Chains of Interest

About

The exhibition  Chains of Interest  continues Isaac Chong Wai, Lizza May David, Wilhelm Klotzek, Ofri Lapid, Adrien Missika and Gitte Villesen's personal engagement with the collection of the ifa - Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations.

Since autumn 2021 they have been examining the art holdings based on their own artistic practice. In the previous exhibition  Spheres of Interest  , they activated and contextualized the works they selected performatively and narratively. Their selection enabled critical and humorous perspectives on the special history of the collection. The artists discovered and described gaps, political entanglements and created numerous new connections between the selected artworks.

Chains of Interest  is the second part of the artistic-curatorial investigation, which deepens the relationships the artists have entered into with the ifa's art inventory. They come to the fore with their own, newly developed works. Various artistic languages, attitudes and neighborhoods come to light, which are expressed in cinematic, acoustic, linguistic and playful ways. In the exhibition, one sentence, image, thought or action connects with another and creates a polyphonic score.

Based on the empty "Asia" graphics drawer in the ifa depot in Stuttgart, Lizza May David decided to present the text-image works by the Chinese-Filipino artist  Elisa Tan in the exhibition in order to symbolically bridge this gap. Tan's "containers for thought" show imaginary, dancing landscapes and thus establish a connection to Carlfriedrich Claus ' graphic language landscapes  , which elude common viewing, writing and reading habits. Sonorous  mmmms  cover Lizza May David 's new paintings  , inspired by indigenous chants and myths on both sides of the Pacific Ocean in Mexico and the Philippines.

The point of departure for  Gitte Villesen  's new film is  Hannah Höch 's collage  Silken-tail . Her narrative follows the bird of the same name through various gardens and times. At the same time, with  Strings and Berries she combines  the role understandings and references of the two feminist Afro-American authors Octavia Butler and bell hooks. Hannah Höch's garden house in Berlin-Heiligensee, into which she moved two weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War, also plays an important role. Höch used the secluded location to hide her friends’ documents and artworks from the Nazis.

In Wilhelm Klotzek 's work, language and space meet to   a particular degree on the tragic-comic stages of everyday life. His humorous approach creates a specific onomatopoeic language that he stretches and bends in different directions. Artistically, he has a personal connection to  Carlfriedrich Claus , who was part of the critical avant-garde in the GDR. In the early 1990s, ifa put together the touring exhibition Denklandschaften  , which made his work internationally known. For the exhibition, Klotzek selects transparent speech sheets by Claus and puts them on his photo film  DHM (German Historical Museum) opposite. The photographs he assembled from the archives of Peter Woelck and Christine Klotzek reflect his childhood in East Berlin and growing up in the years after the fall of the Wall. His comment from the off tells of how history is short-circuited by means of museum exhibits, contemporary art and dreams.

Ofri Lapid  initiated a complex chain of translations based on Joseph Kosuth's lexical work  Titled (Art as Idea as Idea)  and following the tour of the exhibition  Kunstraum Deutschland  since 2000. From this she developed the polyphonic performance of the same name with over 30 speakers. For  chains of interest she develops a new audio work out of this almost Babylonian confusion of languages. Lapid's method of "silent mail" to translate Kosuth's terms from one language into the next - in analogy to the tour route - leads to the deconstruction of the actual definition of the terms "meaningless", "purple" and "volume". The resulting alienation effects create a critical distance to Kosuth's black and white language images, while at the same time the language spaces of the more than 30 exhibition stations can be acoustically recreated.

In her sculpture  Pietà  ,  Käthe Kollwitz depicts a mother with her dead son in a protective gesture. Touched by Kollwitz's self-portrait,  Isaac Chong Wai is  concerned with the quadruple enlarged copy of the figure in the Neue Wache in Berlin, which has been there since 1993 to the " Victims of war and tyranny”. What does this enlargement do? How does the perception of the sculpture change when it becomes an expression of national mourning and commemoration? Wai traces the sculpture with his breath. The result is a new installation with a glass sculpture and photograph that is in dialogue with Kollwitz' original (1937-1939) and gives form to the fragility of life.

Adrien Missika  founded MOTUS, a mobile two-wheeled museum that both presented and activated the Fluxus works he had selected in public space. For the new exhibition, Missika combines  Endre Tót's poetic drawing  series Very Special Drawings  with  Joe Jones ' mechanical musical instruments . Surrounded by minimalist sounds and drawings by the two Fluxus artists, he invites the audience to interact with a syllable dice game made of found marble stones. Like an oracle, the words rolled on the dice point to the future.

With the two-part exhibition  project Spheres  and  Chains of Interest  , the invited artists reflect on the collecting practice of the ifa and enable a new and public examination of the German-German art inventory.