maryam
jafri
valerie
tevere
lars
mathisen
matthew
buckingham
January 30. - March 10. 2004
at
Sparwasser HQ
Offensive für zeitgenössische Kunst und Kommunikation
Torstrasse 161, 10115 Berlin Mitte
Opening hours: Wed-Fr 4-7 PM Sa 2-6 PM
Photos from the exhibition opening
Going to the edge, or optimizing something beyond expectations in order to find different kinds of truth: this is the logic that ties together the works of these four artists from the USA and Denmark. push the envelope! assesses various displacements in culture that frustrate reality and subjectivity and render them unstable. A trait common among the artists' works is a simultaneous gaze on the historical and the everyday event: subjective micro-narrative meets the larger time span of global events. The works in the exhibition go beyond the documentary, through various strategies of dramatization, narration, and manipulation, to create a kind of bouncing effect in time and space, and, in this way, come to grips with notions of an elsewhere. The artists thus seek limit conditions and radicalize attempts at interpretation.
maryam jafri
In Maryam Jafri''s "Theatre" (Video, 2001), the artist
plays two characters who can be seen as distinct people and also
as different sides of the same self. The two characters complete
each other's sentences, reliving a moment when both, or perhaps
only one, first came on stage. What happens onstage parallels
what happens offstage; what happens backstage influences what
happens onstage. Physical and mental space collapse into one,
allowing the backstage world to function in part (but not only)
as a metaphor for the unconscious. In the video, however, no stage
is ever seen, time and place are presented solely through language.
The language hovers between speech and thought, collapsing stage
directions (i.e. "I enter," "I turn to the left,"
etc.), internal thoughts ("I'm nervous"), and conventional
stage dialogue into one text, giving the narrative its labyrinthine
structure.
valerie tevere
Valerie Tevere's "Two City Tour" (Video, 2002/2003)
is comprised of two videos (excerpted from her works "Palm
Trees on Madison Avenue" and "Vertical City on the 101")
that explore projections of urbanity and how the formation of
two US cities is shaped in the collective imagination. "Two
City Tour" locates Los Angeles in New York and New York in
Los Angeles. The 'bi-coastal' journey follows threads of travel
through NYC and LA, complicating the myths of each city. Each
video follows a distinct route produced by different mapping techniques.
In one video, the maps are derived from the NYC and LA phonebooks:
the artist searched the NYC phonebook and interviewed businesses
named after LA. Then, in LA, she did the opposite, setting up
interviews with businesses named after NYC. Through the operation
of naming, these commercial entities function on nostalgia and
dislocation, and from one place they refer to another whose imagined
essence has been packaged for consumption. In the second video,
the maps are produced according to the perceptions of NY and LA
residents who have never visited the other city. Together, Tevere
and interviewee, travel to locations in NYC and LA that reference
a LA or NY only visited in the interviewee's mediated imagination.
lars mathisen
Lars Mathisen's short film, "Document in the Past Perfect"
(Video, 1994/2004), frames 20th-Century ideologies and dreams
of liberation, using found footage. "Document in the Past
Perfect" presents an account of the period between 1932
1985, juxtaposing two different films in a montage format. One
is the 18mm home footage of an unknown Danish family, taken before
and after WW2. A deadpan camera registers happy holiday moments,
the Berlin Olympics (1936), and the World Exhibition in Paris
(1937). Subsequently, and with the same lack of involvement, we
see the liberation of Denmark in May 1945. The second film is
a first generation erotic movie, shot in 1972. The film shows
a student's party developing into carnality. The actors' unworried
frolicking, conveying an air of unselfconscious innocence, reflects
the liberating promises of this newly legalized pornography. The
entire montage is accompanied by the obsessive rant of the convicted
murderer Charles Manson, who projects his messianic views from
his prison cell. Through its anti-dramatic slide from normality
to perversion, "Document in the Past Perfect" implicitly
challenges the 20th-Century welfare state's promise of freedom
to its citizens.
matthew buckingham
Matthew Buckingham's "The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in
the Year 500,002 C.E." (Text & photo, 2002) considers
the historical and future conditions of one of America's most
iconic symbols of patriotism: Mount Rushmore. The monument, massive
portraits of four American presidents (Washington, Jefferson,
Roosevelt, and Lincoln) carved into the mountain that the Sioux
called the Six Grandfathers, memorializes the birth, growth, and
development of the USA. The work comprises a black and white photograph
and a timeline, both of which imagine the monument's distant future.
Buckingham digitally altered the photograph of Mount Rushmore
to portray its appearance five hundred thousand years from now.
The result sustains a tension between fantasy and reality, as
the four presidential heads are erased by the mountain's slow
erosion. By transferring current anxieties about democracy and
belonging onto a projected future landscape, Buckingham addresses
the irony of Mount Rushmore's return to a more-or-less natural
state. The timeline exposes some of the hidden and more obvious
details of Mount Rushmore's contested history. Buckingham's timeline
offers a panoramic historical view of the paradoxes generated
by such sites and symbols, unraveling suppressed or distorted
accounts of violent conflict from the past and the present. It
is telling, for instance, that the Shrine of Democracy, as Rushmore
was officially designated, was carved out of sacred land taken
illegally from the Sioux, and executed by an artist who had been
a secret but active member of the Ku Klux Klan.