Residence NRW+

In the joint project space
of LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur and Westfälischer Kunstverein.

 

Admission via Westfälischer Kunstverein:
Rothenburg 30
48143 Münster

 

Opening hours:
Tuesday-Sunday: 11 am-7 pm

 

Admission: free

 

"Epilogue"

30 April - 14 May 2021: Jasmin Werner

18 May - 1 June 2021: Sarah Buckner

5 June  - 19 June 2021: Sami Schlichting

23 June - 8 Aug 2021: Pablo Schlumberger

 

From 30 April to 8 August 2021, the project space will host four consecutive solo presentations with accompanying events in which the first fellows of the young artist support programme, launched in 2020, will interrogate the material and discursive framings of their own work. What nourishes an artistic practice? What conditions does it underlie, what conditions does it presuppose? - New works ranging from sculpture and installation to painting, taking advantage of the special showcase situation between the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur and Westfälischer Kunstverein. 

 

Curators 2021: 

Marie Sophie Beckmann (* 1989, lives and works in Berlin)
Julie Robiolle (*1996, lives and works in Geneva)

 

 

 


 

Pablo Schlumberger „Horror Vacui“

23 June - (extended until) 8 August 2021

 

A net is a useful metaphor to enter into Pablo Schlumberger’s practice - sometimes tight, sometimes wider, diverse, but always permeable. The stories and symbols he develops never quite add up to a uni ed structure. They have a tendency to escape and be found again some knots later. ‘‘Horror Vacui’’ explores places of drinking [that bar downstairs or your aunt’s Partykeller] as images and structures in which a very speci c cultural Zeitgeist seems to be preserved. The possibility of obsolescence is rarely envisioned here but rather built upon. When there’s nothing left to do but to drink all alone, what remains? Playing with footnotes and doubling, the installation develops two concepts which are important in the artist’s practice: the seemingly insigni cant and its value. The objects you’ll find here are “second hand”, ‘‘vintage’’, “DIY” or just out-of-date, allowing you to more or less discreetly, get that drink you’ve been craving.

———

Schlumberger’s installations are usually developed as a maze within an ostensibly  uid concept: water [or here: alcohol]. Within it, corridors are slightly shifted and signs always are at risk of drifting away, slipping and turning their backs on us. Objects and images, as containers or content, sometimes just fail. Fluctuating between their symbolism within the picture and larger contexts of meaning, they reveal cracks within the semantics of both high and pop culture. [what should we be thinking about a telephone swimming in a glass of wine? Or a found wax bas- relief that inspired this series of paintings? It is just catching dust, waiting to melt when the bar’s doors open onto the afternoon sun.]

———

Things rarely stand for themselves in this exhibition. Or to put it another way: you’ll  nd objects that act as echoes or repositories. You might even find some objects referred to because they don’t really matter. Er schon wieder (II) – calling forth the motif repertoire of Carl Spitzweg and extravagant yet familiar mid- century interiors– hint at the cultural patchwork of post-war Germany. Images we have digested so many times they lost their substance [such as the tipsy monk] are thus endlessly reproduced as an anecdotal decor. Yet the exhibition is entirely about what is sitting next to it, and turns out to be very serious.

———

Take the mini-bar. A decadent device hidden in a mundane object. Drinking as a moment where sense is lost while habits remain as culture. A crystalized gure of insigni cance. A moment of doubling of the sight that is not supposed to create meaning or value. A gadget demanding mastery of your aloneness. An elitist experience for the ones who know what lies behind the clock.

———

[That’s the thing with Pablo, everything is there but he’s never going to willingly provide the full story. Like the one with the guy who’s house started to burn, but the  re extinguisher turned out to be a minibar. He had a drink instead, looking in horror at the void that was slowly replacing his home.]

———

 

 


Public programme

"Tutto Domani" | Friday, 25 June 2021 from 4:30 pm

Through music, Fion Pellacini will bring Pablo Schlumberger’s Dionysian installation to life.

Fion Pellacini (lives and works in Hamburg and Dortmund) is a visual artist and musician. His work has been seen and heard at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg and David Roberts Art Foundation, London, among others.


Sami Schlichting „The Walls Have Ears’’

5 June - 19 June 2021 

Equally elegant and precarious-looking figures and forms populate the space. Their sketchy silhouettes and spiky outgrowths stay on weathered pedestals. Walls and platforms are placed at their side – and it is unclear whether they serve as backdrops or are themselves set accents with their cold light, and protruding cable ties cast ghostly shadows on the wall, which in this scenario could itself be haunted by some kind of ghost. 

