calendario eventi  :: 

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19/4/2008

Two exhibitions

Kunsthalle Basel, Basel

Aleana Egan - We sat down where we had sat before

The Irish artist Aleana Egan (*1979, Dublin, Ireland) will present at Kunsthalle Basel her first major solo show in an institutional context. Egan studied painting at the Glasgow School of Art and her work has gained wider attention in the last few years with solo and group shows at Mary Mary gallery, Glasgow (2006) and Galerie Sandra Buergel, Berlin (2007), among others. She is also currently participating in the 5th berlin biennial.
The title of the exhibition – We sat down where we had sat before – is a reference to a line from the novel The Sea, the Sea (1978) by the Anglo-Irish writer Iris Murdoch. The novel explores the human obsessions of love, vanity and jealousy against a backdrop of poetic descriptions of the sea and rugged coastline. The title is also a reflection of Egan’s working method: her art embraces intuitive and subjectively motivated processes of interpreting literary source materials as well as precise observations of her immediate surroundings and of people who are close to her. Egan’s sculptures, collages and drawings evoke abstract forms and are made from simple, relatively crude materials which she assembles and transforms using manual techniques such as dyeing and bonding. She often relates her sculptures to the exhibition space by incorporating selected architectural features in a modified way into the formal structure of her works. Egan creates highly evocative settings that instil an atmospheric mood in the exhibition space through the forms, materials and colours that give her works their physical and fragile tactility.

For the main gallery space in the Kunsthalle Egan has developed a five meter high sculpture with a rough, uneven surface made of cement, bonding and dye, which occupies the space like a massive piece of rock. The form of the sculpture reflects ongoing impressions the artist gains from observing landscapes and the sculptural processes motivated by these findings. It is also a direct response by the artist to the large, historical Oberlichtsaal, which itself has a classical sculptural aspect with its domed skylight and friezes and is here contrasted with the amorphous sculptural form. The work’s title – Stage of Concern, 2008, – refers to a term coined by the English psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott in the 1960s for the point in a child’s psychological development when he or she becomes aware of an “inner” und “outer” world and begins to feel concern for his or her mother’s welfare as an object of desire. Egan’s sculpture, the form of which oscillates between the recollection of a landscape and the representation of an inner feeling, makes the viewer feel a sense of irritation and the loss of a definitive linguistic description. The rough-looking object becomes a neutral mass that does not so much contain or display thoughts and ideas as it evokes them.

In two other, elegant wall objects entitled prospect and terrace, both 2008, constructed from cardboard, paint and glue, Egan makes reference to architect Johann Jakob Stehlin’s design of the interior of the Oberlichtsaal (1868/72). The sculptural reliefs with their interrelated, abstract line drawings echo the form of two sets of large wooden double doors, which Stehlin originally designed to open the hall onto the adjacent rooms in a representative manner.

In the following rooms the artist presents two video works from her ongoing Readings project. For some time Egan has been filming friends and family reading excerpts from their favourite texts out loud in front of the camera. In the film Harry, 2008, a young woman standing on a country track between fields reads from works by American writer Henry Miller and English poet Ted Hughes; in Helen, 2008, a woman reads excerpts from books by Iris Murdoch in a disparate interior setting. The intimate act of reading out loud and the concentrated gestures of those reading offer sensitive insight into their personality. The artist underlines this by staging each reading in a carefully arranged setting with controlled lighting conditions and specific colouring, sometimes installing some of her own artworks in the spaces. In this way she has a constant presence in her films, which are a form of autobiographical analysis and at the same time create a suggestive narrative space through the literary texts being read aloud in outdoor settings or interior spaces. Aleana Egan’s films and sculptural works reflect her observations of her personal environment and lend a poetic voice to the tiny details of our everyday surroundings which we otherwise hardly notice.
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Ahmet Ögüt - Mutual Issues, Inventive Acts

The artist Ahmet Ögüt (*1981, Diyarbakir, Turkey) will present his first large solo exhibition Mutual Issues, Inventive Acts at Kunsthalle Basel. In his drawings, performances, photographs and videos, Ahmet Ögüt addresses social phenomena and thematises historical processes and their effects on the society and politics of his homeland. For the artist, the choice of a medium is crucially dependent on a work’s idea and hence can alternate between the more intimate form of a publication to public performances.

For Kunsthalle Basel, Ahmet Ögüt has developed a special exhibition display, consisting of various zones. Whereas the focus in the first zone is on the innovative acts of individuals and doesn’t relate to a specific color, the three other zones are oriented around the colours red, yellow and green. The red zone takes as its theme the importance of community in today’s urban society. Dealing with state representation of power and coming to terms with history are the points of contact for the others.

Mutual Issues, Inventive Acts, 2008 is a new project by Ahmet Ögüt based on precise observations of daily life on Istanbul’s streets. The artist shows eight large-format photographs in which found scenes – for example, a man trying to repair a street lamp by standing on two ladders, one on top of the other – were restaged in various European cities, as well as a selection of drawings of other inventive plots. These practical ideas for adversities of all kinds seem, at first glance, rather absurd, but they point to the conditions under which people live in their respective social and economic contexts. A lack of resources is also the idea behind the video Short Circuit, 2006, which shows children playing football at night. Their playing field is a street, which is illuminated briefly at regular intervals by a single passing car. The film implies another aspect of Ahmet Ögüt’s works: translating facts into fiction by means of expressive images. In Ögüt’s work, the intensification of a possible reality sometimes turns suddenly into the absurd, by showing the futility of a situation and at the same time revealing the comedy in it. The video Death Kit Train, 2005, is one example; it shows a group of men pushing a car. Because the first men are joined by an endless series of other people who in turn push those in front of them, the situation is stripped of its original goal. It shows an act of community that relates industrial production to the significance of manual labour.

The installation Today in History, 2007, consists of a mural, a wooden figure, and the book of that title and attempts to come to terms with historical events. Ögüt compiled excerpts from Turkish newspapers from 1961 to 2007 and illustrated each of the texts with an image. A description of the first escalator in a department store in Ankara (1967) is included alongside one on the murder of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink by a young Turkish man (January 2007).

In addition to history, grappling with the use and meaning of state symbols is a central aspect of Ahmet Ögüt’s oeuvre. Magic Eye Flag, 2008, is an edition of 3D postcards with a five-point star – a symbol common on flags, including Turkey’s own – which is employed here as a picture puzzle and becomes only recognisable on closer inspection. A subversive commentary on the representation of power is also found in On the Road to Other Lands, 2008, a publication produced as part of the 5th berlin biennial based on Ahmet Ögüt’s extensive research. The German printing office, which is located next to one of the biennial’s exhibition venues, prints euros, bank notes, and passports for various EU countries, former East Bloc states such as Romania, and for Turkey. The artist mixes real documents with fictional stories by precisely analysing the pictorial idiom of passports on one hand and creating collages from the information collected on the other. The visual material for this book is shown at the Kunsthalle Basel as part of an installation. Exhibited in colourful picture frames, the pages of the book are shown in the display cases from an apartment and hence suggest a ‘Community’ greater than that of belonging to a nation. Finally, Perfect Lovers, 2008, was created in reference to the eponymous work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres; it shows a Turkish lira next to a one-euro coin. Whereas in Gonzalez-Torres’ work two supposedly identical clocks are hung next to each other, Ahmet Ögüt’s deceptively similar coins comment with a wink on art history and point to the different economic and political realities of two states whose rapprochement is the subject of current debates in Europe.

Kunsthalle Basel
Steinenberg 7 - Basel

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