Jamie Diamond, DonChristian Jones, Rachel Libeskind, Kristina Schmidt, Marika Thunder: Youth Hostel
07.10.–12.11.2022, marytwo

Youth Hostel is a group exhibition that was inspired by the energy and exuberance of the founders of marytwo. Curated by Dr Kathy Battista, the exhibition is predicated on an international youth hostel and the concept of transitory spaces. Known for short-term, low-cost stays, hostels are also temporary communities and places of refuge. Guests often stay in dormitory style rooms and interact with strangers, exchanging information, advice, and tales of their travels. They are transitional, social spaces with the potential for magical coincidences and at the least, social bonding; however, travel can also be an isolating experience as an outsider to a new culture. Before the age of the Internet and the advent of AirBNB, youth hostels were important mainstays for international travelers. Combining notions of nostalgia, internationalism, and youth culture, the exhibition builds connections between young artists akin to the random meetings of travelers. The artists will share the gallery space, their work temporarily in dialogue with each other. Each artist was selected for producing work that relates to concepts of travel and transition as well as community and isolation. Rachel Libeskind is an artist who lives and works in Berlin. A multidisciplinary artist, her research-based practice examines the construction of history and the enduring power of images. The Traveling Bag, in the words of the artist, is “an ongoing performance that is about stuff, suitcases, memory, and personal history”. It is an evolving work that was first performed in 2014 and has been staged at various venues around the world. Libeskind will perform on the opening night of the exhibition and a concomitant work and two new collages will be installed at the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. Jamie Diamond is a New York based artist whose lens-based work explores themes of intimacy, fact and fiction, gender and identity. Augusta Family (2022) is a new work in her ongoing series Constructed Family Portraits. Titled after the hotels in which these photographs are shot, Diamond assembles strangers that she meets on the internet or in person who pose as family members in what seem to be banal portraits. The series questions notions of fiction and reality, as well as gender and family roles. Augusta Family was shot at the Augusta Hotel in Berlin and is seen for the first time at marytwo.

DonChristian Jones is a multi-hyphenate artist, born and raised in Philadelphia, whose work takes the form of visual art, performance, music, and curating. Photographic and video work are from his series The Politics of Mourning (2018 ongoing), in which the artist created and archived solitary performances in the Italian landscape. The work is a response to the alienation and verbal abuse that he encountered on his extended trip to Italy. Shot entirely on an iphone8, Jones’ queer, black body becomes a metaphor for socio-political and individual strife as well as navigating foreign territory as an outsider.

Kristina Schmidt lives and works in Munich and New York. Her work often takes the form of figurative painting that depicts herself in a comic version performing quotidian tasks among abstracted domestic backgrounds. Schmidt’s figures never confront the viewer and appear as universal psychological studies. In Zügig ist die harmlose Form von schnell (2022), she paints herself in the pose of the profile picture of Thomas Bernhard, a controversial Austrian author. Known for his harsh views on his native country and its history of genocide, Bernhard’s loner protagonists often recite isolated monologues on a pessimistic state of the world. Schmidt’s paintings are accompanied by a wall-based light sculpture that casts a sequence of moving light patterns.

Marika Thunder is an artist who lives and works in New York. Her work primarily takes the form of paintings that explore her personal history of a childhood spent between NY, Texas and Hungary.For Youth Hostel, Thunder’s Yeshiva Door 5 (2022) is taken from a photograph that she translated into a painting. The photograph was taken at a school for Hasidic boys in Westchester, NY. Thunder zooms in on a door, which is a poignant symbol of transition, in this case from the school to the outside, as well as from boyhood to maturity. Thunder’s painting captures the theme of the exhibition, focusing on the universality of change and evolution through experience across time and locations.

Links

See the whole documentation here.