Istanbul is the only city
in the world that straddles two continents, thus connecting Orient and
Occident. The cultural interrelations between these two regions of the
world, as manifested in the city Istanbul and in its interaction with
European cities, are important aspects of the extensive exhibition.
But the exhibition does not represent the aesthetic perspective of strolling
artist-tourists curiously roving through the city; rather, it delves
into the city, the megalopolis, as a case study in global processes.
/ Opening at Martin-Gropius-Bau, July 8th 2005,7 pm
 more |
| Viewers of Lisi Raskin’s new installation “Parallel
Telegram” are half reminded of the paranoid atomic bunker
architecture of the Cold War, half of the monstrous rocket silos
of that epoch. It is only possible to enter Studio 4 of the Künstlerhaus
through a tunnel; it captures the visitor in a dizzying world of
artificial light and transports him to a place somewhere between
the power-mad fantasies of the super powers and today’s technological
planning games, generating a feeling of claustrophobia. |
Lisi Raskin spent years researching this chronicle from the domain
of science fiction created by the contrivers of the apocalypse.
She grew up during the eighties, when a final atomic age was constantly
being conjured up, remaining a disturbing fantasy in films such
as “The Day After”, but almost becoming reality in
the atomic catastrophe of Chernobyl. The artist travelled as far
as Lithuania in order to study the legacy of the Soviet technological
empire at the atomic power station “Ignalina”. She
also examined bunker systems such as those in Kossa and Freudenberg,
which aimed to prolong man’s survival briefly in the nuclear
desert after the onset of atomic war.
In her Berlin installation, this basis develops into a narrative
about the order and set-up of a world on the threshold to destruction.
Here emergency exit doors prove fakes, and the emergency stop
device to prevent the premature launching of a cruise missile
is a folklorist, non-functioning dummy. Lisi Raskin describes
a Wonderland of omnipotence mania, but it turns out to be an astonishingly
close copy of real catastrophes and thus a realistic, distorting
mirror image of our own environment.
www.artistsspace.org
www.newsgrist.typepad.com
Studio 4, 1st– 17th July 2005, Wednesday
- Sunday, 2- 7 pm, Opening: Thursday, 30th June 2005, 7 pm
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The installation created by the Japanese artist Shiro
Masuyama offers a helpful sanctuary to those of us who attend exhibition
openings only reluctantly, and who would prefer to escape to a secluded
life when faced with their usual pugnacious atmosphere, generated
by endless attempts to make a social impression and market one’s
own work in the art business.
He offers visitors nine seats at a bar, without any compulsion to
communicate. Isolated by wooden dividing walls like blinkers, hidden
from the audience behind curtains, and separated from the barkeeper
by smoked glass, the art consumer can order his drinks by filling
in a form and even use headphones as acoustic protection from his
surroundings.
In this way, Masuyama’s "Parky Party" installation
reverses the entertainment factor which has become a firm component
of the art business and its culture. Few large-scale exhibitions
fail to provide an artists’ bar these days. But what was -
only a few years ago - a counter strategy to the tidy, unworldly
art system has now become a mirror image of the latter’s compulsion
to entertain. |
"Parky Party" analyses these conditions, and at the
same time it offers an analysis of the semi-public situation "art
exhibition". A defence of the private amid the public is
one of Masuyma’s general themes. In the Künstlerhaus,
these reflections on self-protection in the city also develop
into a service for the public.
The interactive installation "Parky Party" will be operating
on the opening and closing (17th July) evenings from 2 –
7 pm.
www.shiromasuyama.net
Studio 2, 1st – 17th July 2005, Wednesday
- Sunday, 2- 7 pm, Opening: Thursday, 30th June 2005, 7 pm
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Ronnie van Hout’s artistic originality
is sustained by his self irony and the cryptic humour with which
he dismantles subjects such as finding identity, cultural affiliation
and the search for self-realisation, all of which are usually so
resistant to humour. Often the installations resemble distorted
self-portraits of the artist, who appears within his own works in
diverse forms.
Van Hout’s installation in Studio 3 of the Künstlerhaus,
for example, is devoted to memory and demonstrates – using
an example from his own childhood - the impossibility of recalling
one’s own history as a description of facts, since it is always
filtered through the sediment of subsequent feelings and influences.
In reality, the memory that he illustrates in his work is only a
substitute.
Van Hout not only loves Heavy Metal and films about body snatchers
and zombies, but also Elvis imitators and Beckett’s “Waiting
for Godot”. So the audience can expect to be offered a mixture
of bizarre figures and constellations as a "substitute".
"'Ersatz' with its actual objects offers a 'poor' substitute
for reality but seeks redemption by representing an aspect of van
Hout’s junk-store warehouse of ‘bad’ memory."(Ronnie
van Hout)
Studio 3, 1st – 17th July 2005, Wednesday
- Sunday, 2- 7 pm, Opening: Thursday, 30th June 2005, 7 pm |
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