Lilo Nein: Inconvenient Positions

About

For the exhibition Inconvenient Positions, five sculptures by Lilo Nein are positioned in the rooms of Galerie Michaela Stock. The sculptures, which were developed for different exhibition contexts between 2012 and 2016, are shown together for the first time.

The exhibition Inconvenient Positions is the first stage of the project Writing Performance, which investigates various modes of recording, textualization and translation of performances in the interplay between different media.

Originating from considerations about performance in visual arts, the exhibition is interpreted as a time-based medium in which the sculptures take place in the encounter with the audience. The proportions as well as the reflective and matte mirroring surfaces stress the dialogue between the sculptural elements and the bodies, the movements of the audience members in the exhibition space; whereby this dialogue can implicate conflictual aspects.

Moreover, the discursive dimension of the works is made a subject of discussion through an invitation to five art critics / curators who will each write a short text about one of the sculptures. Following Walter Benjamin, the critique as well as the translation are forms in which the life of an art work continues, whereby Benjamin understands the notion of life totally unmetaphorically, it should be determined by history, not nature. Besides the texts, the sculptures are going to be photographed and filmed in the exhibition. From the visual material, music scores are produced to which the texts of the critics are sung. The resulting songs are going to be exhibited in a subsequent exhibition in the Gallery of the Koninklijken Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague.

With this project, Lilo Nein sheds light on the material and discursive dimension and brings them into a mutual relationship with one another.