CÉLINE MANZ

'fold;' is a multi-media installation based on a long time research that investigates the notions of copyrights, cultural heritage and issues of gender in art. As a follow-up on the project 'Rythme sans fin', it is centered around the effects of intellectual property on artist legacies after their deaths, when they are no longer in control of what happens to their work.

Building on Walter Benjamin’s idea of the reactivation of artworks, Manz aims to quote cultural artifacts and their makers back into existence through means of visibility. The project consists of several elements; case studies based on the example of Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a multidisciplinary Swiss Avant-Garde artist who, for the 70 years following her death (id est until her copyrights expired), was exceptionally difficult to research.

The work revolves around archival material - letters Taeuber wrote to her husband - and extracts of her oeuvre. These two elements are presented in an installation that juxtaposes various media ranging from text, performance, fabrics and sound. Manz is notably interested in examining the nuances between ‚being inspired by‘, copying and re-anacting, and which of these methods is the most effective for re-activating Sophie Taeuber‘s voice in a contemporary context.

The title ‚fold;’ refers to the folds in the letters and the folds created by draping fabrics. It is also a concept; as a verb, fold; refers to Manz’s practice of superposing and layering elements with the aim to create a new image.

The project is based on various mulitdisciplinary dialogues. It includes contributions by Jakob Warmenbol (‚fold; Rhythmic Sound Patterns'), Laura Lienhard ('fold; The Letters - Dadaist Lecture‘), Leo Silkeberg William-Olsson & Amina Seid Tahir ('fold; Rean-Actors‘). With a special thanks to Jules Estèves, the Zurich Central Library, Emmeli Person from Index Contemporary Art Foundation in Stockholm, Claire Hoffmann from the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris, as well as Andreas Schneitter.

'fold;' was made possible through the support of the Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt and the Patronagefonds for young Swiss Artists.

Web version of full publication

Multiple. Risography on various Munken papers, threads, ribbon, stitched cardboard box. 220x175x60 mm. Edition of 15 + 2 AC, signed and numbered. Published by STUDIO 47 PRESS.

'fold; DaDa Letters' is a performative lecture by Laura Lienhard using the work 'fold; The Letters' as a script for a dadaist reading of Sophie Teauber's love letters to Hans Arp.

Save the date: On 14.3.2020 Laura Lienhard will perfom 'fold; DaDa Letters' at the Kunsthaus Langenthal

Mixed media installation with fabrics (Jacquard weaving, embroidery, sewing, and prints on semitransparent silk), lights and audio.

This series tests various forms of 'Simulationisms'; the appropriation of a style or genre – and not of an existing work – in order to produce a new work in the same manner. Based on the oeuvre by Sophie Taeuber as an applied research into the nuances between art fraud and repetition.

Images: Outside my studio in London in April 2019, during the festival-conference 'Regenerative Feedback' at Worm, Rotterdam, May 2019. installation for the RCA Degree Show 2019, London and 'fold;' at Herman, Rotterdam, May 2019. Photos by Cem Altīnöz and Céline Manz.

Limited Edition of Organza silks inspired by Sophie Taeuber's oeuvre. The series is conceived as an intermediate between affordable art and sensuous scarf. 9 different designs, 100 % silk, edition of 10 + 2 AC, signed and numbered. Manufactured in the UK. Published by STUDIO 47 PRESS.

More details here.

On the occasion of Art Basel 2019, a selection of these designs is available at Ooid Store Basel.

For purchases contact hello@studio-47.org. Images © STUDIO 47 PRESS and Ooid Store.

'fold; Rhythmic Sound Patterns' is a collaborative project between Jakob Warmenbol and Céline Manz. It is part of the body of work 'fold;' by Manz; a case study on the role of copyrights in posthumously edited narratives, and the issue of who gets to speak and whose voice gets to be heard on the example of Sophie Taeuber and Hans Arp. The project explores different forms of „voicing“ and encompasses several aspects of Sophie Taeuber’s personal and artistic legacy. Next to "fold; Ryhthmic Sound Patterns", the project encompasses a publication and a series of designs based on Taeuber‘s oeuvre. As part of the project, Manz asked the Brussels-based musician Jakob Warmenbol to create musical reactions that are based on artworks by Sophie Taeuber. For Taeuber, as was the case for many of her contemporaries, music and sound played a significant role in the creation of her work. The 'Rhythmic Sound Pattern's reverse that. Here, the image is the inspiration that creates the sound. The result is a series of experimental pieces of each 1.5 to 2.5 minutes. Each piece is named after the work it is inspired by. The full album with Jakob‘s musical interpretations of Taeuber‘s works was released for free download in May 2019 in the frame of the Regenerative Feedback Festival 2019 at Worm Rotterdam.