The sculptures and wall pieces in ‘‘The Walls Have Ears’’ are largely reappropriations of the artist’s earlier work. Destroyed, discarded, or deposited in places no longer accessible, they exist only in the image archive or as memories. Such a remix practice, however, should
not be understood as mere repetition, in the sense of a digital reproduction logic in which original and copy are identical. Rather, the processes of reappropriation follow an approach that confuses the linear sequence of temporal levels. As if the past was something waiting for its still imminent discovery or realization, it inscribes itself where memories pair with 

From everyday moments and any area of entertainment, Sami Schlichting collects themselves in the mind, often even remaining sensory in the body’s memory: The movement of a cartoon character, the motif of a record cover, the shape of a bulky waste such as David Cronenberg’s The Fly, Ridley Scott’s Alien and Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, or precisely that pop-culturally often quoted phrase that gives this exhibition its name. 

Such references are abstracted in Sami Schlichting’s works in such a way that they, at
most, evoke vague associations. This may also be due to the materials used: organic wire, Styrofoam, and plastic parts. Wavering between chance and intention, excess and reduction, organic-looking form and formlessness, the sculptures stop at none of these poles. One could understand them as embodiments of the impossible, as spawns of an in- between world. 

In this respect, remix could also be understood here in the sense of mutation, and mutation in turn as a perpetual possibility of variation that always holds both the potential of openness and plurality as well as a latent danger–of the monstrous, the contagious, the as an «allegory of the apocalypse caused by the absence of a boundary between the world and the otherworldly, order and chaos, technology and nature, human and non-human life.»1 And principles of origin and authorship, innovation and originality become obsolete at the latest when these new forms give birth to new variations, in a potentially endless game of simulation, repetition and deviation. Nothing is ever new, nothing is ever lost–it only changes form, appearing and again and always differently. 

 

Marie Sophie Beckmann

 

 

Short story

 

Inspired by the motifs of repetition, reproduction, and (trans)mutation prominent in Sami Schlichting's exhibition, author and film scholar Philipp Röding wrote the short story Garbage Mom. As the only escape from the diffuse fear of transformation, a mother admits herself to a clinic for euthanasia. Her daughter, meanwhile, believes that her mother's suicide plans are only out of revenge against her. Neuroses, delusions and inescapable attachment play just as large a role in the narrative as the eternal, looping stuckness produced by language, thought and, ultimately, kinship.

 About the author: Philipp Röding, *1990 in Stuttgart, 2021 doctorate in film studies, is the author of plays, novels and stories. Most recently, Luftschacht Verlag published the near-future novel 20XX.  


 

Sarah Buckner „Head over Heels”

18 May - 1 June 2021

Émile Zola's novel Thérése Raquin begins as follows: "At the end of Rue Guenegaud, coming from the quays, is the arcade of the Pont Neuf, a sort of narrow, dark corridor leading from Rue Mazarine to Rue de Seine. This arcade is at most thirty paces long and two in width. It is paved with worn, loose, yellowish tiles that are never free of acrid moisture. The square panes of glass that form the roof are black with dirt." 

With Thérése Raquin, Zola refined a new literary genre in which the climate, as an expression of an unbridled nature, free of any Cartesian morality, provides the framework for the characters' development and actions. Drawing on this genealogy of characters shaped by atmospheres, contemporary writer and experimental musician Jenny Hval explores a similar motif in Paradise Rot. In it, Hval creates an atmospheric situation that is based, like a climate, on relationality-a climate that, in the novel, permeates human relationships and their emergence in the world to tell the story of an organic, fungible, erotic morality that is intimate yet undefined. 

If I've been talking about literature and not Sarah's painting so far, it's because the works on view in this exhibition were created in parallel with another series that developed while reading, among others, Virginia Woolf's Orlando. As the pandemic invaded our everyday lives, distancing us from our previous normality and bringing with it a vocabulary of contamination, invisible threat, and destabilization of intimacy, Sarah found in novels the material for "L'invitation au voyage." "Head over Heels" thus appears as a formalization of what might be described as atmosphere creation as a narrative practice she employs to tell of an everyday, alienating pandemic in the Kinderhaus neighborhood of Münster.

