Mathis Altmann – More Than Yesterday
2019.01.04 to 2019.04.07
More Than Yesterday starts with bottomspace. A modified garage newly
turned white cube, placed in a flourishing, to be creative/art-hub in
Guangzhou, Haizhu district. Still an area of ongoing construction, workers
improving buildings that will host the latest undertakings by creative
workforces. Fashion designers, photo-studios, entrepreneurs, and
contemporary art galleries mingling together with dumpling producers,
craftsmen, a manufacture of prosthesis, and after work badminton players.
Artificial limbs occasionally cross the path.
Bottom-Up.
The creative enclave seems hard to find, the way up leads through small,
maze-like traditional alleyways between apartment buildings. Densely
populated, filled with grocers and domestic commodity vendors.
Workshops and restaurants spill into the streets. The neighborhood stays
to the core. No matter what, you don’t need to go anywhere, you can find
everything here.
Unimpressed by upgrades.
Illuminated letters in Westeinde Caption typeface are dispersed through
out the space, reading: M O R E T H A N Y E S T E R D A Y.
Commissioned at a local sign-shop, one of many who serve the coming &
going merchants with fast-paced manufacturing expertise for their
corporate needs. Here the writing operates as a backdrop in order to
choreograph an enterprise with no discernible point.
Mind your own business.
Right after the show opens, bottomspace will be abandoned. The main
initiators will be gone and the space will turn semi-public. No appointments,
no phone calls. No hosts, nobody on guard, the doors remain open. Private
turns public. bottomspace becomes remote.
Globalized leftovers.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of China’s economic reform and
opening, the permission for entrepreneurs to do business, resulting in the
most dramatic poverty reduction in history. If new money is made, it also
requires itself being spent on new things. Enabling the idea of shaking off
the old and putting down nostalgia with bloodshed. Unless the neighbors
next to bottomspace recollects acute remembrance in a manufactured
fashion, reads in caps lock: WE ARE THE WORLD.
No QR code to enter.
More Than Yesterday remains idling. This time, no fiscal achievements
will be made, rendering the investment obsolete in order to reboot the
commodified settings of the mind.
This show marks Mathis Altmann’s first artistic appearance in the People’s
Republic of China. Born 1987 in Munich, Germany, works and lives
between Los Angeles and Zurich. His work has been exhibited widely.