Nina Canell: Foam-Skin Insulated Jelly-Filled Vowel

“Foam-Skin Insulated Jelly-Filled Vowel” is the Nina Canell‘s third exhibition at Barbara Wien. It coincides with the abc gallery night on Friday 16th of September 2016. Floor-based tangles that consist of emptied out subterranean fibre-optic cable sheaths will share the gallery space with an installation that sets the short-term memory of wires into motion.

Exercising their remembrance through heat they are synched and syncopated by an alphabet of sine waves. Canell’s practice concerns the place and displacement of energy. Her work employs an array of materials ranging from the synthetic to the organic in order to produce a distinctive sculptural syntax. For Canell there is no mediation that is lossless between solid objects as well as living things – an output is never the pure transmission of a source – but always as much the distance it has travelled, the things it has come in contact with or bounced with or off.

Nina Canell, born 1979 in Växjö, Sweden and educated in Dublin, Ireland, lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Occasionally she collaborates with Robin Watkins (*1980 in Stockholm). Canell has shown widely internationally. Amongst others she has had solo shows at Moderna Museet Stockholm, Camden Art Centre London, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, Kunsthalle Fridericianum Kassel and MuMoK Vienna. Additionally, the artist took part in various international group exhibitions, i.a. at the Biennale de Lyon, Witte de With Rotterdam, Manifesta 7, the Sydney Biennale, the Liverpool Biennale, MoMA New York and the Gwangju Biennale.