You will succeed where I have failed

About

You will succeed where I have failed.

It starts with a cocoon made of clothing. Fused with each other, the individual items are still recognizable, and the many small traces they bear – the sweat and skin particles of their former wearers – are now conserved with them forever. The form is reminiscent of a punching bag, but no hand can make its mark here anymore, no frustration be discharged, thoroughly hardened and protected at the same time.

The starting point of the expansive installation You will succeed where I have

failed. initially seems a dystopian one. A sick system that regenerates itself ad infinitum. No exit, no escape. Or is there a possibility to withdraw, to refuse this spiral?

Alexander Klaubert sets off in search. He wants to show the roots of structures, the potentials for resistance, and change. Processes like multi-generational conflicts and traumas that unconsciously shape one’s own behavior and in part lead to misunderstandings and incomprehensibilities that can’t be overcome form the starting points for Klaubert’s artistic investigation. He thereby moves in the contexts of Édouard Louis and Jack Urwin.

This is reflected, for example, in his many-faceted dealings with spatial perception and its subtle influence. Like the use of continuous sound collages that engage in an ambivalent game of negotiation that, through their fragmented composition of offensive or quiet accompaniment sometimes gently move and sometimes push into the space.

Silence is my new best friend.*

A light shines from somewhere – a warning one? On a closer look, one discovers two photographs showing a single eye of an albino rabbit. A luminous eye, photographed in childhood, shines in today’s present space.

In close proximity stand objects that once held lights. Light boxes that no longer radiate, no longer advertise or announce anything; fissures appear in the surface and the exhibitors turn into the exhibited. Their erstwhile function shed, they move themselves into the center of attention, and a melancholy optimism spreads.

The city is yours, not ours.*

Alexander Klaubert encounters many ideas and objects on his daily strolls. Seemingly remote street observations are transferred to the exhibition space and, through abstraction, display the diverse and profound possibilities of their interpretation.

By shedding the function or identity attributed to them, other ways of seeing things result. And in this way, Alexander Klaubert proceeds to let facades crumble and to reveal hidden meanings like the shelter structure that is precisely no longer that. But there, too, the gutted structure raises new questions: in what system are we moving, which one do we submit to, from which one do we want to liberate ourselves?

How can we learn to deal together with the subjective perception of relationships and situations, and how can a fundamentally different togetherness be shaped?

Alexander Klaubert translates these questions in his artistic work by dealing openly with his own grief, rage, and fragility and by taking us along and touching us, sometimes demandingly, sometimes reservedly. This becomes clear especially in the sensitively and precisely designed performances that are part of his spatial installations, which play an important role also in You will succeed where I have failed.

Alexander Klaubert creates an echo from the painful past that we have an inkling of, based on our own very individual biographies. But with his displayed diverse forms of appropriation, a possible approach is transported and with it also a possibility, held in common, of healing.

I know I’m not alone, because I’m going with, because I’m going with you.*

*Excerpt from the Sound Art piece that accompanies the Performance.

Press release by Julia Lübbecke