EMA- -LIN

Honeymoon in Pickle Paradise

Room 322, The Landmark Hotel, NW1 6JQ, London

8 - 19 October 2015

A solo show byAthena Papadopoulos

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SUPERIOR

When we got an email from Athena three weeks before the show opened to say that she couldn’t possibly exhibit her works in the hotel we prematurely booked for the occasion, she drew the comparison to the web phenomenon http://greatartinugly- rooms.tumblr.com.

It didn’t help that when the concierge showing her around on her second visit, was seductively reclining on the dust-coloured bed sheet while asking for her age. It also didn’t help that we then had to find a new location for her Honeymoon on such short notice during the busiest week of the year.

However Jasmine, who by then was an expert of Hotels in the vicinity of Regents Park, miraculously discovered a Hotel that in its lobby had palm trees taller than houses. Fast forward a couple of weeks and a group of strong lobby boys from the Landmark Hotel helped us carrying more than fifteen pieces of “luggage” to room 322. From then on-wards, between the installation of the works, the opening, the performances, the sales, the late night dinners in the empty hall and much more, it was one of the most unique collaborative efforts we could have ever wished to experience in our short career as curators.

Yet, despite and because of everything, each Honeymoon is bound to end and can only live on in our memories. This exhibition catalogue however, with four wonderful essays writ- ten by Athena’s friends for and about the exhibition, is a great testament to Athena’s first solo show in the UK. Scribbles left in the visitor’s book by friends and new friends accompany the following pages, showing that this is but a small indication of the feeling that filled room 322 for ten days in October 2014

Without the help of every single guest who contributed in making this exhibition so remarkable, we would see Athena’s work soon featured on the aforementioned Tumblr. Perhaps it will, but unlike the Monet in the trailer home, there will be a really wonderful story as to why the Landmark was lucky enough to be the temporary host of a Honeymoon in Pickle Paradise.

Thank you,

Emalin

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DELUXEby Holly Parmley

‘Enter as if you are a guest and continue to Room 322, at the Landmark Hotel’ was my invitation to the solo exhibition titled ‘Honeymoon in Pickle Paradise’ by artist Athena Papadopoulos. Knowing Athena’s style of work, I immediately assumed her debauched aesthetic would contaminate the neutrality of such a space; a beige haven for feeling good while spending money. However, while the perversion of the space certainly held a strong underlying current to the show, I was pleasantly amused to watch the relationship organically unfold between the hotel room and the objects within. The soft palette of luxury intertwined as another medium amongst her other multidisciplinary works. The purity of the space would become Athena’s muse: a structure to hold the skin of her characters, a space to house the unra-velling narratives played out between bodies, relationships, behaviours and money. The words honeymoon and paradise immediately prompt us to think about ideals: a measured amount of time where bodies engage in euphoric activity and love is at its most heightened state; a constant celebration amongst a wonderland of perfection and bliss. The intrusion of the pickle, whether referencing the delectable canned vegetable, comically hinting at a limp phallus or connoting a sticky situation, introduces a stain on the gentle 5-star scenario. The absurd object subtly hints at a potential pickle-phobia and what at first may seem approachable and jolly, may not be so savoury.

Athena’s multidisciplinary practice permeates the space in a spontaneous and instinctive way. When you walk in, your first sight is a cushioned stripper pole, and on the mantelpiece three vases hold stuffed phallus looking objects which are, of course, oversized pickles. The bed is covered in dyed canvas cut outs emulating rose petals, and beside the bed sits an enormous on-looking cushion sculpture sat upon three chairs. Its formless shape reminds me of party bodies and wild limbs. Wall-space reserved for decorative paintings have been replaced by Athena’s layered canvasses and the closet is filled with hand-sewn clothing/pyjamas. Dotted around the bathroom are pickles that have escaped from their jar as well as other miscellaneous objects such as resin disks encasing detritus of old cigarette butts and chicken bones.

