Valentine: Working Title (Abstraction)

Valentine presents its first collaborative project outside an art fair in the newly opened Parnassus 212 space. Bringing together five galleries from Tbilisi, Tokyo, Jakarta, Guatemala City and Berlin, the project takes place in Amsterdam, a city with an important history of Conceptual Art during the 1960s and 1970s, but also one shaped by much longer histories of trade and colonialism. Conceptual Art repeatedly transformed context itself, language, information, distribution, place, into material.

Valentine starts somewhere around here, translating this logic into today’s multipolar present: a gallery can be understood as a set of coordinates rather than simply a room; an exhibition as a relation between one place and another. Inevitably, this also involves value, and, after all, Valentine derives from the Latin valēre: to be strong, to be worth. Valentine is itself a kind of abstraction: five galleries with different histories and economies temporarily putting their values in an experimental shared form. Departing from this condition, the exhibition asks what forms of abstraction might we need in a multipolar world?

From pictorial reduction through modernism’s claims to universality and Conceptual Art’s use of language, measurement and information, abstraction has continually changed how art produces meaning. Loosely recalling Seth Siegelaub’s experiments with communication and distribution in the late 1960s, both Valentine and the exhibition approach abstraction not simply as a visual language, but as a means of establishing relations between different things, places and positions. Perhaps what emerges is a kind of universalism from below: a common ground produced through difference rather than established in advance. What can be shared without becoming the same?

Valentine is: LC Queisser (Tbilisi, Cologne), Misako & Rosen (Tokyo), ROH (Jakarta), Proyectos Ultravioleta (Guatemala City), Trautwein Herleth (Berlin).

Curator: Martin Germann