Thomas Taube: NARRATION

About

In 2015, Thomas Taube was honoured with the Prize of the 22nd edition of the “Leipziger Jahresausstellung”. An expert jury chose Taube’s video installation DARK MATTERS (2014) with the following motivation: “Taube succeeds, in an aesthetically exact as well as suggestive manner, to condense the everyday life of a security guard into a universal symbol of the human condition. With virtuosic concentration the artist links questions of identity, the ubiquity of media and the ambivalence of observing and seeing. In result he creates a poetic as well as precise image of isolation in a connected world.”

In the award exhibition G2 Kunsthalle presents Taube's latest video piece NARRATION from 2016 as 6-channel installation with a length of 115 minutes. The film – featuring Ulrich Matthes in the role of the narrator – will be premiered at the opening of the exhibition at G2 Kunsthalle on 10 March 2016.

With NARRATION the artist, once again, succeeds in realising a project dedicated to a complex as well as universal topic. In NARRATION Taube explores the principle of narration not only in terms of artistic practice, yet also as a form of human communication. NARRATION is divided into six interrelated parts focusing on different aspects of its subject: setting, situation, narrator, approach, past, and construct. The film discusses the elements that make narratives in visual or literal form possible and mark every narrative structure in different ways. All six aspects of the term NARRATION are presented equally and simultaneously, but not in identical form. To emphasise their simultaneity and mutual connection Taube presents his piece as a 6-channel installation, giving the viewers the opportunity to connect all parts of the film in regard to the images and content themselves, and thus to approach NARRATION in the most adequate form possible: as an exploration of the individual order of things that represent the basis of all fiction.

With NARRATION Taube achieves a work of complex references, that goes beyond the surface of formal, theoretical issues. In a highly focused manner NARRATION links issues of social relevance, such as the systematic exploitation of workers on arab building sites, with questions of awareness and the perception of (constructed) narratives in our everyday lives. Different languages and associated concepts – such as imagination and seeing – are interleaved into a well arranged field of associations. In Taube's work the "flow of images" becomes a symbol for the flux of visual concepts and the impossibility of them ever coming to a halt. The impact of the film is also due to the performance of its protagonists, who, at times far from playing a role, represent and reflect their own actions: the actor comes to represent the narrator on a stage.

The Prize of the 22nd edition of the “Leipziger Jahres-ausstellung” is awarded by the Sparkasse Leipzig, the Elke and the Thomas Loest Foundation and Doris Günther Foundation. The Prize of the year 2015 is dedicated to the Jewish banker Hans Kroch (1887–1970). The award includes a solo exhibition realized by Thomas Taube – the Prize winner of 2015 – in close collaboration with the G2 Kunsthalle Leipzig. The exhibition is generously supported with technical equipement by the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig.

Thomas Taube, born 1984 in Munich, studied Media Arts in Leipzig at the classes of Günther Selichar and Clemens von Wedemeyer and in Braunschweig with Candice Breitz, receiving his degree in 2014. Since September 2014 Taube is “Meisterschüler” (postgraduate) at the class of Clemens von Wedemeyer, Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig; 2015 Prize “Leipziger Jahresausstellung”; 2016 International Studio and Curatorial Program New York fellowship from the Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen. NARRATION at the G2 Kunsthalle is Taube`s first institutional solo presentation.

Thomas Taube, NARRATION, 2016, 6-channel video installation, ca. 115 minutes (movie version: 86 minutes), actors: Ulrich Matthes, Pina Bergemann, Denis Petković, Hannes Lehmann, Eva Langkabel, Laust Frederiksen, Tjarko Bohlen a.o.