While her practice encompasses a wide range of media, everything is meticulously hand made. Mixing the found and the personal, figurative illustrations and photographic cut-outs from various sources make their way onto the surfaces of the work. Sexual politics and the family unit are exploited through the creation of fictive and factual memories. Familiar protagonists continually crop up, most notably her father, the women he surrounds himself with and the artist herself. Collaged

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amongst these personal momento’s are bodily portrayals of party moments taken from stock like imagery or sketched through memory. What may once have been an easily consumable portrayal of fun is now a menacing character starting you back in the face. While no narrative is explicitly stated, we begin to string together our own assumptions about what is being inferred through the divorced middle class family cliché; its failure mirroring the failure of the sixties, its dreams of free love against the system and its turn towards a new love of capitalist endeavors. Depending on how deep you would like to delve into the details and history of her practice, each work thickens the plot as we begin to connect one work to another. However, as frequently as she is saturating the characterisation of the narrative, she is equally stripping it back and undermining its authenticity. It is a constant process of revealing and hiding, sewing up and peeling off, putting us in the position of the peeping tom.

These compositions are further complicated by her use of materials; pepto bismol, berroccca, make-up, t-shirt transfers, wine, beer, food colouring, party food, chicken bones, peanuts shells, beads and thread, stitching, fake tattoos, shoe polish, hair dye ETC. Cures for overindulging, so we can overindulge again. Take more to have more, there is no release. Everything is treated as a surface to be temporarily covered up and toyed with, the fabric becomes our skin. Everything undergoes surgery and alterations to flavour and liven up. From your pale face to the scuffs on your shoes, everything is in constant need of a make-over, including your stomach. Every aspect of the work is taking part in creating a representational moment including the form of the actual object itself- the shape of getting wasted.

The works successfully hover between the celebratory and the shameful. Power relations are played out through the depictions of the female characters; gold-diggers, party girls, strippers and of course, herself as maker and object. Both the belly and the underbelly of power relations around men, women and money are explored through humour and the grotesque, confidence and disgust.

With ‘the party’ being a central theme to the show, the works relied on constant hu-man traffic and mingling; from the opening night to the end, the space stayed active through evening guest performances and invited sleepovers. Upon request (keeping the exhibition a secret from the hotel) the room was not cleaned daily but rather grew messier and dirtier with each passing day. One couple who spent a night in the hotel and also performed on one of the evenings was artist duo Mr. and Mrs. Philip Cath. The married couple, most well known for their hilariously sexual and absurd paintings, performed a re-enactment of their wedding night. Appropriately fitting within the premise of the show, it was equally awkward, funny, beautiful, layered and at moments rather sad. With Athena as the narrator of their timeline, they began with when they first met, and continued to divulge the details of the proposal, the wedding day and of course, the pinnacle of ecstatic emotion: the night

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of the honeymoon. As it took place in such small quarters, the experience was intimate to say the least. The sounds of their lips touching as they kissed, to the creaking of shoes and swishes of wedding dress fabric added tension to a situation already made uneasy through the scenario being played out under your nose. Alongside the performance they allowed the viewers to look through old wedding albums, personal love letters and print outs of saved msn conversations. The inability of ever being able to enact or re-enact loves past emotions or seduce the viewer into falling in love with someone else’s love story laid bare an empty distance between everyone in the room. Suddenly everything felt appropriately plastic, and, much like the rest of the work, denies us any attainment or gratification but rather focuses on that brief moment when something just falls slightly short.

From its beginning to its end, the exhibition felt like the evolution of the party, and one that continually attempts to renew itself. I don’t know whether I’m experiencing the party, the hangover or the memory of both. However, if I spend enough time exploring the inside of the outside in Athena’s work, a nightmarish carnival soon emerges and the monsters come out to play. Your interpretation of the party is up to you. The objects around the room are looking at you, they are flirting with you. They want you to pry further, to consume their stories and their aesthetics. They want us to be the peeping Toms we already are.

