Our current ZUSPIEL issue will present individual works by Kasia Fudakowski and Thomas Gust.

„A grouping of works exploring the swing between positive and negative interpretations of Enthusiastinnen (female enthusiasts).  Rusty, convulsed, dug-up shapes are carefully placed together to form recognisable features, and with great enthusiasm, miss-interpreted into parallel functions. Alleged situations are recreated, sometimes one shift beyond their origin. Die Enthusiastinnen are both comic heroes and a tragic heroines. They are both hopelessly devoted. The enthusiasts’ energy, is often miss-placed and they can quickly find their ardour renegaded to the outskirts.  The enthusiast is the perpetual amateur, denied the official recognition of the professional. The question remains; was that a pat on the back or a slap in the face?“ (Kasia Fudakowski)

For his installation “Off the bone. A pinball and photographs“, Thomas Gust has transformed a former flipper game into a kind of altar, which he has filled with a wide range of relics and objects of baroque symbolism. The playful iconography that Gust creates a reminder of religious rapture, ecstasy before the altar. This effect is underpinned and consolidated by the sound that is audible in the room – a composition including vending-machine noises by Robert Lippok. The photographs by Gust also being shown, from the “Black Barock“ series, are a direct take-over or assimilation of pictorial fragments from classical paintings, allegorical symbols removed from their pictorial contexts, the meanings of which have been lost to our collective memory. Darkness functions like a veil, decelerating our reception of the images. This slowed-down, fragmentary perception corresponds to our culture of memory, which is one of forgetting and resultant disappearance.

Kasia Fudakowski, born in London in 1985 and Thomas Gust, born in Bautzen in 1972, live and work in Berlin.