Joshua Zielinski. Parallelen sind nie daneben

About

Are those little retro-style lamps gathered on the podium for the award ceremony? For the series Lakope, Joshua Zielinski dismantled and reassembled discarded sports trophies. The small marble bases remain intact, but the trophies themselves, with their Talmi-aesthetic, are sometimes reminiscent of cake pans, sometimes of shimmering parasols mushrooms, one of which is trying to hold onto its hat with thin little arms. The trapezoidal, gentle yellow plinth raises the objects to the viewer’s eye level and unites them into a sculptural whole.

The sculpture Twin is also the result of a transformation: originally, the sandstone was intended to serve as a plinth in a different context, but a sculpture was never installed on it. However, traces of its previous intended use (drill holes) and storage (discoloration and broken edges) have been deliberately preserved. Zielinski carved a stele from the existing material, whose shape corresponds to a mirrored profile of a “Berlin”-type baseboard. This historicizing form from the Wilhelminian era, a kind of “room plinth,” is a functional design element found in the old buildings of many major German cities (cf. Hamburg/Frankfurt profile).

In the larger exhibition room, two museum vitrines dominate the scene. These vitrines, which usually protect valuable objects from dust and other elements, here instead house two collections of dust. Man Ray’s famous photographic work Élevage de poussière (Dust Breeding) comes to mind—an enigmatic image showing the dust that had accumulated over months on Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre. Yet Zielinski’s display cases contain no household dust, but rather fine stone dust—they protect visitors from the latent danger posed by it. The fleeting dust is contained within the display cases; the amorphous form of the material makes the ensemble appear like a comparative mineralogical experiment. Are we seeing here the remains of a stone, a sculpture, or could a new form emerge from this?

Zielinski’s type metal casts Löschblätter raise similar questions: made from the individual melted letters from letterpress, he has produced seven casts of different blotting paper pages. A somewhat absurd process, the pastel-colored, thin paper sheets—which otherwise absorb excess ink in school notebooks—here encounter the weighty, now obsolete former carriers of potential texts. Fine veins, grainy surfaces, or sharp edges lend each cast a unique presence.

Finally, there is Der Unstete, a sculpture made of gneiss. One senses a figure in its form—or perhaps just the shadow of a figure? The layered structure of the material reflects its nature as a metamorphic rock, which likely has wandered from Scandinavia to Germany as an erratic boulder during the last Ice Age. This sculpture, with its almost classical appearance, thus relates with the other works in the exhibition; they are linked by their transformative nature and the ability to continually create new identities from the same material.

Text: Bettina Klein