unstable narratives

Stories - personal narratives, unstable reflections, attempts to define identity and points of view – are streaming from everywhere. They all resist one single interpretation. Everybody has a story, and everybody claims the right to be listened to. Besides this multiplicity of narrations, one and the same narration is expressed in many different ways. What makes these stories unique? To what extent does the position of the narrative and narrator coincide? The exhibition "unstable narratives" deals with these and further questions.

The Artists

Miodrag Krkobabic asked his friends to introduce themselves and one another. The title of his work, "6 = 36", indicates that the encounter of 6 people results in 36 identities. In this case the people selected by the artist are good friends, all of them members of the same generation and social class. What could we expect, if the persons would belong to diverse age groups, ethnic groups and social classes?

Milica Tomic's Remembering series is applied to the ex-West German context. "Dortmund erinnert sich..." is a big print of a German communist party membership card with the artist's face projected on it.

For his video work "The Corner in My Mind", Eike Berg installed a rotating camera in a private space. In the room among other things mirrors are placed, reflecting the situations and actions behind the camera, as well as several TVs, showing the recorded images of the camera. The different layers of "reality" we see in this video, each stands for only one of the possible narratives of the given situation.

Hajnal Németh's videos show us the usual, the banal in a very ambiguous and uncertain way: the objects of the everyday life are altered, hidden elements are inserted and independent images are interconnected. In these works the ever shifting narration results in an unstable perception of reality.

The computer printed flip-picture of Balazs Beöthy shows a boy wearing a necklace with a symbol that changes with every little move of the viewer. Here the position of the viewer becomes essential, that is the form of the symbol – and through this also its meaning - is entirely depending on it.

Kiss-Pál’s mechanic ball performs an unpredictable movement through the exhibition hall, rolling around as an independent entity in the given space. Sometimes it rolls into the range of a fixed video camera that captures its picture. A small technical intervention is enough to turn the ball into its own inverse...Can one talk about the presence of the represented ball?

In the context of his project "Copy That!" Dan Perjovschi each day will send by e-mail a drawing to the exhibition hall, which will be displayed here on a monitor for the whole day. Perjovschi invites the visitors to make a copy of the drawing. The title “Copy that!” refers to an american slang which actually means:“Do you understand it?”. This imperative phrase forces in the case that someone understood, to repeat it, to “Copy it“.

The video "10 second couple" by Cristian Alexa shows a woman in a white dress who walks down the street, chooses a person, grabs his/her hand and follows this person for a while. After 10 seconds she let the hand go and chooses another person.

Daniel Knorr presents his project "Not Another Readymade (Visible Invisible Series)", which was started in Zurich in 2001, followed by Iasi and Chicago. However, the piece exists only in the sphere of the spoken word: In each gallery where the work was presented the guards had to explain to the public that there are no works to be seen.

A project by
medien_kunst_netz dortmund
> hartware > Museum am Ostwall > Kulturbüro Stadt Dortmund

In co-operation with
Protokoll, Cluj, Rumänien
Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart

Curated by
Attila Tordai-S.
Founder of the art space Protokoll and editor of the rumanian/hungarian art magazin Balkon.

Assistents
Ulrike Möglich, Tabea Sieben

Technic
Hans D. Christ, Uwe Gorski

Support
Kulturbüro Stadt Dortmund

Text by Attila Tordai-S. at Balkon
www.balkon.hu/balkon_2002_05/13unstable.html