3/12/2008
Tools and Relics
etc.galerie, Prague
Small Structures Are Beautiful vol1: Janne Schaefer and Kristine Agergaard. The artists playfully deal with belief systems and models of understanding and explaining the world. Comparable with the approach of experimental archeology they - in self-experiments - act out fictional, conceived characters and roles.
In cooperation with uqbar http://projectspace.uqbar-ev.de the
project space etc.galerie http://www.etcgalerie.cz will host
Prague's first solo exhibition by artists Janne Schaefer (1976 in
Darmstadt, Germany) and Kristine Agergaard (1975 in Copenhagen), who
have worked together as J&K since 1999. The artists playfully deal with
belief systems and models of understanding and explaining the world.
Comparable with the approach of experimental archeology J&K - in
self-experiments - act out fictional, conceived characters and roles.
With these experiments and the staging of magic rituals the artists try
to appropriate images and ideas of deviating worldviews and experiences
and thus make them alive.
The exhibition at etc.galerie takes us on a journey into a complex
parallel universe, which J&K create with the help of objects and images.
/Tools and Relics/ is based on the stock the artists used and produced
in the recent years as well as some new works. On display are artefacts
and performance relics, such as small vessels, semiprecious stones,
playing cards, or images from National Geographic magazines of the last
50 years, as well as collages and staged photographs. All of these point
to a system of symbols and rituals that the artists have invented. J&K
use this material to orchestrate a collage-like installation.
Formally presented in a style refering to traditional historico-cultural
collections and curiosity cabinets the mundane objects and works on show
are charged with the aura of cult objects and museum artefacts, which
seem to be evidences of a cultural memory. The artists play with various
systems of reference and stress the constructedness of reality and
truth, as we face it in seemingly objective reports, but also in
historiography and museum presentations, particularly in the combination
of text and image. Cognition processes and knowledge prodcution are at
the core of J&K’s playful, fantastic creations, questioning notions such
as authenticity, uniqueness, original/ity, reality, truth, fiction,
illusion, deception and thus the basis of a rationalist worldview. The
viewer gets involved in a confusing mind game of references and links
between reality and fiction and is thus invited to produce his/her
reading. The work does not end in the eye of the beholder, but only just
begins there, or like John Mulholland writes in his Magic Manual: "Magic
is made to fool the mind and not the eye."
Under the title */Small Structures Are Beautiful /*Antje Weitzel and
Marina Sorbello, uqbar, Berlin, will talk about their exhibition
practice and the importance of non-profit project spaces and
institutions in the European context on *December 5, 2008, 5 p.m., at
the* Goethe-Institut Prag <http://www.goethe.de/ins/cz/pra/deindex.htm>,
Masarykovo nábřeží 32, Praha (in German language and simultaneous
translation into Czech).
Small Structures Are Beautiful is also the title of the exchange
project between the project spaces uqbar, Berlin, and etc.galerie,
Prague, supported by the Czech-German Future Fund
<http://zukunftsfonds.cz>, the Cultural Administration of the Berlin
Senate <http://www.berlin.de/sen/kultur/index.html>, the Danish Arts
Agency <http://www.danisharts.info> and the Goethe-Institut Prag
<http://www.goethe.de/ins/cz/pra/deindex.htm>.
<http://www.goethe.de/ins/cz/pra/deindex.htm>
The guest exhibition /Tools and Relics/, organized by uqbar, is followed
in 2009 by a presentation of etc.galerie in Berlin with works by the
Czech artist Martin Kubíček.
Contact: Marketa Vinglerova mailto:info@etcgalerie.cz (etc.galerie)
und Antje Weitzel mailto: projectspace@uqbar-ev.de (uqbar)
Opening *Thursday, December 4, 2008, 7 p.m.
etc.galerie
Katerinska, 20 - Prague