Two exhibitions
dal 13/12/2012 al 16/3/2013
Segnalato da
13/12/2012
Two exhibitions
Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Dusseldorf
Simon Evans & Oyvind Fahlstrom have developed separate cartographies of the world with the eyes of a traveller. Evans largely produces psycho-geographical maps, Fahlstrom is interested in the laws governing the collective that are reflected in pop cultural pictorial worlds. The show of Yin Xiuzhen consists of a comprehensive survey of her artistic oeuvre with the expansive installations as well as the recent monumental accessible textile sculptures.
15. December 2012 – 17. February 2013
Simon Evans & Oyvind Fahlstrom
First we make the rules, then we break the rules
Curated by Elodie Evers and Magdalena Holzhey
Both Simon Evans (b. 1972) and Öyvind Fahlström (1928–1976) have developed separate cartographies of the world with the eyes of a traveller. Evans largely produces psycho-geographical maps that enable him to define his own standpoint and locate himself within his environment; starting from the personal, putting his finger on general human shortcomings and desires. Fahlström is interested in the laws governing the collective that are reflected in pop cultural pictorial worlds and in the accumulation of political and economic data. He composed paintings and installations from variable elements and formed politically charged information into complex geopolitical maps that relentlessly reveal global injustices. The variability of the elements, the game as the basis of the artwork clearly shows that the world can fundamentally be altered by the individual. Both Fahlström and Evans motivate the viewer to rethink his own position, whether within the global play of power or in the everyday. And the two artists also make generous use of sarcasm and irony in their analyses, with the result that Evans is far removed from any and all form of sentimental self-adulation and Fahlström’s work does not approach the realm of political propaganda. The formal ingenuity of the artists, both of whom utilise collage techniques and fragmentation, is likewise fascinating in equal measures. Fahlström treats the overabundance of visual information in compositionally condensed labyrinthal structures, combining appropriated images with fictitious forms or creating nearly dreamlike sequences when, for example, the swimming figures from Green Pool come together in ever new constellations. Like his associative observations, Evans’ works have an almost ephemeral and delicate character. Just as the external and internal world overlap in the collages, countless layers of text and image similarly overlap. Tiny snippets of paper cut out of notebooks, everyday elements, drawings, erasures and overpastings result in a concentrated network of interwoven elements. Traces of time, the flow of ideas as well as the awareness about the impossibility of fixation are consequently also reflected in formal terms in Evans’ works. He simultaneously counteracts situationist activities with concrete instructions, findings and assertions.
The idea of showing a double exhibition with works by these two artists came about in a dialogue about their works. Even more fruitful was the discovery that for Simon Evans – and doubtlessly for many other contemporary artists as well – Fahlström’s oeuvre represents a major source of inspiration.
The show focuses on a small selection of works depicting maps, groundplans and playing fields or – in Fahlström’s case – which actually function as games. The artists use these classification principles in order to structure complex contexts: First we make the rules. They break at the same with the usual means of systemisation despite employing their methods in terms of form: Then we break the rules – it is a claim that Evans redeems by way of the supposed typing error on the invitation and catalogue cover both in terms of its literal as well as its figurative meaning.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by the Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König that features numerous colour illustrations, a foreword by Elodie Evers and Magdalena Holzhey, an interview with Simon Evans by Elodie Evers in addition to essays by Raphael Rubinstein and Maibritt Borgen.
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15 December 2012 – 10 March 2013
Yin Xiuzhen
The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, in collaboration with the Groninger Museum, is presenting the first major solo exhibition in Europe devoted to the work of one of China’s most important artists, YIN Xiuzhen (born 1963 in Peking, lives and works there). The show consists of a comprehensive survey of her artistic oeuvre.
The exhibition begins with Yin’s early installations that are often presented in uninhabited, untouched landscapes and now exist solely in the shape of photographic documentations. The show focuses however on the expansive installations as well as the recent monumental accessible textile installations that represent a watershed in Yin’s oeuvre.
Yin’s works from the 1990s, for example “Washing River” (1995), are strongly motivated by politics when she broaches the theme of the consequences of industry and technology on nature and the people: a performance is documented in photographs in which Chinese citizens “wash” dirty water that has been frozen into a rectangular block of ice with sponges until the ice melts. Other photographs, for instance “The Tree of Parting” (1994), reference a separate reduced aesthetic by means of the motif and its pictorial composition that makes it appear like an autonomous work, despite the fact that it was not conceived as such.
Yin has produced large-scale sculptural and installative works since the late 1990s from old clothing, shoes, furniture and simple construction material like cement and stone, often in public spaces. A distinctive turning point in Yin’s work is evident after 2000: second-hand clothing has become a rich source of ideas and subsequent pieces that often revolve around state-of-the-art technology and urban growth. By selecting airplanes, automobiles and highways as the motifs for her large sculptures, the artist calls attention to the seemingly limitlessness of mobility and the fast-moving pace of today’s globalised world. With their richness in detail and the revelation of the individual parts that are attached to each other, for example welded sheets of metal or sewn-together pieces of cloth, Yin’s works simultaneously reference artistic handicrafts themselves that require skill, patience and above all time.
Expansive pieces such as “Collective Subconscious (blue)” (2007) and “Engine” (2008) exemplify this ambiguity in her installations: on the one hand it is the overstimulation and rapid rhythms of everyday big city life that affects the collective subconscious as well as the heart, the “motor” of the individual. But on the other hand these works in particular also invite the viewer to take time, tosit in the automobile and to listen to the music that accompanies the installation.
