Unpredictable Liars Revolt

Isabella Fürnkäs’ Unpredictable Liars are accompanying our exhibition projects for the third time now. In this series—continuously developed from show to show and from place to place—they draw a subtle arc through a variety of urban typologies and sites of social significance. In EINE STRASSE, it is especially committed family-run and individual businesses, which long shaped the once bourgeois grand boulevard, that provide an urban stage for the ensemble of figures. When Lena Moos’s bridal fashion is collaged by Fürnkäs into ambivalent figures—draped in veils and cable strands, seated on a wedding swing—two cultures intertwine in a bold game of mistaken identity and indistinguishability. The figure arranged at Linzbach in the time-honored pipe-decorated setting—wearing garters and a (barrier) chain—not only challenges the staff, but also makes people wonder in the workwear store directly on the Kö how repurposed DIY supplies could become opulent adornments.

With all its intended ambiguities and potential for confusion, Fürnkäs interprets the commercialized urban space—seemingly marked by vacancy and decline—as both a relic and a stage of a production-based society that appears to be nearing its end. However, the continuity of the three exhibitions also reveals a now permanently postponed exodus of that society, which—given its recent revivals in arms races and war production—is taking a dangerous turn toward a toxic economy more willing to drag the world into the abyss than change itself. Fürnkäs’ post-human figures accompany this development as silent witnesses, commenting on it from their dystopian perspective.

In the age of full-blown consumerism and ideological inertia, individual identity is primarily communicated through labels with which an imagined self is positioned and valorised. The different needs and constraints result in a patchwork of veiling self-dramatisation, an anomythic hide-and-seek game of surfaces in which analogue and virtual individuals threaten to collapse. The complexity and diversity of semiotic references form a cross-milieu system that can no longer be penetrated individually and leaves its bearers behind. In the context of the sound collage, the voices of the latter - once the medium with which self-image and self-assurance were communicated - become a barely perceptible whispering, speaking and singing, which at the same time invites direct sensory experience as a stream of consciousness and negotiates questions of role-playing, isolation, interpersonal communication and social co-existence.

- Text by Markus Ambach

"Human-like figures, magnificently draped in colours and patterns, nourished by their engagement with Japanese theatre and arts and crafts; with the appearance of having grown out of painting, populate spaces and, in a limp, melting state, pour colourfully across the floor, becoming drawing again." - Andreas Reihse

The main impulse for the first version of the installation Unpredictable Liars (2017) comes inspired by Japanese Nō theatre, which already has inherent loss of the individual through the use of centuries-old symbols. Another version was formed in 2018-19 with the series Unpredictable Liars II, where the ghostly transhuman characters seem like the last survivors of a utopia. In the new series Unpredictable Liars Revolt (2021), the figures have been encased in epoxy, which further emphasises the congealed character of their disguise, devoid of meaning and stripped of interhumanity.

- Text by Matthias Jakob Becker

They are encased in epoxy, which further emphasizes the frozen character of their veiling, which is devoid of meaning and torn from the interpersonal. The sound coming from the figures, is a barely perceptible whispering, speaking and singing. As a stream of consciousness, it becomes a sensory experience to the listener and negotiates questions of role play, isolation, interpersonal communication and social co-existence.

- Text by Gilles Neiens

Isabella Fürnkäs embraces the heterogeneity of Essen's City Nord and makes use of various locations around the district, which she brings into speculative connection with each other. She creates hybrid apparitions in the consumer world-mostly based on traditional mannequins —out of everyday disposable and leftover materials, which she uses in a comparable way to costume jewellery and other accessories.

In the goth shop Dark Ages, in shop windows such as those belonging to the Enza Home furniture studio or the Art Faktors tattoo studio, on the escalator of the second-hand shelf rental scheme Konsumreform, or inside Expo Alternativ, her figures blend almost imperceptibly into their surroundings while subtly commenting on them. In their ambiguity between the affirmation of consumerism and the fetishism of fashion, they merge into an amalgam of urban neuroses.

At a time in which gender roles are being called into question by fluid (self-assigned) identities, fashion's culture of labelling takes on a dystopian element. In Fürnkäs's work, fashion's symbols of glamour collapse into worn-out cable harnesses, ruined shopping bags, and repurposed DIY supplies. In autumnal shades of blush and ruby, her transhuman figures comment on the urban locations where they are displayed, the shop windows, displays, and display cases becoming ephemeral stages in a consumer society that seems to be coming to an end and is searching for new perspectives.

- Text by Markus Ambach