renata lucas - o perde

Das sagt der/die Veranstalter:in:

In o perde, Renata Lucas’ third solo exhibition with the gallery, the artist builds upon competing notions of interaction and displacement, inviting viewers to participate in a game of billiards. The field for play is itself a sculptural object based on the traditional form of a pool table, modified by Lucas: Rather than balls being gathered once pocketed, they are instead guided away from its players - along the ground and through built barriers - triggering an off-site intervention at the nearby Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) and continuing her ongoing engagement with spatial concerns.

Lucas creates work that grapples with the psychological implications of space and its design, adopting approaches both hyperlocal and global. Always conceptualized and realized in dialogue with their contexts, her projects draw upon behaviors dictated by culture or environments. They give rise to seemingly happenstance encounters, finding site at busy intersections, on sidewalks or across cityscapes, activating and deconstructing them in pursuit of a reimagined social fabric.

The participative sculpture o perde (2024), presenting as a regulation pool table on first glance, is in fact subtly reconfigured to redirect each pocket’s ball-collection systems originally intended to capture the game’s pieces for simplified retrieval and infinite play. Lucas’ alterations interrupt this, instead allowing each ball to continue along paths that stretch away from the player, to the extents of the exhibition space and beyond, transforming a contained tabletop structure into one that is unified with its surroundings.

The work is outfitted with a series of channels that lead to the space’s floor, allowing the billiard balls to traverse architecture: Openings in the gallery’s walls allow them passage through previously impermeable barriers to the adjacent courtyard. This cyclical disappearance and reappearance elsewhere lends a surreal tone, while the illusion of control and its sudden dissolution become central. Lucas’ act introduces a rift into the otherwise ordered world of play - one governed by sets of established rules and the dynamics that they shape. She acknowledges this predetermined structure, reanimating its mechanisms of power in order to dismantle them, and constitutes a call for interpersonal exchange. o perde’s reach expands further, its sensations, sounds and physicality embedding itself within n.b.k. (Chausseestrasse 128/129, 10115 Berlin). There, the sharp, percussive tones of momentarily colliding resin accompany falling billiard balls, dispensed from the sites’ wall. Together, the exhibition’s dual sites imply a game whose location in physical and temporal spaces are indeterminate. Expectations and their defiance are deployed in tandem with the acts of displacement and superimposition, bringing the intricacies of action and causality to the fore.

Renata Lucas (b. 1971) has been the subject of international solo exhibitions, including those at Performance Space New York, New York (2019); Secession, Vienna (2014); Peep-Hole, Milan (2011); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2010); Redcat, Los Angeles (2007); and Gasworks, London (2007). She has also created site-specific works for the 8th Biennale internationale d’art contemporain de Melle (2018); dOCUMENTA (13) (2012); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009); and the 27th Bienal de São Paulo (2006). Lucas lives and works in São Paulo.

This project is realized in collaboration with Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.).