A Boring Grey Jumper and An Over Complicated Top
Steffi Klenz & Clare Strand
Steffi Klenz and her fellow artist friend Clare Strand could not meet during the Covid pandemic. They decided to engage with each other in written dialogue and spend their mornings, afternoons and evenings committed to their written conversations. Both artists’ practice is conceptual, and their agility of thinking is reflected in the ways in which they combine disparate references in their work. Klenz and Strand considered their yearlong dialogue as an opportunity to reflect upon the references and critical theoretical frameworks that underpin their artistic practice and as a way of defining their way of thinking as artists.
The video work A Boring Grey Jumper and An Over Complicated Top feels like a productive day spent in a university library, or a jump down a Wikipedia wormhole. Images, archive film and original footage are collaged together into essayistic treatises on the essence of visual art, communication and language. The video piece is conceived as an encounter for Strand’s and Klenz’ two-sided exchanges, merging multiple perspectives where the researched and the critical actively unfold in the enjoyment of unusual connections, interpretations, meaning and critical approach to the interpretation of art and its historical context.
The video piece inhabits a space between expanded video, visual art, and critical theory and incorporates a rich tapestry of artist-historical, academic and literary connections, uses and reworks archival and contemporary images, interrogates ignored archives, rediscovers and realigns forgotten stories and personal narratives. Drawn from this wide range of resources and materials the video is driven by extensive research into monochrome colour schemes and colour theory, structuralist approaches to language systems in modern art history, histories of mathematics, painter Édouard Manet's and art collector Charles Ephrussi's exchange over a bunch of asparagus, Noh theatre and Taylor Swift’s snake day, the tribulations of Rattlesnake Kate, ideas of verticality and failure, Bataille’s toe, and Ambam the walking gorilla.
A Boring Grey Jumper and An Over Complicated Top throws the audience off, and makes its viewers’ thoughts dizzy with endlessly questioning. The video piece displaces the serial logic of a documentary and suggests a different context for an encounter with moving image; one that defies the conventions of television making or cinema but instead creates an experimental and as well as experiential collage not merely of pictures and sounds but more fundamentally of concepts and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics.
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Steffi Klenz is an artist based in London who works with photography and video. She has exhibited her work across the UK and internationally. Selected venues include The British Museum, Camden Art Centre, Wellcome Collection London, The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and The Royal Academy in London, FotoMuseum Antwerp, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Los Angeles Centre for Digital Arts, Phoenix Art Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Alicante, The Fine Art Museum Luleå, The Finish Museum of
Photography, Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Kunstverein Ludwigshafen and Museum Künstlerkolonie in Darmstadt.
Her work was part of the the Rights of Passage Project for the 2015 Venice Biennale, The Biennale for Contemporary Photography in Germany in 2020, The International Biennale for Photography in Belo Horizonte (Brazil) in 2021, The Biennale for Electronic Language and Technology in Sao Paulo (Brazil) in 2022, The London Festival of Architecture in 2022 and the
2023 Tokyo Biennale.
Klenz is participating with her work as part of Postcards for Palestine (PfP) and Arts of the Working Class (AWC) during the current 60th Venice Biennale. She recently presented her solo-exhibition An Alluring Maquette as part of the 2024 European Capital of of Culture in Bodø, Norway.
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Clare Strand is a UK-based artist, working with, but mostly against the photographic medium. Over the past 25 years, she has made work with found imagery, kinetic machinery, web programmes, fairground attractions, large-scale paintings and chamber music.
Strand has exhibited in venues such as The Museum Folkwang; The Center Pompidou; Tate Britain; Salzburg Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her work is held in the collections of MOMA; SFMoma; The V&A Museum; The Center Pompidou; The Kunstmuseum, Bonn; The British Council; The McEvoy Collection; The Arts Council; The NY
Public Library; The Provincial Collection, The Uni Credit Bank; The Mead Museum: Cornell University, The Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf and The DZ Bank.
Strand has produced 4 publications to date, including Clare Strand Monograph published by Steidl (2009), Skirts published by GOST (2014) Girl Plays with Snake published by MACK (2017) and Negatives for Fun with Clare Strand Photography published by Multipres (2019). Strand was one of the four nominees for the Deutsche Borse prize ( 2020). She is currently represented by Parrotta Contemporary Art, Cologne/Bonn.
