Phantom Limb 2024 - Alban Karsten and Steven Jouwersma

A familiar form, an archetypal office chair, serves as the basis for a new sculptural collaboration between Alban Karsten and Steven Jouwersma. Appendages such as wooden sculptural handles, sound, movement and painted elements are applied to this alleged piece of furniture, enabling Alban and Steven to merge their art practices into one object.

Unobtrusively, the chair rotates from left to right. On the back of the chair, a small gong gently moves around via a cable track, occasionally hitting a chunk of meteorite dangling above it. The chair slots itself in a rich DIY-tradition of modified chairs for self-improvement – within which all sorts of do-it-yourselfers try to enhance their sex lives, lift their sense of gravity or watch birds for as long as possible without moving. Phantom Limb presents a chair that its creators believe can facilitate contact between different realms, through its continuous back-and-forth rotational movement, its adjusted height that prevents one's feet from touching the floor, and the high-pitched sound of the gong that occasionally strikes and resonates for a long time.

In this collaboration, Alban and Steven explore the boundary between useful, serviceable things, and things we recognize as art. A performative influence on this concept is the early work of Mike Kelly who presented his objects as “demonstrative sculptures”. Alban and Steven aim to dissect and liberate the obscure function of this object, by making it permanently resonate through the addition of subtle sounds and movement. 

Everything on The One, groupshow at Arti et Amicitia, April 2024
initiated and curated by Frederique Jonker, Mike Moonen, Sander van Noort and Marcel van den Berg

supported by the Mondriaan Fonds