23 Jan 2011

Stedefreund Berlin: Flip Shift Show Switch – Transitions in Showing

#2 // Archeology of Hole – Creating an Archive // Marlena Kudlicka // Claudia Kugler

The exhibition project Archeology of Hole – Creating an Archive explores the question of what conditions need to be met, in transitions in showing, for nothing (in the material sense) to become a thing of economic or symbolic value. In a pot, for example, there is a cavity, which represents nothing. This hole can be seen as the absence of a thing – a thing, however, which in turn lends nothing, i.e. the hole, fundamental meaning. How, then, are we to imagine nothing? Is nothing measurable? How can nothing become visible? And what significance does it gain in the transition between that which is shown and that which remains hidden? Marlena Kudlicka's starting point is the observation of various types of holes in landscape and architecture, which are constantly in transition (as a result of construction, for example) between different forms of materiality. Is the scale of a hole merely an occasion to stretch one's imagination in proportion in order to construct a form? Would the form then be linked to the sensation of gravity? Among other things, the artist is interested in the physicality of holes, and she constructs objects which, in their physical presence (through material and arrangement) are brought into a state of irrational tension with respect to the actually existing architectural elements of the exhibition space. A second artist invited by Kudlicka, Claudia Kugler, constructs pictures and objects in which she questions potential boundaries and transitions between visibility and invisibility. To this end, she illuminates spaces of imagination and imagines the pictorial space as an event that, though materially present as picture or object, is nonetheless cut off from our reality. What is the significance of the intangible mental image for the physical perception of the object?

Text: Anne Fäser