Title: HEAVY LOAD
Artist: Anne de Vries
Year: 2021
Dimensions: Variable
Material: Sand, Fences, Vinyl Prints.

Historically, the right to bear arms was hereditary — a sexually-transmitted inheritance from parent to child, like the color of your eyes or the deed to a home. Heraldry developed out of this, a state-regulated economy of signs demonstrating that the bearer, or his ancestor, was legally entitled to wield a weapon. Like a mise en abyme, this visual system involved layers of meaning. Mere possession of a family crest demonstrated a certain social standing, but its specific form also carried weight. For instance, the so-called “king of beasts,” a lion, implied strength, nobility, or courage in the battlefield. But over time, these direct semantic connections weakened, between the animal and its depiction, as well as between a coat of arms and knighthood. Heraldic designs eventually came to signify simply the product of a birthright: generational wealth, which is to say, power. Sand itself doesn’t signify power, but it makes it work. A vast and obscure extractive industry turns shorelines into the glass skyscrapers that compose the skylines of Alpha global cities. Sand is both a major resource within the contemporary global economy and the origins of its symbolic representation. That is, like the relationship between the living lion to its stylized double on a heraldic crest, the shifting reality of sand haunts the visual embodiment of finance capitalism as architectural form. For HEAVY LOAD, an exhibition at Fragile in Berlin, Anne de Vries has filled the space with 15 tons of sand. Impressed in its surface are the chopped and screwed traces of corporate logos, neighboring buildings, and the pawprints of a knight cannibalized by its own herald, put on podophilic display.

Text by Nicholas Korody
Sand sculptures in collaboration with sand sculpture: Bouke Atema 
Curator: Jonas Wendelin
Where: FRAGILE Berlin

Title: Boids
Artist: Anne de Vries
Year: 2015
Dimensions: Various
Material: Polystyrene with UV print on Vinyl wrap.

Subject matter: Photographs from different social, political, and religious gatherings, such as Hong Kong Protest 2015, Mecca Hajj Sep 2014, Tunisia Protest Jan 2011, ‘Je Suis Charlie’ March Place de la Republique in Paris, Jan 2015, Martin Luther King Jr. speech in Washington August 1963, Guatemala Rises Up May 2015, and others.

About: Before they could be used for flight, feathers first appeared on dinosaurs for other, terrestrial purposes such as heat regulation, camouflage or signaling. Blindly, and through the ecstasy of geological timespans, their use was transformed and mortal animals were again granted the power of flight in a new way. In biology the evolution of the feather is an example of an exaptive trait, namely a trait that evolves for use in solving one adaptive problem, but then is at some point retooled or co-opted to serve another. Recent computational models of E.Coli suggest most traits start off as exaptations. The exaptive trait stands in opposition to the idea that biology or the world is pre-determined. Instead it is wholly contingent. If the forms and functions of heredity can be so fundamentally repurposed and our material, animal bodies transmogrified to fly over mountains and swim beneath oceans, it is because matter is itself inherently open, lacking in essential character or permanent identity. A deep modularity of/and in service to a matter determined to experience all variations of itself. Whatever functions a structure has today is no clear indication of its function or meaning in the future. At each moment of time, we are new. Dependently originated, the universe in a unique configuration; empty of essence yet pregnant with unimagined forms and unpredictable capacities. The artworks and objects in this exhibition speak to the ability of the world to transform to its core.

Installation views from E_MERGE at Foam Museum, Amsterdam and ‘Asdzáá nádleehé‘ curated by Timur Si-Qin at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York