Small Structures Are Beautiful vol I1
(Uqbar Project Space in etc. galerie)
December 2008 – January 2009
In cooperation with the Berlin project space uqbar, etc.galerie hosted Prague's first solo exhibition by artists Janne Schaefer (* 1976 in Darmstadt, Germany) and Kristine Agergaard (* 1975 in Copenhagen), who have been working together as J&K since 1999.
The artists deal playfully with belief systems, and models of understanding and explaining the world. Comparable with the approach of experimental archaeology, J & K - in self-experiments - act out fictional, conceived characters and roles. With these experiments and the staging of magic rituals the artists try to appropriate images and ideas of deviating worldviews and experiences, and thereby bring them to life.
The exhibition at etc.galerie takes us on a journey into a complex parallel universe which J&K create with the help of objects and images. Tools and Relics is based on the stock the artists have used and produced in the recent years. On display are artefacts and performance relics, such as small vessels, semiprecious stones, playing cards, or images from National Geographic magazines of the last 50 years, as well as collages and staged photographs, connected to a system of symbols and rituals invented by the artists. The artists use this material to orchestrate a collage-like installation at etc.galerie.
Presented formally in a style refering to traditional historico-cultural collections and art and curiosity cabinets, the mundane objects and works on show are charged with the aura of cult objects and museum artefacts, which seem to be evidences of a cultural memory. The artists play with various systems of reference and stress the constructedness of reality and truth we face in seemingly objective reports, but also in historiography and museum presentations, particularly in the combination of text and image. The cognition process and knowledge production are at the core of J&K's playful, fantastic creations, questioning notions such as authenticity, uniqueness, originality, reality, truth, fiction, illusion, deception and thus the basis of a rationalist worldview. The viewer gets involved in a confusing mind game of references and links between reality and fiction and is invited to produce its own reading. The work ends not in the eye of the beholder, but only begins there - or, as John Mulholland writes in his Magic Manual: "Magic is made to fool the mind and not the eye."
1 Small Structures Are Beautiful is the title of the exchange project between the project spaces uqbar, Berlin, and etc.galerie, Prague, supported by the Czech-German Future Fund, the Cultural Administration of the Berlin Senate, the Danish Arts Agency and the Goethe-Institut Prag. The guest exhibition Tools and Relics, organized by uqbar, is followed in 2009 by a presentation by etc.galerie in Berlin of works by the Czech artist Martin Kubíček.
© 2007, etc. galerie
Kateřinská 20, Praha 2, Czech Republic / info@etcgalerie.cz
