YOU ARE LIVING IN A SPACE LIKE MINE | By Knut Eckstein
GfKFB network for artistic research @ flutgraben e.v.
Opening: November 1 at 7pm | Exhibition: November 1-30, 2008
ARTISTS
knut Eckstein, Nikola Irmer, Zilla Leutenegger, Claudio Moser, Prinz Gholam and Alex Villar
YOU ARE LIVING IN A SPACE LIKE MINE brings together projects from various media that convey a feeling of being in a place that is like a déjà -vu, an intrusion of associations and representations into the ordinariness of interstitial sites as staged encounters. The result eludes the determinateness of a specific place, conjuring up multiple associations of waiting around or hanging out somewhere on a street, in a park or around mass-produced urban infrastructures. These non-places pull apart the concentration of experience in a stable form in favor of a poetics of repetition and disjuncture. Repetition implies a sameness of different locations that is broken by the role of the subject.
The common grid of Knut Eckstein's modern architectural units creates a fragmentary and banal mise-en-scène for the exhibition setting, while Zilla Leutenegger's mobile conversation in a non-descript hallway is overplayed by the Japanese dialogue of "Ghost in the Shell". Architecture's organizing principle is countered by thoughts and memories. The artist as subject reacts to absurdity against the strict regulation of infrastructural form in Alex Villar's video performance. Nikola Irmer's intimately portrayed youths are melancholically cast in park settings, often open and lost. Claudio Moser's images of solitary structural elements engulf the individuals placed there like on a stage. The spaces evoked throughout the exhibition reflect earlier dreams of urban planning, now either melancholy and solitude, or charged with anonymity. Prinz Gholam turn the exhibition itself into a stage, placing their own selves in relation to each other and call out fragmentary memories of medial culture as a private encounter in the midst of the opening.
It is the encounters between protagonists and settings in the exhibition which produce the space in question, a space which we may uncannily recognize. (Text: Scott Budzynski, 2008)
GfKFB network for artistic research
@ flutgraben e.v.
office: +49(0)3053211592
am flutgraben 3, 12435 berlin
Opening hours: Thu - Sun 2 - 7 h p.m.
Additional opening hours during the ArtForum Berlin from 1st - 3rd Nov. 2008:
on Saturday (the opening), from 7 - 11 pm,
on Sunday and Monday from 2 - 7 pm
