Sarcevic's new series consists of four works, three of which are now on display for the first time at carlier | gebauer. The super-16mm film loops are each about three minutes long and are focussing each on a setting of objects embedded in music, which was conceived for them by Turkish contemporary composer Ulas Ozdemir. Sarcevic's films are shown on modified 16mm projectors, set up in acrylic glas pavilions, which are projecting the image from the pavilion onto the surrounding walls of the space. His super-16mm films are differing from the usual 16mm format in that they imitate the 1,85:1 format of cinematic movies.

Sarcevic's 'Skulpturen Film', to quote their working title, are comprised of film, music, sculpture and architecture, alluding to the modernist total works of art of the Bauhaus and of architectural functionalism as much as to their consequitive historical desintegration. Sarcevic's pavilions are not structured by glittering clarity alone but every now and than the shadows are taking over the sceneries which the camera is slowly scanning. The sets of the films seem to mimmic the material studies of a cultural history in miniature, which is carefully released from its functionalist allusions. Ozdemir's compositions are introducing their own context into this setting. Ozdemir's ethnographical approach to music history as well as his use of traditional instruments produce yet another layer, in which the memory of modernism, which seems to be omnipresent in Sarcevic's works, is recreated. Here, the forms are emancipating themselves from their functions and are ascribed to the capacities of gestaltung within their materialities.

In his exhibition, "The breath-taker is the breath-giver" Bojan Sarcevic is continuing his translations of sculptural scenes into filmic rides which were last shown in his solo exhibition "Only After Dark" which at the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 2008. In this show he had also worked with Ozdemir. But whereas in "Only After Dark" the films were more driven by Sarcevic's own previous sculptural practice and opened up their formations into new sceneries, his new films are presenting material in three object groups. Thin, coloured paper is spun onto a thicker brown cardboard, looking like a set of stones cut open, an impression irritated by a red-blonde hairpiece, which seems to grow out of it. A fragile geometric wood construction, stretched by thin threads, is positioned in light sand like an attic column and a seemingly organic group of clayforms, covered in black cotton, in which some few pearls seem to be positioned somehow resemble dead bodies. Sarcevic's film sculptures never allow for a comforting place between the organic and the formal. Their material mixtures construct contexts which remind their viewers of later modernism, but yet carry with them no possibility of a definite localization in time or place. As in George Kubler's break with modernism, "The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things" (1962) also Sarcevic's works seem to construct a cultural history within the objects themselves, in the expressions of their materials.

Sarcevic is advancing the transformation of his sculptures into the ephemeral material of film. He counteracts the intuitively expected experiences of his media. His architectural elements are permeable, the space which they construct is open, whereas the spaces of his films are much more enclosed and physical. The non-space of the projected film and the acrylic glas pavilions is confronting the architecture of the exhibition space. Sarcevic is interwining the filmic- and the architectural space as well as two different conditions of material: the transparent acrylic glas of the pavilions corresponds to the translucent celluloid of the film, whereas the filmed material forms a dialogue with the pavilions architecture. The music, an immaterial medium in and of itself, unifies those different perspectives as an outside, a commentary like media within the film-sculptures. Sarcevic is relating sculpture, architecture and music back to its materials, which in "The breath taker is the breath-giver" are the source of the space created around them.

Bojan Sarcevic was born 1972 in Belgrade. He studied at the Rijksakamdie in Amsterdam and at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris. His works and installations were shown among others on the Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg, at the 50th Venice Biennale, at the Witte de With in Rotterdam, at the Artist Space in New York and at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau in Amsterdam. Currently, his work is on view at the Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine in France. For this year's summer, Sarcevic's works will be on view at the Tate St Ives, UK.

 

 

March 10 - May 5, 2009

 

Conrads are pleased to announce the first solo show by Mounir Fatmi in Germany.

