10.1. until 5.3.2017
Andrea Fraser
»Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk«

The perception of art’s environment, but also doubts as to whether museums and their players are really merely “neutral” mediators of art are themes of central importance to Andrea Fraser’s œuvre. With her videos, performances and installations, the artist is a protagonist of “institutional critique”, that, since the 1960s, has concerned itself with the art world and its social, institutional and economic structures as well as its activities. »Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk« is one of the earliest “Gallery Talks” with whose aid Fraser has been investigating the presentation forms, hierarchies and exclusion mechanisms of art institutions since the mid-1980s.

The video shows a performance the artist carried out at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the role of “Jane Castleton”, a fictive member of the museum education staff, she gives a cryptic and humorous guided tour of the museum, which is home to one of the most prominent collections of arts and crafts in the U.S. In terms of content, Fraser’s comments are based on documents and texts from the museum archives, but also from the fields of psychoanalysis, economics and sociology. In the video she speaks passionately, and directly into the camera. As is customary in guided tours, she begins with an introduction to the museum’s history and collection. She digresses increasingly, going into details about peripheral aspects of the museum such as the cloakroom, restrooms or museum shop, and muses about social history and the museum’s responsibilities towards society in the U.S. With theatrical skill, she thus cleverly and critically analyses relationships between class and taste, philanthropy and politics and their consequences.

In “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk”, however, Fraser’s focus is on more than just the museum institution and its power structures. Her charming role play also examines the role of the visitors – a role the museum “creates” – as well as artists like herself who work with the museum.

 7.3. until 1.5.2017
Marcel Odenbach
»Im Schiffbruch nicht schwimmen können«

History doesn’t repeat itself. Historical situations and contexts are far too complex. And yet, in Marcel Odenbach’s view, we cannot leave history behind.

The Paris Louvre – the setting of Odenbach’s video “Unable to Swim in a Shipwreck”– is a reservoir of history and a place of memory. In the video, three African men of different ages visit the world-famous museum. They sit down in front of a monumental painting and contemplate it silently. Even though the camera shows only sections of the work in alternation with shots of the men, it is easily identifiable as Théodore Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” (1819). It tells the story of a human disaster that took place on the high seas when the French frigate “Medusa” ran aground off the coast of Mauritania in July 1816. France had just reobtained its colony Senegal. Because there wasn’t enough space on the lifeboats for all the passengers, the crew used the masts to build a raft for 149 persons. Then, however, the connecting line was cut. For thirteen days, the castaways drifted helplessly in the sea, were washed overboard, and massacred one another. Only fifteen survived. The French public was scandalized by the news, and Géricault’s unsparing depiction deeply shocked its audience.

Odenbach’s sequences in the Louvre are interspersed with shots of the surf off the coast of Ghana with superimposed texts. The latter are based on interviews he conducted with the three Africans about their flight: the sea, their lives and feelings of foreignness. At the same time, already in its title, “Unable to Swim in a Shipwreck” points unequivocally to the fact that, in the present refugee crisis, many people do not survive crossings of this kind in the Mediterranean. In this video, as in many of his works, Odenbach thus links history and the present, Europe and Africa. And by renewing the political explosiveness of Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa”, he once again shows that, then and now, human disasters and the consequences of colonial politics defy repression.

3.5. until 2.7.2017
Karsten Krause
»Arrangement of Skin«

To document and preserve nature is a need of human culture – a need that is institutionalized in natural history museums and zoological collections. Karsten Krause visited such “archives of life” in Stuttgart: at the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart and the Wilhelma, he pointed his camera at the human appropriation of nature for the purpose of gaining insights. Within this framework, he focussed especially on taxidermally stuffed animals and their reconstruction and animation in museum presentations.

It sometimes looks as if the camera had replaced the animal’s extinguished gaze at the human being. Krause directs this gaze towards the work of taxidermists and the post-mortem craft they carry out in the museum workshops, where they counter decay with preservation techniques. The filmmaker studies their actions, and the skill and familiarity with which they handle the dead creatures. Often the focus is entirely on their facial expressions, which speak of concentration, experience, accuracy and dedication as they cut, skin, flay, stuff and mount – with, for example, the obituary page of a newspaper spread out underneath. The animals are to look as natural, alive and aesthetically appealing as possible for their exhibition in spectacular dioramas. It is there that they make their final appearance alongside other stuffed animals against backgrounds imitating idealized biotopes – and there that they encounter the species that arranged them.

The visitors’ curiosity is mirrored in the panes of the display cases. Amazed off-screen whispers are heard. The wild is viewed and marvelled at as an art product that, although based on human phantasms, nevertheless continues to resist its object status. The video thus revolves primarily around the contradiction between scientific neutrality and creative interpretation, but also around the pleasure researchers, museums and visitors derive from the imagination.

Supported by Akademie Schloss Solitude and MFG Filmförderung Baden-Württemberg.