At the Venice Biennale of 2003, Santiago Sierra walled in the entrance to the Spanish Pavilion and hired security guards to keep viewers out. Only those who held valid Spanish passports were allowed the privilege of entering the building. Non-Spanish visitors were puzzled, insulted, irate, annoyed, and more--though they should hardly have been surprised, given Sierra's history of aggressively toying with economic, political, and social issues to the point of genuine discomfort on the part of the viewer. Sierra's most recent project, Haus im Schlamm (House in Mud) at the kestnergesellschaft in Hannover, Germany, links the institution's history with the city's. Taking as his starting point the manmade origins of Lake Masch, which was created in the city center as part of a government unemployment-relief program in the mid-1930s, Sierra addresses the question of what work is really worth. Visitors to the museum, which is the city's oldest art venue, are confronted with two rooms full of 400 tons of mud, spread on the floor and walls. Wearing a pair of the provided rubber boots or just bare feet, viewers are invited to trudge through and leave their tracks all over the art establishment.

Santiago Sierra: House In Mud (German and English Edition)

Arts & Photography

Wagner, Hilke

Hieber, Lutz

Rohrbein, Waldemar

Uhlmann, Gordon

Individual Artists

Hatje Cantz Publishers

Peter Doig paints without wanting to depict nature. Instead, his models from photography, film, books, and other media offer room for the viewer's ideas. Somehow, conspicuous citations of the individual and partly identifiable motifs produce an expressive force manifested in the final paintings. His recent work from Trinidad &amp; Tobago is presented for the first time in this volume.

Peter Doig: Metropolitain (German and English Edition)

Schwenk, Bernhart

Walther König, Köln

Since the 1980s, Barbara Kruger has been widely considered one of the most important artists of her generation. A brilliant conceptualist who works with abrasive, large-format text and image collages, often installed to create overwhelming, all-encompassing propagandistic environments, she appropriates advertising imagery and other symbols of conspicuous consumption to question stereotypes and ask questions about identity and the cultural representation of power. This volume documents a 2006 graphic installation as well as the video installation, Twelve, both installed at kestnergesellschaft in Hannover. Kruger was awarded the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2005 Venice Biennale. She is represented in New York by Mary Boone.

Barbara Kruger: Desire Exists Where Pleasure is Absent

Görner, Veit

Moll, Frank-Thorsten

History & Criticism

Kerber

How did you do this Mr. Téllez? This catalog documents the first museum-based solo exhibition in Germany by the New York artist Javier Téllez (born 1969 in Venezuela). This monograph would seem to be long overdue in view of the fact that the artist has already taken part in innumerable group exhibitions, such as the Biennials in Venice (2001 and 2003), Sydney (2004) or the Whitney Biennial (2008), as well as Manifesta 7. Javier Téllez, whose work oscillates between fiction and documentation, reinterprets classic material from the stage and screen, and deconstructs accustomed socio-cultural boundaries. Alongside installations by the artist, the Kunstverein also presented Téllez’s four most important films. »La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc« (Rozelle Hospital, Sydney; 2004) is regarded as being exemplary for Téllez’s pioneering film production. The reworked silent film »Jeanne d’Arc« (1928) and the film »Twelve and a Marionette«, which was shot in a psychiatric clinic, were shown as a double projection. Twelve women speak in very different ways about the institutional treatment of their illnesses (depression, schizophrenia). The juxtaposed projections of Jeanne d’Arc – who was stigmatized and persecuted in her day as a soul possessed and is recognized nowadays as a misunderstood visionary and national hero – place the patients’ maladies in an altogether new light. In the film »Oedipus Marshal« (2006), Téllez stages Sophocles’classic tragedy, »Oedipus Rex«, with Western costumes and Japanese masks. An abandoned gold rush town in Colorado served as the backdrop. The masks and maskings in Téllez’s films introduce a meta level. As ambivalent elements, they both conceal or demystify them at the same time; they destabilize personality boundaries, but also symbolize the facility that psychiatric patients – whom Téllez tends to employ as actors – have for mimicry. »Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See« (2007) draws on the eponymous classic by Diderot and the Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant. The parable makes us aware of the fact that »reality« is by no means an objective constant, but defined instead by our own perception. Téllez’s film »Caligari und der Schlafwandler« (Caligari and the Sleepwalker; 2008), is based on the 1919 Expressionist silent film, »The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari«. In Telléz’s interpretation, Dr. Caligari carries out a kind of therapeutic conversation with Cesare, who has been in a kind on somnambulist state for years and can only communicate by means of slabs of slate. The mixture of layers of reality, changes of identity, and polyphony are common thematic strands taken up by, but also implemented in terms of representational techniques by Téllez’s films. By selecting the Erich Mendelsohn’s icon of Expressionist architecture, the Einstein Tower in Potsdam, as the location for the film, he also points to an epoch of art and film history in which pathological disturbances were addressed for the first time and inspiration duly drawn from them.

Javier Téllez: 4 1/2: Cat. Kunstverein Braunschweig (English and German Edition)

Snoeck

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