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The inherent structure of a hotel is its mundane transience. It is a place with a revolving door, absorbing and spinning out people and their parceled belongings at a rapid rate; the comings and goings stimulated by the currency of desire and sleep. The hotel’s starred rating system produces a visualisation of class structure and, in the construction of a narrative, a specific context for an associated set of expectations. A 5-star hotel, with its exclusive decadence, makes possible various activities to be discreetly concealed from one another. The ever-roaming, efficient housekeeping staff wipe and clear the stage for the next cast of characters who claim the sterile place as their own, enacting their compartmentalised story separate from those who came before and who will come after. Athena Papadopoulos creates artwork with domestic materials that stain or are hard to clean away—self-tanner, lipstick, mustard, Pepto-Bismol, shoe polish, Berocca, red wine, baby powder —highlighting the futility of erasing the excess of traces left by human bodies. The focal point of activity in a hotel room is the king-sized bed, the site of ongoing sleeping and sex, endless horizontal individuals dreaming, rubbing, sweating, dripping and drooling; the mattress is a giant absorbent sponge. The amassed secretions are mirrored in the artist’s canvases and her layering of house-hold products, fueling the transformation of the caricatures into three-dimensional anthropomorphic forms.

The Landmark Hotel is the backdrop for Honeymoon in Pickle Paradise and the core cast of characters are all extras who have hitched a 5-star ride: pantyhose-tanned hooters’ girls, spring-breakers drunkenly spilling out of their speedos, arm-in-arm Grey-Goose-guzzling temptresses clad in fur and knockoff designer goods, a glea-ming beer-cocky tanned torso, and a trio of curved mottled-green pickles present their firm erections. The debaucherous celebration of the union between the bride and groom is emblematic of a duality within lust—for security and to be coveted. Through the deployment of unavailability, marriage is rendered as a tool to tease, an exclusive game of hard to get. The symbolic transition of two united as one is presented as the pinnacle—an endless night of drunken love festivities. Hanging halfway between a honeymoon and a last-chance stag or bachelorette party, the moment is tinged with optimistic promiscuity before the jaded future arrives in the form of a permanent hangover.

Amidst Papadopoulos’ repeated and similarly treated line-drawn characters, their traits bleeding into one another, how do you locate the protagonists? Shapeshifting is abound: the father, the groom, the lover, the bride, the mother, the sister, the daughter, the artist, all are one and the same. Through the act of projecting—for example, images relocated through t-shirt transfers—the represented world often comes out backwards, misshapen or stretched. Papadopoulos’ visual storytelling is illustrated as an aggregate of personal and found artifacts where meaning emerges

EXECUTIVEby Persilia Caton

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from clusters of association. Brought to the fore is the capacity for changeability, both within the space of a hotel room and through the malleability of human beha-viour.

The pickle is playfully positioned as the condition of being ‘in a pickle’ (a predica-ment) and ‘pickled’ (saturated in alcohol). Papadopoulos’ specific use of this word to describe the salty snack also known as a gherkin introduces another level of transformation, this time through language. The pickle, a predominantly North American term, is a nod to the artist’s Canadian background. Positioning her practice within a Canadian context, the trickster can be seen as an influence. The figure of the trickster, ever-present in the art and storytelling of Aboriginal Canadians, is a complex entity known for being the messenger, the fool, the clown, the teacher. Often the trickster artist introduces alternative entry points to dark or taboo subjects through irony and humor, utilizing laughter as a tool to expose rigid preconceptions. The trickster—who shifts appearances from spirit, man, woman, and animal, most often a coyote—is swift and cunning and utilizes this power to disobey normal rules and conventional behaviour.

Papadopoulos uses humour and the position of trickster-as-transformer to question mainstream culture’s systems of classification. In grappling with convenient and dismissive stereotypes and typecast characters she opens up paradoxes. Beyond the plastic beads, the pair of false tits and the mid-life crisis one might find that a seductive red anthurium is poisonous or that superiority lies with the firm green pickle in its ability to outlast the cucumber.

