Andrea Geyer
On this day
5 March – 20 April 2019
Opening reception: Tuesday, 5 March, 6 – 8pm
Hales New York, 547 West 20^th Street, New York, NY 10011

Hales is proud to present Andrea Geyer: On this day. This is Geyer’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Geyer’s critically-oriented work ranges across media, incorporating text, photography, painting, sculpture, video, and performance. It explores the complex politics of lived time, its absence and presence in the context of specific social and political situations, cultural institutions, and historical events. From her early investigations into notions of citizenship, and the role of photography in the colonization of North America, to more recent research into the structures that render women’s central contributions to modernism invisible, Geyer’s work continuously seeks to create spaces of critical, collective reflection on the politics of histories that allow for the formation of new memories of that which is marginalized or obscured. Uniting all of Geyer’s ambitious work is the belief that “art should be a site to offer the possibility of re-orientation(s) towards a current moment.”

The exhibition at Hales New York premiers two of Geyer’s most recent works: a multi-media installation, Feeding the Ghost and a series of silkscreens titled On this day.

A complex installation of furniture, slide projections and voice recordings, Feeding the Ghost continues Geyer’s investigation into the inextricable links between art and politics, past and present. Specifically, it reflects on the integral relations of the personal and the political within an artist’s work. Based on a live performance lecture Geyer gave at the Dia Art Foundation, Feeding the Ghost takes its lead from a work by the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman titled A Family in Brussels. Akerman, who was born in Brussels in 1950 to Polish Holocaust survivors, is renowned for her significant contributions to avant-garde art and feminist filmmaking and was influential to Geyer as a young artist. A Family in Brussels is a one hour reading by Akerman herself that Geyer experienced live at Dia Art Foundation in October 2001. Observing the life of a woman during the time her husband is dying, it is Akerman’s mother’s story that inevitably involves Akerman herself, and shares similarities with her seminal work Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Following Akerman’s lead, Feeding the Ghost observes Akerman doing her reading in which she works through her feeling of loss, of her father and weaving the experience of her family into the larger histories of erasures in Europe. Geyer, in turn, addresses her experience of loss, on the one hand that of the elder artists, but also that of a post 9/11 New York. She combines Akerman’s story with her own viewing of it, weaving her autobiographical details with those of Akerman. Other sources that Geyer uses are Ackerman’s writings, proposals and interviews. The resulting text evokes a striking intimacy, constantly shifting subject position, from herself to Ackerman and back again, layering Akerman over the present artist—and in turn reviving the presence of the often-repressed histories both artist’s works address. In Feeding the Ghost, presence and absence exist side by side in the liminal space between the personal and the political, between past and present. “You cannot un-invite the ghosts,” Geyer reminds us and proposes art as a site where they can co-exist.

On this day, developed during a Rauschenberg Residency in the summer of 2018, offers a different form of storytelling in which both artist and viewers are called out as protagonists. Responding directly to the current political climate, this work materializes how (violent) histories resonate in our contemporary bodies. Driven by Geyer’s upbringing in Germany, this work reflects on the role of the “bystander,” informed by history in the current volatile and precarious times. Geyer layers news imagery and text in silver iridescent and white paints on rag paper. The resulting works – large and flag-like – curve towards the viewer in a gentle, yet persistent fashion, proposing an inevitable proximity of the receding yet present image to a viewing body. Geyer asks us to envision multiple moments in time and a viewer’s relationship to it. To by-stand, to view art, to witness, are all put forward as related actions, as possibly parallel, as lastingly impactful.

Across both bodies of work, the patterns that emerge are haunting: “Repetition bloodshed, repetition silence.” By centering unsung histories in their perpetuation and pointing to processes of active concealment in the present, Geyer urges viewers to look and to listen again, reminding us of our own agency and capacity to break through any questionable silence.

ABOUT THE ARTIST