People attempt to subjugate their own bodies in many ways. Bodybuilders and tightrope artists are a testimony to this, and every big city marathon is a mass demonstration of collective self-discipline. But without doubt, the most radical way of making the body into its own object is to design the skin, decorating it with symbols and other marks. This does not mean today’s endemic Ibiza-tattoos or conventional earrings, but a desire to create a synthesis of the arts on ones own body. As from 4th August, the Künstlerhaus will be showing a survey of such practised self-stylisation of the body: by means of tattoos, cuts, piercings and a metamorphosis of the skin into material to carry cannulas and needles.
The exhibition SIGNS & SURFACES - curator Christoph Tannert - collects together photographs by Andreas Fux, Ali Kepenek and Herbert Hoffmann showing piercings and self-injury in their most radical form. In their pictures, bodies become the stage for painful dramatic productions, faces are turned into the background for a graphic arrangement of needles, and skin becomes a canvas displaying ornamental decorations.
The exhibition project thus represents a guide through the practice of body marking, but also outlines the development of individual biographical legends and links the technique of body manipulation to myth, spirituality and fantasy.
Signs & Surfaces, Studio 1,
August 4th – August 20th 2006,
Opening: Thursday, 03. August 2006, 19 h
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In a museum, paintings are hung like sacred objects. Only art historians and others who are initiated are able to determine the history of their development from “secret” information. From the outset, Marten Janssen revokes this aura of the complete. It is his aim to make processes of development and traces of construction visible in the work itself. Production and chance thus become the subject of Janssen’s work. In this way, visitors who take time for a little detective work while viewing the pictures can follow their artistic structures back to the origins.
Transresistor, Studio 3,
August 4th – August 20th 2006,
Opening: Thursday, 03. August 2006
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Filippa Arrias is primarily concerned with painting, but also works in the field of photography and scenography. The exhibition "dazwischen" in Studio 4 shows selected paintings from a current project, which illuminates media images and their influence on our everyday lives while simultaneously questioning the illustrated ideals and realities of today's globalised view of the world in a critical way. The media and advertising use the iconography of painting in order to transport their message effectively; Filippa Arrias, for her part, re-implements the message in the "slow" medium of painting.
dazwischen, Studio 4,
August 4th – August 20th 2006,
Opening: Thursday, 03. August 2006, 19 h
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There are two kinds of contemporary political art: the bold, know-all approach, which conveys a good feeling to its viewers, and painstakingly researched projects, in which art nears the limits of its traditional field of influence. In his exhibition in the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Jesper Nordahl presents the Women's Center self-help project and the Kotmale hydro power plant project in Sri Lanka. Using eight videos and a large-format billboard, he illuminates the political context and the effect of "Free Trade Zones" and shows alternatives to the World Trade Organisation’s current policy.
For a long time now, Nordahl has made an intense study of western economic aid; the principles of its implementation and the question of its moral legitimacy. He has travelled to focal points of globalisation, areas where western political and economic strategies have failed, and has gained his own impression of the conflicts involved – at protests against the WTO, or viewing the work of women’s action centres and documenting their efforts for better living conditions.
Katunayake Free Trade Zone and the Kotmale Project, Studio 2,
August 4th – August 20th 2006,
Opening: Thursday, 03. August 2006, 19 h
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