Eroding While Tracing, Waning, Forming   

2015–2021
Mixed-media installation   
Dimensions variable   
Courtesy the artists 

Presentation with support from ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) 

The installation is composed of intricately sewn and painted textiles. Made over several years in response to an experience of exhaustion and illness, the works trace the ongoing journey of the artists as they re-establish their relationship to life, to each other, and to their artistic process. Avoiding narrative in an explicit sense, the textiles harbor a sense of deeper meaning defiant of a worldview where everything—including artistic practice–is expected to adhere to predetermined levels of productivity and information-driven legibility. Conceived through a correspondence between ritualistic daily habit and the fluidity of materials and gestures, the swathes of color and meandering lines bring to mind processes ranging from the transformative to the residual— traces of life and longing that accumulate gradually across a surface.  

Erika Arzt (b. 1969, Austria) and Juan Linares (b. 1972, Spain) have been collaborating since 2007, studied at the University of the Arts and the Royal College of Art, UK, and live and work in Berlin. Resisting a general demand for effectivity, project-based productivity, and information-driven legibility, their later work is an intimate re-negotiation of practice by means of experimentation and correspondence with the habits, rituals, and relations that constitute it. Previous exhibitions include Fundación Botin, Santander (2012); Johannesburg Art Gallery (2011); and Spreepark/Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Berlin/Vitoria-Gasteiz (2010).

Göteborgs Konsthall