On the occasion of Gallery Weekend, Callie’s presents
The Lemniscatic Elliptic, Colin Self’s first solo exhibition in Europe. Drawing together numerous threads from Self’s mutable practice, the exhibition marks the culmination of a period of research and experimentation by the artist while in residence at Callie’s. The Lemniscatic Elliptic will be activated by a program that includes an artist talk on the opening night, Thursday, April 27th, and the premiere of the performance Prologue X Parable on Saturday, April 29th.

At Callie’s, Self has been continuing work on their new opera series Shadow, creating puppets and researching phantom worlds, collective voices, and tulpamancy—the act of conversing with tulpas, or shadow selves, through meditation. This exploration comes together in the exhibition The Lemniscatic Elliptic: Beginning with the glove, a talismanic symbol for the lost and lonely, the exhibition features a series of vignettes comprised of puppets, drawings, stages, audio-visual works, and compositions from Self’s forthcoming record. The exhibition presents the first arc of a new body of work from Self and acts as a prologue to the material and physical aspects of X, a persona embodied by Self in their most recent music and performance.

X is central to Self’s new performance, Prologue X Parable. This operatic intermezzo presents a colloquial introduction to the character and their relationship to The Council, a group of wise tulpas (here, puppets) who act as X’s guides to transdimensional travel and communication. As the artist notes, the work “interweaves timelines of parallel consciousness, tying the quotidian and the phenomenal together with a ribbon.” With Prologue X Parable, Self presents an initiatory ceremony into ways of braiding together grief and playfulness, levity and lostness in the quantum realm.

The exhibition runs from Friday, April 28th through Sunday, April 30th, and will be open from 1 pm until 7 pm daily. Please join us for the opening from 6 pm on Thursday, April 27th, there will be a talk with the artist at 7 pm. Attendance is free.

The performance premieres on Saturday, April 29th, with showings at 5 pm and 7 pm, respectively. Prologue X Parable is created and performed together with Cammisa Buerhaus.

Colin Self

Colin Self was born in 1987 in Portland, United States of America. They studied puppetry and experimental writing at Evergreen State College in Washington before completing a BFA at the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. Self received an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 2017. Self’s work has been presented at the Whitney Museum of Art, USA (2023); Cleveland Museum of Art, USA (2022); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2022); KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2021); HAU, Berlin (2017); MoMA PS1, New York (2013). Self lives and works in Berlin.

Cammisa Buerhaus

For the past ten years, Cammisa Buerhaus has worked between disciplines, developing a hybrid practice across harsh noise, acting, and visual art. She has recently starred in Christiane Huber’s play Scratching Trees (2023), Martine Sym’s feature The African Desperate (2022), and Jordan Strafer’s short PEAKHEAVENLOVEFOREVER (2022). Her work has been presented at Les Urbaines, Lausanne (2022), Stuttgarter Filmwinter, DE (2023), Mala, Lisbon (2021), Festival d’ Automne a Paris (2016) The Whitney, USA (2015) and MoMA PS1, USA (2014). She became friends with Colin Self when she released their first album, Herstory Already (2014), on her record label Wild Flesh Productions.