signs and symbols

Jen DeNike & Pola Sieverding: we tell ourselves stories in order to live

December 2, 2020 - January 9, 2021

Opening Day:
December 2, 2020
2:00 - 6:00pm

signs and symbols is pleased to present we tell ourselves stories in order to live, a two-person lens-based photography exhibition by Jen DeNike and Pola Sieverding. The exhibition reflects on storytelling; the artist’s lens becomes the ink that captures her fantastic stage and experiences in time.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live... We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” —Joan Didion, The White Album, 1979

She tells herself stories in order to sort through her complex emotions, her realities, her truths. Her story manifests through different forms and muses. Her lens a window, the landscape her journal, crafting stories of her life, of people she knows, personal stories, intimate stories. She is the artist, she is the creator, she creates the universe and that is the source of her power. Does she create delusion to get by? A precarious slip between fact and fiction. A seemingly ever-present possibility that anything can be true while proven to be a fabrication. Through her narratives, she takes ownership of her future tense.

She who tells a story. Her perspective of the world interweaves and sculpts time – an idyllic landscape, the existential meaning of the female body, time freezes in agelessness, not a death scene but one of life. An erotic thirst. She is nature. She is nurture. She casts her in myriad roles. Daughters, sisters, a mother, a lover, a goddess, her mother, my mother, our mother. She daydreams as we wait for the light. She lies in the water. She escapes reality by floating in garlands of flowers. She is water. Unaware of her surroundings, of growth and decay patterns. She comes to terms with disorder, amused in thought. She possesses a willingness to question the things in life that we trust and the assumptions we make. An imagined utopia. Each storyteller offers a vision of a universe she has perceived and created, expressing the course of time within the frame. She emphasizes drama through the use of lighting contrast and attention to the female figure. Her topic of choice is surely the body. Waves ripple through her honeyed hair. Her stone-skin torso the container of desires. She casts off what binds her, a fragmentation drenched in sweat, a fabric shell. She gasps for air.

A click of the shutter captures the light.
She who tells her story.

—Mitra Khorasheh

jen denike (b. 1971) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her video, photography, performance, collage and installation work has been exhibited internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf; MoMA PS1; The Brooklyn Museum; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; Participant Inc; 54th Venice Biennale; Garage Projects, Moscow; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; MOCA Toronto; MACRO ROMA; Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart; Red Line Contemporary Art Center, Denver; CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-On-Hudson; MEF Museo Ettore Fico, Torino; Schauspiel Köln Opera House; Art Basel Miami Film Sector; and Wallis Annenberg Center For the Performing Arts, Los Angeles. Select commissioned projects include Bombay Beach Biennale, EMPAC, LAND Los Angeles Nomadic Division, Creative Time, Performa Biennial and Faena Art. Her work is held in the permanent public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Julia Stoschek Collection, IL Giardino dei Lauri Collection and The Bunker in West Palm Beach, among other private collections. In 2019, DeNike premiered the first act of her new ballet Crystal Cut Levitation at signs and symbols. Forthcoming exhibitions include a group exhibition at Anat Ebgi Gallery in Los Angeles, an online solo exhibition of video works at signs and symbols, and a solo exhibition Sculpting Time with an accompanying book at Feld+Haus in Germany.

pola sieverding (b. 1981) is a visual artist working in the field of lens-based media. With photography, video and sound, she investigates the physical body as bearer of historical narratives that shape a contemporary discourse on the social body. By defining the body linguistically as an alternative to words, she exploits the classical ideal of the body as locus of pleasure and power. She is attracted to extremes and socialized emotions, something felt when the body switches between looking and being looked at, touching and being touched. Her images explore the body as an expressive element, the way we alter our behavior when we feel ourselves to be acting, a performance of just being. Sieverding studied at the University of the Arts Berlin, CMU Pittsburgh and Surikov Institute Moscow. She was a visiting lecturer to the Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah and an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich from 2016-2020. She has received a number of grants including a DAAD travel grant in 2008 and the Arbeitsstipendium by the Senat of Berlin in 2014. She has exhibited internationally at Art in General, New York; dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (with Natascha Sadr Haghighian); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (with Orson Sieverding); Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Dubai Photo Exhibition, Dubai; NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; and MAK Museum für Angewandte und Gegenwartskunst, Vienna. Sieverding lives and works in Berlin.