Jani Pietsch | Doris Hinzen-Röhrig | Marie Rolshoven | Florian Voss | Cătălin Bădărău | Adriana Florea Băloiu | Anca Boeriu

On allait coller un homme contre un mur et lui tirer dessus jusqu’à ce qu’il crève…
(Jean-Paul Sartre, Le mur)



The project hosted by Go Contemporary gallery presents the results of an innovative collaboration between Go Art Projects (a platform for contemporary art) and Fantom Berlin - Netzwerk für Kunst und Geschite(n): three Romanian artists (Adriana Florea Băloiu, Anca Boeriu and Cătălin Bădărău) communicate with four German authors (Jani Pietsch, Marie Rolshoven, Florian Voss and Doris Hinzen-Röhrig) in an attempt to identify a visual theme for the profound, plurivocal meanings of the walls. Because the wall has been regarded as a dramatic obstacle, which separates, delimitates and excludes, as a mark for borders (The Berlin Wall) and death (the wall of execution from Sartre’s short story). But apart from all that, a wall bears the visible signs of time, becoming a privileged witness of recent history.


The exhibition called Ziduri (Walls) faces the beholder with distinctive points of view and conceptual marks, visually configured through settings coming from different areas (painting, sculpture, object, photography, video and sound).


In Adriana Băloiu’s illusions (Illusion) the wall becomes an excuse for evasion (“the walls, the borders, the limits of human inside or outside existence... are there, here, everywhere. We know that. But what can we do best with this piece of information is to ignore it, to close our eyes and imagine a dream scenery”).


On the contrary, for Anca Boeriu the wall is a concrete reality (built by monumental characters - women and children –, cut in a zinked chalkboard, on which she adds drawings and color), but also a metaphor for exile (imagined in the exhibition through a wall on which there are shown monotypes of the immigrant women).


In Derail, Cătălin Bădărău created a wall by crowding so many characters that it becomes an almost shapeless mass, suggesting the drift of humankind.


Compared to the more or less metaphysical dimension proposed by the Romanian artists, the German authors have chosen to fairly fructify some emblematic moments of recent history. Therefore, the Eingesperrt_Ausgesperrt (Locked In_Locked Out), presented two years ago in Fantom gallery in Berlin, creates a dialogue among several historical episodes that thematize the wall as a border and symbol of exclusion, exile and – in extremis – of death. The video installation created by Marie Rolshoven and Florian Voss remembers the 136 victims of the Berlin Wall, visually inspired by the research work of historians like Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke, published in the volume entitled Die Todesopfer an der Berliner Mauer 1961-1989. The two authors virtually reconstructed the Berlin Wall, projecting on its image, as it was, graffiti drawings that suggest or narrate, with words and ideograms, the history of the victims, as it has never been written on the real wall, which was demolished after 1990.


Jani Pietsch has covered in Ausgesperrt aus Europa the filmed image of a wall made of barbed wire (the one that separated the Spanish enclave Melilla in Morocco, as the extreme Southern border of Europe) with loud recordings in four languages (testimonies of immigrants belonging to different generations and areas, forced to choose a life in exile as the only form of survival).



For Doris Hinzen-Röhrig the wall seems to be a visible witness of history, developed in a series of photographs on which the artist intervened with pictorial elements.


The pathway created by the exhibition eventually determines the beholder to make a necessary exercise to remember a common recent history, in order to fight against the inevitable temptation of forgetting. 



Ruxandra Demetrescu

11 October 2016

WALLS
GO ART PROJECTS BERLIN FANTOM
Opening: 14. October, 19 h
Str. Semicercului, Nr. 10
Sector 1
Bucharest 14. - 30. 10.2016