Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo)

Working under the pseudonym Puppies Puppies, Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo's practice is a constant negotiation between visibility and opacity. In her installations and performances, she questions the ableist frameworks of artistic and capitalist production, primarily by expanding on ideas around the readymade. She imbues ubiquitous, everyday objects, signifiers and actions with a personal and political charge. Over time, the artist has developed a vocabulary of self-expression that is both sardonic about contemporary lifestyles and highly personal. While Kuriki-Olivo's early works regularly featured proxies, avatars and other figures from children's entertainment - a refusal to be seen - her more recent works foreground notions of cultural consumption or the political nature of privacy, as well as issues of representation, and revel in the playfulness of readymades. In addition, many of the artist's exhibitions have included elements of action: campaigns to support friends' transition funds, free HIV testing and counselling, a shower open to the public,… In this way, Kuriki-Olivo asserts that life can be seen as its own form of endurance practice, or the ultimate readymade. ...

Balice Hertling was founded in 2007 by Daniele Balice and Alexander Hertling. Balice Hertling has hosted the debut solo shows of many artists like Camille Blatrix, Xinyi Cheng and Isabelle Cornaro—all of whom have gone on to earn widespread recognition. From 2012 to 2016, gallery founders Daniele Balice and Alexander Hertling operated a project space in Manhattan. Returning to France in 2017, they relocated the main gallery to Paris’ Marais district and transformed the former Belleville location into a space for curated projects and shows by younger artists. Indeed, many artists represented by the gallery exemplify unique subcommunities of the emergent art world. This breadth of representation also translates to a breadth of medium, as the gallery represents painters as well as artists working in mixed media such as film, performance and sculptural objects. The gallery also represents artists whose careers are more established : British conceptual artist Stephen Willats, Syrian-born painter and sculptor Simone Fattal, and Italian artist Enzo Cucchi. In its programming and practices, Balice Hertling constantly works toward creating a more diverse and equitable art landscape. In this spirit, the gallery is proud to represent the Estate of Behjat Sadr, who was the first woman artist to be recognized as a modern master in Iran. As a result of the pandemic, the gallery co-founded « Palai » in the summer of 2021, a yearly exhibition hosting a small group of galleries from around the world, in historic locations in Lecce, a city in Italy's Puglia region. Palai is neither a curated exhibition nor a fair, it is thought to be a version of a residency, a collegial collaboration, where artists, galleries, and friends of the art world come together. In 2021 Balice Hertling relocated and brought closer both spaces in the Marais with a new main space inaugurated by a Ser Serpas scultpure solo show, and a new showroom and project space on rue de Montmorency. ...