calendario eventi  :: 

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4/7/2012

Three exhibitions

Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe

Marianne Wex
„Weibliche" und „männliche" Körpersprache als Folge patriarchalischer Machtverhältnisse

Co-curated by Mike Sperlinger, London.

During the years 1972 to 1977 Marianne Wex photographed people and their body language along the streets of Hamburg and subsequently classified her photos into different categories. She juxtaposed women and men according to the specific positioning of arms and legs, feet, knees, elbows, hands, shoulders, and heads. She was interested in the degree to which gender-specific conditioning and hierarchy is reflected through everyday poses and gestures. In order to expand her research, Wex supplemented the approximately 5,000 photographs taken in public space with rephotographed pictures from mass-media sources and comparative historical representations from antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The artist transferred the copious results of this research onto panels. She assembled the images and explanatory texts on each panel as collages: the upper row shows men posing as a mirror of patriarchal power structures, with the women situated below and occasionally a few exceptions to the stereotypes. Tying into this installative form, Wex published a more extensive book titled Let’s Take Back Our Space: Female and Male Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (1979). The panels and the book open up a gamut of photographic source material, ranging from Wex’s street photographs and photojournalistic shots to advertisements, art-historical reproductions, snapshots from family albums, to even include pornographic images, photographs of celebrities, and stills from television and films.

Marianne Wex’s photo project is highly conceptual. It elucidates a specific approach to the medium of photography and to the appropriation of found image material. At the same time, her work is localized within the context of the feminist movement of the nineteen-seventies, with the photo panels having been shown for the first time in 1977 as part of the exhibition Women Artists International 1877–1977 at NGBK in Berlin. In the late seventies and early eighties, the photo panels traveled to a number of national and international exhibitions but were eventually forgotten before some of the panels being once again exhibited in 2009 at the Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea. The exhibition at Badischer Kunstverein is now showing all existing panels, which have been prepared and compiled in collaboration with Marianne Wex for their current presentation.

The display structure has been developed in cooperation with artist Ruth Buchanan and architect Andreas Müller.

With special thanks to bildwechsel, Hamburg.

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Tanja Widmann
eine von euch

With the exhibition eine von euch (one of you), Badischer Kunstverein is presenting a new, space-encompassing installation by the Vienna-based artist Tanja Widmann. The eponymous work has been produced in collaboration with Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, and tranzitdisplay, Prague.

Tanja Widmann creates her artistic works based on an interest in the potency of language and its role in the performative construction of subjectivity. By tying into historical concepts of video-based performance, she explores the techniques of reproduction, memory, and repetition, but also the counterpart of the (camera) apparatus as a machine facilitating recording, affect, and interpretation. Here language is examined as to its conventionality and regularity, with its ambiguity and fundamental openness simultaneously fathomed.

Establishing the point of departure for the new installation eine von euch is a report on a psychoanalytical session held by Félix Guattari with his patient R.A. and the composition of their interaction. This has led Widmann to investigate acts of speaking that suggest a specific (power) relation between “speaking/knowing” subjects and “unknowing” ones, as can be discerned in the psychoanalyst’s speech—but also in remarks made by the British animal scientist David Attenborough about his research subjects or by the scientists in Frederick Wiseman’s film Primate (1974):

Look at her.
She’s a wonderful animal.
Oh yeah.

Get some juice,
good girl,
ok.

In the exhibition, Widmann arranges various media and materials in an open and installative way. The montage approach underlying the video-performance scripts is carried forth in the exhibition space, which now allows heterogeneous elements to uniquely encounter one another, such as psychoanalysis, primate research, early speeches given by Margaret Thatcher, contemporary art blogs, but also a Versace collection for H&M and embroidery patterned in speculative constellations. Political-economic discourse and feminist leanings are visited, as are questions exploring the connections between artistic authorship, collective production, and the status of artwork, commodity, or object.

Setup: Johannes Porsch
Embroidery: Tonio Kröner

The exhibition is produced in cooperation with Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, and tranzitdisplay, Prague.

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The Infinite Library
(Daniel Gustav Cramer & Haris Epaminonda)

Badischer Kunstverein is showing The Infinite Library in its first solo presentation in Germany. It encompasses an exhibition and a comprehensive book published in cooperation with Jeff Khonsary/New Documents, Vancouver.

The Infinite Library is an ongoing project through which the artists Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer have been collaborating since 2007. Their interest is focused on the creation of an archive comprised of books, whereby one or more pages from existing publications are integrated into each copy. In achieving this, every single found book is dismantled, modified, and newly arranged.

The concept behind each new volume develops step by step: the starting point is both the content of the respective original book and the associations that evolve throughout the process of creation. At times the artists work solely with simple interventions by removing individual pages, orchestrating them into new constellations, and then observing which changes have ensued. The essential moment for Epaminonda and Cramer arises in the production of a new book, but also in the combination and reorganization of images.

Fostered through this rearrangement of pages is a new attentiveness to detail. The praxis of the photographer instantaneously takes on relevance, as do the questions of publisher, authorship, paper, but also the principle of order or deviation. Many of the books used by Epaminonda and Cramer originate from the nineteen-fifties and sixties and evince a specific postwar design. This makes The Infinite Library likewise interpretable as an archeology of modern forms and arrangements of text and images. In the exhibition space, the archive becomes an installation in which each individual book may be considered a focal exhibition object and is accordingly understood and presented with its content, form, rhythm, and logic in mind.

The publication accompanying the exhibition represents an integral facet of the project. Resembling an index of all pages from the hitherto fifty compiled books that make up The Infinite Library, it facilitates an overview of the entire archive and reveals a wealth of knowledge that can only be presented in an excerpted way by either the individual book or the exhibition, for each open page inevitably conceals all of the others. Making a book about books is the great challenge inherent to this publication. At the same time it reflects the vision of the ideal book that embraces all other books; an encyclopedia that infinitely continues on—extending beyond the margins of the pages and the edges of the books into the surrounding space.

Image: Tanja Widmann, eine von euch (Production still), 2012. Photo: Rudolf Steckholzer

Office
Contact person: Gabi Johannson tel.: +49(0)721 28226 gabi.johannson@badischer-kunstverein.de
Press office
tel.: +49(0)721 28226 presse@badischer-kunstverein.de

Opening: Thursday, 5 July, 7 pm

Badischer Kunstverein
Waldstraße 3 - 76133 Karlsruhe
Tuesday to Friday from 11:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m. and
Saturday/Sunday from 11:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Admission: 3 Euro, reduced rate 1,50 Euro
(free for members)

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