Monitoring – Exhibition for Time-Based Media Art | Kasseler Kunstverein
The Boxwood has a long history in European horticulture. The ancient Romans already framed their garden beds with boxwood hedges and brought the shapeable plant with them to conquered areas. BUXUS in German rhymes with “Luxus”[luxury], which seems fitting in light of the expansion in popularity of the tree into the gardens of Versailles as well as the suburbs of Germany. BUXUS also rhymes with the name of a well-known art movement; indeed, it could be argued that the controlled styling of the plant has become an art movement in itself. When Dagmar Weiß came to the region of Münster for an artist residency, she didn’t plan on realizing a cinematic project. However, the location, which is characterized by newly constructed buildings from the 1990s, carports, rockeries, and, well, Boxwoods, triggered a feeling of trepidation, of being watched. The new surrounding seemed to influence behavior and movement, which gave her the impulse to respond to it. Thus, the work also became a means of establishing contact for her. Four photographs of empty front yards and five videos of choreographies came out of this. Although Dagmar Weiß had for previous projects mainly worked with professional actors, it soon became clear to her that, for BUXUS, the performers had to be locals. Taking as her point of departure the shape of front yards, which she remodeled into stages, the artist created choreographies and started searching for people to perform them. The performers comply with the design, walking on paths and executing movements that are prescribed by the strict architecture of the gardens. They disappear behind trees, move their heads in circles, or swing their arms through the air like waves. The participation of local residents can be read as an element of self-irony, but above all they take a sovereign position capable of critical analysis. As actors of their own – with all the natural resistance of amateur actors to directing – they take part in a kind of questioning and reflection of their living environment. Dagmar Weiß asks about the purpose and effect of order and neatness: What aesthetic, and social standards exist here? Who establishes them and who complies to them? Questions that could also be asked of pictures, she says, since she also uses a structured aesthetic in her photography and cinematic work. Simply put, structure also exercises power and can become a means for aesthetic and social control. But where is it a prerequisite for the development of living together, of communication or artistic work, and where does it have a restrictive or even hostile effect?… >>>
They use terms such as “resistance”, “we are many”, and “grassroots”; on the website the two board members present themselves, in keeping with the times, with full beard and MacBook. In the same way that the AfD [rightwing political party “Alternative for Germany”] gave the word “alternative” a new aftertaste, here also, we see a reframing of terms which were formerly used by a left-wing opposition. The movement “Ein Prozent für unser Land” [One Percent for our Country] is a self-proclaimed, alt-right citizens’ network committed to the “patriotic protest against the irresponsible policy of massimmigration and the ever-growing gap between the ruling political caste and the actual sovereign – the people”. The association, founded in the Saxon town of Oybin, stages itself effectively in social media through emotionalizing propaganda films – in which a “patriotic rock band” with the subversive name “Wutbürger” [rage-citizens] has its say, among others. The citizens’ initiative is monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Silke Schönfeld took her camera to the locations where “protests” of the movement had already taken place, searching for their traces in the analog space. The selected images are calm and unspectacular, and are only accompanied by ambient sound. They show familiar German landscapes – small towns, fields, bus stops, a rustically decorated festivity hall. Everything is very German, very “folkish” – but swastikas are of course nowhere seen here. Only the sparingly displayed textual information, which is indexed according to place and designed graphically like lexical definitions, provides insight into what has happened in the respective places. In the restaurant “Zum Schäfchen” in Schnellroda, Saxony-Anhalt, the summer and winter academies of the “Institute for State Policy” run by far-right intellectual Götz Kubitschek take place, we learn. Also, the neo-right publishing house “Antaios” has its seat in Schnellroda. Visitors of the seminars include young right members of the “Identitäre Bewegung” [identity movement], “Ein Prozent e.V.” or the “young alternative”. In addition to theoretical input on topics such as homeland, war, gender, elitism, Germany, and party power, there is always a sports program. And in Erfurt Marbach, Thuringia, the local hamster population was used to prevent the construction of a mosque in the industrial area. It is precisely in the subtlety of the images and their messages, which show us the familiar with new information, that Schönfeld evokes the uncanny of the attitude and rhetoric emanating from this “citizens’ initiative”.… >>>
