fake or feint

Scenario 5 (May 16th to June 13th, 2009)

The photos of Daniela Comani’s series Eine glückliche Ehe (A Happy Marriage) show a couple in situations of shared everyday life and leisure activities: walking along the beach, toothbrushing, engine trouble, shopping in the supermarket. Only at second sight it becomes manifest that it is the same person (namely the artist herself) who is embodying both characters.
In her visualisation of the “artificial product ‘heterosexual relationship’” (Hanne Loreck), Daniela Comani addresses the sustained effectiveness of the stereotyped idea of the harmonic coexistence of the sexes with predesignated roles. Alongside the technical post-production that assembles two pictures into one, it is especially the performative production of the characters respectively perceived as ‘male’ or ‘female’, that is able to operate by the most simple means: Various combinations of garments from the artist’s personal wardrobe and a glued-on three day beard account for a (minimal) difference of outward appearance. Gestures, postures and a few props reproduce cliché attributions such as: “traveling, car, explaining – male domains; listening, communication, the ability to be lead, devotion – women’s characteristics” (Hanne Loreck), and thus complete an amazingly effective illusion.
The series, perpetually continued since 2003, can be read as a consistent approach to the mechanism of repetition that confirms and stabilises such notions with each new inscription of stereotypical visual data. In a new picture Daniela Comani refers to her latest work Neuerscheinungen (New Publications).

Keren Cytter’s short film Der Spiegel (The Mirror) confronts the viewer with the naked body of a woman aged about 40. In a spoken stream of consciousness she expresses her desire for a younger body and for a man to save her from her loneliness. A chorus made up of three further women comments on and moderates the events. It represents the “mass” which is as “proud and frisky” as it is merciless. As two men arrive the situation sharpens dramatically.
The theatrically condensed setting takes place in a single, almost empty room; it is registered in a single shot by a restlessly moving hand camera. Camera and mirror, other’s glances and comments are the instances that confront the protagonist with the reality of her ageing body and -time and again - make clear how self- and external perception differ. The individual’s relation to its social surrounding is staged in the shape of its perpetual collapse. The film thereby fathoms the expressional potential of verbal, visual and theatrical languages.

Within Heiko Karn’s space installation Separate Together the perspective shifts from social interaction through gazes, gestures and language to the furniture that arranges and structures these relations.
Functional furniture such as lecterns, podiums and curtains produce certain speaker positions and viewpoints, thus defining a social and political space of interaction. Vertical blinds for example represent economic activity/administration and the defence against intruding looks and outside threats. A speaker’s desk for its part organises the relation of sender and receiver by materialising attributions like authority and listening, overview and being looked at.
In Heiko Karn’s installation these functional properties of the furniture appear as placeholders for socio-political scenarios. Yet they stay open and undetermined in relation to a specific use: as single curtain-elements hanging from the ceiling, as a pedestal or podium whose interior is visible and whose lifted surface is laid under a hybrid object composed of both lectern and voting booth.

back