Cover (Something Newly Missing), 2020 / Trocadouro (They saw it last), 2018/2020 / Limits of Law, 2020 / Lingual (assembling), 2018/2020

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Press release:

The Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim is pleased to host Read Before the Fire, the first institutional exhibition of the artist Lucas Odahara. The work of Lucas Odahara unfolds at the interface of visual art and writing practice. Language as an omnipresent presence that determines our lives is at the heart of his artistic examination. The artist questions conventional narrative patterns in texts, spoken language, and images that have grown historically and continue to shape our perception of the existing world order and its respective power relations to this day. 

For the rooms of the Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim, Lucas Odahara is developing a multimedia installation that deals with language in times of loss: Loss of memories, of social and political rights or laws. This loss is not understood as an act of mourning, but as a possibility to find a heightened alertness in the face of 'something newly missing'. Most of the works conceived for the exhibition deal with recent developments in Brazilian politics. Against the background of the revoking of various laws and a worldwide media testimony about the disappearance of large parts of the Amazon rainforest, Lucas Odahara in Read Before the Fire deals with various concepts of loss and implements them in a diverse media presentation. In addition to text-based works, images and objects, a sound installation will be installed in the rooms of the Kunstverein.

Trocadouro (They saw it last), 2018/2020

Lingual (assembling), 2018/2020

Limits of Law, 2020

Lingual (assembling), 2018/2020

Trocadouro (They saw it last), 2018/2020

Hand Dialogue (after Kollwitz, after Clark), 2019

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Press release:

With the design of the railway underpass in the Käthe-Kollwitz-Straße, the artist Lucas Odahara has created a site-specific installation that views the work of the artist Käthe Kollwitz from the perspective of contemporary working conditions. On the whole, Kollwitz often portrayed the lives of workers in her work, of whom she herself said that, in contrast to the bourgeoisie, they "have courage". The tunnel in Bremen that bears her name is a dialogue. Odahara's work is about a dialogue between the walls of the tunnel, between different times, different practices and above all between the body that works and the laws that shape it.

On one tunnel wall, excerpts from Kollwitz's historical drawings are reinterpreted. The focus here is on the hands of the workers* whom the artist has depicted. On the opposite mural, a pattern of knots and tunnels shows sentences taken directly from German labour laws. Hand Dialogue (after Kollwitz, after Clark) is a reminder of the flexibility and bodily features of written language, which create the basic conditions for the work of our bodies. The tunnel becomes a space of negotiation between the body that executes these laws on the one hand and the language that defines them on the other. For whom are these laws intended and how do they get to our body, both physically and bureaucratically? These questions about the mutual dependence and negotiation between body and language are inspired by the pioneering artist Lygia Clark. Her work entitled "Hand Dialogue" (1966), which consists of an elastic band in the form of a Möbius-shaped strip connecting two hands, gives the work its assigned title. Hand Dialogue is thus also, an art historical dialogue between these two critical artists.

Hand Dialogue (after Kollwitz, after Clark), 2019.  

Special thanks to Rose Pfister, Anja Wohlgemuth, Ulrich Jahn, Karl-Ernst Kraack, Jens Prigge, Suin Kwon, Helene Romakin, Daniel Rossi, Cássia Vila, Gustavo Méndez López, Timon Mürer and Scott Roben

Permanent public comission in Bremen Lesum, Germany. Photo: Jens Weyers

Hand Dialogue (after Kollwitz, after Clark), 2019. (detail)

Photo: Jens Weyers

Cover (Something Newly Missing) with Luiz Monteiro, 2020

Cover (Something Newly Missing) with Luiz Monteiro, 2020

Cover (Something Newly Missing) with Luiz Monteiro, 2020

Between Name and Image, 2015/2020

Lingual (Descending), 2019

with the contribution of Sameena Nazir and Asad Alvi (texts in Urdu). Readings by Asad Alvi, Sameena Nazir, Luiza Prado, Herisson Redi, Luiza Sidinani, Chris Thomas, Cássia Vila and Anushae

