Freisteller
Deutsche Guggenheim Presents Current
Villa Romana Fellows
The Villa Romana Prize has been
awarded to promising young artists since 1905. It is not only the oldest
German art prize but also Deutsche Bank's longest-standing cultural
commitment. With the "Freisteller" exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim,
this cooperation has reached a new peak. In addition, the show continues
the series of exhibitions conceived by the bank in the joint venture with
the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Silke Hohmann presents the
current Villa Romana Fellows.
The
Villa Romana in Florence
Photo © Gregor
Hohenberg
For a contemporary artist,
receiving a fellowship to spend time in Florence can be a burden of sorts.
Here, in the "cradle of the Renaissance," art of the highest quality has
been ubiquitous for centuries; and the appreciation of art also harks back
to a long history of admiration, devotion, and reverence. Considering that
young artists are already struggling to emancipate themselves from what
has already taken place in art history, Florence can't be an easy place to
take on.
Asli
Sungu, Ganz die Mutter (quite her mother),
video
still, 2006
© Asli Sungu
How
does it feel to a newcomer in a foreign country to meet experts who
sternly scrutinize everything one does? How does one learn to cope in a
place where everyone seems to point to one's mistakes? The artist Asli
Sungu, born in 1975, graduated from the Universität
der Künste in Berlin, and is one of the four 2008 Villa
Romana fellows. Since February of this year, she has been living and
working in the classicist villa on the outskirts of Florence. In the work
she is planning on showing in the exhibition of the 2008 fellows at the Deutsche
Guggenheim, she carries the feeling of always being somehow in the
wrong to an extreme. For her video Faulty (2008), she invited four
experts to her home, each of whom, standing behind the camera, seek to
correct one of Sungu's everyday acts: a dental expert calls her attention
to her erroneous tooth-brushing technique; a laundry expert lectures her
on the proper way to iron; a chef makes critical remarks about her
cooking, and even washing windows provides an opportunity for advice.
Asli
Sungu, Ganz der Vater (quite her father),
video
still, 2006
© Asli Sungu
The
grotesque exaggeration of the superego and the compulsive fulfillment of
others' expectations is a constant theme in Asli Sungu's work. For Ganz
die Mutter und Ganz der Vater (2006), she asked her Turkish
parents each to dress her in the way they'd most like to see their
daughter. Two contradictory images emerged: the mother's version resembled
a small girl, the father's was more of a businesswoman. "I'm interested in
expectations as well as the mistakes and disappointments experienced while
attempting to meet these expectations," explains the artist, whose second
area of artistic activity-painting-might appear completely different, but
also explores the notion of identity and representation. In her paintings,
Sungu tries to combine the formal qualities of the work with its thematic
content to form a single entity, "which means that the paint and what the
paint represents shouldn't be two different things," Sungu adds. To her,
paint possesses its own character as material; it shouldn't depict
anything more than itself. "In keeping with this idea, I am currently
making a wall that consists purely of acrylic paint, such that the wall
can stand freely," Sungu says.
Asli
Sungu, Frappant, 2005
©Asli
Sungu
Standing freely is the leitmotif
of the exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim, also in a figurative sense.
Some of the works on display were made during the artists' fellowships at
the Villa Romana in Florence. And indeed, working in Florence might
actually feel liberating-to be embedded in a larger historical context
that is simultaneously relatively removed from the current debates and
discourses of the major centers of contemporary art.
Yet the show's
title Freisteller
is less a programmatic dictate than a successful attempt to find a name
that describes all four very different positions, while also referring to
the institution's tradition of removal to a remote location. The state of
being removed, the independence that a stipend to the Villa Romana in
Florence was intended to mean for an artist has been a tradition since
1905: the Villa was founded by the Deutscher
Künstlerbund with private funds as an institute independent of
the German state. At the time, the prize was created as a counter-model to
the awards of the state academies. Deutsche
Bank, host to the exhibition together with the Deutsche Guggenheim,
has been supporting Villa Romana since the 1920s.
Dani
Gal, La Battaglia,
video audio
installation, 2007
© Dani Gal
The
Israeli artist Dani
Gal, born in 1977, is an expert in the extraction and isolation of
varying phenomena. He removes historical documents from their contexts to
enable a new and differing view to arise. His materials are documents from
world history; important occurrences appear side-by-side with events from
everyday life. One work explores an American school lesson from the 1970s
that teaches pupils about the threat of terrorism; another has him
searching out the Israeli sound engineer Avi
Yaffe, who took his sound-recording device with him into the bunker
during the Yom
Kippur War of 1973 and recorded the first seven hours of the surprise
attack.
