ECHT? based on a true story
Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir, Uli Knörzer, Ahmet Öğüt,
Slavs and Tatars, Guido van der Werve, Ming Wong
February 12 - March 27, 2011
Opening: Friday, February 11, 2011, 7pm
“Echt?” – teenage talk, an expression, a reaction, slang instead of an exhibition title – the word itself evokes wonder, amazement, scepticism, questioning of authenticity, a double-take or simply a bored fill-in.
As the first exhibition curated by the new artistic director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Adnan Yıldız, “ECHT?” initiates the upcoming programme. It presents instances of artistic research influenced by the perception of fictionalised reality and investigates how self-reflexivity operates in artistic production. An artist talk with Ming Wong, an artist talk with Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir and two floors of installations connected via a poster link by Slavs and Tatars to the city centre turn the exhibition into a stage for questioning new forms of artistic reality and critical imagination.
The exhibition begins with a 2-channel video installation by Ming Wong, whose work explores the intersections of language, identity and performance by reconstructing the world’s cinema and stage. For his piece Kontakthope, he assembled a group of dancers comprised of artists and curators he has met since moving to Berlin. The group took part in a workshop where they practiced Pina Bausch's Kontakthof, originally created for the Tanztheater Wuppertal in 1978.
Slavs and Tatars is a collective concerned with an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Their work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers, focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between the Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians. Their installation of posters and a mirror, strategically located in the exhibition space, share a controversial title and a self-reflective statement, Advice to intellectuals, Let no one represent you! (2010) reflecting on the politics of representation in post-Foucauldian times. Their contribution links itself to the city centre with a poster installation at Kulturplatz, Klett-Passage of Hauptbahnhof Stuttgart.
The video trilogy, Beyond Guilt #1-3 (2003-05) by Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir explores the entanglement of sex and the state of Israel’s structural violence. The directors, Sela and Amir, take an active part in the occurrence. They seduce the interviewees and then turn the camera over to them. Through this negotiation, the artists become absently present in the process.
Guido van der Werve is trained as a pianist. In his work music, time and performance are key elements. His performance-based film, Nummer acht. Everything is going to be alright (2007) shows the artist walking fifteen meters in front of an icebreaker in the dramatic landscape of the Finnish Gulf of Bothnia, the performance itself lasting the time of one roll of film. It reminds one of the emphatic effect of Yves Klein's Leap into the Void from 1960.
Uli Knörzer’s Untitled (2010) presents a series of drawings dedicated to legendary female icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Nico, Romy Schneider or Edie Sedgwick, grappling with the reality of their death through the immortality of beauty. Just as how Roland Barthes refers to Greta Garbo’s face by discussing the vanity of society and the moment of cinema, Knörzer develops a critical gaze on the way that we attach ourselves to these faces of immortal “dead” women hailing from popular history.
"ECHT?" ends with Ahmet Öğüt's installation, 203 Mehmet YILDIZs (2009), composed of an app. six-meter drawing and a sound installation. The drawing depicts two-hundred and three licensed players in Turkish professional and amateur football leagues, all of whom are called "Mehmet Yıldız". The repetition and variation of the same name by the legendary Turkish sports broadcaster Daghan Irak announcing a fictitious game between the multiplicity of names, entitled "All Stars Team versus All Stars Collective", evokes the effect of a common name - such as the German "Markus Muller".
Opening: Friday, February 11, 2011, 7pm
8.30pm: Artist Talk with Ming Wong
9.30pm: Real Party DJ CANTÜRK (Dönerlounge/Zum Alpharaver)
1am: After Party, Café Monroe’s, Schulstraße 3
Parallel to Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, galleries Hauff, Friese and Parrotta are opening exhibitions or hosting events on the same day from 5 to 9 pm within the framework of “LINIE WEST“. www.liniewest.com
Finissage: Saturday, March 26, 2011
5pm: Artist Talk with Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir
8pm Uhr: Workshop (details to be announced)
Press:
Marlene Laube
ml@kuenstlerhaus.de, Tel: +49 (711) 617652
Künstlerhaus Stuttgart
Reuchlinstrasse 4b, 70178 Stuttgart
Tel.: (0711) 617652, Fax: (0711) 613165
www.kuenstlerhaus.de
Hours: Wed-Sun 3-7pm
