Please go around the construction area by the lights and over the traffic island
Exhibition curated by Ariane Müller and Martin Ebner
with Lucio Auri, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Hans-Christian Dany & Nicole Wermers, Carola Dertnig, Stephan Dillemuth, Martin Ebner, Yusuf Etiman, Katja Eydel, Ellen Gutovsky, Judith Hopf, Joan Jonas, Christoph Keller, Thomas Kilpper, Nina Könnemann, Antje Majewski, Ariane Müller, Henrik Olesen, Kirsten Pieroth, Daniel Pflumm, Deborah Schamoni, Juliane Solmsdorf, Klaus Weber, Annette Wehrmann, Jean-Michel Wicker, You Never Know, Florian Zeyfang
2011, Schattendorf, Austria
Institution
Kunstverein Schattendorf, Austria
Location
Kunstverein Schattendorf, Austria
Duration
one month
Synopsis
People in a space, movement, they interact, use tools, do something, and again do something, as a matter of course. But something is different. In the exhibition, conceived for Schattendorf Kunstverein, Joan Jonas Video Song Delay of 1973 constitutes a visual point of departure. People move through an empty lot in New York following abstract patterns, cadenced by the beat of wooden sticks – a performance, thus the actual movement of people through space and a film, which tells a story in itself.
Moving in and crossing through space, the public space, is on one hand a technique of conceiving space, as has been put into the concept of the dérive by the situationist movement of the 60s, on the other hand it is the daily bread of some professions and pictured for example in the video Why not Yellow of Lucio Auri. It may also be, as in Judith Hopf/Henrik Olesens film The Evil Fairy hinting at some other hidden identity, readable or not readable, depending if someone is looking for it.
There are also some more contemporary notions of this movement through space. Besides that of the hypertrophical, capitalistic notion of real estate as starting point of one of the biggest post-war economical crashes, the city has a usage value. Once all mortgages and investment rates have collapsed, it is still usable. Ornamentals and Accidentals, a video of Florian Zeyfang and Martin Ebner, talks about that.
The exhibition has been conceived by Martin Ebner and Ariane Müller, artists and editors of Berlin based art magazine STARSHIP.
The exhibition consist of video installations, photo works, and other media produced by a specific Berlin based generation of artists, who are working on broadening the range of what gets represented in society. In this city, Berlin, picturing on one hand the wealth of a highly industrialized nation, falling apart at its many fringes, and only then being difficultly reassembled. It is a new form of narration in all its aberrations which comes into its form based on the coexistence and the impliciteness of its realities.
