A bed dismantled into its components, table legs, door leaves and slatted frames – stacked as if for bulky waste. Florian Slotawa has taken apart what is reminiscent of the purist camps of refugees and homeless people in hotel rooms and placed them in new contexts and orders.
The serial photographs of boldly furnished still lifes transform the utilitarian space into a cheerfully absurd space for thought and use real circumstances to take the illusion to the extreme.
The exhibition “Frozen Mirrors” at Kai 10 in Düsseldorf is dedicated to illusionism and questions about reality and time. Curator Ludwig Seyfarth transfers Umberto Eco’s concept of the “freezing mirror,” which simultaneously negotiates the sign systems and layers of different levels, to contemporary still life.
Most visibly related to Eco are Michael Wesely’s long exposures and double exposures. The patterns in the photographs are placed on top of each other like alloys of multiple mirror images. In shimmering urban scenarios, light and air become diaphanous veils or luminous sails that span streets and houses or draw time loops over decades.
Cultural cliché box
Georges Adéagbo’s installation “Le Dieu – Les Dieux” is worth visiting the exhibition with a total of fourteen positions, including Saskia Groneberg, Konstantin Totibadze and Stefanie Pöllot.
Adéagbo, born in Benin in 1942 and participant in Documenta 11, joyfully delves into the box of clichés of African and European, elite and popular culture, abolishes hierarchies and linear thought structures, thwarts and ventilates our minds with his cabinet-of-curiosities pieces.
On a carpet and on the walls, knick-knacks and frilly dresses meet wooden sculptures from Africa, trendy record covers meet hard-hitting headlines from global magazines and newspapers. They report on poverty and football success or the world’s first retirement home for homosexuals. A handwritten note refers to the mirror in the context of art, a football jersey pleads for Germany in large letters, and next to it a book title sighs “Ach, Africa”.
© Michael Wesely VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
Lilla von Puttkamer’s glass showcase with keys and brushes, a wristwatch, knitted socks and a mouse also suggests an archival character. Glazed ceramic objects that explore an enigmatic and humorous relationship between everyday utility, fragility and size.
The German-Hungarian artist’s archaeological search for clues leads to “Hannah’s Cave Allegory”. As a ceramic miniature, Hannah Arendt looks at the world of things that only seemed real to the prisoners in Plato’s cave as a shadow. The great philosopher has come to the light of reason; However, how much truth, illusion or imagination underlies the things surrounding them remains doubtful.
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In times of fake news, information overload and so-called social media, in which reality begins to dissolve in real time, questioning and differentiating between illusion and reality is not an easy but urgent undertaking.
The cleverly conceived exhibition explores our perceptual sharpness and fuzziness with bizarre “three-dimensional still lifes” by the Belgian Guillaume Bijl, with Karin Kneffel’s paintings in which the immediate present breaks into architectural and art-historical pasts, with photorealistically painted sinks by Helene Appel or René Wirths’ oversized skulls and ghetto blasters that convey the illusory nature of “Blow Up” happily thwarting.
The world as a dummy
“Perhaps the world of things and goods in our time is just a dummy that hides the fact that we no longer live in a goods society but in an information society?” says curator Seyfarth.
The first exhibition that opened Kai 10 in 2008 was about illusions. Behind the ambitious “Space for Art” program is the Arthena Foundation with Monika Schnetkamp as founder and its high-speed engine. The entrepreneur and art collector from Oldenburg wants to “give impulses to society” by communicating contemporary art.
Two new memories
The thematically focused exhibitions are accompanied by a discursive supporting program as well as publications selected in terms of content and graphics. In addition, the foundation cooperates with institutions and academic institutes at the interface between art and science, organizes workshops and lectures with experts, awards scholarships and supports catalog projects by artists. Because the cultural asset of books is also a matter close to the heart of the busy patron.
In the architecturally garish potpourri of Düsseldorf’s Media Harbor – with buildings by regional and international architectural celebrities – the former warehouse building from the 1950s stands out precisely because of its simplicity and visual concentration. Monika Schnetkamp has now acquired two adjacent warehouses in which her private collection will be presented in the future and space will be created for studio scholarships.