Petrine | Liste Art Fair Basel 2023

Petrine is pleased to announce its first participation at Liste Art Fair Basel, presenting new work by Lenard Giller.

Lenard Giller is developing a practice which explores and collapses the life-spans of time-based technologies and their two-way translations into language, memory and perception. Adaptations (2023) follows recent video-works made by the artist over the course of the past year. These previous works are characterised by static recordings and precise assemblage of found and recorded material—drawn from popular culture or the everyday languages of mass-media—along predefined timelines. The works and their technical realization mirror one another: digital or analogue footage is displayed according to their historical containers or material necessities.

Adapations (2023) moves freely between digital and analog processes. Made up of two tables and three Hantarex monitors, the three channel video installation portrays B & W photographic documentation made by the artist inside the studio environment at UCA Canterbury, the art school where he completed his foundation year studies in 2016. The three monitors are supported by two custom powder-coated tables taken from the artist’s own studio. The architecture and furniture of the school is both the central subject of the photographs and the support structure which held the camera in place during the process of documentation, thus creating a link between the perspective, the production of the images, and their final presentation. Giller is interested in the ways in which an environment adapts and is adapted to by those who inhabit it, and in turn, how the camera can both register and reflect these processes. Change generates adaptation in the form of physical or psychological transformation. This can constitute a morphological translation from one state, place or material into another. In this case, analog B & W film records a studio environment which is later processed by the developer, stop bath, and fixer. Similarly, the adaptation of the eye to the changing levels of exposure in the video is performed by three of its key structures: the iris, retina, and pupil. Adaptations (2023) is given its own body by the three monitors placed at the far edge of the tables. They play a morphing sequence of images of a place stripped of any identifying features other than the tools that constitute the twentieth century studio setting, from modernism to the dawn of the digital age. Adaptation and change involve loss and gain, both of which are difficult to register in the blink of an eye.

The video installation is set against the backdrop of Untitled (2023), a series of silver gelatin prints framed in horizontal panels reminiscent of story-board structures. The images on the panels draw from a selection of the B & W images that make up the video work and revisit the genre of the photogram: a cameraless technique advanced in the early twentieth century, in which objects are placed onto photosensitive paper and exposed to light, thereby recording the silhouette of the object itself during a specific moment in time. These digital-analog hybrids constitute an attempt to generate ornamentation from the functional, now lifeless, interior of the studio, the object of this work.

Starting in September 2023, the UCA Canterbury will no longer be offering tuition free foundation programs, in line with budget cuts that are affecting art schools across the UK. Adaptations (2023) was born out of an urgency to see and make sense of these spaces before they fade and morph into co-working cubicles. The feeling evoked by the images is at once haunting and evasive, almost as if it were unclear where, when or why they were made.

– Chiara C. Siravo

Lenard Giller (born 1997, Munich) lives and works between Berlin and Rome. Upcoming and recent exhibitions include Akwa Ibom, Athens (2023); The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2023); ERMES ERMES, Rome (2023); Chess Club, Hamburg; Petrine, Paris (2022); and Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin (2022; 2020).