All tracks composed and performed by Jakob Warmenbol, Chicago, Ill, United States 2018/2019. Cover by Céline Manz 2018/2019. Published by STUDIO 47 PRESS.

Image: Jakob Warmenbol performing in the immersive installation by Céline Manz during the album release on the occasion of 'Regenerative Feedback' in May 2019 at Worm, Rotterdam. Curated and organized by S. de Jager. Courtesy Regenerative Feedback, photo by Cem Altīnöz.

Presentation of a work in process during the OPEN STUDIO at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in September 2018. The multi media installation "Cento" revolved around fragments of my master dissertation at the Royal College of Art in London, and featured several fragments of said dissertation, a digital print, a series of polaroids, a light installation, a website, a printed version of Meret Oppenheim's speech 'Dankesrede für den Kunstpreis der Stadt Basel' in German, a series of Pochoirs based on Oppenheim's oeuvre, as well as the series "Nues", which was projected onto transparent holographic fabric.

Series of case studies that investigate issues around legacy and copyright in digital age.

Website including the research here

Images: Kunsthalle Basel, courtesy of Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt, photos by Nici Jost.

Website including the research

Limited edition of 8 unique photograms on the occasion of the London Open 2018 at Whitechapel Gallery. Waxed oak frames in size 42 x 29,7cm and UV glass, costum made by the Frame Factory in London.

(Autoplay does not work on Chrome since the April 2018 update)

Part of

deuxpiece presents: SCREEN_by ADA W. POTTER: 5 NEWSLETTER / 5 WEEKS / 5 ARTISTS - Aida Cheng (CN/USA), Esther Hunziker (CH), Céline Manz (CH), Jessie Stead (USA) & Daniela Brugger (CH).

Ada W. Potter's project SCREEN_ [ "screenspace"] is an email-based art "space" that produces monthly artworks, sent/received via email. Each participating artist creates a unique artwork for each installment. Email recipients are asked to subscribe. This opt-in structure is meant to elicit an engaged audience and help the project avoid spam status. Subscribe here

Link video

Comission for the group show "Chäs u Chole" at Kunsthaus Langenthal, Switzerland.

"Chees and Coal. A photographer from Gondiswil, Johann Schär (1855–1938) 3 x 3 contemporary approaches. David Elsener, Nicolas Fernandez, Matthias Gabi, Nina Haab, Urs Mannhart, Céline Manz, Valerio Moser, Nele Stecher, Maria Ursprung.

Stately farms, beautiful cows, proud cheese makers, youngsters and cheerful women picking berries in the forest – Johann Schär's photographic documentation of a sedate rural life at the beginning of the 20th Century has no comparison in its density and quality in Switzerland. The documentation of the coal surface-mining in and around Gondiswil is unique and gives an impressive testimonial of this rare activity of mining in Switzerland.

For the first time, Kunsthaus Langenthal presents an overview of Johann Schärs's (1855–1938) work. Over 4000 glas-negatives, historic prints, album and postcards were secured, researched and digitalized by Fotobüro Bern.

The exhibition was curated by Markus Schürpf (Fotobüro Bern) and will be accompanied by an extensive catalogue that will be published on 18 March 2017.

Under the title «3x3» the Kunsthaus invited nine artists and writers to approach the photographs by Johann Schär from a contemporary perspective and react to them with a new work." Source: Website Kunsthaus Langenthal

Episode for RietveldTV

Based on some of Hitchcock's notorious scenes that subverted the 'Hays Code' and an artist's trials and tribulations to make the perfectly legal piece of appropriation art.

Details taken from screenshots of online museum catalogues which are not allowed to show reproductions of artworks from their own collections due to copyright limitations. Commissioned work for the 100th issue of the Dutch Art Magazine Tubelight. With interview.

