At this year's Art Cologne, the art museum Museum Ludwig in Cologne (Germany) presents a new acquisition. It's an artwork by American artist Ser Serpas.
Ser Serpas - memory station, she cast index bedding myself for you, gate closed bye bye yes its in people. Art Cologne 2023, Cologne (Germany), November 16, 2023.
Official description: The Junger Ankauf is an innovative form of collective patronage. The initiative was launched by the Young Members of the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst in 2005. The procedure is quite unique: During regular meetings with the museum’s Director, Yilmaz Dziewior, and the Curator of Contemporary Art, Photography and New Media, Barbara Engelbach, the Young Members present artistic positions from their own generation and discuss these in detail. Which work is ultimately selected as an acquisition for the museum’s collection is a democratic decision among the members of the initiative, subject, of course, to the consent of the museum. The new acquisitions by the initiative are shown annually at the Art Cologne.
Ser Serpas was born in Los Angeles, California in 1995. After completing her bachelor’s degree at Columbia University in New York, she went to Europe in 2019: first to Geneva, Switzerland, where she completed her master’s degree at HEAD – Haute école d’art et de design in 2021, then to Tbilisi, Georgia and Paris, France. Serpas’s work has been shown in numerous international solo exhibitions, including at La Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris, 2023; the Swiss Institute, New York, 2023; Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, 2022; LC Queisser, Tbilisi, Georgia, 2022. Selected group exhibitions include Tolia Astakhishvili: The First Finger, Bonner Kunstverein and Haus am Waldsee Berlin, 2023; It’s Personal, OCDChinatown, New York, 2023; Looking Back: The 13th White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York, 2023.
For the first time since the JUNGER ANKAUF was founded in 2005, an artist has been given carte blanche. In May of this year, Ser Serpas created three site-specific works of art in Cologne, which will be donated to the Museum Ludwig. With the open invitation to the young multimedia artist Ser Serpas, the initiative continues its series of progressive and contemporary positions acquired for the Museum Ludwig: three sculptures were created, as well as poem, from which the individual titles of the works are borrowed. Serpas’s residency in Cologne served as a starting point and source of inspiration. During her forays into the city, she collected the material for her works herself. The artist arranged discarded objects in cellars or garages, transforming urban found objects and bulky waste into free-standing sculptures that are held together only by gravity. This form of in-situ work has already been practiced by Serpas in connection with renowned art institutions and galleries such as Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (2022) and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2020).
The process is quick. In a short space of t
Ser Serpas - memory station, she cast index bedding myself for you, gate closed bye bye yes its in people. Art Cologne 2023, Cologne (Germany), November 16, 2023.
Official description: The Junger Ankauf is an innovative form of collective patronage. The initiative was launched by the Young Members of the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst in 2005. The procedure is quite unique: During regular meetings with the museum’s Director, Yilmaz Dziewior, and the Curator of Contemporary Art, Photography and New Media, Barbara Engelbach, the Young Members present artistic positions from their own generation and discuss these in detail. Which work is ultimately selected as an acquisition for the museum’s collection is a democratic decision among the members of the initiative, subject, of course, to the consent of the museum. The new acquisitions by the initiative are shown annually at the Art Cologne.
Ser Serpas was born in Los Angeles, California in 1995. After completing her bachelor’s degree at Columbia University in New York, she went to Europe in 2019: first to Geneva, Switzerland, where she completed her master’s degree at HEAD – Haute école d’art et de design in 2021, then to Tbilisi, Georgia and Paris, France. Serpas’s work has been shown in numerous international solo exhibitions, including at La Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris, 2023; the Swiss Institute, New York, 2023; Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, 2022; LC Queisser, Tbilisi, Georgia, 2022. Selected group exhibitions include Tolia Astakhishvili: The First Finger, Bonner Kunstverein and Haus am Waldsee Berlin, 2023; It’s Personal, OCDChinatown, New York, 2023; Looking Back: The 13th White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York, 2023.
For the first time since the JUNGER ANKAUF was founded in 2005, an artist has been given carte blanche. In May of this year, Ser Serpas created three site-specific works of art in Cologne, which will be donated to the Museum Ludwig. With the open invitation to the young multimedia artist Ser Serpas, the initiative continues its series of progressive and contemporary positions acquired for the Museum Ludwig: three sculptures were created, as well as poem, from which the individual titles of the works are borrowed. Serpas’s residency in Cologne served as a starting point and source of inspiration. During her forays into the city, she collected the material for her works herself. The artist arranged discarded objects in cellars or garages, transforming urban found objects and bulky waste into free-standing sculptures that are held together only by gravity. This form of in-situ work has already been practiced by Serpas in connection with renowned art institutions and galleries such as Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (2022) and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2020).