In doing so, the visitor becomes a central part of the installations to the extent that he is confronted with the artist’s personal recollections as well as with collective memory landscapes situated between the familiar, the local and the global. The suitcase series “Portable Cities” (2000-2012), for example, derives from Yin’s travels, during which she collected pieces of old clothing from the inhabitants of the respective city she was visiting with the intent of later patching them up into an urban landscape that takes the shape of a suitcase, oriented on the map of each town. In this way she broaches the theme of her own experiences in a globalised world where the idea of “home” has to be rethought. Focus is moreover placed on further questions concerning the construction of history and memory as well as on individual life in everyday big-city life.
Despite their poetic formal vocabulary, her pieces can also be read as critical commentaries scrutinising the desires and fears of the individual in a global world that is oriented on mobility and efficiency. Especially in Asia, cities are rapidly growing into enormous sizes. One speaks in the most populated country in the world of high-speed urbanisation, and Peking now has over 16 million inhabitants. Yin not least references 15 December 2012 – 10 March 2013
Yin Xiuzhen
The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, in collaboration with the Groninger Museum, is presenting the first major solo exhibition in Europe devoted to the work of one of China’s most important artists, YIN Xiuzhen (born 1963 in Peking, lives and
works there). The show consists of a comprehensive survey of her artistic oeuvre.
The exhibition begins with Yin’s early installations that are often presented in uninhabited, untouched landscapes and now exist solely in the shape of photographic documentations. The show focuses however on the expansive installations as
well as the recent monumental accessible textile installations that represent a watershed in Yin’s oeuvre.
Yin’s works from the 1990s, for example “Washing River” (1995), are strongly motivated by politics when she broaches the theme of the consequences of industry and technology on nature and the people: a performance is documented in photographs in which Chinese citizens “wash” dirty water that has been frozen into a rectangular block of ice with sponges until the ice melts. Other photographs, for instance “The Tree of Parting” (1994), reference a separate reduced aesthetic by means of the motif and its pictorial composition that makes it appear like an autonomous work, despite the fact that it was not conceived as such.
Yin has produced large-scale sculptural and installative works since the late 1990s from old clothing, shoes, furniture and simple construction material like cement and stone, often in public spaces. A distinctive turning point in Yin’s work is evident after 2000: second-hand clothing has become a rich source of ideas and subsequent pieces that often revolve around state-of-the-art technology and urban growth. By selecting airplanes, automobiles and highways as the motifs for her large sculptures, the artist calls attention to the seemingly limitlessness of mobility and the fast-moving pace of today’s globalised world. With their
richness in detail and the revelation of the individual parts that are attached to each other, for example welded sheets of metal or sewn-together pieces of cloth, Yin’s works simultaneously reference artistic handicrafts themselves that require skill, patience and above all time.
Expansive pieces such as
“Collective Subconscious (blue)” (2007) and “Engine” (2008) exemplify this ambiguity in her installations: on the one hand it is the overstimulation and rapid rhythms of everyday big city life that affects the collective subconscious as well as the heart, the “motor” of the individual. But on the other hand these works in particular also invite the viewer to take time, to
sit in the automobile and to listen to the music that accompanies the installation.
In doing so, the visitor becomes a central part of the installations to the extent that he is confronted with the artist’s personal recollections as well as with collective memory landscapes situated between the familiar, the local and the global. The suitcase series “Portable Cities” (2000-2012), for example, derives from Yin’s travels, during which she collected pieces of old clothing from the inhabitants of the respective city she was visiting with the intent of later patching them up into an urban landscape that takes the shape of a suitcase, oriented on the map of each town. In this way she broaches the theme of her own experiences in a globalised world where the idea of “home” has to be rethought. Focus is moreover placed on further questions concerning the construction of history and memory as well as on individual life in everyday big-city life.
Despite their poetic formal vocabulary, her pieces can also be read as critical commentaries scrutinising the desires and fears of the individual in a global world that is oriented on mobility and efficiency. Especially in Asia, cities are rapidly growing into enormous sizes. One speaks in the most populated country in the world of high-speed urbanisation, and Peking now has over 16 million inhabitants. Yin not least references
China’s significant role as a dominant textile producer for the world market and hence the associated working conditions in the textile industry when she reduces technological megalomania and its mass production to absurdity by means of individual manual labour in enormous textile installations.
YIN Xiuzhen’s works have already attracted much attention at the 2007 Venice Biennale and at the project space of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2010.
A comprehensive and profusely illustrated English-language catalogue with a German supplement will be published on the occasion of the exhibition. It features essays by Huo Hanru, Gregor Jansen, Leng Lin, Mark Wilson and Sue-an van der Zijpp, among others, as well as an interview with the artist.
Price in the museum shop: 39.99 Euros; in bookstores: 49.99 Euros. ISBN 978-988-15064-8-1.
Image: Yin Xiuzhen, Thought, 2009, clothes and steel 340 cm x 510 cm x 370 cm. Courtesy of The Pace Gallery, Beijing
Press and Communication
Dirk Schewe Tel.: +49 (0)211 8996256 Fax: +49 (0)211 8929576 presse@kunsthalle-duesseldorf.de
Openings friday december 14, 2012 at 7p.m.
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
Grabbeplatz 4 D-40213 Düsseldorf
Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, public holidays: 11 am – 6 pm
Adults EUR 5,50
Concessions EUR 3,50
Groups (10 or more) EUR 3,50
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Young persons under age 18 free
free of charge between 6 and 8 pm on the last Thursday of every month