Website Original habitat

Html, Google Street View, digital collage

Contribution to the Pictures Generation issue of Metropolis M Magazine. Based on Sherrie Levine’s Statement from 1982, including plagiarized quotes by Sherrie Levine, Sarah Charlesworth and Barbara Kruger. Samples of interviews and artist statements given between 1981 and 2016:

THE TRIANGULAR NATURE OF DESIRE

I worked for many years using images from popular culture, but never related to the word ‘appropriation’. I'm not interested in stealing images. I want to know what this strange world of images is that I live in. This is why I deconstruct images, take them apart, to find out what they're made of, how they function and how they picture the world for us. A symbolism is attached to particular images, becomes marked in the unconscious. So I abstract objects that socially carry a strong emotional charge or symbolic significance. The arrangement of images is loaded in many different ways which allows multiple interpretations. The viewer completes the act of interpretation. It allows even contradictory interpretations. To me, a picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. To exorcise it, to rearrange it, to reshape it, to make it my own, involves unearthing it, describing it, deploying it in form, and then rearranging it. Casting my world back into the given world. It’s like a reformulation of language, a recreation of a new metaphor. I'm interested in as many layers of meaning as possible. The more you know, the more meaning and the more history can be brought to bear on it. Ergo the viewer is very, very important. He is the tablet on which all the quotations that make up an image are inscribed without any of them being lost, so to speak. I did a lot of commercial art for money and freelance illustration stuff when I was younger, so I do understand how magazines work. I use images drawn from that culture because I see in each piece an interface between my personal subjectivity and a given world. Being socialized within similar constructs of myth and desire, it is not surprising that most people are comforted by popular depictions. Sometimes these images emerge as ‘semblances of beauty;’ as confluences of desirous points. We have seen that pictures and words have become the rallying points for certain assumptions. There are assumptions of truth and falsity and the narratives of falsity are called fictions. In most design work, received images and words are arranged and aligned to produce assigned meanings. I am engaged in rearranging and realigning these dominant assignments. The idea is to broaden the discussion, not to narrow it. The idea of multiple images and mechanical reproduction fascinates me. When I first started to work as a commercial artist, I was really interested in how advertisers dealt with the idea of originality. If they wanted an image, they'd just take it. It was never an issue of morality; it was always an issue of utility. There was no sense that images belonged to someone; all images were in the public domain and as an artist I found that very liberating. I just imagined that they're mine. Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that copyright and so-called intellectual property is a euphemism for corporate control in so many ways. But don't get me wrong. I believe in copyright. I do. But it's been taken to such lengths. So much of our sense of art history is based on copies, fakes and forgeries. I think of originality as a trope. It's not that I don't think that the word ‘originality’ means anything or has no meaning. I just think it's gotten a very narrow meaning lately. What I think about in terms of my work is broadening the definitions of the word ‘original’. Sometimes when things are almost original they can be as disturbing. When it is close, but not the same, as the original, in my mind, there's a different kind of tension. The pictures I make are really ghosts of ghosts; their relationship to the original images is tertiary, that is, three or four times removed. I like to celebrate doubt and uncertainty. To provoke answers but don’t give them. To withhold absolute meaning by incorporating parasite meanings. As far as the visual presentation goes, I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty. A lot of people are like me: they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity. Whatever power, whatever affect the images have, works on its own. A new work should have as much aura as its reference. The tension between the reference and the new work doesn't really exist unless the new work has an auratic presence of its own. It's all about what the work makes you think about. Somebody would say, ‘They’re really awful but come to think of it, they’re really beautiful.’ A picture's meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination.

STUDIO 47 is a collective reflection on property and ownership in digital age initiated by Céline Manz. The studio’s activities are complemented on the website studio-47.org. For information on the program please contact us here

STUDIO 47 originates from a coalition with the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Foam and De Appel and is part of the 3Package Deal, a program supported by the AFK and Bureau Broedplaatsen Amsterdam.

STUDIO 47 PRESS is the publishing platform of STUDIO 47. The publisher’s program solely consists of works that are the result of an artistic appropriative practise. The publications are printed in small editions and available as free PDFs on studio-47.org/press.

8 artworks and the corporate logos of their respective owners.