The process is quick. In a short space of t
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CreativityTranscript
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00:50 I was painting this wall yesterday,
00:53 kind of looking like a maniac to everybody
00:55 in the surrounding booths that I was working with.
00:56 They're all working today, and they're like, oh,
00:59 you look kind of sane today.
01:01 I left ink all over my face.
01:04 But you know, it's the price of the job.
01:11 This also may be a good makeup look for me to have ink
01:13 all over my face a little bit.
01:14 Anyway, that's besides the point.
01:18 So for when I make a sculpture installation in various cities
01:23 that I've been lucky enough to be invited to make
01:25 sculpture installations in, I usually
01:29 collect about, let's say, 60 objects,
01:32 as simple as a broken piece of shelving,
01:35 like an old mirror, a TV.
01:39 I bring them into usually a gallery space,
01:41 an institutional space, one time a rooftop at Lecce,
01:45 like a kind of historic building, very medieval.
01:48 And I'm allowed to run wild.
01:52 I'm left alone for a bit.
01:53 I make compositions, and usually I work by myself.
01:58 My mom has back problems.
01:59 I'm going to start having more people help me, usually.
02:02 So I get a massage every time I'm done.
02:04 But otherwise, I'm usually alone,
02:06 and I'm able to make compositions like these.
02:10 But they're never exactly the same,
02:11 because I never find exactly the same thing.
02:13 And I tend to avoid Ikea stuff.
02:15 Not that I don't like Ikea stuff.
02:17 I love Ikea stuff.
02:18 But that is one thing I've been able to find in every single
02:20 city that I've been in.
02:21 But here, of course, there's a local flavor to the things
02:25 that I found.
02:25 And there's a really strong color palette to the things
02:29 that I found, which I love.
02:31 And I don't know if I came back and did this in 20 years
02:34 in Cologne, that I would necessarily--
02:36 I definitely wouldn't find the same quality of things even.
02:39 And maybe the color palette would change.
02:41 But anyway, with that being said,
02:43 every time that I go to a new city to make sculpture,
02:46 I write a poem while I'm collecting the objects, which
02:49 is what you see on the wall back here.
02:51 This is the poem that I wrote while I was in Cologne.
02:53 And I rip out lines from those poems to title the sculptures.
03:00 So I thought for this, I would read the poem that's back here.
03:05 But then also, I would read poems from installations
03:09 that I've made in Lecce, in Italy, in Tbilisi, in Georgia,
03:14 in Geneva, in Switzerland, and yeah, in Miami as well.
03:21 I have these poems all saved on my phone
03:23 because I write them all on my phone notes.
03:25 And luckily, they're dated.
03:26 And that lets me have a little bit of a memory of them.
03:31 But yeah, I'll just read like four or five.
03:33 [LAUGHTER]
03:37 But I can start with the poem that's right behind me.
03:45 So the poem here, I mean, the logic behind it
03:47 is I like to do this kind of--
03:49 I mean, it starts from the bottom and then keeps going.
03:51 And then breaks off over there like a game
03:54 of snake on your phone.
03:57 Yeah.
03:58 So this-- "Traffic down, memory station, fear in its name,
04:04 style, form, form, form, listing moments,
04:08 falling inwards, type of thing to do.
04:11 Salad days, myself forming.
04:13 Selling, Spangawi, meet me later.
04:15 Died, tried, forlorn, myself, Sam.
04:18 Myself, people she cast, index, bedding, myself, for you.
04:22 Salad in it, myself, for you, saw it, dead, farm, fixer upper.
04:27 Mom and baby, I see, rape, girl, be off myself.
04:31 Take it, I sent your files, done and for done.
04:33 Sexy, die, gate closed, bye bye.
04:36 Yes, it's in people, fuck it, fuck it.
04:38 Baby, baby, hello, later."
04:41 So I think I was like going to one of these parties
04:45 at that time, or maybe I was like,
04:47 oh my God, that was that poem that came from there.
04:50 But you know, some of them are more--
04:52 oh, OK.
