Intersticio is pleased to present the first solo show by Ouka Leele with the gallery.

La Luz que reflejan los cuerpos danza dentro de mis ojos, presents a collection of Polaroid photographs by the spanish photographer Ouka Leele commissioned by french designer Philippe Model and taken in 1988 in Paris. For the occasion, the artist portrayed the designer’s collection of accessories in different locations that she projected from her imaginary, using a giant polaroid camera. This machine was the only one in Europe at the time that could produce instant images of 50 x 60 cm and it was transported from Frankfurt to Jouy-en Josas (France) for the occasion. The serie, 26 photographs in total, was presented for the first time at the Cartier Foundation in 1988, within the frame of the Photo Month from the city of Paris.

Ouka Leele, born in Madrid in 1957, is a Spanish photographer whose real name is Barbara Allende Gil de Biedma. Even though she wanted to be a painter, she discovered photography as a medium to express her natural and intensive artistic sensitivity. It is in the 1980s in Madrid during the nation’s “movida” movement when she demonstrated her interest in a variety of artistic disciplines such as drawing, serigraphy, painting and literature resulting in a series of photos labelled as “icons of her time”. In her photography one recognizes the references to the ancient civilizations, mythological stories, literature and intimate worlds of family and friends placed in different settings including portraits and self-portraits. Her unedited photos that are often additionally hand painted is an attempt to show human nature and to reveal the connections between life, emotions and its translations in art language.

She was awarded the 2004 Culture Prize by the Community of Madrid and the 2005 National Photography Award and her works can be found in a number of collections including Collection Arco (Madrid), Foundation Cartier (Paris), Foundation La Caixa (Barcelona), Cervantes Institute (Lisbon), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Tabaco Gitanes (Paris) or the Archivo Lafuente (Cantabria) in between others. She currently have a retrospective exhibition at the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid)

Intersticio is pleased to present Martin Llavanera’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, including a new body of work and a site specific intervention in the space.

The reflections of light on this puddled area are disposed as an arrow, as a triangle, as a D. The swallows cross from one side to the other of the fence, after they go down and graze the water with their feathery torso. They drink or they don’t, they refresh in between muddy waters. ‘And what a lovely itinerary, the solar radiation, traversing the universe, circulating through my stomach as atoms of the naná nana1’

Around me, a territory as soft as a nest extends itself. This place remains in a decomposition that it is held impassively in front of my eyes. And I continue… From this observation, from the sensation of falling apart on an undefined floor, I have made a cocktail of sentences …. ‘inconsistent material… not like that flow of stored goods in airport units, that before arriving at their destination, they go off.’ My crepuscular walks are talking and they arrive to a point where a flow it’s opened; where things float and the flow expands until the meaning it’s diluted in the change of scale.

Martin Llavaneras

Martin Llavaneras studied Fine Arts in Bilbao (University of the Vasque Country), Berlin (HTW) and Barcelona (MA in Artistic Production, UB). Some of his most relevant solo exhibitions are “CAU” (POLS, Valencia, ESP); “Turbaturbo” (La Capella, Barcelona); “Fruit Belt” (Espai 13 – Fundacion Joan Miro, Barcelona, ESP); “Humus Recalls Curvatures” (Centro de Arte La Panera, Lleida); “Reenginering Calcium” (Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona) y “Next” (Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria). He has been part of group shows in Centro del Carmen Cultura Contemporànea, Valencia; CAPC – Musee d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux; ADA Project, Roma; Yaby, Madrid; Meetfactory, Praga; House of Egorn, Berlin; Atelier 35, Bucarest; Saliva, Barcelona in between others. He has received awards and production grants like Premi Art Nou, Premios Injuve, Sala Art Jove, Beca per a la recerca i pensament de la Generalitat, Beca Guasch-Coranty; and he has been artist in residence at Ca2M, Centre d’Art i Natura en Farrera and the MUSAC.

