The character of Claire Healy’s and Sean Cordeiro’s installations is irritatingly methodical. Their meticulous deconstructions mean that they almost resemble art-economical experiments in a laboratory, so contravening the dogma that fine art cannot be arbitrarily reproduced. For example, Healy and Cordeiro had already devised the original pattern for their joint project in 2003, when they dismantled a wooden house from a Sydney suburb into equal-sized pieces and piled these up until they reached the ceiling of the exhibition room.
Their material - a demolished house - thus experienced a rapid rise in value. The artistic act of destruction made the dilapidated house into an artefact; only after its destruction could it be accredited with the autonomy suitable for the art business.

The Berlin installation "flatpack" transfers this procedure to a more mobile home. From a tranquil suburb inhabited by the middle classes, west of the Havel, they transported a recently occupied caravan into Studio 2 of the Künstlerhaus. After the caravan had been dismantled into pieces, all exactly the same size, they delivered it door to door, neatly wrapped in transport film and laid on palettes. The vehicle, which was built in the 60s, is a symbol of the German dream of a mobile living-room idyll; here it is transposed into the cool world of globalised packaging and container norms. Even more importantly, an aspect of the mobile “heimat” ideal is transformed into a work of art, employing sober automatism.



flatpack (zusammen mit/together with Sean Cordeiro), Studio 2,
May 12th – May 28th 2006,
Opening: Thursday, 11. May 2006, 19 h

One might say that in Erla Haraldsdóttir’s work our everyday life becomes crazy. Using digital processing, collages and other means of media alienation, she makes the familiar appear so disconcerting that visitors begin to doubt the reliability of their own perception.
Attributes and images of completely opposing worlds merge with such seamlessness that the illusion can only be discerned at second glance, and in the end, the audience is left face to face with an alienated world.

In her work "Sad with Satie", which she presents as a video projection, Haraldsdóttir causes hand-filmed, apparently autobiographical video sequences to merge into animated drawings. The filmic narration permanently oscillates between drawn surfaces and the photographed outside world, until it finally becomes impossible to determine whether a photographically recordable reality is taking possession of the drawing, or whether the drawing is simply taking the place of this reality. Filmed "Post it" notes as the protocol of an unhappy love affair or intermittent, spoken comments which have the character of confession alternate with everyday fragments from an artist’s life, while Erik Satie’s grotesque, eccentric and simultaneously melancholy-barren music colours the action of the film.

"Sad with Satie is a funny, self-ironic and disturbing work of art, which fundamentally questions the desire to portray authentic emotional experiences."
(Lisi Raskin, essay on Sad with Satie)



Sad With Satie, Studio 3,
May 12th – May 28th 2006,
Opening: Thursday, 11. May 2006, 19 h

The Berlin art public and the inhabitants of Kreuzberg are still waiting for a concept from those occupying the Künstlerhaus. While the majority of the squatters long ago took refuge in a former school building that the district of Kreuzberg-
Friedrichshain had generously provided, a splinter group continues to hold out comfortably in the south wing of the Künstlerhaus on Mariannenplatz.

Never having presented a substantial concept for usage, the squatters and their legal arm – the "Initiative Zukunft Bethanien" (IZB) – pretend to be popular and to have affinities with the city district. They maintain that their "work" offers something to the whole of Kreuzberg, to Berlin’s immigrants and innumerable other addressees. It does not trouble the squatters that the inhabitants of Mariannenplatz have now even begun to criticise the IZB in handbills, and show more interest in a more active mediation of art by the established cultural providers. They continue to proclaim the virtues of local culture, dozens of opportunities for which have been available in Kreuzberg for many years. Old wine is being filled into new bottles, and seldom has so much rent-free space been available for the purpose.