04:53 Here's one that I wrote around the time of an exhibition
04:57 that I made in Tbilisi.
04:58 Falling inverse, heads in perforated,
05:04 ongoing nothings, skewers in shapes, treading on bone.
05:09 So disease and longing, keeping things in shape
05:12 by keeping down lines, putting them down at points
05:15 and touching the birds, sat onto dusky hill.
05:19 New relationships, those you implore, a swan song for two.
05:24 What gets consumed and why that hurt my teeth,
05:26 not so sweet and tangy in the scenes.
05:28 It's a standup, do as well to decry itself
05:32 in the face of others.
05:33 Detangled architecture, how it goes away to die on its own
05:37 and what one can recreate honestly.
05:39 How a moment and a story, when you justify movement,
05:43 you come to yourself again.
05:44 Aspect ratio off and fucking, it's decrying,
05:47 face in words while accumulating what is left to track.
05:51 We would wish for more, would we not skewered,
05:53 floundering on the surfaces of unretouched landscapes,
05:56 having to give cons to us, not so enticing.
06:00 Why can't we have what we want?
06:02 When you meet people, you have to give it up for them,
06:04 a centerpiece in the way we relate.
06:06 Maybe it's not OK.
06:08 I'm using the sun's rays and blocking them
06:10 with your cellophane.
06:11 Who gets charged with anything?
06:13 Facilitating exchanges in a facility,
06:16 circumscribed threads, a disaster in the way disasters
06:19 go.
06:19 One to one ruins were found and left behind you,
06:23 didn't know where to go but to find them behind you,
06:25 under you, excess in spots marking.
06:28 No use in taking up the spots before the motif,
06:31 so ephemeral as to make a case for themselves.
06:34 What we learned in forgiving and elongating promises to you
06:37 and me, informed by our material, love shared is not
06:40 loss, is not equanimity.
06:43 I feel only the end, not so much in its encroaching,
06:46 but in what it does.
06:48 Makes forget once known truths, defenses, and burials
06:52 so specific as to breathe life in you.
06:54 This oxygen has no space.
06:56 This way of living is killing me and my other motives.
06:59 This window would not be into my own space,
07:01 but inhabited, unrecorded, engaging with that,
07:04 so not there as to be theirs.
07:07 This work was finished before we met.
07:08 Maybe more so would be again.
07:12 (audience cheering)
07:15 And I would need like one more from around the time
07:23 of that exhibition that I put together in Latche.
07:27 Okay.
07:28 Ever feel different, had a change of heart,
07:47 take the book down my ravine, I wish you were predictable.
07:50 Back to plucking, ephemeral shudders,
07:53 conversation with skin too deep,
07:55 and I think I cut my ring finger.
07:57 I feel fucked up in the head, mostly at most,
08:00 a resource for discard.
08:02 Found this point of intangibility, sun and icarus,
08:05 ever again, one in my same pool.
08:07 Take your chances, destroy somebody please.
08:10 The more I fuck with the art world, my pool stays dirty.
08:13 I can see everyone in it,
08:15 especially my high school, 10 crush.
08:17 That one relationship I'll never forget,
08:19 getting my hand stuck in the cringles can.
08:21 Can you ever not?
08:22 I'll never stop missing school.
08:25 Your necrosis is suddenly tucking me back.
08:28 I'm back on the train, I would write daily schedule.
08:31 I committed so much, I should have been committed.
08:33 Thinking about essentialism, absolutes,
08:38 truths and the lie, I'm learning a definition.
08:40 Too close to my septum, do much damage,
08:43 control predatory behavior,
08:45 income neoliberal social media practitioners
08:48 of everybody's access to everybody.
08:51 People used to store power and secrets,
08:53 collective knowledge and restraint.
08:55 I rate into submission folds, metal porpoise.
08:59 Your purpose is verbose, scintillating at best,
09:02 feeling you in and out judgment day,
09:05 scary when not, wish I could mediate.
09:07 I love you today and tomorrow.
09:10 I love you and you smell so good.
09:12 I love you and you should wake up and hear a bird.
09:14 You are loving carnival, we let you down.
09:16 Not before I, I wanna say, I wish I was your dog
09:19 and could bite the world when you hurt.
09:22 Well, that was that.
09:23 (audience applauding)
09:26 - Thank you, thank you.
09:30 Thank you.
09:32 Thank you so much for the great discussion.
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