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Images travel, but we can’t say for sure whether it’s for business or pleasure. One would merely be asking the question to themselves in order to understand why it is they are looking at an image, a process that can alter one’s relationship to it. Per-haps historical distances are required to take stock of the transformations taking place between ourselves and images, with each other, and even how images interact and relate with one another – grand theories of ‘the great flattening out’ or ‘the liquidation of the image’s significance once it has been introduced into the digital slipstream’. But even this act of reflection carries obstructions; we are always in the way of ourselves. Certainly the notion of images having intelligence in this age, or a form of subjectivity, is developing currency. However, amid this growing acceptance image’s agency, it has often produced commentaries of subjective abstraction that leave one left to their own devices. One is on their own when it comes to facing the litany, and others can only offer hints to devising techniques of viewing, relating, and interpreting this atmosphere in which the image seems to be doing quite well on its own. Perhaps this hyper-subjectivity within critique is due to the fact that most of the images one interacts with now are in a state of physical isolation, or perhaps it is a result of the academic industrial complex in which writers are working to carve out a niche.

Returning to the travel of images, I’ll begin with a reminder the historical condition that for some time it was us who made the trek, met the image half way. Prior to, as well as during this process of facing it, we constructed frameworks for veneration and celebration, rejection and defacement. Now the image is said to be liquid, or at least viscous, and as we know has gone through various stages of presentation and storage, from discrete to reproducible to digitalized, from 9 to 5 to 24/7, from overtime to ‘always on’. It is in the latter atmosphere, towards and around the image, that Athena Papadopoulos’ work operates. Indeed, there are avatars, or rather recognizable traits that link one ‘body’ of work to another. Papadopoulos has in a remarkably short period of time devised a visual language wholly her own, howe-ver very little of it is slick: her work takes time to make. The crayon drawings are of a naïve hand, the images semi-autobiographical, and which, if one intends to use a methodology that keeps the artist at a distance from their work, illicit a certain caution to interpretation. In many aspects of the work an element of seduction is at play, or at least temptation, especially when it comes to analysis. The abrasiveness, the ad hoc quality – especially of her pillow constructions, the allusions to imme-diate family as well as to herself invites the viewer into certain modes of analysis that have been systematically condemned and abandoned within academic discourse and artist criticism. The author is to wait at the wings, to pre-empt an arm’s length relationship with the viewer, offering the works to operate as semi-autonomous en-tities, or at least as platforms upon which a multiplicity of significations can co-exist in and amongst one another. This ideal is out of reach if one leans in and looks at Papadopoulos’s image transfers, a technique that is not unlike the one used in the application of fake tattoos.

PRESIDENTIALby Spencer W Stuart

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Furthermore, and this pertains most readily to her earlier works that involve scan-ning the back of photographic prints, there is a consideration of the ways in which one’s practice with photographic objects (i.e. prints) actually maintains, or leaves room for a consideration of an Aura. Each scratch, scar, and smudge mark a mo-ment of contact, the passing through of a threshold. Each alludes to alternate forms of travel that photographic images take forms not opposed to current conceptions of the photographic through the digital, but which remind us one of the co-existence of multiple modes of transport and transmissions that remain despite the continual acceleration and streamlining of visual culture through digital networks. The modes and models in Papadopoulos’ work lean toward a layering, or stratification, that is more archaeological than cosmological, a process that is more downward and spra-wling than upward and precise; all things at once rather than consolidation into the similar.

Returning to the developing visual and material languages that Papadopoulos’ em-ploys in her work, I believe one could link this interest in the abrasive or failures to transmit. This, of course, is manifested in the uneven result of the image transfers, the overlaying of sheet upon canvas, the excessive layering and overlapping of fabric surfaces, the stain as reference to occurrence with the social configurations and dynamics she represents in the images themselves. Looking at the shopping list of products that are infused within one of her works such substances could be con-sidered to function as mechanisms to cope with a brief moment of time, lubricants of one form or another that allude to physiological as well as psychological discom-forts. The Pepto-Bismol that coats the upset stomach (assumed to be caused by over eating), the pads that soak up spills, the beer that is consumed to quell social anxiety, the mustard that is spread to enliven the flavourless - or perhaps even ran-cid - dishes. Each item, its function, and its inclusion allude to an event or repetitive way of being that is ultimately never explicitly addressed or represented.

