nicht weit von der wirklichkeit entfernt (not far from reality)

Every detective film teaches us that it is the tiny, insignificant things in life, which provide the decisive proof in clearing up crimes and catching the guilty. Banal everyday happenings seem highly suspicious as soon as they are viewed from another perspective. Finding out the truth is thus a question of attitude, interpretation and “reading”. Seemingly unconnected things have to be linked in a logical, new order to enable the course of the act to be reconstructed. However, this also means that it might have happened in a completely different way. Reconstructing a crime, as well as his/stories, identities or events is, therefore, always linked with their construction – including all fallacies, mistakes and prejudices.

The banal and everyday, the unusual and the suspicious are the motives inspiring the artistic works in the exhibition “nicht weit von der wirklichkeit entfernt” (not far from reality). Here everyday banalities constantly intrude into unusual events and the exceptional intrudes into the banal. Events in the exhibition are loosed from their contexts and embedded into another story. In doing so, the artists are in no way trying to re/construct stories, identities and events into a water-tight, unambiguous story, but to throw up inconsistencies. Their stories are not far from reality, but far enough however to create doubts and ambiguities.

Artists

One of the objects under examination is an American suburban housing estate. Here Edgar Arceneaux’s video installation An Insignificant Moment gives us insights into the everyday experiences of three black women who live completely separate lives. For reasons, which are unclear the three women accidentally meet. A coincidence which is simultaneously casual, significant, plausible and unbelievable, but which seems to have no outcome.

Roland Schappert’s camera observes people in front of and behind the window of a trendy café in Cologne. The blurred faces of some of the passers-by are picked out and examined more closely in the form of phantom like drawings, thus tainting them immediately with an air of suspicion.

For their part Dagmar Keller and Martin Wittwer’s video installation Ruhe im Schatten deals with a true, unsolved, murder case, which occurred in a small alpine village in the 50s. In staging dialogues, which are related to various cross-questionings of this case, the artists are not so much interested in solving it as depicting the villagers’ desire to re-establish the idyllic, peaceful image of the village.

Bettina Lockemann’s work Position I & II consists of 66 computer prints intended to thwart the strategies of webcam and satellite images as well as photographs and maps, whose common aim might be to provide clarification and orientation. The point of departure is the web-recording of a cruise, whose reconstruction and subsequent re-siting here is undermined. Her video installation Border Control literally traces the invisible boundaries of cordoned-off areas, but the boundaries themselves and their functions remain invisible.

Michel Francois’ interactive CD-ROM Action ( La Plante en nous) contains 120 video clips of often seemingly absurd everyday stories. The viewers can call up the various clips, step by step via a selection of stills, a selection, which is thwart by the invisible structures of the software programme. The interaction between the viewer and the programme always leads to different connections between the clips and generates a non-linear pattern of story-making.

In Jens Brand’s installation Silence – Landscape viewers step separately into a semi-anachoic chamber where a video film is playing. They are confronted with a 360° pan over a desert landscape in Botswana, one of the few places in the world where at certain times there is almost absolute silence. Loudspeakers in the installation broadcast the authentic soundtrack – almost “nothing”.

Speech and images are basic element anchoring us to reality. Their natural laws are stretched, deconstructed and reversed in the works of Gary Hill and Andreas Gedin. Gary Hill’s 30 minute film Why do Things get in a Muddle? (Come on Petunia) from 1984 – examining the relationship between order and disarray – - runs backwards, whereby the performers also speak and act in reverse so that the laws of speech and the logic of the film are to a certain extent reconstructed, but not without leaving considerable traces of “damage”.

Andreas Gedin shows what seems to be two identical persons relating a story about twins. But every single word is split up and distributed between the two making it almost impossible to conceive which of them is speaking.

A programme of documentaries and short films dealing with the re/construction of memory will be running alongside the exhibition from the 18 – 20 October.

A project by
hartware medien kunst verein

In the framework of
Scene: Schweiz,
37. Internationale Kulturtage der Stadt Dortmund mit der Schweiz

Organisor
medien_kunst_netz dortmund
> hartware medien kunst verein
> Museum am Ostwall
> Kulturbüro Stadt Dortmund
> Universität Dortmund

In co-operation with
dortmund-project
LEG

Partner
Klangraum Phoenix
Programme electronic pop culture:
genesungswerk and sternschaltung

Supported by
Kulturbüro Stadt Dortmund
Ministerium für Städtebau und Wohnen, Kultur und Sport des Landes NRW
Pro Helvetia
and others