Low Affinity: Johanna Strobel at GiG Munich

Featured Project: with founder and curator Magdalena Wisniowska

Johanna Strobel’s mind-bending multi-media sculptural installations at GiG Munich resonate with an urgent longing for an orderly system while a sense of entropy surfaces simultaneously. Plug going into socket, red and blue lights turning on and off—hint at an unstable world where information is lost through failing USB cables and unreliable mnemonic devices.

Tell me briefly about GIG and its genesis.

GIG Munich was set up as an independent art project space by Magdalena Wisniowska and David Henrichs in the courtyard ‘garden house’ of Baumstr. 11 in 2015 – hence the German name, ‘Galerie im Gartenhaus’ or ‘GiG’. Magdalena Wisniowska had recently moved to Munich from London, where she studied and later taught, at various art institutions (Goldsmiths, Royal Academy Schools, City and Guilds of London Art School). She thought this would be a good way to engage with the local Munich art scene especially as Munich does not have that many independent art project spaces. As her main research interest lies in philosophy, the exhibitions at GiG have a strong theoretical component, with Magdalena Wisniowska writing, organising discussions and generally providing a critical context for the exhibited work.

What is your curatorial vison for this show and what would you like to share about the artist and the artwork in this show?

The exhibition Low Affinity is part of a series of exhibitions ‘Thinking Nature’ funded by the Department of Art and Culture, Munich. The idea was to explore the relation between man and nature as it is presented in philosophical thought. This exhibition may not seem to involve that many concepts of ‘nature’ or what we would view as the ‘natural environment’, nevertheless the artist Johanna Strobel, often works with very fundamental, even grand ideas, of time, space, experience, which are central to our understanding of this relation.

This is also true of the work on display, which plays with a number of themes. There is the theme of light, with the wax balls hanging in the middle of the space and the room darkened with blue and red fabric. Switches are actively used and featured as a motif of the wall piece, deep association. There is also the idea of time in works like false friends, two clocks connected by USB cable—one going anti-clockwise, the other mirrored, showing the right time only at 6 am/pm. In figures, the hand of the clock ticks exactly three times before hitting the surface of the mirror before going back—three seconds being how long we experience the ‘present’ as the ‘present’ before it is considered to be the past. The USB cables that hold and connect all the objects together hark back to the ancient idea of aether, one of the five classical elements, a material that supposedly filled the universe and held up the stars in the sky.

The work simultaneously alludes to our need to find order and meaning, while acknowledging the futility of this task, USB cables falling prey to entropy, information lost over distance. Knot making is also a mnemonic device and a feature of children’s games like ‘cat’s cradle’, images of which reoccur in works made of wax as well as the wall piece, the duration of the present (red/blue), which frustratingly and playfully switches off as the viewer approaches.

All images courtesy of the artist and GiG Munich

Magdalena Wisniowska is an independent researcher based in Munich, Germany. She received her PhD in visual cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2010. Her essays on aesthetics have been published in Deleuze Studies, SubStance and Speculative Aesthetics. Since 2015 she is also the director of the independent art project space, GiG Munich.

Johanna Strobel is an interdisciplinary artist from Germany, currently based in New York. She holds degrees in Information Science and Mathematics and graduated in painting and graphics from the Academy of Fine Arts Munich with Honors (Meisterschuelerin of Gregor Hildebrandt) in 2017. In 2020 she received her MFA from Hunter College New York (New Genres). Since then she has participated in numerous exhibitions in Germany, Italy, Taiwan and the US, with a solo exhibition at the Municipal Museum Cordonhaus Cham, 2019. In 2020 her work has been included in The Immigrant Artist Biennial, New York, USA, Jahresgaben, Kunstverein Munich, Germany and featured online by Hauser & Wirth. Johanna was a fellowship artist in residence at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn in 2021.  

Low Affinity, Johanna Strobel at GiG Munich, Germany, through Nov 14^th, 2021