galerie laurent mueller, Paris

© Mischa Kuball, playtime (domestic version) - 2014
 
 
MISCHA KUBALL
PLAYTIME (DOMESTIC VERSION) - PARIS
a proposal by Marguerite Pilven
 
October 16th until December 20th 2014
 
Scenographer of the projected image, Mischa Kuball questions the way media relay the reality as well as the underlying social implications. The installation playtime (domestic version) - Paris was inspired by the eponymous movie by Jacques Tati and the optical research of Marcel Duchamp, synthesised through Le Grand Verre.
 
Does technical sophistication, dealing with all the aspects of reality as mediated through images, allow a better communication? Is it authorising an extensive knowledge of the world or is it blocking the view? At the heart of the immersive installation presented, lies a movie shot in the streets of Paris, over-mediatisated by a complex projection system which elongates and disperses it in time and space. Mischa Kuball often uses this “scattered vision” as subject of his works. “Gifts from elsewhere” infiltrate our daily routine through portable screens that accompany us. These windows easily take us away from the places where we were, or the problem which held us back, we are now suddenly subtracted, distracted from ourselves; the here and now bursts.
 
By imagining a device similar to a magic lantern, Mischa Kuball breaks down the conventional division between imagination, space and time caused by technological developments and currently debated in science.[1] The whole reminds us as much of the fleeting images of a landscape seen from a speeding train, as the polychromatic spectacle provoked by stained-glass windows inside religious architectures. This mechanical ballet is a centrifuged condensation of optical experimentation and Pop wonder.
 
The unfinished and radical character of the playtime (domestic version) - Paris installation conserves an interrogatory style, close to a phenomenological reflexion of empiricism’s favourite terrain: perception. An able scenographer, Mischa Kuball avoids to emit too many hypotheses on who watches or on what is being watched and bets on the capacity of each to organise this continuous flux of interactions. From the original Playtime movie, Kuball keeps a vision of modernist architecture as “liquidation of the interior”, but also a critical ambivalence which converts the frustrations and the duds of the experiment into catalysers of poetry.
 
MP
 
Mischa Kuball born 1959 in Düsseldorf, Germany
He teaches at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. He intervenes in the public realm since 1987 by using light as tool to explore architectural spaces. His temporary installations could be seen at Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf - 2005, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin - 1999, ZKM|Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe - 2005 and Centre Pompidou-Metz - 2010. Since 2009 he has been installing a series of in situ works called public preposition, realised among others at Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas - 2009.
 
A catalogue will be published on occasion of the exhibition
 
1] Doris Krystof, “Look thru’my eyes, Mischa Kuball’s video”, Mischa Kuball...in progress, ed. Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, 2007.
 
 
galerie laurent mueller
75 rue des Archives
75003 Paris
France
T: +33 1 42 74 04 25
 
galerie laurent mueller
 
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