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11/5/2010

Three Exhibitions

ZKM_Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe

Robert Wilson. Video Portraits
Curated by Peter Weibel

Although Robert Wilson refuses to interpret his works, he gladly takes on the task of interpretation when it has to do with other personalities. He created his first portraits of important personalities, such as Louis Aragon, Pontus Hultén, and Helene Rochas already in the 1970s. His portraits are theatrical stagings and in that, also interpretations. Wilson’s work as an artist is constructed from decisive artistic impulses of the 1960s (from Performance through to Minimal Art), which flowed into his epochal and legendary stagings beginning in the 1970s. Starting from his stagings, he also became a stage designer and sculptor, painter, and drawer. His visual art was, accordingly, not limited to surfaces; he also created three-dimensional objects, installations, and environments of the highest poetics, in part absurd and surrealist, in part extremely minimalist, but in all cases, surprising. With the time-based visual forms video and film he achieved an innovated visual language shaping a world between Chaplinesque and Kafkaesque, but was always absolutely Wilson.

Wilson has concentrated all of his experiences as worldwide celebrated visual and object artist, as stage designer and director, as choreograph and curator in his video portraits since 2004, as the technological possibilities of High Definition television allow him to differentiate the wealth of his pictorial and stage languages: movement, gesture, make-up, costume, scenery, lighting, as well as the style of high and pop culture, classical and also new media, painting, design, music, opera, dance, theater, photography, television, film, etc. The portrayed personalities here refer not only to their own biographical details, but also to cultural history. Thus, Robert Downey Jr., for example, presents the corpse of Rembrandt’s Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) and Johnny Depp can be seen in drag, posing as Rrose Sélavy by Marcel Duchamp. The subjects are both constructed and authentic, biographical and socio-graphical, portraits of their lives as well as of a media and an epoch. The portraits are visual histories, but also part of history, or are themselves history.

Yet Robert Wilson does not portray only famous personalities, such as Isabella Rossellini, Brad Pitt, or Caroline von Monaco, but also unknown people and animals who have until now escaped artistic representation, such as a street dancer or a frog. In precisely these stagings, Wilson’s complex visual and sound languages reach their climax, namely, a celebration of empathy: anonymous people become divas, neutral beings achieve cult status. Wilson’s video portraits thus have a cognitive function. Within the history of portrait painting and photographic portraits, especially staged photography, his staged portraits present not only a pinnacle of accomplishment, but also, first and foremost, a climax that is groundbreaking.
Thus, as an essential component, every video portrait, goes beyond the scenic element, underscored by a sound carpet that can contain anything ranging from field recordings to video game music, from classical to blues, rock, and punk, or even Heiner Müller lyrics quoted by Robert Wilson.

Exhibition venues:
After showing at the Neuen Galerie Graz and the Sammlung Harald Falckenberg in Hamburg, the exhibition at ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art will show a selection of video portraits specially put together for the venue.

Catalogue:
A catalogue will be published for the exhibition at ZKM (ed. Peter Weibel) with contributions by Norman Bryson, Ali Hossaini, Noah Khoshbin, Matthew Shattuck, Nicola Suthor, Peter Weibel, and Robert Wilson.

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Jürgen Klauke. Aesthetic Paranoia
Curated by Peter Weibel

The way of thinking and experiencing in past epochs can, with Shakespeare, be rewritten as the structure of intrigue. The ways of thinking and experiencing in the present can probably be aptly described with the title of a book by a successful top manager of hegemonic information and communication technologies: "Only the Paranoid Survive" by Andrew S. Grove (in the late 1960s, co-founder of the computer firm Intel and its CEO until 2004). In an era of ubiquitous data flows, paranoia seemingly operates as an undercurrent of all psychic and social processes. The psychoanalyst Lacan entered the field in 1932 with an examination of paranoia. The disturbance of perception created by paranoia is no longer a failure in the classical difference between illusion and reality, between reality and representation, but instead, perception is doomed by interpretation's primacy over it: all that is perceived is interpreted differently than it is shown.

Jürgen Klauke was the first to emphatically transfer this symptom of contemporary society's condition into aesthetics. Aisthesis, from which aesthetics is derived, means perception. His current work thus describes paranoid perception, as well as the paranoid structure of our present world.

Klauke contemplates in his photographs in austerely minimal to excessive, sometimes also surreal scenes, the basic conditions of paranoid existence. Using quotidian materials as a means of staging his photos, he achieves a concentrated look at the absurdity of life and the systematic collisions between subject and system, stimulus and reaction. Jürgen Klauke, who as one of the seminal photo and media artists in Germany has achieved pioneering art work in the area of Body Art and critical confrontation with socially normed gender identities and social patterns of behavior, now goes even further in his new work phase.

The exhibition at ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art will present a selection from Jürgen Klauke's most recent work group, for example, from the recent series of large format black-and-white photos "Ästhetische Paranoia" and "Wackelkontakt," as well as the premiere of the series "Schlachtfelder," which was created especially for the exhibition. In addition, Jürgen Klauke will install two sound spaces and an environment with seven plasma screens, showing another fascinating facet from the Cologne media artist’s extensive oeuvre.

Hatje Cantz Verlag (ed. Peter Weibel) will publish an exhibition catalogue with contributions by Andreas Beitin, Régis Durand, Ursula Frohne, Thomas Macho, and Peter Sloterdijk (German/English.; ca. 220 pages, ca. 39.80 euros).

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Katrin Jakobsen: everything is going to be alright.

The exhibition “everything is going to be alright” comprises mixed-media installations, a photo series, and two videos on the current topic of child abuse. The France-based media artist, Katrin Jakobsen, born in Hamburg in 1958, explains that the idea for this project developed from one of the photo series she did for the Swedish magazine Elle in 2006 on UNICEF’s aid to HIV positive children in Thailand and Cambodia. Jakobsen’s research led to her confrontation with the reality of thousands of abandoned, abused, and mistreated street children who sell their bodies to so-called sex tourists. These images pursued her so greatly that a complex artistic project, spanning several years, arose.

The twenty large-format photos in the exhibition show scenes of violence and abuse of children, a world that takes place behind closed doors. Jakobsen avoids staging voyeuristic scenes in her photos. Instead, she seeks a discursive perspective, as photographer depicting what plays out before and after an act. The camera lens is hereby covered with a condom, making the scenes appear blurry.

Katrin Jakobsen’s photographs are depictions of the scenes that play out in her mixed media installations. The artist produced the miniature film sets herself, did the interior design and lighting, and worked them out through to the smallest detail. They are compiled with the videos and photos to a comprehensive, large scale project.

Complementing the exhibition is a documentation room presenting the artist’s research and other activities in conjunction with her work on child abuse.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive educational program offered by the ZKM | Museums Communication.

Press contact
Friederike C. Walter
Head Department Press
Phone: +49 (0)721 / 8100 1220
Fax: +49 (0)721 / 8100 1139
E-mail: presse@zkm.de

Image: Robert Wilson, Johnny Depp, 2006, Filmstill
Dissident Industries Inc., © the artist

Opening Wednesday May 12, 2010, 7 p.m.

ZKM | Center for Art and Media
Lorenzstraße 19, 76135 Karlsruhe
Hours: Mon, Tue closed | Wed - Fri 10am-6pm, Sat - Sun 11am-6pm
Thurs May 13th 10am-6pm

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