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28/9/2005

Jonas Dahlberg and Jan Mancuska

Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn

The first minute of the rest of a movie

That language can generate images and, vice versa, images language and speech is sufficiently well known. In the exhibition by Jonas Dahlberg (*1970) and Ján Mancuska (*1972), two artists meet, who – the different their work is – both place processes of understanding as subject matter in the core of their practice.

Understanding is always dependent on the point of view that is assumed. While Jonas Dahlberg explores the viewer’s standpoint and its fragility in space with his filmic images, Ján Mancuska deconstructs conceptual understanding, i.e. language, in space. Language and space are essential parameters that are basic to our understanding of the world. Language, image and space enter a bond to break down the processes of understanding and make them available for spatial experience.

In the Bonner Kunstverein, Dahlberg and Mancuska develop an exhibition dispositive that specifies the location of the visitor, his perception of the space he occupies and how it is to be understood in a labyrinthine system. The assumably stable ground beneath our feet and the conferring of associative meanings become physically tangible in their factual instability.

The exhibition is not a groupshow in a traditional sense. Jonas Dahlberg and Ján Mancuska are invited to undertake an artistic dialogue and develop an experimental field within which their body of works literally coincide. The aim of any group show is not only to display art in reference to specific conceptual and thematic topics, but to set up an intellectual and artistic dialogue. The latter is the starting point of the collaborative approach of Dahlberg and Mancuska. This exhibition is the first of a series of dialogical shows which takes place at the Bonner Kunstverein and which aims to question and search for different modes of collaborations.

The institution’s aim is not only to set up a platform for art and mediate it to a public, but also to foster possibilities for artists to develop and think into their practices in modes they otherwise could not.

With his installation “A Cup” Ján Mancuska was represented at Czech-Slovakian Pavilion ("Model of World") at the Venice Biennale 2005. His mostly sculptural works concretize cognition and language, which are otherwise immaterial. Mancuska plays off space, in contrast to many other conceptual approaches that are occupied with assigning meaning. Definitional thinking takes on the spatial form of a sculpturally modulated vocabulary, making cognitive processes physically tangible. What is striking is the "economy" of the means - particularly since the artist’s somewhat laconic approach to meaningful questions of fundamental processes of understanding also boasts an immanently subtle humor.

While Mancuska’s work is not comprehensible until the visitor walks around the room and understanding is itself deconstructed in space, Jonas Dahlberg’s video installations transport the viewer to an insecure state of disorientation. The perception of his own location is destabilized in slow camera swings through deserted cities or houses. Dahlberg constructs scale-model houses that he then films, often playing off cinematographic takes, and thereby developing projected illusionistic and alienating spaces. Physical and psychological instability is conferred on the viewer. Irritated by his own perceptual input of where he is, the viewer will end up at times weightless, at times dizzy. The concept of the uncanny (unheimlich or non-homey), which Freud defined as the collapse of our familiar, at-home feeling, is a characteristic of Dalhberg’s work and inquires into the position of the “self”, of one’s own viewing locale.

The exhibition will be shown from 8th April to 28th May 2006 at the Neue Kunst Halle St. Gallen (CH).

The exhibition is funded by
The German Federal Cultural Foundation, IASPIS (Sweden), German-Czech Foundation (Czech Republic)

and supported by
Thiel Videokonzept GmbH (Germany), Liesegang Projection GmbH (Germany)

Image: Jonas Dahlberg - Ján Mancuska, 'The first minute of the rest of a movie’, Sketch, Bonner Kunstverein 2005

Opening: Thursday, 29th September 2005, 7pm

Talk in the exhibition: Tue, October 11th, 7pm with Prof. Dr. Anne-Marie Bonnet (University of Bonn) and Christina Végh (Director Bonner Kunstverein)

BONNER KUNSTVEREIN
Hochstadenring 22 D-53119 Bonn
Opening hours:
Tue-Sun 11am-5pm/Thu 11am-7pm
Sat/Sun 11am-5pm

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