Mind the Gap

‹Mind The Gap› is the warning announcement to passengers getting on and off the London underground. It refers to the gap between the train and the platform, but it could mean more than taking care not to stumble. The transition encompasses different places, times and social constellations. Constant change, abrupt transitions and radical upheavals have become everyday events in our speeded-up times. Permanent reorientation constitutes a significant challenge in contemporary life. It can be experienced as an opportunity, but also as a source of existential insecurity. The exhibition takes such transitional situations as its subject and at the same time reflects the current situation of Kunsthaus Glarus which finds itself, with its change of curator, in a phase between continuity and change. Metaphorically, the works reveal confusing scenic, spatial, perspectival and, not least, existential breaks. The photographs, videos, film works, installations and performances prompt moments of bewilderment, staging volatile transitions and assembling them into new, coherent and yet broken images. They seek to play with spatial and temporal dimensions, inside and outside, reality and reflection, habit and uncertainty, nostalgia and progression. Time and again the viewer is stripped of a supposedly certain perspective. Real and mental spaces blur and form reflective spaces between reality and fiction, which encourage viewers to scrutinise their own vantage-points in ambivalent situations.

Christoph Girardet (b. 1966, lives and works in Hanover) uses ‹found footage› material, predominantly taken from films of the fifties and sixties, which serves as the starting-point for his filmic experiments. He dissects scenes and images before editing them into new units. In the work Scratch (2001) he creates the illusion of a scratch in a record, which is only revealed at second glance as a film-loop. Kristall (2006, in collaboration with Matthias Müller) combines various scenes in which the protagonists of the film engage with their own reflections. Through repetitions of similar sequences from different films the artists sketch out a developing melodrama of claustrophobic-looking mirror cabinets while at the same time revealing the stereotypical nature of these scenes. The mirrors create images within the image, placing the figures within a frame and at the same time make them appear disunited from themselves. By filming and editing the sequences through a mirrored projection, they add a further level of confusion to the scenes. Thus the figures appear broken in a number of ways, between self-assertion and narcissistic staginess, between emotions of fragility, doubt and loss.

William Hunt (b. 1977, lives and works in London) works in the medium of performance, the ephemerality of which he also captures in videos and installations. He always exposes his body to situations that are physically almost unbearable and thus tests his own resilience and endurance. He accompanies these emergencies with self-penned songs commenting upon his situation. The poetry of the songs generally contrasts with the image of the performer as he takes himself to the point of physical exhaustion. In his new work I Forgot Myself, Looking At You (2008), which he is showing for the first time in Kunsthaus Glarus, self-image and role-model stand in existential competition with one another. He allows the audience to participate in an ambiguous backstage setting in which he applies a plaster mask to himself. Caught in the mask and blind to the audience, Hunt then plays the harmonica, accompanying his performance on the guitar. He refers to the double meaning of the word ‹casting›, which can refer both to the technique of plaster-casting and the selection of actors and musicians. After the performance he frees himself from the mask and his role as an entertainer. Several levels of reflection allow multiple perspectives of this process of the construction of public identity. The performance shows the ambivalence of transitions between different situational roles that are acted out in everyday life.

Nils Nova (b. 1968, lives and works in Lucerne) extends the view of the side-light hall of the Kunsthaus by a baffling component which throws the familiar perspectives into confusion and puts the orientation of the space into complete disarray. He reflects the external space of the surrounding park with a wall-sized photograph papered to both the existing walls and bits of wall specially installed for the purpose. In this way he elaborates complex and variously broken systems which become superimposed over one another in the viewer’s perception. The perspectival displacements and duplications give rise to an imaginary space. Photographic works and painting with filmic references contrast with the situation of the installation in which they appear. Here, for example, two protagonists meet, so similar that they could be doubles. In another picture a park scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up faces the real park in the Volksgarten. These contrasted images are also concerned with repetition, displacement and the construction of reality. Nova’s complex installation works call into question the real three-dimensionality of the space and, in the viewer’s mind, set in motion a chain of associations concerning the relationship between reality, fiction and deception.

Adrian Paci (b. 1969, lives and works in Milan) reflects in his work the existential feeling of loss and the fragility of human existence. The starting-point for his work lies in his biographical background, his immigration from Albania to Italy in the late 1990s. Since then he has produced many videos, installations, sculptures, paintings and photographs which abandon the autobiographical realm for the formulation of universal archetypes. In Per Speculum (2006) Paci films, in a mirror, the supposedly carefree play of children in the Southern English hills. Only gradually does the idyllic (reflected) image begin to falter. The fiction of a safe children’s world is called into question just as the mirror is shattered into pieces with a catapult. The picture-in-picture situation makes visible the break between reality and its perception. In the closing shot the children sit in the branches of an old tree and dazzle the camera with the sunlight in the shards of the mirror, the fragments of the supposed idyll. Paci’s allegorical pictures refer to the history of religion, art and film, and open up thematic areas of the fragility of innocence and knowledge as well as genealogy and origin, the big questions involved in the contemporary construction of identity.

In her photocollages Martina Sauter (b. 1974, lives and works in Düsseldorf) combines film-stills and other photographs into apparently coherent pictorial spaces. Only at a second glance do harsh cuts divide the supposedly homogenous illusory space. The artist uses various films from the film noir tradition, particularly Alfred Hitchcock, but also from other genres, such as Robert Altman (Short Cuts) and David Lynch (Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive). She also uses pictures of film-studio sets, some of them copied in the studio, as well as photographs of real places. In the Alte Nationalgalerie series, for example, Martina Sauter investigates one of the sets of Hitchcock’s 1966 film Torn Curtain. Since the American film team had no access to the Alte Nationalgalerie during the Cold War, the location had to be rebuilt in the studio. The juxtaposition of film-still and the retrospective photographs of the real setting in Sauter’s works plays with the multi-layered dimensions of reality and fiction, and puts the photographic and filmic staging mechanisms up for discussion. With incongruous transitions, partially covered spaces and obstructed views, Martina Sauter creates situations of suspense, a formal means of cranking up tension, and prompts the viewer to think about possible narrative sequences. She works with all the devices of film and photography, thus spinning a fabric both seductive and inscrutable between reality and fiction.

Philip Wiegard (b. 1977, lives and works in Berlin) saws and cuts up everyday pieces of furniture and reassembles them with a distorted perspective. In the process he transfers the central-perspectival foreshortening from painting and photography to sculpture. While this compositional device creates an illusion of three-dimensionality in the two-dimensional image, in Wiegard’s sculptural works it brings about an extremely confusing distortion of the spatial structure. The result is relief-like formations that are not yet pictures, but at the same time no longer objects, leaping back and forth between the second and third dimensions. By working with second-hand furniture as well as a great variety of art-historical references, he also extends distortion by the dimension of time. In his new works he particularly quotes the surreal stage-set worlds of Giorgio de Chirico, deserted interieurs and landscapes with furniture, in unusual multi-perspectival spatial constructions. In a work made specially for the Kunsthaus Wiegard integrates parts of the building’s original furniture, building a scuptural reconstruction of de Chirico's painting, thus creating a new and surreal perspective.