Mounir Fatmi's work can be of political or existential nature while being aesthetic. The question of "the other", an external being, is a permanent element of his creation. The artist constructs visual spaces and linguistic games that aim to free the viewer from their preconceptions of politics and religion, and allows them to contemplate these and other subjects in new ways. His videos, installations, drawings, paintings and sculpture bring to light our doubts, fears and desires. They directly address the current events of our world, and serve to both clarify the origins and symptoms of global issues, as well as speak to those whose lives are affected by specific events.

 

Born in Morocco in 1970, he now shares his life between Paris and Tangiers. Fatmi auscultates the role of an artist who feels as a foreigner towards his own cultural context, which is, in fact, his own role.
Mounir Fatmi's work has been exhibited in the Migros Museum fur Gegenwarskunst, Zurich, the Museum Kunst Palast, Duesseldorf, Germany, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. He also participated in the Gwangju Biennial, and the 2nd Seville Biennial.
In 2006 he was awarded the Grand Prize at the 7th Dakar Biennial, and his work were included in the 2007 1st Luanda Triennial, 8th biennial of Sharjah, the 52nd biennial of Venice and in the 1st Brussels Biennal(2008).

 

Minimalism is Capitalist is based upon two questions. First, it questions the link between religion and image. Second, it questions the connections to and the relationship between an artistic movement and a political ideology.

Considering the image - "The picture is almost monochromatic." "There is no image on the canvas." "There is 'nothing to see'." These are comments frequently heard about minimalist art, and yet, the "meaning" of the image is still questioned. In Minimalism is Capitalist the central part of an easel is painted in a bright red that contrasts with the "white on white" of the rest of the installation. This work suggests a recurrent motif throughout the major art movements in the 20th Century- from Suprematism to Constructivism, Bauhaus to De Stijl, Minimalism to Conceptualism, as well as to the Christian cross, the canonical image in western art history. It was this same easel (whether of Matisse or Delacroix) that was introduced in the colonized East, steering Arab artists away from the ornamental style and encouraging them, for a moment, to copy the figurative styles of oriental and occidental art history. Through this encounter these artists began to question their relationship to the image, eventually rejecting the use of the figure as an imitation of the divine, and began once again, to use non-representational imagery in their work. It is this easel that the Russian Constructivists in the 1920's, were compelled to remove and which the American Minimalist movement in the 1960's would finally disintegrate.

Questioning the links between an artistic movement and a political ideology - Is Minimalism is Capitalist an oxymoron? Perhaps. With this phrase Mounir Fatmi specifically refers to American Minimalism, a movement born in the 1960's in reaction to Abstract Expressionism, and particularly to Pop Art, an aesthetic considered to be the epitome of the frenzied capitalist consumer society and the "American way of life."

Minimalist artists such as Frank Stella, Donald Judd or Carl Andre, who appropriated the « less-is-more » theory as a rule, were influenced by and indeed connected to thepolitical and aesthetic concerns of the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a famous architect based in Chicago in the 1940's and who was often (incorrectly) associated to the "less-is-more" maxim, as well as to the Bauhaus and to the Russian Constructivists. History forced many Bauhaus artists to flee from Nazi Germany to the United States, bringing with them their roots of Malevitch and Rodchenko, the artistic supports of the Russian Revolution. Through such events, history can be understood like a "dynamic geography", a "rhizome of plateaus" (Deleuze), a short-circuit of the historical prejudices. These personal migrations, and with them, their ideas, are why many skyscrapers in Chicago or New York, the triumphant symbols of the capitalism, as well as the early concepts of Le Corbusier, are descendent from ideas of Russian Constructivism. This is also why Dan Flavin in the middle of cold war in America made a sculpture in tribute to Vladimir Tatlin.

The Bauhaus manifesto said: "the ultimate aim of all creative activity is building." But for Mounir Fatmi, it is the idea, and it is precisely this notion of "building" that he proposes to deconstruct in the installation Minimalism is Capitalist, piece by piece.

Text "Minimalism is capitalist" and translation from french: Marie Deparis

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