Gerry Bibby and Henrik Olesen at Deborah Schamoni
Artists: Gerry Bibby and Henrik Olesen
Venue: Deborah Schamoni, Munich
Curated by: Nikola Dietrich
Date: July 29 – September 17, 2016
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of the artists and Deborah Schamoni, Munich. Photos by Ulrich Gebert.
Press Release:
This exhibition is the first time Gerry Bibby and Henrik Olesen have collaborated after beginning a few months ago in Porto. It now continues in the gallery Deborah Schamoni. As part of a longer process, the works have been developed for different scenarios embedded in a particular Yes/No Landscape. Within these various constructed social-landscapes, images were created that follow direct or fictional-narrative traces and signs.
Strasse (Street)is the title of the first room, which, while providing orientation, allows for variable play with rhetorical and material possibilities. This first appears as a simple graphic image, in which an encountered street view has been flipped into the vertical. The black and white motif initiates a series of inversions and shifts that could be equated with closed structures like positive/negative, yes/no, outside/inside, vertical/horizontal. On the hard asphalt, paths and perspectives intersect, leading toward a rather fictional mental space in which conversation and exchange take place. In the second room Language becomes a motif, onto which, against an illusionistic background, multiple levels of meaning can be projected. Within the installation it assumes a performative form, where different attitudes—“when all is said and done,” “yes/no future,” “what is empathy?”—come to be worn within the Yes/No Landscapes.
The view behind the delineated space of the work No Wall admits that the end also means a beginning—for something that establishes, as on a further level in the gallery’s upstairs room, a transparency and view of the outside world.
An uncertainty in this system of perception and attitude is here considered a productive interference, and a potential to address new ideas. In the words of Paul B. Preciado* this could constitute a kind of “fictions-politics”, where “footprints cannot be followed, but instead have to be invented”
* Beatriz Preciado, “Gender and Performance Art. Three Episodes from a Feminist Queer Trans Cybermanga…,” (2004), extract from (Mis)reading Masquerades, produced by If I Can’t Dance in collaboration with the Dutch Art Institute, Piet Zwart Institute and Van Abbemuseum; Revolver, Berlin, 2010.