With this most recent installation and set of works, it is not entirely clear if one has arrived before or after the festivities, or perhaps it is occurring somewhere else simultaneously. As Papadopoulos’ work continues to employ these more ad hoc materials and techniques of image reproduction, such as the image transfer of line drawings and personal photographs, the introduction of more immersive modes of transmission (such as the installation Honeymoon in Pickle Paradise), indeed the desire and excess alluded to through the images will seep out into their modes of distribution.

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Dear Athena,

Thank you ever so kindly for the invitation to take part in your Honeymoon in Pickle Paradise exhibition, in room 322 at the Landmark Hotel in Marlybone. You must be thrilled with how critically acclaimed your show became during Frieze week, aka the “Art Sport Invitational” of London.

You began the week as an art nobody (apart from sho-wing in the New Contemporaries) to being a star by the 19th Oct. How dreamy to be listed in the press alongside Ed Forniales and Ryan Trecartin as being the ‘show to see’ outside of the fair and manage get works into an amazing private collection.

I know how hard it was for you going to bed drunk at 5am night after night because of the relentless partying with the VIPs, but you did well not get sacked from your shitty day job. I don’t think people appreciate just how hard it is to go out every night, with a fabulous outfit, and be engaging and witty for 7 nights straight, but your dedication paid off dear…. by the end of the week, you had officially emerged, covered with gold dust, or even better, art buzz dust!

THE MARYLEBONEby Khloe Cath

WTF! Why even the Serpentine Extinction Marathon was begging to come use your space for Jesse Darling’s per-formance by the last day of your hotel room show. Well done you!

Bunnykins, you know I am a long time believer in your genius, and of course I am totally envious, but you are a true maker and artist to the dying and bitter end. You already know how much I love your paintings, so forgi-ve me if I just skim over the fact they were predictably incredible. ( I was already loving them when I saw them at your Chisenhale studio, and tell me, why don’t all art patrons help young artists get studio awards? -because since you were awarded that residency, your work has accelerated toward a startling maturity in a short time.

But back to your show, your irreverent hang was the best part; who knew any artist could take on the gentle luxury of the 5* Landmark’s Hotel room (taupe, gold, beige and sand palette) just like any other medium? I also never realised just how many people have a pickle phobia, but rest assured you deepened that phobia for them with the repulsive pickles scattered on the floor of the marble shower like little green penis turds. Jasmine, one of your curators, said the hang was all instinct for you, and how

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you selected pickle jars to prop the canvases against the wall rather spontaneously; you make those display witti-cisms look easy girl! (Did I detect a hint of ‘contemporary art aesthetic’ sarcasm in there?)

If I wasn’t a impecunious artist, the piece of yours I would most love to acquire are those chunky sculptural resin discs, filled with cigarettes butts and studio floor detritus. I could gaze endlessly into the depths of their own easy self-knowing, oh the stories it could tell! Can’t you just see it working in Anita Zabuvolitzc’s formal living room next to her (potentially) artwork phone, or maybe it was actually just a phone because it looked exactly like what the hotel phone looked like FYI; do you remember Morgan Quaintence and I studied that phone carefully for like a whole 10 minutes to speculate if it was ‘work’ or not?

But back to your show, also meriting a mention were the ridiculous soft sculptural objects which appear to be very failed sofa pillows in supersized scale. They had a distin-ct grotesqueness to them which actually became more menacing the longer I spend time studying the surface, like when we slept in your exhibition. The drawing of the woman’s face started coming out to me, criticising me whilst I was drifting off to slumber/ aka passing out, and then she criticised the man sitting next to her in the drawing. The vibrant line of your drawings, ironed on to the surface were somehow invisible when I “looked” at the works during the show during the private view, but like psychedelic toys that become animated when children go to sleep, so did your drawings. Creepy, but I liked it.

