Isabella Fürnkäs
Siamese Dreams, 2021
Video installation, video projection on mattress,
12 min 47 sec, color/sound, durational performance
Edition of 3 + 1 A.P.
Courtesy of the artist and WVK
We used to sleep in our beds. Today, we live in them. Advanced digitalization has progressively capitalized on this intrinsically intimate space. Through our mobile devices, we bring the world into bed with us and, by the same token, expose ourselves to the world in bed. The bed—perhaps the most intimate place of retreat—is thus increasingly becoming a public zone. Siamese Dreams conists of filmed recordings by the artist that are assembled into a video collage. Close-ups of everyday motifs are rendered alien through this macroscopic perspective and reflect a fascination for the absurdity of the everyday. From this seemingly arbitrary succession of images and the concentrated emotions they elicit, the dreamlike character of the work unfolds, lingering at the interface between remembering and forgetting. Siamese Dreams creates a space that is highly personal yet accessible to everyone. The artist experiments with the thresholds between the body and the imagination, the unconscious and the conscious, the individual and the public. It is not so much a matter of defining boundaries, but of exploring these liminal spaces and allowing them to be experienced.
Text by Paula Ursprung
Isabella Fürnkäs
Blind Land, 2018
Sound installation, 6 sound showers
Basin with balck water, 6x3m
13 min
Courtesy of the artist and WVK
A black pool appears in contrast to two performers dressed all in white. 6 sound showers play a sound scape from above, in which the voices of the performers monologuing and dialoguing are mingled in. The performers move stoically synchronous, imitating each other, responding with eye contact only. Like living sculptures they progressively move on the borders of the pool to finally dive into the basin. The process ranges between hesitation, fear and playfulness. The water is approached like an element of the unknown, with which the performers interact, treating it like a fluid opponent. They pour black color into the pool to dye the water and themselves. The procedure reveals an immersive character of humans assimilating and disappearing in their surroundings, becoming willingly or unwillingly part of an alienated context. The work examines transgression, alienation and immersion. It is a bleak reflection on modern-day identity and isolation, both in a technological and social dimension.
Text by Maximilian Steinborn
Isabella Fürnkäs
The Desiring Machines, 2020
Sound installation, 220 individual hanging glass drops, net, approximately 10x2cm, background sound by Aphex Twin, text spoken by Moira Barrett
10 min
Courtesy of the artist and WVK
The Desiring Machines is a sound installation that consists of 220 individually hand-blown glass droplets suspended from a mash net across the ceiling within a two-channel immersive audio soundscape. Each glass drop is unique and offset in its own way, some with streams of deep red ruby glass inside them. The artist writes “The glass bodies, composed like fixed movement in space, give the impression of a social fabric. Everything is interwoven, everything flows”. The viewer is enveloped in the soundscape based on excerpts from the publication Anti-Oedipus (1977) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. An intentionally hypnotic and difficult to follow text on the “healthy” and “schizophrenic” people in capitalist society – it is unclear who is who. The lyrical arc of the work delves into how productive desire can be. A journey through the human body begins, from its needs and processes to the mundane circulation of bodily fluids.
Isabella Fürnkäs (*1988, Tokyo, Japan) is a French-German artist who works in a variety of media. Her body of work involves equal shares of video, multi-media installation, performance and drawing. In her multi-layered oeuvre she addresses questions of physical and spatial intimacy, the influence of digitalization on interpersonal relationships, and the transformation of social communication patterns, whereas she creates contextual shifts that echo our own vulnerabilities. After completing an academic degree in art history and philosophy, Fürnkäs studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Keren Cytter and Andreas Gursky, where she finished as Meisterschülerin in 2017. She is the recipient of the CCA Artist-in-Residence Program in 2024 and the Berlin Masters Schliemann Residency in 2022. She is a scholar of the Akademie der Künste Berlin and the winner of the first prize of the strike a pose K21 Kunstsammlung NRW award in 2021.
WVK is a contemporary art gallery based in Zug, Switzerland. The gallery is committed to presenting a programme of young international artists in the early stages of their careers and understands art as the primal source to explore the human condition.