Awst & Walther: The Conversation

About

G39 welcomes collaborative couple Manon Awst and Benjamin Walther to exhibit a collection of new and recent works. Awst & Walther's backgrounds in architecture and theatre strongly influence their exploration into relationships between human beings and their physical surroundings. The couple work with a range of media including sculpture, performance, drawing and installation. With their subtle yet critical approach, they put society's governing values and accepted codes of behavior under scrutiny. Their most recent work engages the architectural, temporal and metaphysical notion of a ‘threshold'. They investigate the ambiguous area between A and B (ie, inside — outside; private — public; self — other) through a series of sculptures and interventions. The resulting objects and settings are unassuming and alluring, as they confront the viewer with an awareness of his or her own expectations and vulnerability. For The conversation, Awst & Walther create a site-specific installation that deals with the conversation between the interior ‘private' space of the gallery and the exterior ‘public' space of the street outside. Through simple intervention, they will shift the perspective of the spectator, creating a rupture in the expected consumer-product relationship. The upper levels of the gallery will show a series of sculptures that continue the notions set up by the installation. Here, transient and industrial materials come together and are combined with documented performances. The sculptures will include ‘Das süà Š¸e Leben' (The Sweet Life), a grand chandelier made of grapes which gradually shrinks and decays over the duration of the exhibition. The exhibition uses The Conversation, a film by Francis Ford Coppola (1974) as a curatorial starting point from which to question our initial moral judgments, what we know and what we merely assume through voyeurism and observation.