In this show, your work appeared to be a careless and messy carnival / collage, rammed with a multitude of autobiographical photos and drawings, objects who re-fuse to entirely exist in one designation, upset against their own materiality. And if I could just say, I love your approach in using the platitudes of fluids to mark with, like paint, Pepto Bismal and hair colour, together in an assemblage on the surface. I suspect viewers will over-

look the real emotional impact of the work when they are show-hopping, and are not likely to see any the dark family stuff, because you know well that feeling of when you go to a show and we do that quick image-merchan-dising scan, skimming the space, looking superficially to see what the show looks like. I love that when Flynt had his show at SpaceNY, he made his work so eye wate-ringly dense, it was immune to show scan. (I meant to ask him when he was here for dinner after installing for the Liverpool biennale, but surely his intention is about deliberately arresting this phenomenon) But regardless, this remains a problem for all artists, (thank you Saatchi for telling the world you should get art like you do ads, in just a few secs flat)

Anyway, Athena, In our private conversations, when you and I were at Goldsmtihs, we always came back to the problem that we have both as painters; the image of the work betrays the art of it because the image proces-ses so quickly in the eye of the viewer, that it excludes further readily deeper interpretations of the art. There are two ways in which this is punctured, one surrounds the necessary performative nature of the painter, and two, the fetishation of the painters processes, both of which serve to infuse the image and canvas with further layers of context.

Alex Bacon just wrote about this fetishion of the white male painter’s process in his response to Saltz’s Zombie paintings, and how the market just eats this up. But of course, it is just dawning on me that, in general, paintings are indeed dependent on that accompanying narration, stories about the paintings to tell around the sales-pitch fire…(This artists dips his canvas in plate metal, this ar-tist hires someone to print his canvases in the moonlight, etc..)

But wonderfully Athena, I feel with your work, this exter-nal narration is not worked up by a enthusisng galleriest with an eye to a sale, but rather It is embued with your very and real actual life and it makes more dense your lusciously comical surface.

Guess what Phil and I’s our story is? It used to be just being married (wow), which was too weird and boring. So now, the new story is. Phil and I don’t sell the paintings, and we renounce the determination of what we do as even “art”, so take that art world. (But here is the rub, it looks and smells exactly fucking like art. We make and do things that seem like art, yet we refuse this of our objects and identity. ) What’s left to do in the art world that you can’t actually do as an artists. Nothing. This is it, this is the kind of art you get when all we have are crumbs and the biographical to work with. (next essay: crumb hybridity)

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You know when Philip and I describe to our friends out-side of the artworld what we do, to the friends who are brain surgeons, QCs and WHO policy makers, we demure by saying discreetly “we make bullshit.” We generally take nothing, and make things from nothingness. But there is a genuine craft to making this connoisseurial bullshit. It takes very talented people to do it well and someone really clever to accelerate that commodity of works into being worth something which surpases its ma-teriality by the power of hundreds of thousands.

But in my heart, I still just do love those paintings, as I loved the other works in your show.

Maybe your work, and our work is all based on the real in a cynical world, the paradox between the connsseri-alul bullshit and the private love of painting. This week, I’ve been obsessed on Ordono’s primitivism. I luuuuv primitivism theories. There are things, yeah?, that are better than other things. For instance, paintings, music and stories are masterful, enduring mediums. People like to make marks, listen to pop songs, and read and watch narratives. For that matter, the most primitive action of all -people like to collect, like the hunter gatherers did, or hunter-collectors still do today. (ps I have taken a few liberties with Ordono) But he gives me permission to like it all, even when I know the post-post modernist in me realises the fatality of it, and yearns to escape from the endless irony.

But getting back to the idea of painter as performer, we had our first half idea; to take your show title, as a pro-positional challenge, and to re-enact our wedding night with as much authenticity as possible in your Honeymoon in Pickles Paradise. Our follow-on half-idea was to cast you as our narrator, because Emal.in’s web text it says you are “performative” so why not have you read out (and perform being you) a factual script whilst we per-formed ‘attidues’ from our story? Which convientently turned out to have a 18th century provenance as a early form of performance art, also known as Mimoplastic Art.

As you know, in real life,we had no audience for our real wedding in 2000. No one was there apart from Jeff Warrin, film and video artist in Silt,(Whitney, SFmoma, NYmoma) and he was there just to shoot the film. So our actual marriage at City Hall in San Francisco had no viewers, but was just officiated by mayor Willie Brown and his chief of protocol. Viewerless, but documented.

