30/3/2007
Doors
Portikus, Frankfurt
Judith Hopf and Henrik Olesen
Judith Hopf and Henrik Olesen
Doors, an exhibition at the Portikus, shows a collaborative project developed by
Judith Hopf and Henrik Olesen. Doors offers passageways, entrances and exits,
detours and cul-de-sacs, and repeatedly asks the viewer to come to a new decision.
The different possibilities of action—opening doors, moving (backward) in
space—engender new spatial constellations. They affect what is behind, what remains
initially hidden from view, and necessitate unforeseen changes in direction and
sidestepping gestures. This sculptural space, conceived as a model and designed in
the manner of a stage setting, at once also presents an exaggerated delineation of
social patterns, in which limitations, compulsions, contradictions and strictures,
but also possibilities for decisions emerge into view.
In a similar manner, Judith Hopf and Henrik Olesen also approach the subject of
spatial and personal demarcation by means of film. They re-stage a scene from Luis
Buñuel’s film Le Fantôme de la liberté (The Phantom of Liberty,
1974) in which numerous scenes play out behind doors; we gain only brief insights
into the former by opening the latter. As though in a comedy of manners, people from
different backgrounds meet by chance and only for brief moments in the hallway,
conduct exchanges in small gestures, commingle by accident with the reality of the
lives of others, only to disappear again into their own worlds.
Another remake, of Fluxus artist George Landow’s film The Evil Faerie (1966), points
toward the notion of art maintained by the Fluxus movement, where art was discovered
amid the gestures of everyday life and understood as a realization of human freedom.
Judith Hopf’s and Henrik Olesen’s practice evinces a productively critical
consciousness of socially propagated normalizations. They question the conventions
of the everyday with a view to their socio-political effects. They thus detect a
social pressure upon different forms of life that disturb the public consensus, and
are hence marginalized or rendered invisible.
Judith Hopf most recently showed works during the exhibition “No Matter How Bright
the Light, the Crossing Occurs at Night” at the Kunstwerke, Berlin, and at Extra
City, Antwerpen; her works were also on view at the Secession, Vienna, and at
Gallery Andreas Huber, Vienna.
Henrik Olesen had an exhibition last year at the Generali Foundation, Vienna, and
most recently showed works at the exhibition space Mehringdamm 72, Berlin.
A publication will accompany this exhibition at the Portikus (scheduled to appear in
late July, 2007).
Portikus
Alte Brucke 2 - Frankfurt