Suse Weber Formel:Kongorama#5

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Press release Suse Weber Formula:Congorama#5 November 2 — December 7, 2013 Opening Friday, November 1, 6—9 pm Gallery hours, Tue—Sa, 11 am — 6 pm Galerie Barbara Weiss is pleased to present its third solo show with Berlin-based artist Suse Weber (born 1970 in Leipzig). In its fifth arrangement of the Emblematic Sculpture, she has now produced a new body of work titled FORMULA:CONGORAMA, a series of work started in 2008. Suse Weber adopts existing semiotic systems, modifies and transfers these into her own formal and symbolic arrangements. Thus out of this vocabulary emerge the Emblematic Sculptures, wherein she opens up semantic relations, insinuates the deferment of signs and generates symbol hybrids. The formulae that result from the combination of different orders and logic reject common ways of analysis and question existing prerogatives of interpretation. As such, in her practice Weber integrates little-known or almost forgotten schools of thought such as ethno-mathematics or heraldry. In FORMULA:CONGORAMA, visual and acoustic elements overlap into an operatic staging; a scenario that corresponds to the different elements that have been partially removed from its contexts: Weber's experience of the depiction of African people as monkeys (in the Musée Royal d' Afrique Centrale, Tervuren), the flags and songs representative of a Flemish radical movement (IJzerwake Meeting 2008), node language (Archive Hogere Zeevaartschool and BDSM scene in Antwerp), folkloristic sounds of rural Belgian musical instruments (Muziekinstrumentenmuseum archive, Brussels) as well as of observations of industrial and culture-historic jungle sceneries in a monkey enclosure (in the Antwerp Zoo). The trigger for the development of this sculptural ensemble was, however, a photograph from the archives of the Musée Royal d' Afrique Centrale, Brussels: a table-top equipped with telephone receivers which provided information about the former Belgian Congo to visitors of the 1958 Brussels World Fair. Opposing such miniaturization of an entire country and its resulting limited outlook, Suse Weber creates a new formula consisting of figurants, banners and sound modules. The sound samples are a combination of texts by Suse Weber (Monologue Dodekaederkopf, Instructions for a Hairdresser/Hair Analysis, partially translated into Arabic), Ijzerwakenarzismen (original recordings of the Ijzerwake Meeting, 2008), Saxon Wolf, Belgian Sirens and compositions known as sampelbank consisting of Religi/Drums/Folk Instruments developed in collaboration with Tim Vets (Belgian composer). Suse Weber und Daniel Herleth