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Maintenance Tools of Body and City

Art Exhibition 2024

Material: acrylic on canvas, clay, timber, cotton, self-adhesive hooks

 

Objects are assembled, hung lightly, tucked into the Kabinett interior. The objects are paintings and small tactile sculptures depicting tools of use: maintenance tools for the body and the city. Each depicts the artist’s hands with a tool, in the process of maintaining. Hands represent agency, function, gesture and touch. They can relieve regular pains through migraine massage, they can hold others, give affection, a helping hand. To maintain is: to replace (a lightbulb), to restore (a relic), to paint over (graffiti), to tidy (the street), to check into (a friendship), to fix (a machine), to water (a plant), to rest (a body), to relieve (from pain).

The installation gathers and replenishes representations of useful objects in a site of restoration. The Camberwell Kabinett functions as a form of maintaining a formally abandoned kiosk. In the use of the space it is restored. The installation is contained and yet unguarded, with the artworks available to be taken, moved and removed by any passerby along the open street. The artist will visit the Kabinett once a day during the show, and replenish its stock, replace any taken objects with new ones. Replacement as a tool of maintenance.

The external facade of the Kabinett is formed of an envelope of ‘bed sheet’ imagery, forming a continuous texture of the soft, the tactile and the crease. The ‘bed sheet’ alludes to the practice of rest as a tool for bodily maintenance. The ‘bed sheet’ becomes ‘matter out of place’, a recognisable object with connotations of privacy and intimacy, exposed on the facade of a street structure. It forms a subversive advertisement, unfunded propaganda for the act of rest. The ‘bed sheet’ as a texture speaks through the form of the ‘crease’. Without use, action and movement, the ‘bed sheet’ would remain almost entirely smooth. It is only through the sheet’s interactions with the body as a maintaining tool that the creases form and reform. The project opens up conversations around use, value, and the ritual objects and the processes of care. Nadia Lesniarek is a disabled artist, working in the realms of painting, spatial installation, research and community engagement.

Curated by Isabel Reed

The Kabinett has been removed. The cause of this is uncertain, as many culprits exist. The temptation then exists to point the finger at the ongoing gentrification of the area, sanitisation attempts from Southwark council, or an intervention from TFL (the Kabinett’s legal owner), as all are potential suspects in its removal. 
 
Did someone reach out to complain?
 
The temptation to speculate is pervasive however outside of this, the fact remains that the space was only destroyed once it became a space of public and community art, once it became cared for. Camberwell Kabinett became disused in the early 2000s and remained empty for almost 20 years accumulating trash and detritus slowly decomposing from the inside out, untampered with. It only took a year of being maintained and utilised as a space for public arts for it to be lanced from the street. There is a certain irony to its removal as most can agree that during the process of sanitisation or gentrification, art spaces often play a key role in “regenerating” an area. Perhaps then it is the public nature and lack of exclusivity to the Kabinett that was in turn its downfall. 
 
To be cared for is to be viewed as something that exists outside the self, to be worth looking at. To be maintained for the value you give, independently to a capitalist mindset, is in itself radical; it can therefore be unsurprising that the Kabinett was removed.
 
Nadia Lesniarek’s original intervention was to be displayed within the walls of the Kabinett, in which she would have performed acts of maintenance and care usually reserved for highly valued “closed interior” spaces. However since the Kabinett’s sudden removal on the night before install, this is no longer possible. Instead a discussion into the loss of the space and of how to maintain that which is lost arises. In response to the now absent space of the Kabinett, Lesniarek creates an inverse shell in homage, opposite from the original site. Unlike the Kabinett the temporary, barebones structure has only one main barrier to the street, its door, which was absent during the Kabinett’s permanent residence. In and around the new temporary structure, maintained works will be hung for the duration of the opening and passersby will be allowed to take them.

After the private view, the show unfolds across six sites in the Camberwell area. There map where you might find more ensembles, paintings of maintenance tools of body and city. The artist will replenish the stock of these sites throughout the two-week duration of the installation, in lieu of the absence of the taken Kabinett, evoking a meditative and repetitive process of care.

©2021 by nadia yasmin lesniarek. Proudly created with Wix.com

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