Berlin art space SAVVY Contemporary presents artists from Bauhaus University Weimar: Identities arise daily, hourly, every minute. They struggle with the own and the general and with the desire to demarcate themselves and the wish of belonging to a certain group. The exhibition IdEntitaT presents an assortment of art-works, developed at the Bauhaus University Weimar, where identities never glow as a whole but always as a mosaic of partial identities.
Picture: Fotomontage, assambled of three pices of the videoinstallation "Straßburger" by Markus Wendling
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IdEntitäT
From 5.11. – 28.11.2010, by Andreas Feddersen, artistic staff member at the chair of Experimental Radio Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
6.11. – 28.11.2010
VERNISSAGE: 5.11.2010, 8 pm
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Participating artists: Deniss Kacs, Mareike Maage, Markus Wendling, Andreas Feddersen, Gabriele Rabe
PR-Text: For many of us, the search for an identity is a life-mission. No longer certain about where our ego is centered, we resolve in making multiples or splits of ourselves.
We often expose ourselves on our websites or social networks in a variety of
functions. We gloss over our insecurity by dazzling multimedia presentations of
ourselves, we define ourselves through the daily process of elimination of oncoming
stimuli in the social networks: I like, I do not like, I’m a fan of, I add as friend or I
delete from friends.
The works shown in this exhibition from 05th – 28th November swirl around these
above mentioned points. Identity as a patchwork of encounters with different people
and places, in different stages of life is, e.g., the theme of the work of Gabriele Rabe,
where she grants others the possibility of talking about her and judging her. “Who is
Gabi Rabe?” is a collage of ten different positions about the artist.
Who is Henning Straßburger? Markus Wendling depicts him as a painter at one
moment, but a pop singer or a conductor at the next. Is Straßburger at any given time
only one of these figures or is he always all of them at once? In this video installation,
you do not see a fixed identity, but multiple concurrent identities, all of which reside
within Henning Straßburger. He splits the “multiple personality” Straßburger on its
individual components, to disclose how classical genres have dissolved into the
cross-media world and the genre thinking has become obsolete.
In her work “pendant” Mareike Maage makes visible two of the myriad personalities,
of which most people are made up. Using the example of her own image, the artist
demonstrates how these two parts of her self wrestle each other, love each other and
hurt each other. The outcome is entirely in their hands, but it remains unclear, which
of the two personalities gains the upper hand.
We believe that we only “overcome” the finiteness of life by accomplishing things in
life that cause other people to talk about us posthumously. In his work “obituary”,
Andreas Feddersen anticipates this desired state and throws an ironic reference to
the question of how important we are and even how much influence the gaze of
others has in guiding our actions.
Will I be famous? If so, what for? Will future generations remember me? These
questions will be asked on the evening of the vernissage by personal obituary
editors. The result will then be presented in a formal ceremony.
Deniss Kacs dares a frontal attack on our cultural identity! In his interactive video
installation Goethe’s poems are being recited by foreigners who don’t speak German
fluently. However he chose them as video tutors, whose words are repeated by the
visitors in a small photo booth, and recorded via webcam as well as a microphone.
Souvenir is the title of his work since every visitor of this photo booth can send the
recorded souvenir-video from Berlin via mail to friends or to beloved ones around the
world. The German visitor is now requested to decipher his native language. Since it
is almost impossible to reproduce the original text, a new text is created. The visitor
inevitably gets into a creative process and becomes the creator of a new poem that
arises, freely associated, however in phonetic relation to the original text.
One thing is for sure: the question on identity does not have answers. It is a question
that has to be asked over and over again in different directions.
Info + illus. courtesy SAVVY Contemporary
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