In Hierophant, a short film that you can see at the end of this show, a young man cannot accept that he has become a killer by chance. Killing someone in a car accident, which apparently was of such magnitude of accidental that he has faced no legal consequences, has left him unable to actualise the power of his will. In our society of radicalised individualism, there is only one rational consequence: he must become a killer on purpose. By the end of the film, and through a series of horrifying rituals, he fulfills this role with maniacal intent.

Everywhere we look in today's globalised networks of capital, we see the consequences of radical individualism. Technological innovations in particular have been entirely privatised for the benefit of a very few, based on the work and engagement of us all. In the context of this radicalisation, it is of utmost necessity to look for what unites us, as well as how we are dealing with the consequences of a still violent world, and how the stasis that comes of the privatisation of the common good affects us. Making an art show in a community radio station, organised almost in opposition to the structures previously described, it seemed necessary to me to present the work of a group of artists who deal with rituals, premonitions, and a strange archeology in their work. Together their work hints to me at what community in art can mean today, even if previously not all these artists were known to each other. Named after a song by Veronica Falls, Bad Feeling pays as much tribute to the chance operations that unite us, as those that divide and terrify. Although the latter are, of course, impossible to ignore.

Economic contraction and the loss since the mid-twentieth century of the ability to conceive of innovative futures has lead to artists' retrenchment into traditional mediums. It is hard enough to hang a painting in the best possible way, nevermind having to call in a specialist team to install a multi-channel multimedial installation. And it is primarily the former that is likely to find a new home after the show. Domestic dimensions have also remained constant since the post-war settlement, so when the Sex Pistols sang "No Future," they had already perceived that there was very little space for one.

This exhibition then finds a group of artists on the edge of the conventions of their mediums, yet still finding joy in the fervour of pushing at the edge of these boundaries. The bad feeling precipitates the wrong move, as opposed to warning against it. Like the lead character of Hierophant, they refuse the dictates of chance and embed a critical perspective in works that, with one or two specific exceptions, otherwise resonate with pattern, gesture and precise deployment of colour.

By choosing to work under a pseudonym, Systems Research Group deals rigorously with the personality driven history of painting. Indeed, the collage of found materials, house and oil paint, and rejection of both figuration and abstraction, leads to a form of anti-painting. Both intimately aware of the traditions of Arte Povera and Japanese Action painting and suspicious of them, this work suggests emojis and koans, being at once liminal, fleeting and talismanic.

Equally concerned with refusal is the work of Diane Kotila, whose oil portraits present cartoon-like spectres that refuse the gaze of the viewer. The figures, which somewhat recall Kotila’s famed series of decapitated Tintins, look intently beyond the frame, alarmed at the shadowy operations around them.

The elegantly traced figures and halloween ghosts of Ani Schulze’s work are captured in media res, as they undertake workplace bonding rituals and subsume their psyche in the rotations of fidget spinners. Schulze’s monumental approach to fragile aquarelle painting presents an inherent tension between the necessity to face, and even perform ascent, to the threatening absurdities of the everyday, and how like in Bataille’s feverous dialectic our inner experience is haunted by it all.

Aida Kidane is driven to make work that deals with the post-colonial history of Eritrea, the country of her birth. In the series Asmara Gin, she references the easy-going bar culture of the titular city. By working with unconventional pictorial materials, such as latex, Kidane makes the unusually attractive decay of that city explicit. With her background as an architect, Kidane re-interprets these interiors in the rich patterning traditional to Eritrea. In the work Counting to Infinity she presents numbered stacks of rare okumee wood, which the artist was able to expropriate from a swiss company.

The incidental arrangement of Natalia Janula’s pieces betrays her interest in the construction of a social compact that learns from, rather than acts as an antagonist to the natural world. These oft dystopic fragments suggest processes of reclamation as well remaining cognisant of decay. Through the title Ferment she looks at the potential of the body politic through these processes, while maintaining no illusions about how fleeting unity and collectivity can prove to be.

Bad Feeling ends on a downer, but one that is the result of a seldom collective process and a life-long friendship shared by the artists Lionel Maunz and Theo Stanley. One that endures to this day. Together with Theo’s college roommate, the experimental playwright Brian Torrey Scott, they created two works that exist somewhere between visceral horror and video art. On Isthmus and Hierophant they worked as a trio of directors and developed a uniquely powerful visual form. With Brian Torrey Scott’s untimely death from cancer in 2013, this collective was cut short. While Isthmus, an ambitious feature project, remains incomplete, Hierophant can be seen for the first time in over a decade in Bad Feeling. The film is screened in memory of Brian Torrey Scott.

Bad Feeling curated by Krzysztof Honowski was presented as part of Cologne’s Museumsnacht in the rooms of the community radio station 674FM.

Bad Feeling was a group exhibition about premonitions, rituals, and how violence often finds justification in society by esoteric means. The exhibition presented six positions, with Aida Kidane and Natalia Janula showing works of sculpture and installation, while Systems Research Group, Ani Schulze, and Diane Kotila presented new paintings. Kotila, Janula, and Systems Research Group showed work in Cologne for the first time. 

At the heart of the show, both thematically and architecturally, was a rare screening of the film Hierophant by the artists Lionel Maunz, Brian Torrey Scott, and Theo Stanley.

The exhibition was accompanied by a programme of live conversations moderated by the artist Laura Sundermann and curator Krzysztof Honowski. These were broadcast live on 674FM throughout the evening, along with DJ sets by Karl-Heinz Müller, Keri Y, Hallimasch Hunters, Minister, and Thomas Rhein. The broadcast can be listened back to here:

A hand-numbered zine containing new collages and rare images from the artists was available at the opening.

The show ran from 2nd to 10th November 2024.

Documentation by Krzysztof Honowski and Laura Sundermann.