Exhibition view at IVS gallery, Karachi. Photo: Humayun Memon

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Lucas Odahara’s work shifts between performance, installation, sculpture and text. For this exhibition, Lingual (descending) functions as a collection of objects which through handling and reading, become vehicles for a relationship of the physical body with language and the ways they regulate and impact each other. The written text brings together diverse personal stories, legal histories, news, poetry and literature - all of which impacts everyday life and comment on different perspectives of the body. For the exhibition in Karachi, special recording and writing sessions were conducted with local speakers in Portuguese and Urdu which were then remixed with reading sessions that happened previously in Berlin. Thus, the work also becomes a reflection on the shared relationships between language as it migrates across place and time

text by Aziz Sohail

Lingual (Descending), 2019

Exhibition view at IVS gallery, Karachi. Photo: Humayun Memon

Trocadouro (When he saw him), 2018

Exhibition view at Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, Bremen. 2018. photo: Rahel Pazstor 

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Left - Desfigura (Sumidouro), 2018

Exhibition view at Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, Bremen. 2018. photo: Rahel Pazstor 

Disfigure (Figure it out), 2018

Not every cord is d'accord, 2018 

Os sons deles ecoando entre eu e você, 2017

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In May 2016, the Brazilian historian-activist Luiz Mott left several documents his NGO, the “Grupo Gay da Bahia”, had generated over the years to the Schwules Museum*. One such document was a small pamphlet recounting the murder of the “first indigenous gay martyr of Brazil,” Tibira do Maranhão – a Tupinamba man – by the French colonialists in 1614. Departing from this curious and relatively unknown incident, whose only record is in the travelogue of Yves d’Évreux, a French priest, the installation reconstructs a silenced historical scene: First he was baptized, in order to save his soul, then paraded around and given copious amounts of tobacco to smoke. Once intoxicated, he was placed into a cannon and blown up. The silent figures add up: Tibira’s fate belongs to millions of muted, marginalized, and othered voices, all echoing into the present day. The installation purposefully fragments images drawn from multiple sources, presenting a visual echo chamber: 17th century studies of Brazilian landscapes, flora, and native inhabitants by colonial-era painters, details of cannons and soldiers from Western war paintings of the time, a body cut up into pieces and scattered across the scene. Painted with blue ink on ceramic tiles, it aesthetically simulates precious porcelain, a medium often used to depict historical scenes from the Early Modern period of mercantile exchange. A handmade artist book, placed on a music stand in front of the painted tiles, translates various research strands into anecdotal scores. Collaborators contribute to the assembled texts with observations, images, and interviews on the role of sound in history, from modern political protest songs to the “language” of Amazonian birds.

text by Ashkan Sepahvand

Os sons deles ecoando entre eu e você, 2017 

Exhibition view at Schwules Museum, Berlin. photo: Daniel Weigel

Os sons deles ecoando entre eu e você, 2017

Tempos Verbais (the volume of history and the balance of time), 2017 

Exhibition view at Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover. photo: Lucas Odahara

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“It’s either today, or not tomorrow!”, announces the speaker to his bewildered audience. With passionate enthusiasm, he points out the de deficiencies of the status quo and calls for a reorganization of things. His struggle turns into rhythmic sounds and chanted songs. They are student protests and marches against oppressive governments, which are part of a diverse sound collage played over two sound speakers placed on top of a black-and-white landscape through which roads are drawn. They offer us different definitions of the English “simple present” tense and represent the idea of the progression of time and its grammatical translation within a language system. Lucas Odahara examines the specific state of time within revolutionary processes with “Tempos Verbais (the Volume of History and the Balance of Time)” and brings up the question of how the idea of time can be materialized in space. According to Walter Benjamin, the moment of the revolution possesses the ability to break up the continuum of history. When time describes the progress of the present from the past into the future, the outbreak of a revolution can expose this irreversible flow of time for a moment. During the act of protest, when a collective dissatisfaction is released, the present can be isolated from the past and the future, and an alternative historical path can be taken.

