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14/3/2007

Alice in Wonderland

Giedre Bartelt Galerie, Berlin

Still Life Photography by Toomas Kalve/ EST, Artur Klinau/ BY, Remigijus Treigys/ LT

The subject of this exhibition was inspired by a series of photographs entitled Alice in the land of the mad tea drinker by the Belarussian artist Artur Klinau. He himself characterized the cycle as follows:

These are short photo-stories about the doll Alice who gets into a strange land populated by strange heroes. The sequence shown here tells the story of Alice arriving at a party arranged by three samovars having appointed a drinking-bout. They drink a lot and eat very little. There Alice appears. She drinks together with the samovars until a fourth joins up with them. They all drink very heavily and a real orgy starts. The samovars prove themselves to be bisexual: They start making love to each other and draw Alice into their sex-games. In the end they all fall down completely drunk and exhausted.
It is an uncomplicated but realistic story from the land of mad tea-drinking. Further sequences of Alice’s adventures are planned.

Klinau‘s cycle of photographs ironically paraphrases the famous surrealistic original and enacts it in several sequences – similar to a movie. It helps to understand the bizarre scenery if one recalls the fragile political situation in Belarus under president Lukashenko in particular and the excessive consumption of alcohol in everyday’s life of certain parts of the population in the former USSR and her successor states in general.

Artur Klinau (*1965) ranks with the most versatile and internationally most active creatives of Belarus. He works with different media and became known mainly for his installations and objects. He is publisher and chief editor of the only Belarussian art magazine pARTisan. Klinau also does literary work: In 2006 he published a picture book in Belarus containing an essay on his hometown Minsk. This essay was published in a substantially enlarged version late in 2006 in Germany by Suhrkamp. (Minsk – Sun City of Dreams). The author will read parts of this book on March 14th in the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin and during the Leipzig Book Fair.

On this occasion the gallery shows simultaneously with the Alice-show a selection of photographs from Klinau’s Minsk project as well as his books and the art magazine pARTisan. Complementary city landscapes of Vilnius by the Lithuanian photographer Vytautas Balcytis (*1958) are shown: Vilnius, being Lithuania’s capital, is of great importance to Belarus, too – a fact Klinau also considers in his essay. The photo series is complemented by Balcytis’s picture book and by the recently published essay on Vilnius by Lithuanian poet and essayist Tomas Venclova.

One could call the first part of the exhibition “literary”, and the second photographic. Neither the pictures by Toomas Kalve nor those by Remigijus Treigys are immediately connected with Alice’s story. They are still lives in the genre’s broadest sense, therefore not containing any content. Anyway, the objects occurring within these still lives look surrealistic and brought to life in Treigys’ minimalistic, isolated arrangements as well as in Kalve’s still lives often filled up until the border of horror vacui. So one can easily imagine Alice entering or just having left these strange rooms.

The effect of strangeness these pictures create is generated by pure photographic means. Despite being comparatively young both artists count among the undisputed masters of photography in their countries. Both Remigijus Treigys (*1961 in Lithuania) and Toomas Kalve (*1965 in Estonia) make their silver gelatine prints always themselves in very small editions. Treigys uses a mulitple tone while Kalve tones and colours his photographs. The most obvious difference lies in the size of their pictures. Treigys prefers big horizontal formats. The size of Kalve’s pictures is mostly specified by technical means: He produces contact prints using old french plate cameras dating from around 1900. A fact that draws his photographs even nearer to “real” Alice and her author.

Showroom:
Vilnius - Minsk

Photographs by
Artur Klinau & Vytautas Balcytis/ LT

Books:
Edition Suhrkamp, 2006:
Artur Klinau, Minsk - Sonnenstadt der Träume
Tomas Venclova, Vilnius. Eine Stadt in Europa

Photobooks:
Artur Klinau, Minsk. The Sun City of Dreams, 2006
Vytautas Balcytis, Photographs, 2006

Artmagazin:
pARTisan/ BY, Editor Artur Klinau

Image: Artur Klinau

Opening on Thursday, March 15th 7-9 p.m.

Giedre Bartelt Galerie
Linienstr. 161/ Ecke Kleine Hamburger Str., 10115 Berlin
Open hours: Tues - Sat 2-6 p.m.

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