• Daydreamers: dot to dot

    Reading and sound poem with Paul Noble

    23.05.2025
    Friday 23 May, 6pm–7.30pm RSVP
    Reading will start at 6pm promptly, followed by informal finissage with drinks
     
    Artist Paul Noble joins us for an intimate reading and listening event marking the closing weekend of Daydreamers, Majd Abdel Hamid’s first London solo exhibition. Noble will present dot to dot (2006), his three-part sound poem originally voiced by Laetitia Sadier (Stereolab), in a focused listening session, introduced by a short reflection on his encounter with Hamid in Ramallah in 2007.
     
    The event doubles as the finissage of Daydreamers, an opportunity to encounter the exhibition one final time, and to receive a part of it. Visitors will be invited to take home one of over 600 small sculptural pieces from Daydreamers (Fortune Tellers) floor work, offered as a quiet act of giving, allowing them to disperse and live on through new afterlives.
     
    First presented at Gagosian, New York (2007) and later at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2014), dot to dot resonates anew within the context of Hamid’s exhibition, where dysfunctional binary systems and motifs of patterned dots and the sea recur across his body of work, notably in ongoing series such as Ode to the Sea (2024–) and Daydreamers (Code) (2024–).
     
    Noble and Hamid first met in Ramallah in 2007 at the International Academy of Art in Palestine, Hamid as a student, Noble as a tutor. After many years without direct communication, they reconnected for the opening of Daydreamers, tracing a poetic thread between geographies and evolving practices.
     
    The event will take place in Cell’s upstairs gallery space and will open with a short reading by Noble, followed by the 6-minute, 30-second sound piece.
     
    Curator Adomas Narkevičius
     
    Paul Noble was born in Northumberland in 1963. His work spans drawing, sculpture and sound, often engaging speculative language systems and architectural fictions. Exhibitions include 'Drawing Now: Eight Propositions' at MoMA, New York; 'The British Art Show '(2000); 'Paul Noble: Nobson' at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; and solo presentations at Gagosian, La Chaux-de-Fonds and Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2012 and lives and works in London.
     
    Image: Paul Noble, Sea V, The Carnival Between, 2006, drawing. Courtesy of the artist.
     
    If you require assistance to access the building or have any additional questions, please contact Annabelle Mödlinger, Production Assistant: annabelle[at]cellprojects[dot]org.
     
    With generous support from Fluxus Art Projects, Cockayne Foundation and The Elephant Trust.
     
                        

  • –1, plus One

    Tanja Widmann Johannes Porsch Produced by

    05.06.2025 — 10.08.2025
    Opening: Thursday 5th June, 6-9pm
    6th June 2025 - 10th August 2025
    12-6pm, Thursday - Sunday
     
    Cell Project Space presents -1, plus One, the first solo exhibition by artist Tanja Widmann in the United Kingdom. The exhibition is conceived as a site of negotiation - material, social, affective - where authorship is ‘beside itself’, as in the collaboration with Johannes Porsch | Produced by Johannes Porsch. Read together as Tanja Widmann Johannes Porsch Produced by -1, plus One, the title suggests a conceptual machine of addition and subtraction, of lack and desire, and of the conceptual structure producing subjects as much as subjects producing the structure.
     
    Tanja Widmann’s practice navigates the material constraints and social fictions that regulate contemporary life, tracing the symbolic and economic circuits through which value is produced and circulated. Scripts - readymade objects, images, texts - serve as source code: for reception, (re)production, and deviation. Working with the everyday tech of the home office, laptop, printer, cell phone, etc. – and materials from the hardware store, Widmann’s works function as coded feedback loops: degraded, recomposed. Drawing on the Pictures Generation and Charles Baudelaire, the cliché becomes preferred data. 
     
    Johannes Porsch develops displays that operate as performative sets – objects that articulate the conditions of their own visibility. In dialogue with post-minimal and post-conceptual strategies, they foreground use-value and destabilise autonomy by rendering its heteronomous supports. These structures sustain positions and enable relations, anticipating events while modulating presence. Abstraction does not generalise; it fractures reflexivity, revealing labour as both structural and obscured. What appears autonomous is revealed as contingent, on holding, showing, connecting. Status – objectal or relational – is the effect of ongoing negotiation.
    Curated by Adomas Narkevičius

    Tanja Widmann lives and works in Vienna and Munich. Recent exhibitions: ‘Echo’s Hunger, Schiefe Zähne’, Berlin (2025); 15th Baltic Triennial: ‘Same Day’, CAC, Vilnius (2024); ‘dysfunctional malappropriation’, University Gallery of the Angewandte, Vienna (2024); ‘Lying Daughters. Produced by Johannes Porsch’, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna (2023); ‘Since 1884. Produced by Johannes Porsch’, New Toni, Berlin (2022); ‘Cybernetics of the Poor’, Kunsthalle Wien (2020), ‘V’, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna (2020). Her practice also takes shape in text, publication, workshop, and curatorial formats, often in dialogue with others. Exhibitions: ‘Industry / Against Nature’, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna (2022), and ‘Post-Apocalyptic Realism’, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2017). Publications: ‘Post-Apocalyptic Realism’ (Tonio Kröner, Laura Preston, Tanja Widmann, eds., Walther König, 2019); ‘Postapocalyptic Self-Reflection’ (Laura Preston, Tanja Widmann, eds., Westphalie Verlag, 2018); ‘To Make Oneself Similar in This Sense’ (artist’s book, Westphalie Verlag, 2012). A new artist’s book will be published by New Toni Press in summer 2025.
     
    Johannes Porsch lives and works in Vienna, selected exhibitions include: 'Rehearsals of Metabolism', Kunstverein Kevin Space Vienna (2025), 'Peche Pop', Museum of applied arts Vienna (2024), 'Key Operators. Weaving and coding as languages of feminist historiography', Kunstverein Munich (2024), 'to care, to display, to support', Universitätsgalerie der University of applied arts Vienna (2024), 'currently not available', Julius Koller Society, Bratislava (2019), 'tropology', Kunstraum Lakeside Klagenfurt (2018), 'Tropology', Tiroler Künstlerschaft Innsbruck (2017), 'Julius Koller. One Man Anti Show', mumok, Wien (2016), Kyiv Biennal (2015), 'Unrest of Form. Imagining the Political Subject', Secession Vienna, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2013), 'Counter-Production', Generali Foundation Vienna ( 2012). Johannes Porsch studied at the University of applied Arts Vienna and the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.
     
    For all press and access related inquiries, please contact Annabelle Mödlinger, annabelle[at]cellprojects[dot]org.
     
    With generous support from Phileas, The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art, and Cockayne Foundation