- Director: Silke Schönfeld
Trauma prevents realities from aligning with themselves. Pain stops the puzzle pieces from fitting and forming a full picture, so the soul returns to the scene of its scarring over and over. Clarissa Thieme enters these loops of troubled remembrance: There is a video she found in the Hamdija Kresevljakovic Video Archive that collects footage of the siege of Sarajevo, filmed by Nedim Alikadic. It shows militia men by a river in a residential area. “Film them!” Alikadic is being urged by his companion. Handheld, the camera nervously moves, pans, and stutters, as it seeks to connect to the threat before it. It is this particular camera movement that Thieme tracked with advanced digital image processing technology. The resultant meta-data now control an automatic arm and make it move a ray of light in exactly the same way the hand shifted the camera. Exactitude and ephemerality: extremes meet. The closer ones gets to the traumatic real, it seems, the more strongly it will fracture and disperse over different planes of representation. Thieme enters the gap between them, widening it, while simultaneously pulling the fragments of reality together into one unsettling force-field. Time and space are the very stuff that the writing of history – and reporting of events – whips into coherent shape. What if this was but a poor construct, and life’s changes left time knotted and space dented in peculiar ways? Then the search for lost time and deep listening to the reverberation of tangled spaces would pose a key challenge to historically critical thought: How to recalibrate the senses and learn from modes of heightened attentiveness to perceive the tangled temporalities and spatialities of transformative processes? Jan Verwoert… >>>
- Director: Clarissa Thieme
The state of being half asleep, a never-ending drowsiness, runs through THE DROWSE (OR THE AGE OF CONSTANT FATIGUE). Artist Kristin Reiman’s opera revolves around scenarios of fatigue and exhaustion, the desire for sleep and rest accompanied by insomnia. In a dark and largely empty room, the composition begins with rhythmically spoken, rapidly successive shreds of thought – as on the threshold to sleep. In soliloquy, mental processes are repetitively played through and questioned again; worries and doubts are stirred up only to become more agitated than before in a constant state of exhaustion. Conscious of their repetition, the voices begin to recite passages over and over again – like a mantra, evoking the never-ending state of fatigue. Trapped in the thought-spiral of insomnia, they try to expose various influences and factors as culprits of this inevitable state. Briefly, a moment of sleep seems to occur in the course of the sound piece, but it’s immediately accompanied by a fear of waking, and leads back to the state of semi-somnolence. The voices steadily increase from the spoken word to sung arias, accompanied by simple musical leitmotifs and unconventionally orchestrated samples, re-tuned and distorted voices, and with a slight addition of an electric guitar. Hypnotic singing begs for sleep, which however, as is already revealed in the request, will not bring salvation, since tiredness at the moment of awakening seems to be a symptom of our time. It is a never-ending aestivation; getting up and being active constitute the first obstacle, accompanied by expectations of productivity. Thus, sleep and doing-nothing become both refusal and protest; withdrawal of one’s own achievement is the only way to escape from this general depression – from the time of never-ending fatigue in the world. In the course of the opera, the request for sleep alternates with the beginning of a state of rest. The music that accompanies the text grows into a lullaby, turning the sound piece into an endless flow into which the listeners are drawn.… >>>
THE QUODDY FOLD is an intimate interaction between a woman, a house and the relics of its former tenants. In this one-hour film, Paulette Phillips slowly dismantles a derelict house that sits on the eastern shore of Nova Scotia in an area called West Quoddy. Bit by bit, layer by layer, surfaces are removed to expose new structures underneath in various levels of decay. From under multiple layers of wallboard and patterned wallpaper, old newspapers appear that reveal hints of history dating back to 1893. Despite the dust and mold, many details remain in place – a folded towel on the rack, dishes in the sink and cabinets – that make it look as though the people who had once lived there hadn’t really moved out but had left in a hurry (perhaps their ghosts are still hanging around). Wearing a face mask, the artist works through the different rooms, discarding insulation materials and roof battens. It is a long, dirty and arduous process, interrupted by views of the open Canadian winter landscape and the sea in various states of frozenness, until, once again, spring returns. From a moldy folder hidden somewhere inside the house, mildew-stained black-and-white photographs from the past century surface. Pictures of