Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Travelogue 03]
Thursday 22nd October
Today I am meeting Viennese artists Christiana Spatt and Maria Hanl at the Torhaus. Maria’s work is a film piece and has already been installed, Christiane is a painter and photographer and her work is the final piece in the Corona jigsaw.
A virtual tour is also being created by artist Hendrick Müller, who is also a technician on this project. He is meeting us here later to make some short films of us with the work. I am the first to arrive at the Torhaus and go through the process of opening up and turning everything on. Along with Ralf Wasserman who has also worked on the installation, they have ensured that it all works first time. Whoever heard of an exhibition full of tech stuff that worked first time. These guys are good.
Christiana’s video work has the feeling of the stop motion animation of people such as Jan Švankmajer, with disparate objects coming together to create strange and uncanny forms. The film piece and one of the photographs, printed on a lovely brushed metal surface, feature a sequence of animated hats, and the second photograph features the artist wearing them, all at once. There are also two painted contributions of a person holding a large bunch of flowers that obscure the face.
In her video Maria Hanl takes the concept of the desire path, a track made by people walking across areas of grass not intended by the creators of paths in public spaces, and traces them out across a park somewhere in Vienna. This unconscious activity could be seen as the very human desire to create their own freedom and ignore the freedoms that others are prepared to allow us. This possibly gives an indication as to just how difficult it is to impose rules that will govern an entire society, even during a pandemic; people will always want, whether they realise it or not, to follow their own path.
Much of the work at the Torhaus seems to revolve around an inward looking state of mind engendered by a system that has closed down and seems to offer no escape route. Once again it is that entropic effect that I have written about several times over the years, as pressure in a closed system builds to the point of inertia when the energy has no means of release. This is not to say that the exhibition is without hope, because it definitely is not. In every work there is an element of humour, the kind of humour that carries us through seemingly bleak times. The lamp is not dark and the door has not been shut in our faces.
In the evening we congregate at the house of artist and exhibition organiser Silvia Liebig, along with another of the artists in the show; Stephanie Brysch. We prepare a meal together and head out to visit an exhibition opening at a place called Künstlerhaus (Artist House). Here the work of Nina Brauhauser, Evelina Cajacob, Marta Colombo, Anna LyttonGerhard Reinert, Mira Schumann and Samuel Triendl is presented in the exhibition space of a massive complex of artists studios and housing. The complex not only allows for long-term inhabitants but also short term international residencies.
Some images from Künstlerhaus opening
Tomorrow, a free day essentially with the exhibition all set to be opened on Sunday morning, I shall be heading out to the Dortmunder Kustverein. Afterwards I head back to the studio for the night.