Clare Strand
Steffi Klenz & Clare Strand
Steffi Klenz and her fellow artist friend Clare Strand could not meet during the Covid pandemic. They decided to engage with each other in written dialogue and spend their mornings, afternoons and evenings committed to their written conversations. Both artists’ practice is conceptual, and their agility of thinking is reflected in the ways in which they combine disparate references in their work. Klenz and Strand considered their yearlong dialogue as an opportunity to reflect upon the references and critical theoretical frameworks that underpin their artistic practice and as a way of defining their way of thinking as artists.
The video work A Boring Grey Jumper and An Over Complicated Top feels like a productive day spent in a university library, or a jump down a Wikipedia wormhole. Images, archive film and original footage are collaged together into essayistic treatises on the essence of visual art, communication and language. The video piece is conceived as an encounter for Strand’s and Klenz’ two-sided exchanges, merging multiple perspectives where the researched and the critical actively unfold in the enjoyment of unusual connections, interpretations, meaning and critical approach to the interpretation of art and its historical context.
The video piece inhabits a space between expanded video, visual art, and critical theory and incorporates a rich tapestry of artist-historical, academic and literary connections, uses and reworks archival and contemporary images, interrogates ignored archives, rediscovers and realigns forgotten stories and personal narratives. Drawn from this wide range of resources and materials the video is driven by extensive research into monochrome colour schemes and colour theory, structuralist approaches to language systems in modern art history, histories of mathematics, painter Édouard Manet's and art collector Charles Ephrussi's exchange over a bunch of asparagus, Noh theatre and Taylor Swift’s snake day, the tribulations of Rattlesnake Kate, ideas of verticality and failure, Bataille’s toe, and Ambam the walking gorilla.
A Boring Grey Jumper and An Over Complicated Top throws the audience off, and makes its viewers’ thoughts dizzy with endlessly questioning. The video piece displaces the serial logic of a documentary and suggests a different context for an encounter with moving image; one that defies the conventions of television making or cinema but instead creates an experimental and as well as experiential collage not merely of pictures and sounds but more fundamentally of concepts and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics.
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Steffi Klenz is an artist based in London who works with photography and video. She has exhibited her work across the UK and internationally. Selected venues include The British Museum, Camden Art Centre, Wellcome Collection London, The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and The Royal Academy in London, FotoMuseum Antwerp, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Los Angeles Centre for Digital Arts, Phoenix Art Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Alicante, The Fine Art Museum Luleå, The Finish Museum of
Photography, Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Kunstverein Ludwigshafen and Museum Künstlerkolonie in Darmstadt.
Her work was part of the the Rights of Passage Project for the 2015 Venice Biennale, The Biennale for Contemporary Photography in Germany in 2020, The International Biennale for Photography in Belo Horizonte (Brazil) in 2021, The Biennale for Electronic Language and Technology in Sao Paulo (Brazil) in 2022, The London Festival of Architecture in 2022 and the
2023 Tokyo Biennale.
Klenz is participating with her work as part of Postcards for Palestine (PfP) and Arts of the Working Class (AWC) during the current 60th Venice Biennale. She recently presented her solo-exhibition An Alluring Maquette as part of the 2024 European Capital of of Culture in Bodø, Norway.
Clare Strand is a UK-based artist, working with, but mostly against the photographic medium. Over the past 25 years, she has made work with found imagery, kinetic machinery, web programmes, fairground attractions, large-scale paintings and chamber music.
Strand has exhibited in venues such as The Museum Folkwang; The Center Pompidou; Tate Britain; Salzburg Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her work is held in the collections of MOMA; SFMoma; The V&A Museum; The Center Pompidou; The Kunstmuseum, Bonn; The British Council; The McEvoy Collection; The Arts Council; The NY
Public Library; The Provincial Collection, The Uni Credit Bank; The Mead Museum: Cornell University, The Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf and The DZ Bank.
Strand has produced 4 publications to date, including Clare Strand Monograph published by Steidl (2009), Skirts published by GOST (2014) Girl Plays with Snake published by MACK (2017) and Negatives for Fun with Clare Strand Photography published by Multipres (2019). Strand was one of the four nominees for the Deutsche Borse prize ( 2020). She is currently represented by Parrotta Contemporary Art, Cologne/Bonn.
Clare Strand
︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