ships, landscapes with horses, and many portraits: serious looking men, young women in their best dresses, workers, children, and families – perhaps generations of them. Who these people are remains untold. The camera tracks the photographs as it has previously traced the surfaces of the house, sometimes zooming in on a detail or a face. In the end, the dismantled house collapses. Without the ambition of archeological fieldwork or nostalgic sentiment, Phillips studies the movement from wood to dust, damp paper to mold, and contemplates the notion of the house folding back into the land and sea. Likewise, also the anonymous family archive, only just retrieved, will in all probability follow the natural course of life. Phillips’s performance constantly seeks evidence of dissolving boundaries, thingness, history, and intersubjectivity of space, place, and species. Through the poetics of the ruin, THE QUODDY FOLD is an interrogation of dwelling and landscape that provides space to engage with the ecological, cultural and societal anxieties surrounding impermanence.… >>>
- Director: Paulette Phillips
THE SECRETARY’S SUITE draws from a photograph of the United Nations Secretary General’s office in 1961, which Kiwanga found on the UN’s digital image library. This black-and-white source photograph captures a wall of secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld’s office, decorated sparsely with a table, some chairs, art and two diplomatic gifts: a leopard rug from Northern Nigeria and a bust of Goddess Laxmi / Lakshmi from India. In many ways, the photograph is unremarkable. Except for a strange twist of history: Hammarskjöld died, mysteriously, in a plane crash while on a peacekeeping mission to the Congo (at a time when African colonies were fighting for independence) just two weeks after the photograph was taken. Kiwanga uses the image and its strange circumstances as a point of departure to look at the ambiguity of diplomatic gift giving, and gift-giving culture more generally. “I’m interested in the exchange of worth and value, and what it means to have a gifting relationship with someone else,” Kiwanga said, “because this engagement is more complicated than it might initially appear – it may actually be a relationship of mutual obligation.” The installation presents a blown-up version of the photograph transferred onto semi-transparent fabric behind a bench […] where visitors can sit and watch a video that narrates past diplomatic gifts, ranging from the expected, such as flowers, to the odd, a wedding dress, to the downright threatening – as in the dagger and sheath gifted from Turkey to Russia in the late 16th century. All the gifts mentioned in the work are factual, but in the video component Kiwanga begins to interject small seeds of doubt, her signature blend of fact with the slightest amount of fiction, or re-positioning, that subtly upends everything. “I would say that 98% of my work is fact – or, information that has been verified or supported by experts within a given field,” says Kiwanga. “Really, very little is actually fictional, but it’s just enough to make the audience question the information they’re receiving.” This careful unbalancing is accomplished within THE SECRETARY’S SUITE by Kiwanga’s integration of speculation – about the possible context of certain gifts, and the death of Hammarskjöld. Caoimhe Morgan-Feir, Auszug aus excerpt from Canadian Art, Online, 2016… >>>
- Director: Kapwani Kiwanga
“The only possible relationship you can have to the structures you give yourself is to use them as a screen and, behind the screen, to do anything other than that which the economy allows. It means agreeing to this use, this distance.” In the style of an undercover video, an unrecognizable body speaks in front of a spotlight with a distorted voice. It is a kind of “dropout”, a politically ambitious artist – “played” by Ulf Aminde – who, as he says himself, could see no sense anymore in making any kind of relevant statement within the art industry and its institutions. Guerrilla actions with a “clandestine group”, which had the goal of breaking up the art world from within, were followed by the “strike” – this total refusal to make and exhibit art is initially perceived as a liberation. But the will to subvert existing structures and fundamentally change them remains: “The old and therefore each time repeated question of an emancipatory, political movement is: Is radicalism about the initiation of new institutions, or is it about changing the institutions from the inside?” One answer could be: “Education as a form of resistance against the institution of education” – a parasitic use of the educational institution in order to pursue other goals under its guise. With his performative film work, Aminde proposes a new positioning and marking: not outside the institution but also not as part of it, as a starting point for the search for radical reinvention. The film, whose title is borrowed from the study program “Body, Theory and Poetics of the Performative” at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design (which the artist and professor accompanied in its beginning), is both a parody