KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Exhibition

I am Your Window

Panya Clark Espinal

Photo: Monica Mazurkiewicz

Panya Clark Espinal (born in Toronto, lives and works in Toronto) moves effortlessly between different artistic media such as sculpture, installation, performance, printmaking and textile work in her practice. As an artist, researcher and storyteller, she uses various motifs and objects from the archives of her own family history, which she restages and transfers into space.
The relationship to the life’s work of her late grandmother (Paraskeva Clark, 1898 – 1986), who was herself an artist, is a well-known name in Canada and is now represented in numerous museum collections, plays a special role in Panya Clark Espinal’s work. However, instead of indulging in nostalgic memories or simply fulfilling a longing for the preservation of artistic or craft practices, the artist uses a variety of techniques and materials to “activate” motifs in her grandmother’s paintings, detaching them from the square of the canvas and making them tangible to the audience as spatial phenomena. This goes hand in hand with a detailed analysis of the objects and the viewer’s perspective.

Textiles – including the technique of weaving – play a central role in the exhibition. The artist uses them to tell stories. The word “textile” and “texture” have the same etymology as “text” and come from the Latin “texere”, which means “to weave” or “to plait”. The production of textiles can therefore be regarded as a basic writing technique, as the processes involved are similar: the writing process combines letters, forms them into lines and these in turn into pages of text, but also brings together strands from different places to form an interwoven web. In the artist’s practice, weaving becomes a narrative process that combines stories, materials and forms of thought in a dense structure. This creates a fabric, but also a mental rhythm.
The weaving of threads becomes an act of empowerment and collective expression. This practice connects people, creates community and enables creative exchange and mutual support. Panya Clark Espinal’s exhibition is also about this collective power of weaving. During her stay in Berlin, she helped to build a collective around the activity of weaving: the Weavers of Berlin, and created a new body of work in dialog with other artists (Linda McCue, Ryle Turin, Olga Plistik).

The title of the exhibition “I am Your Window” alludes to the aspect of storytelling. In addition to the painterly qualities of the architectural opening and the reference to the grandmother’s work, the window also serves as a threshold space – as a place for negotiating what is seen, said and passed on. It is a temporal bridge between the generations and the different temporal levels that the exhibition encompasses and opens into the present.

Exhibition
08.11. – 08.12.2024
Tue - Sun: 2 - 7pm
Admission free

Opening
07.11.2024
7 pm