Falke Pisano

I am interested in art as a situated practice that cannot be seen separate from the context in which it takes place. With that I mean that for me the art object is just one term that operates in a broader set of relations, some social, some phenomenological, some conceptual…but all related to an expanded, and ultimately collective, experimental practice that concerns our relations to and engagement with the world of which we are a part, and to the past, present and the possible futures of this world.

— Falke Pisano

In The Value in Mathematics, 2015, Pisano continues her research into the possibilities of overcoming distance and difference. She does so by looking at the implications and the questions that arise when mathematics is considered as a cultural product instead of a value-free global science. This involves questioning the exchange between different cultures, the priorities and methods in education, the traversal of abstract objects across different contexts, as well as challenging the conditions of language, understanding and use.

Falke Pisano and Luca Frei’s double video projection LC in the Bijlmer, 2014 began as a commission for the second edition of Bijlmer Art International in Amsterdam. The artists were invited to make a semi-permanent pavilion reflecting on the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. Although the project fell through, Frei and Pisano continued their research, examining the context of the original commission: what it means to make a pavilion that reflects the work of another artist and what affect it would have had on local residents both physically and psychologically.

The modular sculpture Instrument for a Spatial Conception of Repetition, 2013 consists of three screens and five ‘tools for directing perception’ that can either be attached to the screens as part of the spatial arrangement or displayed as indexical wall sculptures. These ‘tools’, like fragments of a larger diagram, illustrate forces that influence our perception of a series of linked events. Connecting place with a mental position, the posters attached to the tools-as-wall-sculptures describe a point of view, established in relation to the perception of repetition. With Instrument for a Spatial Conception of Repetition, Pisano presents a work of open character that brings together playful, methodological diagrams with a critical approach to representation, as seen in The Body in Crisis.

The Body in Crisis (Housing, Treating & Depicting), consists of a performance and a sculptural installation. Commissioned by Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid the work examines the history of modern medicine in relation to the history of the museum’s building, which was originally a shelter for beggars and later a general hospital. These histories are linked with certain crucial moments in 20th century Spain, which can be found represented in the museum’s collection. The development of public healthcare in Spain is in this way shown to be interwoven with the narrative constructed by works of the collection that depict bodies in crisis. In this work Pisano examines the ability of representation to pose questions of medicine in direct relation to social and political realities.

The Body in Crisis addresses concrete and political moments within the repetitive occurrence of bodies being thrown into states of crisis through violent shifts in the conditions of life. The work centres on six historical moments: Pergamon in 199, Amsterdam 1571, Paris 1793, Mons 1915, Paris 1974, and Houston 1984. Each marks a change in the experience of the body, a node where histories of housing, medicine, architecture, gender, art, and economic and social environments intersect. For Pisano, these recurring moments of crisis, and thus the de- and reconstruction of body functions and fragments, constitute a historical matrix of violence whose structuring element is repetition itself.

Between 2006 and 2010 I developed a body of work titled Figures of Speech, a long-term examination of processes that occur when ‘objects’ start shifting their form, materiality, meaning, description, understanding, role, agency… Largely based in a performative practice of writing—of formulating and reformulating ideas—the works involved a circulation and exchange of language, ideas and forms: a transfer from one work to another often involving a change of status, a reflection within a different context or a further elaboration on an idea. While I focused initially on ‘objects’, later my interest shifted to ‘speech-acts’, and specifically speech-acts in relation to different forms of agency in artistic production.

— Falke Pisano

Conceptual reconstruction concerning form: the object, 2008, consists of three digital collages that have been framed together with short texts. The images show partial views of works-in-progress in Pisano’s studio in Villa Arson. Using the framework of the number three, each sculpture is an attempt to conflate either three different works or three different points of view. The first: making an object out of a singular view of three abstract sculptures; the second: a large scale sculpture from three Joseph Albers drawings, and the third: three sculptures in response to three novels: Period by Dennis Cooper, Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima and The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. With an interest in the process of thinking as a form of making, Pisano proposes that the ideas formulated in the text be treated as an object. The texts thus address the failure or abandonment of a work whilst simultaneously negating this failure by transforming the material object of the sculpture into the immaterial object of an idea.

Chillida (Forms & Feelings) is a personal account of Pisano’s emotional reaction to a series of photographs by David Finn of sculptures by the Basque sculptor Chillida. While going through the pages of the photo-book, Pisano traces the relationship between the characteristics of these specific objects: their depiction, the experience of the photographer, his daughter, as well as Pisano’s own preoccupations concerning existential matters and her emotional response to the photographs.

In this lecture, Pisano outlines a number of ideas regarding abstract objects and their existence. The work departs from two questions: How can an object exist in different conditions? and How could I formulate a possible existence that could be articulated as an object? Following this line of enquiry, several issues concerning an object’s ontology, or ontological status, are addressed in the work. Throughout each case study, Pisano examines the oscillation between the concrete and abstracted status of various objects—whether physically experienced, perceived, or imagined. Considering a threefold relation between sculptor, sculpture and spectator, Pisano articulates diverse analysis of objects such as: abstract memorials for Martin Luther King; Broken Obelisks, (1963-1967) by Barnett Newman; the work of Eduardo Chillida and the photographs of Chillida’s sculptures by David Finn. Along with numerous other examples in this lecture, Pisano complicates oblique relations among a network of objects, elaborating her interest in the deconstruction of established thought.