New Tar

German visual artist Nora Kapfer presents a series of paintings which she developed during her 2016 residency at WIELS, marked by shiny black surfaces. The painterly gestures and symbols resemble the shapes of hearts or the contours of bones, organs, fruits and blossoms. Doused in a layer of Bitumen, they become readable yet are simultaneously denied. The symbols allow for a universal and abstracted communication, rendering present the imperceptible.

On the last day of her exhibition at the WIELS Project Room, Kapfer invites fellow artist and frequent collaborator Inka Meißner as a bodily respondent to the paintings. Adopting questions from American critic Eve K. Sedgwick’s inquiry into how knowledge performs itself, Meißner examines how one reads a surface that is at once pitch-black and reflecting; in between a solidified and permeable state.

Ultimately, Meißner and Kapfer propose a collaboration between the performing and visual arts that goes beyond a mere reenactment and emphasizes instead on the misuse of each other’s practices in the prospect of extending one’s own range of maneuvers.

• Nora Kapfer was born 1984 in Munich, Germany. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Malmö Art Academy. She has recently shown her work at Garret Grimoire in Berlin, Glovebox in Auckland, Muda Mura Muri and Nousmoules in Vienna. Together with Signe Rose she performed at Künstlerhaus Graz on the occasion of the exhibition 'DIDING – An Interior That Remains an Exterior'. In 2016 she was part of the WIELS residency programme.

• Inka Meißner is an artist working and living in Berlin. She studied fine art in Leipzig and recently finished a Master’s degree in Critical Studies in Vienna. She has recently shown at Nousmoules in Vienna and Silberkuppe in Berlin. Her work evolves around descriptive systems and appears in various formats and collaborations.