maryam jafri
valerie tevere
lars mathisen
matthew buckingham
30 Januar -10 März 2004
in
Sparwasser HQ
Offensive für zeitgenössische Kunst und Kommunikation
Torstrasse 161, 10115 Berlin
Öffnungszeiten: Mi-Fr 16-19, Sa 14-18
(Die Pressemitteillung gibt es nur in englisch)
Going to the edge, or optimising something beyond expectations in order to find different kinds of truth, is the logic that ties together these four artists from the US and Denmark. The exhibition assesses various displacements in culture that frustrate reality and subjectivity and render them unstable. In this way, the works in the exhibition go beyond the documentary through various strategies of dramatisation, narration and manipulation to create a kind of bouncing effect in time and space, and in this way come to grips with notions of an elsewhere. A common trait between the artists is a simultaneous gaze on the historical and the everyday event, where subjective micro-narrative meet with the big time span of global events. In this way, limit conditions are sought out and attempts at interpretation radicalised.
maryam jafri
In Maryam Jafri''s 'Theatre' (Video, 2001) the artist plays two
characters that can be seen as two distinct people and also as
different sides of the same self. The two characters are completing
each other's sentences and reliving a moment when both, or perhaps
only one of them, first came on stage. What happens onstage parallels
what happens offstage, what happens backstage influences what
happens onstage. However, in the video no stage is ever seen,
time and place are presented solely through language. Physical
and mental space collapse into one, allowing the backstage world
to function in part (but not only) as a metaphor for the unconscious.
The language hovers between speech and thought, collapsing stage
directions (i.e. "I enter", "I turn to the left",
etc), internal thoughts ("I'm nervous") and conventional
stage dialogue into one text, giving the narrative its labyrinthine
structure.
valerie tevere
Valerie Tevere's 'Two City Tour' (Video, 2002/2003) are two videos (excerpted
from her work 'Palm Trees on Madison Avenue' and 'Vertical City on the 101')
that explore projections of urbanity and how the formation of two US cities
is shaped in the collective imaginary. 'Two City Tour' focuses on the locating
of Los Angeles in New York and the situating of New York in Los Angeles. The
'bi-coastal' journey follows threads of travel through NYC and LA that complicate
the myths of each city. Each video follows a distinct route produced by different
mappings. In one video, the maps are set by the NYC and LA phonebooks. The artist
searched these to interview NY businesses named after LA. Then, in LA, she did
the opposite - set up interviews with businesses named after NYC. Through the
operation of naming, these commercial entities function on nostalgia and dislocation,
and from one place they refer to another whose imagined essence has been packaged
for consumption. In the other video, the maps are produced by perceptions of
NY and LA residents who have never visited the other city. Together (Tevere
and interviewee) travel to locations in NYC and LA that, for each interviewed,
reference a LA or NY only visited in the mediated imaginary.
lars mathisen
Based on found footage, Lars Mathisen's short film 'Document in
the Past Perfect' (Video, 1994/2004) is a framing of 20th century
ideologies and dreams of liberation. Document in the Past Perfect
stages the period 1932 1985 by juxtaposing two different
films in a montage format. The one is an unknown Danish family's
18mm home film taken before and after WW2. Here, a deadpan camera
registers happy holiday moments as well as the 1936 Berlin Olympics
and the World Exhibition in Paris (1937). Subsequently, with the
same lack of involvement, we are shown the liberation of Denmark
in May 1945. The second part of the film is a first generation
erotic movie from 1972, which shows a student's party developing
into carnality. The newly legalised pornography's liberating promises
are reflected in the actors' unworried frolicking, conveying an
air of self-unconscious innocence. The entire montage is accompanied
by the obsessive rant of the convicted murderer Charles Manson,
who from his prison cell projects his messianic views on to the
world. Through an un-dramatic slide from normality to perversion,
'Document in the Past Perfect' implicitly challenges the way the
20th century welfare state promised its citizens freedom.
matthew buckingham
Matthew Buckingham's 'The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the
Year 500,002 C.E.' (Text & photo, 2002) considers the historical
and future conditions of one of America's most iconic symbols
of patriotism - Mount Rushmore. The monument memorialises the
birth, growth and development of the USA, the massive portraits
of four American presidents - Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt,
and Lincoln - carved into the mountain that the Sioux called the
Six Grandfathers. Imagining the monument's distant future, the
work comprises a b/w photograph of Mount Rushmore that the artist
has digitally altered to portray its appearance five hundred thousand
years from now. The result sustains a tension between fantasy
and its realisation as the four presidential heads are erased
by the mountain's slow erosion. By transferring current anxieties
about democracy and belonging onto a projected future landscape,
Buckingham addresses the irony of Mount Rushmore's return to a
more or less natural state. Apart from the photo, a time-line
exposes some of the hidden and not-so-hidden details of Mount
Rushmore's contested history. By unravelling suppressed or distorted
accounts of violent conflict from the past and the present, Buckingham
offers a panoramic view of the paradoxes that such sites and symbols
generate. It is telling, for instance, that the Shrine of Democracy
- as Rushmore was officially designated - was carved out of sacred
land taken illegally from the Sioux by an artist who had been
a secret but active member of the Ku Klux Klan.