Scary Good

During Prague Art Week 22 it will be open from Friday 9. 9. to 15. 9.  11-18h

The exhibition was financially supported by the Deutsch-Tschechisher Zukunftsfonds.

For the third edition of SUMO, Berlínskej Model hosts Scary Good, a curatorial project by the Berlin-based contemporary art gallery Anton Janizewski and the online magazine gallerytalk.net.

There is pain and excitement in creation. As soon as an idea starts manifesting into something that feels too good, one is drawn to distrust the good feeling. More often than not, anticipated greatness reveals itself as trivial rather than extraordinary.

While the truly remarkable in its abstraction is hard to work toward, coolness is attainable as a composition of codes. Executed with nonchalance, a carefully curated and controlled aesthetic protects one’s true desires. Under the shield of recognition pursuing the promising appears to be less frightening albeit dangerous.

The exhibition is both an homage to and a deconstruction of the contemporary cool, toying with clichés of roughness while ultimately neglecting them. Rebekka Benzenberg (DE), Monika Grabuschnigg (AT), Constantin Hartenstein (DE), Eliška Konečná (CZ) and Mary-Audrey Ramirez (LU) draw from fetish and fitness culture, referencing video game creatures, bended bodies, and deadly fruit. Their art and personas merge into what presents as an inviolable surface under which true dedication, doubt, critique, tenderness, and vision are to be discovered.

Scary Good is a flirt with the beauty of darkness, taking the world’s wickedness as a starting point to tap into a deeper examination of shared hopes and fears. It allows within the wish for contentment a craving for triumph. On the off chance that scary good feeling might just hold true.

Rebekka Benzenberg (DE) is based in Berlin. She works with materials that stand and can be read as encodings for social and societal phenomena. The allure of contraries, whether visible or invisible as well as the “inside”, the “outside” and especially the “in between” is her focus.

Monika Grabuschnigg (AU) is based in Berlin. Her work employs a variety of media while continuously returning to clay. She processes familiar objects into installations and sculptures by engaging with popular culture, philosophy, memory and dream.

Constantin Hartenstein (DE) is based in Berlin. His practice includes epoxy resin sculptures and video installations. He addresses issues concerning masculinity, the queer body, exclusion and belonging, reacting to gendered codes and self-optimization in technology-driven times.

Eliška Konečná (CZ) is based in Prague. She uses alternative materials and techniques such as woodcarving or embroidery to give form to an untouchable abstract reality. Her reliefs display floating bodies somewhere between wakefulness and sleep.

Mary-Audrey Ramirez (LU) is based in Berlin. She crafts sculptures from fabric and embroiders pictures. Worldbuilding is an integral part of her practice, contrasting fantasy and real life, the digital and the analogue world.

Constantin Hartenstein (DE) is based in Berlin. Working with sculpture, installation, performance and video, he explores how the human body is immersed in and altered by artificial environments and technological inventions. Hartenstein addresses issues concerning masculinities, the queer body, exclusion and belonging, reacting to gendered codes and self-optimization in technology-driven times.