemies

Be ready to lose everything

                at any given moment

Make the thing no one’s asked for 

          and no one knew they needed

Write a riddle and be surprised by the answer

Choose the big pond

Survive in the leftover water at the bottom of the bucket

You’ll know you’ve outdone yourself

                                            yet again

And we shall be forever kindred.

- Sira Pizà


KIN is a three person exhibition showing works conceived and produced at Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, between the summer of 2023 and the fall of 2024, as a result of a long term residency. Developing their careers in parallel trajectories with multiple overlapping points over the past decade, Monia Ben Hamouda, Michele Gabriele and Andrew Birk have been part of a common generational dialogue culminating in a celebratory acknowledgement of the present as a vibrant convulsive. Sharing an understanding of self duty and the responsibility of overcoming limits as a purpose, this ongoing relationship of mutual recognition and mirrored positions has converged into a situated conversation in the context of Spiritvessel, becoming a self institutionalized hub for new bodies of work that incorporate aspects of the context like organic materials, dimensionality, or working methodologies that are related to the possibilities of this specific time and space frame.

Monia Ben Hamouda draws from notions of heritage using a material language signified by cultural traditions. With an intentional disfiguration of these elements, MBH creates atmospheres equally charged with delicacy as despair. Rain (Blindness, Blossom and Desertification XVIII), 2024 is the latest piece of a painting series that began at Spiritvessel in July 2023, where she uses spices and organic materials from the area to create abstract scenes punctuated by a singular vocabulary built in her sculptural practice, exploring the potential of aniconism rule in arabic traditions through the formal use of calligraphy as a strategy for alternative representation. Burial of all meanings, 2024, is a new body of work that takes MHB’s research back to the three dimensional plane, with the incorporation of the concrete mixer, which industrializes a constant outpouring of matter into the space, creating a violent spill in a motion opposed to contention and gesturing a lyric of muted rage. In one of the iterations, a spread of salt, a high value currency in ancient history used for food preservation and seasoning to this day, echoes simultaneous corrosion and degradation; while the second iteration spills red soil mixed with seeds - a balance between notions of growth and destruction cycles, belonging and returning.

Michele Gabriele uses the material language of ultra-specificity to reach towards possibilities outside of archetypical definitions. Exploring the mechanisms by which mental imagery becomes reality, his proposals expose how imagination is ruled by representational nature.
MG’s sculptures and paintings are always anchored onto something we have already seen or thought somewhere sometime, but they are also evidently something else, and more importantly, they are always doing something else in the space where they exist, in the space where we see them. Mirroring a notion that identity is not only completely fluid, but even non-existent, yet, they bring the spectator to the forefront of the narrative by placing empathy in the center of the encounter. As part of his July 2nd series, in Study of the head of a sleeping teenage triton, 2024 and L’Addio, 2024, MG uses fiction, exaggeration and sobriety in accurate sequences triggering the exercise of filling in the gaps in our projections of what the past or the future, or exponential other timelines, could possibly look like.

Andrew Birk investigates the potential created in the space between his own physicality and the surface of the work, bringing forth strength, vitality, affliction or torment as a confrontational presence and a testament to one's own aliveness. AB uses circumstantial restraints as conditions, turning obstacles into objectives to be overthrown in the exercise of making a painting. The self-imposed dynamic of overcoming limitations is the backbone of a succession of bodies of work that unfold in distinct materialities, where the method becomes the language and the surface resonates the performance. Here, Now, Forever (chainsaw painting 1), 2024 marks the beginning of a series that explodes the notion of scale with a colossal ever-actualized statement of contemporaneity. Using gardening fabric stretched on custom made wooden bars ripped with a working tool, forcefulness and precision appear in the context of AB’s trajectory as an index of existential fervor. On the other side of the same spectrum, Harmony, 2024, uses edible and biodegradable materials to elevate the unexpected symmetry of trivial equilibriums to the same conversation.

All images by Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy of the artists and Spiritvessel.