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Michel Rein: MATHEW HALE - DER WILLKOMMENE FREMDE DORA GARCIA - The Beggar's Things (a social sculpture) - 10 Mar 2012 to 7 Apr 2012 Current Exhibition |
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MATHEW HALE - DER WILLKOMMENE FREMDE
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MATHEW HALE DER WILLKOMMENE FREMDE 10.03 – 07.04.2012 “ The crisis is a cultural model: the same model that has marked western thinking about the organic (with Hippocrates), the poetic and logical (Aristotelian catharsis and syllogism), and more recently the socioeconomic .” Roland Barthes, S/Z, 1970 DER WILLKOMMENE FREMDE 1 , Mathew Hale's second exhibition at the Galerie Michel Rein is centered around a large new work, MARIA UND JOSEPH: It becomes a morbid time ., 2012. This work, which is 10 meters long and incorporates 13 separate, though related, collages alongside texts and extraneous images, forms a constellation of material encompassing a numb of subject; the recent riots in the UK (reported in the media as being without a cause), a royal S&M fantasy (featuring Charles, Camilla and Diana), Punk ‘77 (specifically but obliquely The Sex Pistols), the media (photography as an instant of pain), Freud’s assertion that small children often mistake sex for violence resulting in a misconception about “where babies come from”, regicide (decapitation), “the heir” and generational shifts. The key text is from Antonio Gramsci but has been reversed. The original reads “The CRISIS consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” 2 The reversed version (think Prince Charles as social allegory) reads: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is not dying and the new can be born; in this regnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. The work hopes to achieve a collapse of historical time into mythic time, where today’s online papers can sit quite naturally alongside Elizabethan material or pornography from the 1970s. Made in Berlin by a UK citizen who has lived in Germany for twelve years, and exhibited in Paris (the site of Diana’s death) it features the kind of involuntary insights that are perhaps more easily available to an expatriate looking back at home and recognising a certain pleasurable national malaise that is also at work within himself elsewhere. Alongside this portmanteau work seven individual collages will be exhibited. They are all new works in the ongoing MIRIAM production. While diverse in both form and content they share the characteristic of having emerged from French material, for the most part. The German element of this triangular exhibition will be supplied by the screening in the gallery the tape-slide work DIE MÜNZE [The Coin], 2008-2011. This work, which was screened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, last year is 28 minutes long and features a voiceover read by Astrid Proll the photographer who was an early member of the RAF (Bader-Meinhof) group. Having lived anonymously in the UK for some time she speaks English in a beautiful, strong voice, lightly accented but not in the usual way. The texts are selected or written by the artist. DIE MÜNZE is a kind of film-essay, elusive while compelling. If it is about one thing above all, one could say it is concerned with the disavowal of homogeneity that goes on between the generations; the necessary violence that each new generation must mete out on it’s progenitors – and the tremendous truth, so seldom acknowledged, that we were once one with our mothers. This of course is played out aesthetically through the avant-garde in just the same way. I once heard Mike Kelley say that as a student he gradually came to the realisation that he had a problem with “Quality”. Michael Kimmelman, who was interviewing him on stage asked: “What’s the problem with quality?” To which Kelly replied, with exhilarating vehemence and incredulity: “You don’t know the problem with QUALITY!!? It’s what your Daddy did!! Well done little boy! That’s why we can recognise it!!” The final element in the exhibition is a paper sculpture called EXTREMITIES MEET, 2012. It is made using the geometry found in an aerial photograph of the Forét de Troncais. The photographic perspective produces a perfect equilateral triangle as two divergent roads meet the horizon. By using three copies of this photograph a three sided pyramid can be formed. When this is done the extremities of the triangle on the ground meet in the sky." Mathew Hale, 2012 1 « The Welcome Stranger » 2 Antonio Gramsci, Cahiers de prison, Gallimard, Paris, 1978-82 - 1ST FLOOR DORA GARCIA The Beggar's Things (a social sculpture) 10.03 – 07.04.2012 Galerie Michel Rein is pleased to present its third solo exhibition by Dora García at the gallery (previous exhibitions: Letters to other planets , 2005, What a fucking wonderful audience , 2009). This exhibition will present the artwork The Beggar’s Things which is made up of the performance The Beggar’s Opera, created by Dora García for Münster Skulptur Projekte in 2007. The Beggar’s Opera consisted of an extended performance in which Dora García adopted the character of Filch, who first appeared in the opera of the same name by John Gay and later in Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. An actor inhabited this character and wandered around the town meeting with locals and tourists . By taking on the character of the beggar, the actor became marginal, at times invisible, and therefore, in the words of the artist, was “able to talk to everybody, to say whatever he pleased, and be there without really being noticed – like servants and madmen.” In this way the performer interacted with the public in a half scripted, half improvised manner in order to create situations and reactions. His daily activity was fortnightly recounted in front of a theatre audience in Münster, noted down on the website www.thebeggarsopera.org and later printed in the book The Beggar’s Diary* 1. The scope of this performance resulted in the collection of a great number of objects, each with its own story and its own part played in the action. These elements were brought together to create the artwork The Beggar’s Things , a social sculpture that documents not only Dora García’s historic performance at Münster but also our daily interactions, which, more often than not, fall into oblivion. This artwork has been presented at the exhibitions Contes Choisis at the Centre de Arte Santa Monica in Barcelona (2007), Where to Characters go when the story is over at the CGAC (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea) in Santiago de Compostela (2009), Not to play with dead things at the Villa Arson in Nice (2010), and as part of Dora García’s Spanish pavilion The Inadequate at the Venice Biennale 2011. Dora García uses her work to investigate the relationship between artist, artwork, audience and space. By engaging with Dora García's work we learn to question ourselves and our reality. The artist engages herself with the question of what is reality and what is fiction, drawing the visitor into becoming a protagonist: sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. As well as representing Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011, Dora García has had a number international solo shows, notably at the FRAC Bourgogne (2005), the Kunsthalle Bern, the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela (2009) and Index Contemporary Art Foundation in Stockholm. She will be taking part in dOCUMENTA (13) opening in June this year, adding to her list of group shows in places including the MACBA (Barcelona), Tate Modern (London), Schirn Kunthalle Frankfurt, and the Sao Paulo Biennale. Her work is held in many public and private collections such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Madrid, the Centre National des Arts Plastiques in France, the San Francisco MoMA , the MUSAC, Leon and the Kadist Foundation in Paris which is kindly supporting her project for dOCUMENTA (13). 1 Dora García, The Beggar’s Diary, 2008, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, texts by Brigitte Franzen, Dora García, Samir Kandil, Jan Mech and Peter Aers. |
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