31/10/2002
Pascale Marthine Tayou
Portikus, Frankfurt
The exhibition hall itself will remain closed during the course of the exhibition. The word ''Close'' will stand written in large letters on wooden panels installed between the columns of Portikus.
Erection
Exhibition opening on Friday, November 1, 2002, at 8:00 p.m.
Invitation to a conversation with the press on Friday, November 1, 2002, 11:00
The artist will be present.
Pascale Marthine Tayou has an installation planned for the exterior space of
Portikus Frankfurt am Main. Around and on top of the exhibition hall, as well as
on the nurses' home of the adjacent hospital, Pascale Marthine Tayou will have
flagpoles erected with the flags of all 54 African nation-states. These flags,
however, have been graphically redesigned by students of the Frankfurt
Städelschule, the task being for them to remain legible as symbols for specific
countries. The refashioning of the flags was therefore less about a free
redesign, but rather aimed at a careful and subtle idealisation, an improvement
according to creative and design-related aspects.
The exhibition hall itself will remain closed during the course of the
exhibition. The word "Close" will stand written in large letters on wooden
panels installed between the columns of Portikus. On the one hand, Tayou makes
reference to the imminent closing of the exhibition hall's old location behind
the classicistic portico, which has become necessary due to the planned
reconstruction of the former municipal library. On the other hand, the artist
examines in the ambiguity of this inscription the peculiarity of the
representative façade. The viewer does come "close", but what lies behind
remains "closed". The portico again becomes a merely blind wall standing freely
and without relation to an overall architecture.
By putting up this large number of African national flags high above the gables
of Portikus, the demonstration of power effected by a classicistic column
architecture is magnified to absurdity. In addition, the façade and the place of
the former municipal library - once expressing bourgeois self-understanding and
the bourgeois conception of education - appears occupied or besieged by African
states. In an idealised sense, the space surrounding Portikus turns into a
temporary site of the "African Union".
Pascale Marthine Tayou (born 1967) lives and works between Yaoundé (Cameroon) -
Paris - Gent ...
The exhibition is supported by the Kulturstiftung der Deutschen Bank
as well as the Alfred Ritter GmbH & Co. KG
Portikus
Schoene Aussicht 2 D-60311 Frankfurt
tel 49 069 21998760
fax 49 069 21998761