As we developed our research for our performance/hap-pening we discovered how slippery history is, how cor-rupted it becomes in the retelling, which provokes new histories to form on top of it. Listen, everybody does this, just think of the last holiday you took, and how you described it to someone else upon your return. The story you tell never gives an accurate view of what it actually was, how you felt, who you were on it, but is just unwittingly morphs into a twitterish post card summary, which gets better by the time you tell it, so by the 10th person, is the time at which your fiction is settled, and you begin to actually believe it yourself this storylet or fabilised version of your actual experience.

Anyway, we fretted deeply at bringing in all of our ca-refully preserved documents, our real love letters, and original print outs of those conversations, which were recorded in Instant Messanger on AOL in 1999. (We recreated huge ridiculous floral bouquets for the hotel room, because I wanted them as groteswwue as your sculptures.)

Our performance is almost impossible to write about, because the experience doesn’t fit into language, the elements are too eccentric and unruly to contain and furthermore had too much sincerity to manage rationally explaining. Some said it was beautiful though.

Last night we poured over Instagram photos of our per-formance in your exhibition, which upon reflection we decided was one of the best nights of our lives. I saw someone’s photo with Larkin, that excessively charming guy from Mimmosa gallery, in bed with us as we signed photos the spectators had queued for. The image brings such an altered idea to how it felt to be in the bed. From the image, it looks almost like a John and Yoko moment, but that just happened to be where we ended up after completing the “attitudes” from our spectacular lovema-king session as narrated by you.

We clearly had no idea what we would ‘achieve’ with the performance, (does any performance artist ever?) but it was profound and productive for our practice. I thought the satirical fog machine would be a success, and of cour-se, fog is the root of all affect. But I really liked that the girl who cried whilst watching because she was so moved by our absurd mimoplasty, or maybe it reminded her of

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her failed marriage and the hopes she had had; it seemed risky knowing strangers were reading our letters and re-membering their own blossoming love affairs whilst their held in their hands the archives of ours. Some viewers thought it was all an elaborate construct, and I overhe-ard that someone, allegedly really important, said “it was the best thing they had seen during Frieze”. Thank you random, anonymous somebody important, whoever you were, wherever you are now. Nobody can ever take your comment away from us.

I can’t help wanting to write review of your show (pos-sibly for Kaleidoscope?) I know others are reviewing it, but I wanted to capture the deep –‘real’ of that amazing moment when art seems to do all of the right things, for the right people at precisely the right moment.

Somehow I know that even the brightest, most insight-ful writer, couldn’t’ capture what happening during your ascension to art heaven during Frieze, and how could they, an art stranger describe the inside of your outside? How does any reviewer ever capture the diaspra of little half ideas that join together, how can they describe Joes-lit’s little networks that are growing like baby art crystals, accelerating ferociously when fed properly. I think they are much better understood in the context of everything around them.

Is artwork there just to look with our eyes? What about this unseen context, like how your dreamy curators, Leo-pold and Jasmine, both of whom are clever, well manne-red and freakishly well connected, risked so much to get you that show. Bravo to them, self funding the exhibition was a huge gamble, and based simply on them believing in your work. What of your generosity, roping in your friends from Goldsmiths to join in on the show. And so on…

Well lastly Athena, we offer you an enormous congratula-tions for officially emerging! Your show was brilliant, I’ve always known you are the real deal. Thank you again and eternally for asking us to perform.

It feels like we have had a cellular change in our sluggish bodies since Saturday, but now onto hoping our choice of lead paint doesn’t poison us too bad, it is a nightmare to track down, and as a bonus, completely deadly and illegal If you crash and fall into any dreaded B.S.B, (post show blues) which can sneak up on you, expecially after the heights of your power week, text me, but I know once you are in that studio, it is all magic time.

Lots of Love, Khloe (&Phil)

Emalin was founded in December 2012 by Leopold Thun and Jasmine Picôt-Chapman, two friends living and working in London, UK. We aim to act as a moving platform promoting the work of young artists around the world.

Honeymoon in Pickle Paradise (8 to 19 October, 2014) is our second exhbition.