Than Hussein Clark & David Lieske

Tommaso Corvi-Mora is thrilled to present Anal Peace, an exhibition of new work by Than Hussein Clark and David Lieske.

Than Hussein Clark presents Mother Has Arrived, a project he has been working for the last few years. Part sculpture, part installation and part theatre piece, Mother Has Arrived is an homage to his mother, Martha Fuller Clark. The production details Matha’s life from her birth in 1942 to the present day, navigating between biography and fiction through verbatim and devised theatre. Narratives were extracted from recorded conversations between the artist and his mother, recently discovered recordings of the artist’s father, and archival audio of historical events. The play is performed by two actors and one prosthetics artist housed within a glass vitrine stage designed by the artist. This deeply personal story is revealed over the play’s six-and-a-half-hour duration, as one actor gradually morphs into Martha, now aged 84, and may be watched in its entirety or in part. Conceived in the frame of the temporal, spatial, and structural conventions of a gallery exhibition, Mother Has Arrived begins the moment that the gallery opens to the public and is timed to finish when the gallery closes, and the Mother arrives. It is written, designed and directed by Than Hussein Clark and produced by The Director’s Theatre Writer’s Theatre.

David Lieske presents two new works: the Cutpaintings series and a new time-based work, titled Round Table of Militants.

The Schnittbilder / Cutpaintings I–IX series is conceptually tied to Lieske’s fictional tennis label DL Courtwear: each stretched canvas corresponds precisely to the pattern dimensions of a specific garment designed by Lieske - a polo shirt, a pair of shorts or trousers. Each Cutpainting is printed on left-over material from his fashion line and thus operates simultaneously as an autonomous artwork and as a potential blueprint for a garment. Lieske furthermore integrates motifs from his earlier work into these canvases, re-presenting elements that may not have initially found a commercial audience.

In doing so, the series addresses the phenomenon of overproduction in both the art world and the fashion industry, while also reflecting on their opposing models of assertion of value. Unlike fashion items that can be discounted or recycled, artworks must maintain and insist on their worth—an increasingly difficult task within a contracting audience of collectors, less and less engaged with critical practices.

Round table of Militants in its title deliberately echoes an anonymously published pamphlet of the same name, “Runder Tisch der Militanten”, circulated within Berlin’s left-radical scene in 2000. The modest, self-published booklet — produced in the aftermath of the decline of the Revolutionäre Zellen (RZ) — captured a rare moment of collective self-critique. Presented as a moderated group discussion, the text was less a manifesto than an ongoing conversation: an attempt to untangle the tactical from the ideological, to ask what militancy meant after decades of both clandestine operations and legal public protest.