Series of physical and digital Logo-Reproductions of artworks that are the most representative pieces in the corporate art collection they belong to. A Logo-Reproduction is a technique that uses the corporate logo of a respective artwork owner as a digital brush. The reproductions are made on the occasion of the exhibition celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Netherlands Association of Corporate Art Collections – VBCN. Presented both on wall-filling advertising banners and a website, the BANNERs were juxtaposed with the original artworks that served as their models. The work is based on statistics made by the winners of the VBCN Open Curatorenprijs, Alix de Massiac and Vincent van Velsen. The exhibition united the most representative and the most exceptional art works from 29 Dutch corporate art collections. Exhibition views showing "Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken: Jeroen Henneman - Koningin Beatrix" and "AMC: Wouter van Riessen - Narcissen" made by Konstantin Guz.

Catalogue accompanying the installation BANNERs - 8 artworks and the corporate logos of their respective owners.

Free download of the full publication.

Collaboration with Xavier Fernandez Fuentes.

Handout.

Improvised dance piece superposed with a live sound performance created by two laptops which were connected via Skype, recorded at Banana Beach in Tel Aviv in May 2014.

Collaboration with Israeli dancer and choreographer Yuli Kovbasnian.

Banana Beach is a variation on the "Interference" piece we repeatedly performed in Tel Aviv earlier in 2014.

Commissioned work for the Dutch Art Magazine Metropolis M for the issue Nr 3 2014 - Summer of Love & Hate: Tribute to Ed van der Elsken.

After Ed van der Elsken's 'Beethovenstraat 1967'

Courtesy of Metropolis M

Enter here for free download.

In collaboration with Xavier Fernandez Fuentes .

"What, they seem to be asking, can one do after all has been displayed, when provocation becomes conformist? Sisley’s milk-fed version of porno chic may just lead the way out of the rut and into a new season. It’s got all the subversion, with ironic, wholesome, goodness to boot" - M.K.Hoffman on Sisley's 2001 campaign 'Hungry for love' shot by Mr. Richardson.

"Terry's a really cool guy. There's something very beautiful, very raw about it and I'm glad that there is a photographer out there that does work like that." — Noot Seear, Model

44 ColorWave poster prints in DIN A1

Nominated for the Gerrit Rietveld Award in Fine Arts 2013

Art - Das Kunstmagazin: Interview 06.05.2014

Limited edition, 25 copies.
Thesis, Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam. Practical tips when working with appropriated images, including an introduction on copyright, frequently asked questions about the notions of “copy” and “originality”, a chapter with case studies, a checklist and a list with further links.
Click here for the thesis essay "What do you know about art, you're not a lawyer".

Aude Debout, graphic designer, and Annelies Lesuis, lawyer specialized in copyright.

1 hour 28 minutes 04 seconds of clapping, webcam performance.

Video and audio installation.

Title inspired by Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s essay on photography and postmodernism. First reflections on gender representation in photography.

Photographs under hypnosis.
Rietveld Uncut is an annual happening at the Brakke Grond Art Center in Amsterdam. Each department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie is invited to contribute a project. The 2011's edition theme was the living object. Taking the photographer's ambition to "photograph the beyond" by word, I asked a hypnotist to hypnotize me during the opening and convince me that I was able to photograph the invisible.

The Rorschach Tableaux are Inspired of Roland Barth's Essay "Camera Lucida", in which he describes his unability to -literally - recognize himself on photographs. These 4/5 inch analog portraits were abstracted in the darkroom. Following the principle that photography is a highly subjective medium, the viewer is invited to create his own projection on the person portrayed.

Extract from a series of photograms made with objects which belonged to my grandparents. Both of them had the habit of keeping whatever could be re-used again. When clearing their flat we found an extensive collection of neatly stored everyday objects; used wrapping paper, buttons, corks, elastics, nails, etc. I felt very attracted by these little objects which told my family's story over many years. Before throwing them away I used a part of this collection for an abstracted photographic review. By lightening the photographic paper indirectly with mirrors, glass and punctual lights, the photograms don't show their imprints but just their reflections.

Experiment.
Three photographs a day, all uploaded before midnight, dealing with the double meaning of the french word "vanité" (meaning both vanity and vanitas). As the capacity of free websites is limited, the project ended the day no further pages could be added.
Enter here.