Intersticio is pleased to present ‘Somewhere Along Those Lines’ Katarina Sylvan (b. 1988, SE) first solo exhibition in London. The exhibition is accompanied by a text written by Adam Hines-Green.

They started the interview with the full barrage of necessaries and a little of the informal. The candidate was positioned in the very centre of the room on a swivel chair. The directors sat A to D, clockwise, in each corner. Questions were asked by director A then director B then director C then director D sequentially and very much in that order. Directors A to B headed up health and services, and directors C to D comms and skills, and though none had previous experience they absolutely loved directing. A glass of water was provided but went unnoticed.

Tell us about a time you encountered unhealthy communication. 
[B raises eyebrows to D, who glances momentarily at A]

The candidate recounted a narrative beginning with Once upon a time, and ending with They all lived happily ever after, and in the middle likened themselves to the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz. It positioned them in an exceptionally good light. C noted they’d used a mixed metaphor at one stage but otherwise the candidate was uninterrupted. The directors pressed the candidate about the nuts and bolts of the candidate’s candidacy. The candidate said they’d always wanted to join the directors on the other side and described an elaborate but metaphorical trebuchet-like mechanism to propel them there. The directors reminded them that the interview was for ‘Candidate-in-Chief’ and certainly not director, and given the four corners were occupied there obviously wasn’t currently a vacancy for director, but they appreciated the ambition and all simultaneously ticked a box for ambition and scrawled competency aspired to along the straight line beside it.

Tell us about a time when you were overprepared but underexposed.
[A nods to C, and then nods at D too because C isn’t looking in the right direction]

The candidate told a roundabout tale of preventing mischief and mayhem when they worked as a desk clerk in a role they described as deadly serious. They regularly referred to individuals nicknamed the attempteur and the attemptress in various positive and negative lights. Ultimately, no-one came across well except for the candidate, who excelled. Here’s the thing, said B, who pulled out a leather-bound dossier from the basement archives of the practice – a basement the candidate was totally unaware existed. It’s very cold down there – excellently preservative said C. Opened like a book, the dossiers held phalanxes of USBs encrusted by rust on ornamental keychains. But damp too, C went on. These are the cold hard facts of the matter at hand. The candidate made a face to say they recognised these as the dastardly contraptions of a wicked soothsayer. This was the evidence from a wizard who won’t forget. They stopped considering progression and would settle for survival. The candidate said they’d changed tack since then. They started to think of terrible ideas some of which bordered on the nihilistic – wiring in bathtubs and plug sockets dripping in the pouring rain. They started to make sounds which were no more than elaborate ummms, ahhhs and hmmms. They were talking a lot but not saying anything. They felt themselves tilting towards the inept. The directors began to apply pressure – they asked the candidate if they’d be willing to take a hit from the eyebrows up for the team. A started to share plans about warmongering with their fiercest competitors, and aggressive craft-based strategies for foyer remodelling. B said they must have missed a memo, but kept saying missed like it was a longing nostalgia. C recounted the fatal consequences of a noisy voice message which revolved around confusion between miscommunication and missed communication. D shared their ambition to devise a GPS-trackable lawnmower called the Clattermole. These outlined the necessary tangents for the knockout punch.

Tell us about a time when you were adept.
[A to D smirk in alphabetical order]

The candidate asked for the question to be repeated, and said well when you’ve got a hammer in your hand everything looks like a nail and that isn’t the half of it, and said another way to look at things is the nail repeatedly slapped the hammer flush in the face, but died trying and was summarily buried. The candidate started to repeat a-dept like it was a thing perched on their palm, which disintegrated into each letter being enunciated individually, and they riffed on this discovery for some time, replacing consonants for t and k sounds on loop and vowels with guttural umlaut-related noises. They started to cry but it wasn’t clear to anyone whether in the ecstasy of creation or the misery of failure. In the first clear thought for some time they thought of their father, who offered some advice on his deathbed from a career in surgical theatre – Don’t just do something, stand there. And so the candidate didn’t say anything at all, and the directors didn’t ask anything again. The candidate swivelled from director to director clockwise, to the point where it felt like the silence had constructed a podium to start bellowing:

