Encounters, almost
Encounters, almost
Emotion Eins
The dials register speeds above 200 km/h as we tear past lorries and hurtle towards the packed ring road. A daredevil ride, and one not simulated: someone took a camera along to illegal street races for Matias Faldbakken’s video Gateway. Then suddenly it’s still and a music video starts up in the next exhibition room. Benny Nemerowsky Ramsay is on stage as a member of a boy band, as a sweet, funny, shy rocker. Four versions of himself in fact, side by side. ‘I’m the boyband’, thanks to a little manipulation. When the song is over, a different work appears: Roth Stauffenberg’s whimsical montage Schall und Rauch. A concentrated child’s voice is reading aloud. In the darkness of the Frankfurter Kunstverein, projected images light up one by one before being swallowed up again immediately by the gloom. The result is simple but highly effective. You leave the museum wondering why no one else before has ventured on this middle course somewhere between the successive shots of a film programma and the juxtaposed images of isolated video booths. It is in this context that video can finally claim its due in relation to painting, photography and sculpture. Computer-driven projectors beam the works alternately, sometimes on the same wall, sometimes moving from wall to wall. In their shifting presence the projections are no longer continuously available – like exhibited paintings or drawings – and their subservience to time makes the individual works all the more precious, their after-effect much greater. With this clever staging, Nicolaus Schafhausen has eliminated the inconveniences of the inconventional vieweing of, and concentration on different works within one exhibition. As in a film or on stage, you might say that the works ‘encounter’ one another, giving the exhibition a choreaography entirely of its own. On the first floor a wooden cube stands in a lit, elongated room. Behind the cube a work by Vanessa Beecroft is projected over the entire wall: women dressed in white are grouped around the Fassbinder actresses Irm Hermann and Hanna Schlygulla. They in turn have a view of Mark Raidpere’s Ten Men, a film of Estonian prisoners who, underscored by constand piano music, show off their muscles and tattoos in various, obviously trying poses. Beecroft’s poses take on new meaning confronted with this video, becoming now an encounter between sexes and generations. It is combinations of this kind that justify the title of the exhibition: Emotion Eins. Besides David Shrigley’s cartoon-like drawings in which the current reticence towards what is ‘sensitive’ is recorded with a mobid irony, it is above all direct experiments that are on view. These are less a celebration of the emotional than a genuine attempt to capture the fragile transition between the inner and the visible. For instance, Javier Téllez invited a patient in a psychiatric clinic in Dublin to help him make a video animation that would convey how the mentally ill really think. Thanks to the handmade, artificial technique of the film, it never becomes painful. Speech bubbles with questions and answers from conversations between God, patient and psychiatrist appear on a green field, and a she-devil is at the ready to play the role of the docter. It is the patients in this silent film who act out the dialogue. But Schafhausen also opts for works like the video in which Su-Mai Tse plays Das Wohltemporierte Klavier with her fingers held in splints, and Hans-Jörg Mayers’ monumental painting of the intertwined figures of Love, Devotion and Surrender.This all makes it clear that Emotion Eins questions the works in terms of their desires – as expressed in the music and images of youth, happiness, rebellion and beaty – without completely rejecting the time-worn motifs of populair image production. The emotion, after all, is elaborated in a classical romantic manner. In other words: in the Frankfurter Kunstverein Fassbinder is deconstructed just like a boy band. Emotion EinsFrankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt8 June – 8 August
Catrin Lorch