Emblem Of Modernity
Reality is dead - Long live Reality

April 30 - May 27, 2011
Reception: April 29, 4pm

Opening hours: Wed – Sat, 4 - 7pm and by appointment

With works by:
Erik Smith, Mario Asef, Perla Montelongo, Sascha Schniotalla, Swen Daemen

 

According to Nietzsche (“We have eliminated the real world—which world is left ?”) and Baudrillard (“The reality that has invented itself over recent centuries is now dying out”) reality as it once was no longer exists. Our surprise in the postmodern era over this disappearance has now yielded to an almost matter-of-fact handling of today’s concurrent, multi-dimensional, and fast-changing realities; it is the (!) prerequisite for existing and communicating both globally and locally.

At the same time, an important notion regarding the myth of our life is based in the idea of reality as something fictive; yet a large portion of our awareness is shaped by an educational system and the media industry, which create a unique, dynamic and concrete actuality, governing the common run of mankind. As such, we live not only in an enchanted world of illusions, but also in a reality that can no longer be regarded as an isolated, self-contained, or static system. On top of this, it has become nearly impossible to objectively differentiate between real and fictional worlds since everything is purported to be like reality… Fictional environments are becoming the cultural foundation whereby both the original and the copy serve as historical reference points.

Drawing on this perspective, the artists in this exhibition operate under the assumption that our world is just such a place—with unclear boundaries separating the real from the imaginary—where ultimately everything is possible; because everything that can be imagined is also viable. In their works they seek to transcend convention and those conceptual habits that limit and define the myriad ways in which we perceive reality. Just as the hollowed out slogan Emblem of Modernity thereby functions as a paradoxical formula for the show, this extended definition of reality comes across as a metaphor that hints at the possibility of immersing oneself in the unique“imaginary” dimension of a self-chosen reality. If then the imaginary turns out to be authentic, the unreality behind it disappears.
The artist as pilot and the spectators as passengers, traveling between reality and fiction within a hyperreal, interconnected world; this becomes a starting point for the exhibition, and the missing principle of reality as we once knew it, an emblem of a bygone modernity.

 

 

Swen Daemen's relief series Zweig der Liebe (Bough of Love) uses the methodology of a ballad from the 19th century, questioning the truth of naming, identity, and historical narrative. In this four-image story the maiden shall marry a honorable candidate from the neighboring village. Escorted by her father she hits the arduous path which involves several unexpected perils. Both image and text in this work complement and refer to each other, but without being associated with certainty. A potential viewer therefore has always to adjust his/her position to get a closer look from the new perspective on the content matter of the event. One may think of an adaptation of film stills, photos, and comic strips with speech ballons when looking at the images. These run into a chaos of activities and carry away the viewer into consistently new and strange-seeming worlds. The excessive wealth of figures and motives, wedged together and captured each other in dizziness, follow as a matter of course the direction of the wood grain.

 

The video Börsianer / The Operators (Stockbrokers) by Mario Asef shows the hustle and bustle in the stock market. In fact, the stock market works in detail unspectacular and emotionally cool: sales take place on a digital network, the setting remains empty and untouched in its minimalist form. No shouting, no hassle, there is no exchange of papers. The future of the world economy is decidedly digital. Compared to this abstract value-system, nature embodies itself as the master clock. But what if nature is experienced as an overall fact and dictator of reality, just as an idyllic scenery through glass? The film compares the clinical cool of alleged human free decisions in the stock market with a first hand view of the living conditions in the streets of Frankfurt: abstraction and reality? Civilization and wilderness?

 

The work of Sascha Schniotalla reflects the potential of spatial impact and imagination. His mural summarizes parameters such as perspective, shape, plasticity, or materiality and acts as a carrier of an imagined utopian space that seems to lie outside the actual space. Schniotalla questions the concept of reality. Occupying the border between physical presence and non-material representation of the spatial, the concept of reality is called into question. His work seems to lie exactly between them and confuses viewers in the perception of the surrounding, which is transmuted to an element of the pictorial space.

 

"All is Dream. I know that all is Dream. I knew it always, since I began dreaming that i am existing: This world is not real." Michael Ende
Perla Montelongo: I don’t see my work as an artwork. I just started to build devices to try to see what is underneath things, to see behind the world’s scenery; a naive attempt to try to discover hidden layers. Will I have success? I don’t think so. But that’s not the point, what moves me is just the need to try. At the end I think we are just chasing our own tails.

 

Erik Smith's installation Untitled (Deconstruction) takes an existing feature of the gallery's extended surroundings, an old wood shed located in the backyard of the space, and partially deconstructs it, depositing its exterior facade and roof in a stack on the floor of the exhibition room itself. The work grew out of a response to the oddity of this lost structure, whose original function as a child's playhouse had long since been repurposed for the necessities of storage and semi-orderliness. Like many of the abandoned buildings around the city that are slated for destruction or which have already disappeared, taking this mini-house apart was a way of inhabiting the transformational processes currently remaking the urban landscape, ones situated between being and vanishing, function and detritus, object-hood and nothingness.