(group exhibition)
EXHIBITION CONCEPT
Participating Artists:
- Christiane Frey (DE): video
- Christl Mudrak (DE): monumental painting
- Gerald Zahn (AT): video and objects
- Julien Clauss (FR): sound installation
- Lynn Pook (FR): audio-tactile installation
- Mathias Kutt (DE): photography
- Morten Dysgaard (DK): film
- Nika Radic (HR): sculpture
- Nils Olav Boe (NO) photography
- Pawel Jaszczuk (PL): photography
- Robert Mathy (AT): video
- Roberta Lima (BR): performance video and photo
The opening exhibition Leave your Rich and Beautiful Friends Outside is a programmatic group exhibition meant to introduce FIELD’s special exhibition and art education concept to the public and to place it within the art business.
The title Leave your Rich and Beautiful Friends Outside is an ironic allusion to the present practice on the art market and refers to the subject matter of the art works on show. The "human body" as thematic focus of the curated project space is dealt with by twelve international artists using a wide range of artistic media. As in every FIELD exhibition there will be a thematically corresponding programme accompanying the opening show consisting of interdisciplinary discourse labs, film screenings, performances, readings, and practical workshops.
The exhibiting artists distinguish themselves through a progressive use of their medium, the frontiers of which they often cross, and they are concerned with the human body in very different ways. Their work has a conceptual and dialogue character, transgresses cognitive and sensual limits of conception, and approaches the interfaces of art and other humanistic and scientific disciplines.
- The work of the young video artist and student of the University of Arts, Berlin, Christiane Frey, deals with the search for identity and the associated oscillating between the wish for individuality on the one hand and the desire to belong to a group on the other. In her video performance Puppenstubenzeit (Dollhouse Time) (2003) she simultaneously embodies the host of a home shopping show and the product that is being advertised: a porcelain doll. In so doing, she adapts the structures of popular media and with the means of exaggeration exposes their stereotype-producing mechanisms and influencing power, as well as their reproduction of gender roles and racist clichés.
- Christl Mudrak challenges sensual perception with her space-encompassing monumental paintings; incoming stimuli to the eye transgress the usual bearable measures. A constant impulse to her work is the occupation with the question of how a bodily state of exception can be initiated by visual stimuli and which emotional reactions can be evoked. In her work For Higher Power (2007) she follows her passion for designing and to claim entire rooms. She makes use of the power of monotone fluorescent colours and creates organic structures in paper to produce disorientation in space.
Christl Mudrak was a master student of Katharina Grosse at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee, Berlin, and meanwhile studies at the Goldsmith College of Arts, London. In addition, she was a scholar of the DAAD in 2002 at the Muchina Akademia in St. Petersburg, and since the beginning of this academic year she is a docent at the ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich), Zurich.
- The mixed media artist and filmmaker Gerald Zahn deals with phenomena of everyday culture and interpersonal rituals. He questions society’s conventions, moral ideas, and deep-seated behaviour patterns ever in a humorous way. In the video Hairy Monsters (2007) and the tableau Frequently Asked Questions (2007), made up of 81 buttons, he devotes himself to the beauty ideal of the hairless pubic area in a way that is at the same time unsettling, humorous, repulsive and familiar. The Button, known as a popular and collective symbol conveying group membership, becomes an intimate and individual unicum.
Gerald Zahns works have been shown several times at the Diagonale (festival of Austrian film) in Graz, at the Ars Electronica (2004) and at other international festivals. For the month of July this year he was artist in residence at the Association of Icelandic Visual Arts (SIM) in Reykjavik.
- “With my work I want to withdraw the viewer from his accustomed visual perception and let him or her become a resonating body him- or herself,” Lynn Pook describes her audio-tactile installations. Rather than interactive she uses the word “interpassive” regarding her work, since it doesn’t ask the recipient to participate actively as much as one is invited to give quiet attention to the on-goings in ones own body. The installation À Fleur de Peau (2003) is a ten minute 16-channel-composition, in which the recipient is lead into a whole bodily tactile and sonic experience. For the recipient the impression arises that the different sounds and vibrations, caused by tiny speakers, are moving across the body.
Lynn Pook’s installations have been displayed in Germany at the ZMK Karlsruhe (2003), the Transmediale in Berlin (2004), the festival Bonntanzt, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (2004), the Tanztage Berlin (2006) and at the festival Sonambiente, Berlin (2006), among other places. Internationally she was presented at the festival EXIT in MAC Créteil (FR), the WRO – 11th International Media Art Biennale, Wroclaw (PL), and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montréal (CA), to name just a few.
- The young photographer Mathias Kutt, who recently finished his studies at the Lette-Verein in Berlin, explores the boarders between reality and fiction in his work. Thereby, he exposes photography as an ambivalent media, which claims to be documentary and seems to give a true image of reality, but by selection of what it displays actually creates a construct. Mathias Kutt is distinguished through his skillful application of techniques borrowed from advertisement, such as the use of atmospheric, artificial lighting and computer editing. He uses these aesthetics to give a photographic correspondent to the common clichés about the social upper class and their lifestyle. In Heures de Loisir II (2007) Mathias Kutt creates scenes in which two young couples freshly in love are having a picnic on the country side. He serves the cliché of an ideal world as is ascribed to the elite, who live in apparent conformity, light-heartedness, and upper-class decadence.
- The video works of Morten Dysgaard investigate cultural identity and its layered systems of representation. By questioning the individual reality-constructs of his protagonists, he appeals to the audience to search for answers by analyzing their own ideals, sentiments and cultural conditionalities. Dysgaard’s most recent film The presence of another door (2007) shows the area of conflict between cultural identity, national stereotypes, and global life.
