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Place: Kunsthaus NRW, Kornelimünster

Date: -

Artists: Isabella Fürnkäs, Amit Goffer, Volker Hermes, Olga Jakob, Evamaria Schaller, Christian D. Stefanovici

Curated by: Elke Kania

Works: The Desiring Machines

The Kunsthaus regularly undertakes surveys of young artists from North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). The group exhibition "you are here – Artists from NRW on the Move," curated by Elke Kania, highlights the fact that artistic creation implies movement: many artists in NRW have international backgrounds, they move between places, develop their own artistic identities along their journeys, and create site-specific works.

The exhibition explores different forms of mobility in six artist-dedicated spaces, featuring installations, paintings, photographs, and time-based works conceived specifically for the Kunsthaus. These range from traveling artworks and artists, to artistic research on the former Imperial Abbey as a pilgrimage site, to time travel and navigation through both the digital and real worlds.

In this extraordinary year, the exhibition offers the opportunity to travel visually and mentally — the fragments from travel brochures visible in the first room appear like a glimpse into a bygone world. Travel enables interaction and new perspectives — all of which can be experienced while walking through the artists’ spaces.

The Desiring Machines is a sound installation that consists of 220 individually hand-blown glass droplets suspended from a mash net across the ceiling within a two-channel immersive audio soundscape. Each glass drop is unique and offset in its own way, some with streams of deep red ruby glass inside them. Entering the room activates the sound level of the installation, which creates this dialog with the viewer that the title suggests, we are inside a web of desire. The artist writes, “The glass bodies, composed like fixed movement in space, give the impression of a social fabric. Everything is interwoven, everything flows”. The viewer is enveloped in the soundscape based on excerpts from the publication Anti-Oedipus (1977) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. An intentionally hypnotic and difficult to follow text on the “healthy” and “schizophrenic” people in capitalist society - it is unclear who is who.

A lyrical arc of the work spans tells how productive desire can be, how desire bridges gaps and is a force of creation. Attentive observation reveals engravings in some drops - words in which overriding values, longings and desires crystallize literally onto glass. A kind of journey through the human body begins, from its needs and processes to the mundane circulation of bodily fluids. The red hue of some drops can evoke associations with blood but also other connotations of red, a signifier of passion, like glass, something fragile or frozen as if a manifested snapshot, a frozen state of the fluid, the ephemeral, the intangible.

- Text by Elke Kania

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