Indeed, the images shown as part of "Epilog" differ from Sarah Buckner's previous work. In shades of brownish red - the bricks of the Münster suburb - or of green and blue - the humid landscape of a summer afternoon - the works replace earlier dream fantasies conjured by uncanny couplings of motifs with the airy feeling of a damp, all-pervasive climate. As with Hval, Sarah's subjects float and spread out in resonance with the colors of the landscapes, uncertain of the direction they are taking. Sculptures enter this vague, un(assured) scenery for the first time, as a novelty in the mostly two-dimensional work of Sarah Buckner. They seem like the archive of the Kinderhaus district, which is characterized by agriculture, and at the same time make us think of Ex-Voto. The reification of a motif that appears here may testify not least to a primordial human desire - a desire that seems downright necessary in the surrender of space and time: to grasp something and hold on to it, in contrast to the fleeting, elusive, and blurring worlds of color in the paintings. 

But it would be missing the point if I were to describe Sarah's painting as a mere echo of literature. If a narrative only comes to life with the words, these not only seem to fall silent in Sarah's exhibition. More than that, there is no need to speak them at all. For words, mine included, can at most scratch the surface of a meaning that has organically condensed with the help of moisture, quiet eroticism, and immediate intimacy.

And there, where my fingernails have left traces, a rift may open up through which one might get a glimpse of a search for a possible position, an identity within an affective, restless world.

 

 

 

 

 

Jasmin Werner „Unschuldsengel“

30 April - 14 May 2021

Spot on. Senorita Latifa Sharifah with angel wings in front of - and inside - the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Facades, columns, steel, concrete, glass. Architectures of power, in which the ideology of national grandeur, optionally also the belief in a great idea, be it capitalism or socialism, manifest themselves. Viewing platforms allow the view from above instead of below, the city becomes an experience, the overview a commodity. And behind the window frames: even more angels of (in)guilt, only from other times. Corporate identities, one hand holding the other. Western Union and Remitly, send money online fast. 

What we see are smartphone images, logos of money transfer services, and excerpts from archival reproductions of 15th-century paintings from larger sacred representation contexts, donated to the Westfälischer Kunstverein and given on permanent loan to the LWL Museum of Art and Culture, where they are on display in the current collection presentation. A kind of transfer business between those two institutions that the project space connects as an in-between space. The lamenting, mourning, praying angels are fragments from the high altar of the Benedictine monastery Liesborn. As "still usable fragments," they were sawed out when the rest of the altar was accidentally defiled, according to the museum's inventory catalog. The four angel fragments are therefore still of value - not least as exhibits and clues for an elaborate reconstruction of the altar, in which various experts, institutions and collections participated.

Printed on protective netting and fixed to aluminum frames, the angels, architectures, and lettering are superimposed by Jasmin Werner to form montages and interconnected on an image surface.  Together, the frames hanging from the ceiling and on the wall or standing in the room, facing the window front of the project space, result in an arrangement whose provisional materiality is also reminiscent of montage: here something is (re)built and (re)constructed, here something is created. Possibly not permanent, but there for the moment, as a sign of promise. Like tarpaulins on a construction site scaffolding, printed with images of a not yet existing - or entirely imagined - building facade. 

Even without knowing the respective history of the pictures in detail, the suggested connections become perceptible. The image montages create an associative reference system of transfer and circulation: it is about exchange and displacement of both signs and their cultural value and meaning as well as power and morality, guilt and debt. For the question of debt is never only one of money, but at the same time a political one and most closely interwoven with - religiously shaped - ideas of morality. Particularly in the Middle Ages, the merging of the forming world religions and trade markets produces a logic and rhetoric of debt that has changed little to this day. If we speak of dependence and freedom, forgiveness and sin, of the true and the false in our global capitalist economic and social system, it still boils down to the millennia-old question: Who owes what to whom?

                                                                                                                                                                                              Marie Sophie Beckmann

 

 

 


Public Programme

Debt and Debts | A Conversation between Dr Petra Marx and Prof Dr Aloys Prinz (in German)

At the invitation of the artist Jasmin Werner, Dr Petra Marx (Curator for the Medieval Collection of the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur) and Prof Dr Aloys Prinz (Director of the Institute of Finance at the University of Münster (WWU)) talk about the historical and contemporary interweaving of moral guilt and financial debt, which the artist illuminates with her newly produced works. The conversation was recorded in Jasmin Werner's exhibition "Unschuldsengel" ("Innocent Angels").


Residence NRW⁺ is a practice-oriented fellowship programme for particularly talented young artists (artists and curators) in the field of contemporary art based in Münster. The programme is affiliated with the Kunsthalle Münster, an institution of the city of Münster, and is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, by the Kunststiftung NRW and by the Swiss cultural foundation Pro Helvetia.