Stephanie Kloss / Joshua Zielinski - Instant Replay

About

Lenin's left ear lies by the Berlin City Palace. What sounds like a yellow press headline is a very abbreviated description of the first room of Instant Replay, the first joint exhibition by Stephanie Kloss and Joshua Zielinski at the Laura Mars Gallery. Here, Kloss has realized a fragment of the backdrop-like architecture of the reconstructed palace as a photo wallpaper. Zielinski's Ausgleichsgewicht (Counterweight, 2023), a giant ear made of red granite, which for one day as a site-specific intervention on the Platz der Vereinten Nationen (formerly Lenin Platz) referred to the Lenin Monument, which was dismantled in 1992, thus becomes a fictitious archaeological find on the former position of the Palace of the Republic.

Repressed, poorly digested, overwritten and yet constantly resurfacing of history also manifests itself in the facades of the buildings in Kloss' photographs in the second room: the Sonnenblumenhaus (Sunflower House) in Rostock- Lichtenhagen, the site of massive racist attacks by right-wing extremists against Vietnamese contract workers living there in 1992; the Zeppelin Tribune at the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, as well as the new Axel Springer building, in the middle of the former Berlin border strip, with black columns on the west and white ones on the east side. It is advertised by OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) as a "building designed to attract the elite of the (German) digital bohemia" and symbolizes the transition from print to digital media. Kloss photographs the buildings close up, getting right up close to them and thus emphasizing a subjective perspective that focuses less on the architecture as such than on the images and events that we associate with these backdrops of political and media power.

Zielinski's Waidmannsdank (Good hunting, 2023) also originally had an architectural reference: the two zinc casts made from a deer pelt, which here rest on wedge-shaped wooden plinths, were created in the context of an exhibition in the park of Schloss Liebenberg in Brandenburg, where they temporarily replaced the elk sculptures at the entrance to the hunting grounds that were destroyed during the Second World War. The spatial and thematic shifts in Zielinski's works (from the public space to the gallery, from solitaire to dialogue with Kloss's photographs) open up new spaces for thoughts and associations that extend beyond the one specific context. Elements from earlier installations are combined to form new sculptures: a roughly carved limestone balances in fragile equilibrium on the delicate half-column made of white marble, a street find.
The row of bronze wedges, which look like artefacts from an excavation, are casts of wooden door wedges that Zielinski has collected over the years from various museums. The casting fixes the status of the more or less worn everyday objects for eternity and ennobles them as museum artefacts. The casting channels and funnels left on the casts give them an individual, sometimes almost figurative character.

Instant Replay is the name given to video evidence in sports broadcasts; the replay in slow motion and with the help of cameras, whose focused perspective reveals more than can be seen in the total shot. The exhibition presents historical fragments, artefacts and trophies as evidence of failed ideologies for reenactment against the backdrop of a fragile present.

Text: Bettina Klein