Kin
Spiritvessel, Espinavessa
5 October – 5 December 2024

KIN is a three person exhibition showing works conceived and produced at Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, between the summer of 2023 and the fall of 2024, as a result of a long term residency. Developing their careers in parallel trajectories with multiple overlapping points over the past decade, Monia Ben Hamouda, Michele Gabriele and Andrew Birk have been part of a common generational dialogue culminating in a celebratory acknowledgement of the present as a vibrant convulsive. Sharing an understanding of self duty and the responsibility of overcoming limits as a purpose, this ongoing relationship of mutual recognition and mirrored positions has converged into a situated conversation in the context of Spiritvessel, becoming a self institutionalized hub for new bodies of work that incorporate aspects of the context like organic materials, dimensionality, or working methodologies that are related to the possibilities of this specific time and space frame.

Monia Ben Hamouda draws from notions of heritage using a material language signified by cultural traditions. With an intentional disfiguration of these elements, MBH creates atmospheres equally charged with delicacy as despair. Rain (Blindness, Blossom and Desertification XVIII), 2024 is the latest piece of a painting series that began at Spiritvessel in July 2023, where she uses spices and organic materials from the area to create abstract scenes punctuated by a singular vocabulary built in her sculptural practice, exploring the potential of aniconism rule in arabic traditions through the formal use of calligraphy as a strategy for alternative representation. Burial of all meanings, 2024, is a new body of work that takes MHB’s research back to the three dimensional plane, with the incorporation of the concrete mixer, which industrializes a constant outpouring of matter into the space, creating a violent spill in a motion opposed to contention and gesturing a lyric of muted rage. In one of the iterations, a spread of salt, a high value currency in ancient history used for food preservation and seasoning to this day, echoes simultaneous corrosion and degradation; while the second iteration spills red soil mixed with seeds – a balance between notions of growth and destruction cycles, belonging and returning.