Esra Nagel
Five Years
Solo exhibition at SOX
2025
I never thought I’d need so many people
David Bowie, Five Years, 1971
The website of the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance published a downloadable emergency-prep kit checklist. During an evacuation and until arrival at a safe destination, the kit should provide essential tools and supplies for at least one person. For the ongoing series Go Bag, shown here for the first time, Esra Nagel recreates some of the items found on the checklist.
Deutsch:
Auf der Website des Bundesamts für Bevölkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe kann eine Notgepäck-Checkliste heruntergeladen werden. Während einer Evakuierung und bis zum Erreichen eines sicheren Ortes soll das Notgepäck die rudimentäre Versorgung von mindestens einer Person gewährleisten. Für die fortlaufende Serie Go Bag, die hier erstmals gezeigt wird, baut Esra Nagel einige der von der Behörde aufgelisteten Gepäckstücke nach.
Installation views by Eric Tschernow
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A 20ft Radio mix by Valentin Hesch to which I contributed a cover version of the song Time Adventure originally featured in the series Adventure Time. My song starts at minute 57:55.
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The artist walks among the flowers
Group exhibition at Believe..→ God iz Love…
2022
with works by
Felix Amerbacher, Mania Godarzani-Bakhtiari, Jonas Kuck, Esra Nagel, Sarah Rosengarten, Lukas Zerrahn
The cutouts in the drywall ceiling are a collaborative work by all participating artists.
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Deserters
Solo exhibition at Teile/2o46
2021
Light slowly fades from burnt vanilla to a sweet grey-blue. Clouds like raw cotton soaking up a watery ink. There is a clicking sound and wind howls past the flanks of the train as the digital clock is totally wrong. Both hour and minutes disagree with the setting sky. The train carriages have been deserted. Representation deserted into abstraction.
The clock that has a different time to the sky is like the reference that has a different time to the final artwork. Is abstract art an empty train on a closed loop with no final station? The practice of open ended and exuberant production with uninhibited material consequences. Thinking about the criticism of abstract art as decorative is doubly frustrating because it presumes the deprecation of decorative and abstract art.
Esra Nagel intentionally departs from and abstracts her reference to paintings by Leonor Fini and dissolves a collective memory of traveling by trains. Both Leonor and Esra focus on the interior surface of the train rather than the potential landscape to be seen from the window. The windows are blocked out making the train carriage an incubator for erotic privacy.
Trains literally are modernism.
These tactile surfaces of history come from another kind of memory as the brain fog of queer ancestors condenses onto the walls as grubby shimmers. Here is the evidence of a transitional time when traveling by train was still an opulent leisure activity. A time when modernist engineering and hygiene hadn’t yet cleaned up the swirling patterns of pre-industrial decorative art. The negation of the train window also begs the question, when did paintings stop being fake windows? The bench invites the visitors to sit down as they become the only passengers on this train from objectivity to deviant revisioning.
The clouds are soaking wet inside.
Plugged into the train’s plug beneath a small sign saying ‘not for public use’, the phone sucks up the juice and charges gradually. Stromsparend paintings, economic in the application of the paint. She touches the surface lightly, keeping a distance. The works share their energy like migrating birds sleeping in shifts. When the birds at the front get tired they fall to the back. The train‘s driver is hidden from sight, it almost seems self driving.
Tracks that the wet paint and brush marks follow. Holding, driving, alighting.
Text by Tommy Camerno