Morten Dysgaard received his Master of Fine Arts from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark, and has since been exhibited internationally at various festivals, as well as galleries and museums, such as the Overgaden, Copenhagen, Denmark (2003), the Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden (2004), the Kunstforeningen Gl. Strand, Denmark (2006), and The Lab, San Francisco, USA (2007). Morten Dysgaard has received numerous scholarships, four times from the Danish Arts Council, and he was shown at the “10th Istanbul Biennial – Nightcomers Project” (2007) as the representing artist for Denmark.
- Roberta Lima makes her own body the site of experiments. In radical performances she questions bodily norms and disciplinarity within society’s conventions. She doesn’t use the instrument of body-modification for shear sensation, but sees it as a way to experience immediately society’s physical and psychological regimentations. Her work The Rings (2005) is the documentation of a performance that is presented to the viewer from two media sources. The video shows her reactions during the performance and the way the artist copes with the pain physically in form of a close-up view of her eyes. The framed photograph records the result of the performance, showing the artist in a submissive posture with her arms stretched out, pierced, and bound together like a corset.
Roberta Lima has exhibited in Austria at the gallery Gabriele Senn, Vienna (2003) and the Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna (2005), among other places, and has been shown internationally at the gallery of the Austrian Embassy in Berlin (2007), and the Kogart House, Budapest (HU) (2007).
- The exploration of the Japanese tradition and culture is the focus of Polish photographer Pawel Jaszczuk’s documentary work. Pawel Jaszczuk has been living and working in Tokyo since 2004. He uses his trained eye to sound out pictures that fascinate, and go deep without falling back on clichés and stereotypes. His aesthetics and formal composition are inspired by classic European documentary photography, which captures the essence of what is to be conveyed in a mere snapshot. For the production of his series Sumo (2004), Pawel Jaszcsuk attended the early morning practice of Sumo wrestlers as a quiet observer and gives the viewer as much sensitive as unusual insights into one of the oldest spiritual martial arts of Japan.
Pawel Jaszcsuk has worked as a photographer for Louis Vuitton, Austrian Airlines, and Sony Music, among others. At Field he now has his first exhibition in the art context.
- In his sonic room installations Julien Clauss works with the materiality of sonic fields and the spatial dimensions of sounds. He operates with sounds in order to create a relationship between the physical body and the surrounding space, hence producing multiple pathways of perception. In Retour à la surface (2006) he tries to locate sounds on a surface, thus creating a sonic tableau that serves as a canvas on which he can draw sound variations.
Julien Clauss participated in the exhibition Placiens du Web (with b-l-u-e-s-c-r-e-e-n), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2004), and at the master students show Le Fresnoy (with O. Perriquet) (2005), as well as an exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne de Lille (FR), and he took part in the Fêtes des lumières (2006), Lyon (FR), among other festivals.
- In the series Simulacrum (2007) by Nils Olav Bøe model figures measuring two centimeters as commonly used for architectural models or model train landscapes are blown up to human size and arranged in scenes that show typical situations of urban life. The imperfect fabrication of these tiny displaced figures, with their rough surfaces and imprecise coloring is made visible. They appear to be intermediaries from a world that is different, and at the same time very similar to our own.
The figures remind us of human imperfection as they reveal the miscarried strive for perfect outward appearance and a doll-like idyll. The unsettling scenes of which they are the protagonists could be stills from a film, perhaps by David Lynch.
Nils Olav Bøe had solo exhibitions at the Haugar Vestfold art museum, Tønsberg (NO) (1998), at the Vigeland-Museet, Oslo (2004-05), and at the Anders Svor Museum, Horningdal, (NO) (2006). He took part in various group exhibitions in different museums, among others at the Uppsala Art Museum, Sweden (2002), the Museu Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, (BR) (2003), the gallery Schloss Mondsee, Salzburg, (AUT) (2005), as well as the St. Petersburg Central Exhibition Hall, Russia (2006), and the Art League, Houston, USA (2007).
- Nika Radic: “To claim that art and language are similar to each other is nothing new. Both phenomena are forms of communication and, in order to function, require knowledge of some rules.” The Croatian artist Nika Radic examines the mechanisms of human communication, their contents, and modes of functioning. By viewing language not merely as literal, but also on a physical basis, she raises questions about universal patterns of communication. For Cocteau (2006) consists of different aluminum casts of her forearm, in which her hands are making supposedly unambiguous gestures that follow cultural rules, due to which they are understood differently.
In the year 2000 Nika Radic had solo exhibitions at the Kunsthaus Essen, as well as the Museum Klovecevi Dvori, Zagreb (HR), and in 2005 she took part in the video festival BO2 (together with Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Brian Doyle, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Jan de Bruin, and others) in Toulouse (FR). This year a large piece for public space was shown at the Festival der Regionen in Austria.
- Robert Mathy is a young video artist from Vienna. In his most recent video work Vibration (2007) he uses material from the Austrian television channel ORF – pictures of a ski-run – in a very peculiar way. He projects the descents of all skiers on top of each other and, as can be shown due to the identical camera positioning in each take, the bodies of the skiers move down the slope in a nearly synchronic way, dissolving in a mass. The background sounds of the skiing and the voice of the commentator become blurred to a monotonous noise as a result of their overlapping.
Robert Mathy, who - as several of the Field artists - is exhibiting for the first time in Germany. He won the second place at the Styrian film and video prize in Austria in 1999. In 2003 he took part in the Diagonale (Festival of Austrian Film) and he displayed his work at renowned institutions like the MAK (Museum für angewandte Kunst, Wien) (2007). This year he began studying at the University for Applied Arts, Vienna.
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