KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Exhibition

Fermín Jiménez Landa

No dogs bark.

A missing island, a country that is crossed swimming from pool to pool, a motorbike ride into nowhere, strange whatsapps, palms and ants join together in Jiménez Landa’s installation, the individual works of which are interrelating in their meanings. Jiménez Landa’s works take the form of objects, minimalist gestures, erratic processes, or even situations that usually require collaboration with other people and professions and a plot involving the public.
Among other things, the exhibition in Berlin shows a structure containing all the keys of an actually existing house in the distant city of Málaga, so that no one can enter it for the duration of the exhibition.
Jiménez Landa uses a sound recording by the writer Juan Rulfo (1917-1986), who reads his short story “No dogs bark” to send a whatsapp in the diction of the app, in which Rulfo’s text mutates into a completely different one, since terms are omitted that did not yet exist in 1986. The main project of the installation deals with the disappearance of an island in the Gulf of Mexico that has been mapped since 1536. The oil and gas deposits there prompted the governments of the neighboring states of the US and Mexico to discuss the course of their borders at sea: the existence of the island, which could no longer be found, played a decisive role here. Instead, a band plays a hymn in honour of the island exactly at the geographical coordinates where it is supposed to be. The action emphasizes the absurdity of the attempt to apply the logic of rigid land borders to the fluid medium of water – a space that is both visible and invisible.

Exhibition
03.10. – 27.10.2019
Tue - Sun: 2 - 7pm
Admission free

Opening
02.10.2019
7 pm