as well as a serious artist statement with deliberately autobiographical references. The “satire” arises from the awareness of the discrepancy between his own privileged position and the simultaneous desire to represent underprivileged positions. These and other contradictions are negotiated in the film, whereby the self-reflexive monolog on collaborative practice is always on the threshold of the comic – unlike in totalitarian regimes, political artists in this country do not (yet) have to act in the underground. Subversion and institutional criticism, as well as the yearning for the self-empowering design of social space, have long been marketable. Nevertheless, one believes the artist in his struggle for a positioning. The questions asked – for example about institutional as well as individual racism – are (again) urgently relevant today.… >>>
From a distance, Elko Braas’ installation looks like a minimalistic sculpture: Two lines that seem to float in space at a fragile angle. But up close, the supposedly simple joint turns out to be an elaborate mechanism, in the center of which a stone is holding its balance – or is being kept in balance. In the observation of the infrequent trembles of the joint mechanism, the fragility of the construction gains a new dimension. It is not only the laws of statics and the material properties that cooperate in this balancing act; rather, actuators and reactors are also at work – an intelligent computerized system of six motors. The contemplative works of Elko Braas are based on technical ideas, which develop a poetic depth in their absurdity and in the interaction of analog and digital components. He is able to negotiate questions of immaterial digital space on a physical, sculpturally comprehensible level. For TRY KEEPING IT BALANCED, Elko Braas has two camera stabilization systems, so-called “gimbals”, work against each other. These complex gadgets work well as systems on their own. In the opposing gearing, however, the chaotic entanglement of feedback, control error and steering cause a permanently unstable condition. The latitudes that result from the mechanical inadequacies and limited processing power become visible. The Stone that is held in between threatens to fall to the ground at any moment. Exemplarily, this self-organized balancing of power dynamics can be compared on many levels to the tangible daily moments of overburdening. The trust in open cybernetic systems, which we rely on in almost every aspect of life, though they remain impenetrable in their hyper-complexity, is staged as unsettling irritation. A sensual experience that raises the question of how we position ourselves today to the statement of computer scientist Niklaus Wirth, who advises against the development of systems whose behavior remains incomprehensible to the individual: “The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built.”… >>>
“The monsters are back! And they invade the exhibition space to tell us stories and sing opposition songs. For a more beautiful world down with your fear, rising monsters!” The ‘others’ of this story are monsters. They frequent places that the maps do not show, where the ships are not moored, and the compasses are surprised. It‘s a landless country. Where the world ends. Rumor has it that wild things live in a remote realm. These ‘other’ figures are the inhabitants of the border region where the mind is weakened and fantasies flourish. But, how did they become ‘monsters’? The etymology of the word ‘monster’ in different languages corresponds to the Latin monstrare (to indicate, to expose), and monere (to warn, to report danger). In fact, the monster has long been in existence in relation to the unseen – seeing, showing and existing. What type of ‘monsters’ do we invoke today? DEMONST(E)RATING THE UNTAMABLE MONSTER is a simple expression of a complex thought – the infrastructure of how images operate. The artist’s response to stereotypes produced in the mechanisms of dominant image production is a symbolic, yet critical opposition. His research-based practice pursues the meaning loaded into ‘otherness’, and the image of the ‘other’ as a monster that finds itself in such mechanisms. Cihad Caner presents a conversation between fictitious monsters and animated avatars in a two-channel video installation. These monsters are unfamiliar; they differ from the images that represent them in mainstream media, targeted to shape our minds. The body of the monster is a political claim on its own; they threaten the known with unknown. Right here they do not want to be represented, but appear in order to exist. They occupy exhibition space and ask us to witness their existence. They sing for us: “Love me, you better love; because I’m not going anywhere without you.” Inspired by various monster illustrations in ancient manuscripts, such as “Acaibü‘l-Mahlukat” and “Garaibü’l-Mevcudat” by Zakariyā’ ibn Muhammad al-Qazwīnī, Siāh-Qalam’s drawings and Japanese yokais (monsters and supernatural characters), and “Gazu Hyakki Yagyō” written by Sekien Toriyama, Cihad Caner invites us to an encounter the ‘other’ and rethink the meaning loaded into their otherness. Seda Yıldız… >>>