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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