Honey-Suckle Company: Omnibus

Honey-Suckle Company ICA

Omnibus is the first survey of the work of Berlin collective Honey-Suckle Company, bringing together key moments of the group’s twenty-five-year history.

Founded in 1994, Honey-Suckle Company identify themselves as a movement, built around an ongoing series of fluctuating and ephemeral interventions within the fields of fashion, music and art. The collective emerged from the post-reunification and pre-Internet cultural and social contexts of Berlin, defined by underground techno and squatting scenes. Honey-Suckle Company derive their name and ethos from homoeopath Dr Edward Bach’s honeysuckle flower remedy. According to Bach, the honeysuckle plant’s properties help one to learn from past experiences and re-establish a sense of trust in the future in order to feel grounded in the present.

Omnibus and its accompanying programme present Honey-Suckle Company’s work as an evolving communal and holistic methodology, encompassing the group’s clothing, performances, happenings, installations, objects, photographs, music, films and publications. The exhibition spans the past, present and future of Honey-Suckle Company, drawing on their recurring fusion of style, performativity and the spatial environment.

Omnibus includes remnants of the group’s clothing collections, originally presented in the 1990s through performances, installations and films in self-run spaces such as the infamous galerie berlintokyo, and in tandem with music produced and performed with collaborators such as Captain Space Sex. The exhibition also presents re-imagined works such as NEUBAND (2000–ongoing), which comprises physical structures, self-playing instruments and bodily adornments, repurposing the stylistic codes and visions of the Bauhaus and the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde. Omnibus culminates in the installations Non Est Hic (2006) and Materia Prima (2007) –  scenographies which suggest portals and transitional states of being. In Materia Prima, a physical structure becomes the container for a zone of nothingness; the haptic, visible world dissolving into an auratic, psychic space. These works emphasize the group’s foregrounding of a collective consciousness, which is in a constant state of transition.

Duration 02 October 2019 - 12 January 2020
Times Tuesday – Sunday: 12pm – 9pm
Cost £5
Venue ICA
Address 12 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH
Contact / info@ica.org.uk / www.ica.org.uk

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