SUPRAINFINIT at Artissima 2023

We are delighted to take part in the 30th Edition of Artissima Art Fair in Torino. For the gallery's third participation in Torino,we will be showing a lively dialogue between artistic collective Apparatus 22 and Hadassah Emmerich in the experimental section of the fair Monologue/Dialogue, intersecting between materialities of pleasure and touch, and between natural and virtual worlds.

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Sensuality and female pleasure in Hadassah Emmerich's work

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The selection of works from artist Hadassah Emmerich presents a universe of vibrant colours, as the female body is merged with plant life forms, celebrating erotic pleasure beyond the categories of the masculine and the human. The almost immaculate flows that unfold on the canvases remind of digital landscapes, creating a powerful sense of confusion between the cyber and the natural worlds, as well as between artistic media such as collage and oil painting. To achieve this, Emmerich has developed her own particular painting technique. She uses stencils cut-outs from vinyl flooring, which she then covers with ink, and impresses onto the canvas.

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Amsterdam-based curator and art historian Nina Folkersma writes about Emmerich's practice: "Body and identity, the sensory and the sensual, the commodification of the erotic and the exotic: these are frequently recurring themes in Hadassah Emmerich’s work. The sensuality of her painting resides not only on the surface of the (erotic) image, but also in her refined use of colour and technical execution. (...) Emmerich succeeds in making the act of looking truly provocative."

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In 2024, a new large-scale public commission by Emmerich will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Athens, Greece, as part of the exhibition cycle What If Women Ruled the World?, curated by Katerina Gregos.

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Apparatus 22, interspecies love, and utopia

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The transdisciplinary art collective Apparatus 22 see themselves as a collective of dreamers, researchers, poetic activists and (failed) futurologists, interested in exploring the intricate relationships between economy, politics, gender studies, social movements, religion and fashion in order to understand contemporary society. A recent topic of research and reflection in the practice of Apparatus 22 is their SUPRAINFINIT universe: a world-making attempt to use hope critically in navigating the present and future. In their very diverse works –installations, performances, text based-shapes– reality is mixed with fiction and storytelling, and all merge with a critical approach drawing knowledge & experience from design, sociology, literature, and economics.

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At Artissima, Suprainfinit gallery, heralding the name of the artists' utopian universe, will show recent works (2022-2023) by the collective, some of the works being part of our latest solo show with Apparatus 22 , featured in the Critics' Picks section of Artforum Magazine.

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The BANNER series of deconstructed flags, made out of recycled leather, help the collective navigate reality under the flag of hope. The banners do not stand for any nation, but for the utopian universe of SUPRAINFINIT, imagined and created step by step in the past 8 years by the collective. Leather is worked into magical~visceral~kink forms, unfolding hyperbolic intensities and queer sensibilities.

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Similar to a totem, As twilight uncrowns the shade stands somewhere in-between reality and SUPRAINFINIT, a portal through which messages, dreams, stories, ideas may be passed along the two worlds. As twilight uncrowns the shade alludes to a telephone, an antenna, a razor, a uterus, while the title is conceived as a spell that at once reveals and conceals. 

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Program me for ecstatic abandon, can be read as a surreal costume designed for the ethereal character of Atletica Ideal. One of SUPRAINFINIT’s inhabitants, Atletica Ideal is an AI machine programmed not to feel emotions by its creators in a quest to understand the human concepts of love and pleasure. Composed of two symmetrical sides, Program me for ecstatic abandon queers Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, like two unheavenly fingers that reach to touch each other in a dark paradise

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The leather-and-neon work My crusade for love, like a map of a yet-to-be charted territory, traces the words of Atletica Ideal, quoting the radio episode About the curious digressions of Atletica Ideal, produced in 2017 as part of the collective’s on-going series THE CONTINUUM BROADCAST. The radio episode takes the format of a ballad composed of voice memos recorded by Atletica Ideal in her impossible journey towards interspecies love. 

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Recent articles on Apparatus 22's practice have been published in Frieze Magazine, The Quietus, and locally in Bucharest in the contemporary art magazine Revista ARTA.

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Main image: Hadassah Emmerich, Substitutionary Seduction, 2020, oil on canvas, 130 x 185 cm 

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Aditional Images: 

Hadassah Emmerich, Nude Reading Group III, oil on canvas, 185 x 130 cm

Hadassah Emmerich, Solar Mirror, 2019, oil on canvas, 150 x 90 cm 

Hadassah Emmerich, Oben Ohne II (Topless II), 2021, vinyl collage, 77.7 x 60.2 cm 

Apparatus 22, As twilight uncrowns the shade, 2022, object (metal leather, wood), 130 x 78 x 48 cm

Apparatus 22, Banner 45:54, 2023, leather, wood, 156 x 78cm / unique

Apparatus 22, Program me for ecstatic abandon, 2022, installation (leather, foams, marble, metal chain), 170 x 300 cm

Apparatus 22, My crusade for love, 2022, installation (neon flex in white, leather in two colours, red thread), 260 x 237 cm

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