Colby Chamberlain on Alina Tenser
The work of Alina Tenser inhabits a notional area on the juncture of a Montessori college and the Container Retailer. Her sculptures, performances, and movies recommend playtime eventualities of experiential studying whereas evoking a distinctly grown-up predilection for organizing. Although youngsters might view the “helpful pot to place issues in” that Winnie the Pooh presents to Eeyore as a lackluster birthday reward, the suitable storage system can excite the passions of adults (or a minimum of “adulting” millennials) in ways in which Marx’s idea of the commodity fails to completely comprehend. Tenser seeks to activate the psychic energies latent within the trays, bins, hangers, clips, and doodads that promise not merely to self-discipline a spice cupboard or tidy a desk drawer but additionally to stabilize and even renew one’s elementary sense of self.
Take into account Tenser’s Container for Utterance, vacant, wine (all works cited, 2022). Made out of clear PVC plastic, Plexiglas rods, and a crimson zipper, this wall piece resembles a kind of collapsible shoe racks designed to hold from the rear of closet doorways. 5 inside segments are seen however stay inaccessible, because the rectilinear construction is sealed shut by the zipper, which takes a zigzagging route throughout its outer floor, prompting viewers to think about undoing the zipper till the vinyl loses its type and sinks right into a crinkly heap. A piece of this nature variously brings to thoughts the particular object (e.g., Donald Judd’s modular compositions of commercial supplies), the nonobject (Lygia Clark’s multifaceted invites to intersubjective encounter), the Surrealist object (Meret Oppenheim’s gadgets substituting on a regular basis utility for uncanny intimation), the comradely object (Varvara Stepanova’s industrial items meant to orient customers away from capitalist social relations), or the Flux object (George Maciunas’s intentionally dysfunctional variations on home wares), in addition to psychoanalytic ideas such because the transitional object (D. W. Winnicott’s comforting equipment that help an toddler’s recognition of the divide between “me” and “not me”). Tenser herself has expressed an curiosity in affordances (James J. Gibson’s cues for motion embedded inside a cloth setting), and the title of her exhibition, “A Explicit Form of Embrace,” borrows from a phrase discovered within the first quantity of Silvan Tomkins’s Have an effect on Imagery Consciousness (1962): “In the event you prefer to really feel enclosed inside a claustrum and I prefer to put my arms round you, we will each get pleasure from a specific type of embrace.”
The works offered right here amount-ed to what we would name a displaced biography—or quite a biography of displacement. A number of further “Container for Utterance” sculptures from 2020 and 2021 surrounded or abutted blocks of concrete solid within the form of Cyrillic letterforms that Tenser associates together with her childhood experiences of relocating from Ukraine to america and needing to study English earlier than she had totally mastered her native Russian. (Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine was launched per week after the exhibition opened, forcing onto Tenser’s recollections an unwelcome timeliness.) In_ Container for Utterance, _ЯЮ, two freestanding zipped-up vinyl buildings displayed concrete renderings of the letters Я, a vowel that interprets into English as “I,” and Ю, which has no fastened that means in Russian however denotes the sound “u” or “you.” Rising up, Tenser confused the phonetic that means of Ю in Cyrillic with its semantic definition in English. The juxtaposition Я and Ю thus took form in her thoughts because the opposition of “I” and “you”—an error in her understanding of “self” and “different” that emerged from the dissonance of dwelling between two linguistic programs.
A second collection of sculptures, referred to as “Parentheses,” 2021–22, introduced collectively pairs of semicircular six-foot-tall screens of perforated steel interlaced with brightly coloured satin ribbon. The screens sat atop caster wheels that allowed for simple motion, harking back to the cell dividing partitions in Herman Miller’s proto-cubicle Motion Workplace. In English grammar, parentheses check with statements that function addendums to in any other case full sentences, in addition to to the curved typographic marks that set them aside (which I’ve relied on right here to help me in sorting by the complexity of Tenser’s work). What’s the explicit type of embrace that parentheses afford? Do they guard towards impulses that threaten coherence, or do they seal off undesirable impurities? Maybe parentheses cluster round particulars so singular that we can’t bear to lose them, regardless of how awkward the match. So, as a substitute, we maintain them tight.
— Colby Chamberlain