The sound installation is a joint project by Lucas Odahara and the designer and sound artist Pedro Oliveira. From their own sound recordings and found online footage the two artists create a continuously growing archive of protest songs. Excerpts from this archive are presented for the first time in the Kestnergesellschaft as part of an audiovisual installation. The sound work will never be complete, as worldwide protests take place and new material is continuously being added into the archive.

original text in German by Elmas Senol

Tempos Verbais (the volume of history and the balance of time), 2017

Time Still, 2017

The Island of Vera Cruz (manuscript), 2015

Exhibition view at Weserburg, Bremen. photo: Lucas Odahara

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In April of 1500, a Portuguese ship expedition took sight of Land after a long journey over the Atlantic. The chronicler Pêro Vaz de Caminha reports in a letter to the Portuguese king about the discovery and take over of the still unknown island. He calls it Ilha de Vera Cruz, the island of the true cross. But it soon becomes clear that it is a huge mass of land and in fact the expedition has landed in today's Brazil. The historical letter, written under false assumptions, creates a fascinating distorted portrait of South America, characterised by facts, courage, and self-willed interpretations.

The island, which only existed for a short time, is the starting point for Lucas Odahara's multi-part room installation. He combines historical documents with fictional writings and narratives, with which he refers to the objects in the exhibition space. These are reminders of a past life - furniture, a book shelf, self-made ceramic bowls - which can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

Odahara is aware of the fact that history is not something fixed, but is always recreated when looking back at it. The past is confirmed, rewritten or completely erased. In this sense he is also not interested in an authentic reenactment. He creates an artificial arrangement in which his personal access, his own version of Ilha de Vera Cruz remains visible. He thus presents the confrontation with history not as something finished in time, but as a necessary process of self-assurance. 

Original text in German by Ingo Clauß

The Island of Vera Cruz (manuscript), 2015

Fifteen Novels on Exactitude, 2015

Under the Influence. Above, the Sun, 2017

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The exhibition Under the Influence. Above, the Sun is a survey on mass revolutions and the body. In his work, Lucas also seeks to reflect on what it means to be productive and how it is defined by society’s current ideology. Actions are labeled right or wrong, productive or lazy, promiscuous or beautiful according to an institutional framework of order and disorder. Could a body resisting the present system be considered well and could actions not accumulating value be considered right? In post-revolution Russia, Chizhevsky meant that the active sun sparked the feelings of possibility for political and historical change. Today, light therapy is instead integrated as a part of the corporate landscape. In this exhibition, Lucas wants to address the feeling of hopelessness towards society and experiment on how we can redirect the signification of being productive.

The exhibition consists of four works. Under the Influence is a series of light therapy boxes built by the artist to create an image that affects you physically. Mood Board is a collection of online articles giving advice for dealing with mood disorders, showed together with the book Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (reviewed), a reprint of the DSM5 where every iteration of the word mental was corrected with the word public. Tempos Verbais (the Volume of History and the Balance of Time) is a sound archive of protests songs made in collaboration with Pedro Oliveira. For this show a new selection was made with protests that took place on the last peak of activity of the sun, that is, 2011-2013, thus mainly encompassing sounds from the Arab Spring.

text by Nora Hagdah

Under the Unfluence. Above, the Sun, 2017

Exhibition view at NUDA, Stockholm. Photos: Frida Vega Salomonsson

Under the Influence. Above, the Sun, 2017

Choreographie für Zeit, 2016

La Villa de Veraneo, 2015

La Villa de Veraneo, 2015

The palace was covered with ivy leaves, 2015

A Suitable Height for Highness (chapter two), 2016

A Suitable Height for Highness (chapter three), 2016

Mapa Estórico, 2015

photos: Eike Harder

Mapa Estórico, 2015