Patrycja German
24 Nov 2007 - 02 Feb 2008
PATRYCJA GERMAN
The performance and video artist Patrycja German, whose installation “a radish a day keeps the pain away” will be shown in the video room, also uses the stylistic means of exaggeration and paradoxical symbolic transformation in her works to question certain moods, tabooed zones and clichés. German reduces her actions to what is essential so as to abstract from both the figure and the act itself to such a degree that a generally valid statement is made. At the same time, she exceeds limits in her performances; she offers herself to the audience to engage in interaction or directly challenges them with the aim of exploring her own reactions and those of others and elucidate invisible sets of rules, condensed in the moment of interaction with the other. In the process, her body becomes an instance of resistance which she as well as the viewer must overcome.
Patrycja German’s works leave the viewer vacillating between permanent attraction and repulsion; whether interacting or merely viewing, he is thrown back upon himself to then take on a position vis-à-vis the artist.
In “a radish a day keeps the pain away”, the work presented in the exhibition, the artist, dressed in a red dress, is on all fours on a white tablecloth. She puts a white radish into her mouth, tries to hold on to it with her red lips, but has to slowly let it slip out again until it falls to the floor. Comparable to a ritual, she arranged and performed this act each day anew; a total of 50 repetitions are brought together as a wall-filling video tableaux.
What happens with the artist in these repetitions, what takes place in the image and the associations the viewers have? “What happens if you proceed from a point at which something usually ends, if you go further than where you otherwise always stop? What happens if – despite the pre-programmed failure – you face the situation and the deeply rooted fear of failing?”
The performance and video artist Patrycja German, whose installation “a radish a day keeps the pain away” will be shown in the video room, also uses the stylistic means of exaggeration and paradoxical symbolic transformation in her works to question certain moods, tabooed zones and clichés. German reduces her actions to what is essential so as to abstract from both the figure and the act itself to such a degree that a generally valid statement is made. At the same time, she exceeds limits in her performances; she offers herself to the audience to engage in interaction or directly challenges them with the aim of exploring her own reactions and those of others and elucidate invisible sets of rules, condensed in the moment of interaction with the other. In the process, her body becomes an instance of resistance which she as well as the viewer must overcome.
Patrycja German’s works leave the viewer vacillating between permanent attraction and repulsion; whether interacting or merely viewing, he is thrown back upon himself to then take on a position vis-à-vis the artist.
In “a radish a day keeps the pain away”, the work presented in the exhibition, the artist, dressed in a red dress, is on all fours on a white tablecloth. She puts a white radish into her mouth, tries to hold on to it with her red lips, but has to slowly let it slip out again until it falls to the floor. Comparable to a ritual, she arranged and performed this act each day anew; a total of 50 repetitions are brought together as a wall-filling video tableaux.
What happens with the artist in these repetitions, what takes place in the image and the associations the viewers have? “What happens if you proceed from a point at which something usually ends, if you go further than where you otherwise always stop? What happens if – despite the pre-programmed failure – you face the situation and the deeply rooted fear of failing?”