Kunsthalle Mainz
Mainz
Am Zollhafen 3-5
+49 (0)6131 126936 FAX +49 (0)6131 126937
WEB
Forster 1754-2015
dal 30/9/2015 al 23/1/2016

Segnalato da

Fabienne Rosenbach



 
calendario eventi  :: 




30/9/2015

Forster 1754-2015

Kunsthalle Mainz, Mainz

Three contemporary artists - Lothar Baumgarten, Camille Henrot, and Friedemann von Stockhausen - take a look at Georg Forster, his legacy, and the continuing validity of his empathetic and visionary approach to the world, transforming the venue's into spaces for thought and perception.


comunicato stampa

Lothar Baumgarten
Camille Henrot
Friedemann von Stockhausen

Curated by Stefanie Böttcher, Trevor Smith and Thomas D. Trummer

“Above all else it should be noted that we frequently view the same things from a range of perspectives, and that the same events can often generate the most different ideas.”

These are the words of Georg Adam Forster (1754–1794), the scholar and progressive republican thinker who worked as a librarian in Mainz between 1788 and 1792. At the tender age of seventeen, he accompanied his father, Reinhold Forster, on board the ship with which Captain James Cook started his second voyage around the globe. What Georg experienced and observed during those three years was to shape his entire view of the world. He made detailed drawings capturing the flora, fauna and landscapes he saw, set up an extensive herbarium containing plant samples, collected (along with his father) everyday objects from various cultures, and upon his return wrote a work which is still acclaimed: A Voyage Round the World.

What is very clearly expressed in all these sources of information is Georg Forster’s exceptional talent for observation and his impartiality towards other cultures, for he was primarily interested in people as individuals and the way they were incorporated into the landscape, the natural world, the state and history. His greatest dream was of a civilization where free and egalitarian cooperation prevailed.

Forster’s enduring approach to observing the world allows us to draw conclusions about our present-day world and the state it is in. Nowadays, we no longer need a voyage around the world to be confronted with differences. Otherness – for instance everything that is strange or foreign or unknown – is located within and all around us, in social interactions, in conflicts, and in crises. Nonetheless, any encounter with the un-known is challenging for the observer, and any disruption to familiarity increases the sum of our experience.

FORSTER 1754–2015 presents Georg Forster’s multifaceted legacy and travels in an exhibition that explores issues surrounding encounters with the unknown and the resulting effects on and interactions with our own culture. The exhibition attempts to view and depict Georg Forster’s approaches and perceptions of the world (which are more urgently need-ed today) from contemporary perspectives. Following his universalist ideas, the exhibition brings together ethnographic, botanical, historical and contemporary objects and concepts: things that somehow belong together or complement one another in terms of their form or content. Three contemporary artists – Lothar Baumgarten, Camille Henrot, and Friedemann von Stockhausen – take a look at Georg Forster, his legacy, and the continuing validity of his empathetic and vision-ary approach to the world, transforming the venue’s three exhibition rooms into spaces for thought and perception.

In his work Words at Sea, Lothar Baumgarten takes the viewer on a journey with multiple interpretations. Submerged in the darkness of the nocturnal ocean, he stands in the hull between the bulkheads of the Resolution, Captain Cook’s ship during his second circumnavigation of the globe. Underpinned by the sound of steadily rolling waves, figures of speech move along the walls, articulating sense and non-sense, fractured consciousness and ruptured reality, the sustained delusions and promises of our contemporary society. The true nature and thought processes of an era are revealed most clearly in its spontaneous neologisms; indeed, they oft-en foreshadow, in the most disturbing manner, the path taken by society.

Quotations from Georg Forster are arranged in the tangential framework of a nautical stick chart. His thoughts on the revolutionary liberation of the individual are further elabo-rated upon by the light of the “ship’s lantern” in plates filled with rainwater. Coconuts washed ashore make reference to the return of heads decapitated in the course of various
revolutions.

Augen der Welt by Friedemann von Stockhausen consists of a multipart drawing that spreads like a collage over all four walls of the exhibition space. The formal vocabulary developing from this evades any clear attribution. Phenomena from the early stages of evolution and organic matter with all its deformations and metamorphoses connect with artefacts and fragments from various cultures, coalescing to become disconcerting new physical forms. In the resulting panorama the observer turns explorer, drawn in – simply by the act of look-ing – to the reciprocal relationship between familiarity and alienation, between entwining and delineating.

Three seven-metre-long translucent backdrops hang in the old tower of the Kunsthalle. A statue and a Hawaiian measur-ing rod for counting numbers of generations encounter the fragmentary figure of a king from the porch of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris that was destroyed by revolutionaries in 1794, the year in which Georg Forster died. Embodiment, remembrance and destruction are brought together here in the most confined of spaces.

Camille Henrot has created an entirely different setting with her work, Grosse Fatigue. In a totally blue booth a video is playing, showing a computer display of the world as it comes into being. Creation myths – whether Sioux, Buddhist, or Jewish – form the basis for a new Genesis in the spoken-word-poetry narration, which is linked to images of the origins of the universe, evolutionary history and ethnographic objects. Windows pop up only to close once more. Countless visual fragments are layered on top of each other, sometimes connected by motif, sometimes by content, before finally being submerged in the flood of images. Numerous pictures were sourced at Washington’s Smithsonian Institution, a place for producing and distributing knowledge that Henrot contrasts with more contemporary forms of processing information. Grosse Fatigue is an ode to simultaneity, density and the creation of knowledge in the digital age.

Image: John Webber, Intérieur d‘un Morais d‘Atooi, 1785, Kupferstich von Robert Bernard, 22 x 26 cm

Press contact:
Fabienne Rosenbach Assistant to director, secretary’s office rosenbach@kunsthalle-mainz.de

Kunsthalle Mainz
Am Zollhafen 3–5 55118 Mainz
Hours:
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday 10 am to 6 pm
Wednesday 10 am to 9 pm
Saturday and Sunday 11 am to 6 pm
Public Holidays 11 am to 6 pm
Monday closed
Admission:
Adults 5 €
Discounted price for pupils, students, OAPs, severely disabled persons 2 € 
Groups of 10 adults upwards (per person) 3.50 €
Groups of 10 upwards reduced (per person) 1.50 €
Children up to 6 years free admission
Annual season ticket 25 €

IN ARCHIVIO [9]
Forster 1754-2015
dal 30/9/2015 al 23/1/2016

Attiva la tua LINEA DIRETTA con questa sede