Text by CLOT Magazine
Art Laboratory Berlin are presenting their new exhibition of 2024, Intermediate Objects by Kristina Stallvik, starting on 23rd February, which reflects on themes around print, copies, replicas, and duplication.
Intermediate Objects represents the culmination of artist Kristina Stallvik’s multidisciplinary, practice-based research on ecosystems of independent publishing. The works in the exhibition are both a documentation of Stallvik’s investigative dialogues and a mediation on the social and material histories of risograph printing.
By displaying the physical stencil masters used to print an eponymous research publication, Intermediate Objects animates these traditionally discarded products of duplication. Drafted with tools developed by Full Auto Foundry, the typefaces utilized in the exhibition further explore the collaborative potential of the stencil itself as a creative methodology.
The term “stencil” originates from a string of etymological relatives: “stansel” (ornament), “estinceller” (glisten), “scintilla” (spark). These Old English, French, and Latin terms capture the careful dance between permeability and imperviousness required of the stencil. During the Paleolithic era, the body itself functioned as the first stencil tool. Cave paintings were created by spraying pigments over one’s hand, a technique later replaced by more intricate carving into leaves and plant matter.
The risograph machine is heavily informed by this lineage, creating prints by pushing ink through a rice-based paper stencil, a method which was considered ‘inefficient’ and replaced with xerography in the early 2000s. The Riso corporation’s adherence to stencil-based printmaking – an intermediary technology between screen printing and digital printing — ultimately created the conditions for its popularity amongst artists and self-publishers.
Also a publication, Intermediate Objects, calls on this history to traverse themes in contemporary publishing, from the evolving relationship between an exhibition and its catalogue to the surprisingly slippery impermanence of a book object. A small library of previous works from Stallvik’s publishing project, Cover Crop, will also be available to read in the gallery.
Intermediate objects runs 24 February to 24 March 2024. More info here.