I scream quality despite all the available evidence! I scream quality! I scream quality! I scream quality! and

I’m talking about problems here big problems I’m talking about the car crash of the century and the permanently unfinished second storey and what I call the patination chain I’m talking about a sort of travelator of accumulative flow and tin hats and iron masks dirty bracken and a hard rain falling I’m talking about the problem of relative growth the problem of straight lines the problem of trying really hard and the corresponding problem of absolute and unwavering public humiliation and most of all I’m talking about the influencing machines and their almighty gleeeam can’t you see what I’m talking about can’t you can’t you can’t you see

Push had come to shove. They accidentally kicked the glass of water over on their way out. It made a watermark the shape of a teardrop on the grid of carpet tiles.

Adam Hines-Green

Katarina Sylvan (b.1989) is a Swedish artist based in London working across sculpture, text and sound. After graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Konstfack University of Arts & Crafts in 2014, she worked as a scenic painter for theatre at Riksteatern in Stockholm, and created artworks for venues such as Fylkingen, ФОМО and Into the Valley Festival. She graduated from the MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London in 2019 and has since then exhibited at Non-Space, Aarhus, Platform, Stockholm and De:Formal Gallery among others and is in 2021 looking  forward to solo-presentations of her work at Intersticio, London, Galleri K4, Oslo and Cylinder Gallery, Seoul. Her work has received awards from the Kenneth Armitage Foundation, Gilbert Bayes Trust, Konstnärsnämnden and Konstakademien. She is currently in residence at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.

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Intersticio is pleased to present ‘Claro el Bosque’ the inaugural exhibition of the new space In Madrid at Calle Alcántara 31, a year after the opening of our space in London. 

The group exhibition ‘Claro del Bosque’ includes works by Josefina Anjou (SE), Nora Aurrekoetxea (ESP), Lucía Bayón (ESP), Isabella Benshimol (VE), Julia Crehueras (ESP), Diego Delas (ESP), Johanna Odersky (CH), Andrés Izquierdo (ESP), Maren Karlson (DE) and Paul Maheke (FR), exploring the spaces, symbols poetics and rituals involved in the process of the occult, the collective and their healing and empowering force.

‘The clearing in the forest is a center where it is not always possible to enter’¹. We cross a verge towards a desire, a dream, a vision, a place for communion and reunion. It is a productive center, but also the start of an exit; a space for conspiration and whisper, where defenseless ghosts, elucubrations of futures and hidden memories navigate. 

The access reveals itself as accidental, frontal, at night or during the day, it is a surprise, a futurity. ‘It is the immediate lesson of the clearances in the forest: you don’t have to look for them, neither look for anything from them’², they will offer themselves to you.

Upholded images appear, recalling encountered lifes, breezes, blindings or reliques from a dream. Unerring spaces lighting a path,
sloped on occasions.
Blind maps shaking us.  

We would not know how we enter,
neither remember the exist,
if a clearing in the forest invites us to access its original feeling. 

A space of prophecies, latent and denied knowledges shrinking away from binarity. Disseminated rituals across new ways of doing, spaces for propositions evading a limitant reason. 

A scenario for healing without even knowing how long that moment may last. A frame for a ritual, traces of light and shadow, whispers crossing our feet. 

We cross the verge and we mutate bodies, circulating across a space of adoration and pause,
daydream and emptiness, where shadows,
games,
failed plans, cover us presenting the listening of those voices from the substratum.

The clearing in the forest is an offering, a recovery. A place of encounter where to shed our skin, remodel the emptiness, listening, a space for a collective reborn.

The brighting light, discordant, appears over a sky, ‘discontinuous, a clearing itself too’³ . 

1
Zambrano, María
Claros del bosque
(Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1977)
p.27

2
Ibid, p.27

3
Ibid, p.30