Dani
Gal, The talking mountain of Israel,
video
audio installation, 2007
© Dani
Gal
In the course
of his research, Dani Gal further dissects the acoustic and visual
material he collects, separating text and image to spark a remarkable
intensity. More than anything, however, he seeks the means in an
exhibition situation to establish relationships between language and
space, and between the individual viewer and collective history, that can
be experienced physically. For Freisteller, he dispenses with the
pictorial level, concentrating entirely on space and sound: he manipulates
two record players such that an approaching viewer influences the volume
and speed of the sound, becoming a performer him or herself. With his
references to subjectivity, Dani Gal shows us that our image of reality
consists of chance occurrences, errors, statistics-of a collection of
moments that could have been remembered very differently. In his
installations, he lets the viewer alter the variables of his or her
experience.
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Dani Gal, La Battaglia,
video
audio installation, 2007
© Dani
Gal
While the
painter Julia
Schmidt uses completely different methods, she also collects found
items from history, isolates them, and sets them into new contexts. The
visual motifs of the Hochschule
für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig graduate might be very different
in nature, but all are precisely and carefully chosen. Some of her images
derive from various print media or the Internet. During the painting
process, they disappear-in part.
Julia
Schmidt, Untitled (shellac), 2007
Courtesy
Casey Kaplan Gallery
© Julia
Schmidt
The centers of Julia Schmidt's
paintings are often empty; the connections between the individual elements
remain vague. Hers is a cantankerous kind of painting that first lures the
viewer with familiar forms and motifs and then coyly blocks all narrative
or emotional access. "In the exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim, I will
be showing a new constellation of images with a heterogeneous spectrum of
motifs," the artist announces. "The makeshift construction of a kiosk,
excerpts of a beggar painting by Edgar
Degas, the grimy crotch of a male figure sprawled in a baroque chair,
and pigs' hairs used to manufacture the finest artists' brushes."
Julia
Schmidt, Untitled (atelier) I, II , 2007
Courtesy
Casey Kaplan Gallery
© Julia
Schmidt
Julia Schmidt will present her
paintings grouped together on a makeshift-looking wall leaning at a slight
angle. There are no protagonists here, no thematic framework. Yet Schmidt
addresses a theme nonetheless-the specific questions that the medium of
painting poses today, including the question of value and merchandise. She
does not address this theme directly, but rather by allowing important and
unimportant elements to blot each other out during the painting process,
by feeling out meaning and the loss of meaning, and by opposing
magnificence with destruction-without aiming for a conciliatory result.
Schmidt's painting embodies ambivalence; it is the refusal to agree made
visible, carried out in a manner that is both interesting and
contradictory-and with supreme confidence.
Julia
Schmidt, Untitled (kiosk), 2007
Courtesy
Casey Kaplan Gallery
© Julia
Schmidt
Clemens
von Wedemeyer also investigates ambivalence as the chief feature of a
postmodern society. The Hochschule Leipzig graduate, born in 1974 in
Göttingen, produces no more than two films per year; he has already taken
part in large major exhibitions such as the Skulptur
Projekten Münster 07. In his films, which are staged but often
appear documentary, he addresses socio-political themes such as urban
planning, border policies, and the disappearance of public space. At the
same time, his works always examine the medium of film itself, calling the
authority of the narrator he creates into question.
Clemens
von Wedemeyer, Die Probe (the test),
video
still, 2008
© Clemens von
Wedemeyer
His contribution to Freisteller
investigates the moment of freely chosen failure, of calling everything
into question at the height of one's greatest triumph. In his film Die
Probe (The Rehearsal) (2008), he details the first minutes
immediately after the election of a new president of an unnamed country.
Backstage at the election rally of the wining party, the president
rehearses his acceptance speech only seconds after he's won. Yet instead
of celebrating his victory self-confidently and aggressively, the prepared
text is riddled with doubt-not only in himself, but in the entire power
apparatus. If he were to give the speech before the public cheering out
there in the audience, it would be a resignation speech. Instead of
stressing the superiority of his election program yet again, he admits:
"My words were merely a means to an end." He wants to refuse.
Clemens
von Wedemeyer/Maya Schweizer, Metropolis,
Report
from China, video still, 2004-2007,
©
Clemens von Wedemeyer/Maya Schweizer
Visibly
in doubt, he leaves the backstage area to head for the stage, but the
viewer is not told whether or not the president actually gives the speech.
Or if he does, if it's not merely part of a pernicious strategy to further
increase his power. The loop then begins again; one sees The Rehearsal
perhaps two or three times with varying degrees of prior knowledge. The
formulation coined by political scientist Thomas
Meyer of "politics as theater" comes to mind, introducing other
references connecting to the location of the Villa Romana-after all, the
media side of politics is hardly as extreme and obvious as it is in Italy.
Clemens
von Wedemeyer, Von Gegenüber (over the way), 2007
for
'Skulptur Projekte Münster 07'
Photo:
Mühlhoff/Vossiek
© Clemens
von Wedemeyer
When Freisteller
opens, the artists will have spent only the first three months of their
fellowships at the Villa Romana, yet there is already an astonishing
coherence among them in dealing with views of the world, despite all the
differences in their positions. All four artists address the question of
objectivity in their own way; all four create new systems of reference in
order to arrive at new insights into contemporary life, entirely in
keeping with Florentine tradition.
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