Tina Schulz
Winner of the Sachsen LB scholarship 2004
17 Sep - 06 Nov 2005
Tina Schulz, winner of the project scholarship of the Leipzig Gallery of Contemporary Art and the Saxony Federal State Bank for the year 2004, is exhibiting her spatial installation “Notizen aus dem OBS-Raum” [“Notes from the OBS zone”] which was created in the course of the past year.
Tina Schulz’s work links materials and objects of diverse origins to form a spatial collage that revolves around the question of the production of sense and significance through the medium of art. Perceived as an open system with constantly shifting boundaries, art is for Tina Schulz a playing field on which signs and images from all walks of life can crop up – when adopted in the field of art, however, their significance undergoes a transformation.
The artist resorts to a strategy of appropriation, through which none of the references she makes is allowed to get away unscathed: objects and images are taken out of their context and modified, to be transferred into new situations that serve exclusively for the generation of significance within Tina Schulz’s work. “Notizen aus dem OBS-Raum”, for instance, includes references to cybernetics as well as to the works of Marcel Broodthaers and Bruce Nauman. The decisive factors in the choice of these allusions are on the one hand Broodthaer’s context-critical handling of language, and on the other the use of the artist’s own body and the way it is perceived as raw material for art, such as we find in Nauman. Tina Schulz assigns a pre-eminent role to language, as a shifter between sense perception and recognized or acknowledged meanings: in her text graphics the viewer is confronted with the diary-like jottings of an I, the subject of which consists in the changes and oscillations within a system that is not defined with any great precision. Oscillating between dry analysis and dreamy digression, there is no final level of meaning offered: the I of the fragmentary text remains open, as do its location and the activity it is engaged in – only language at once evokes and assumes a possible scenery. In combination with the mise en scène of the exhibition rooms and the objects and pictures on view, the textual content however undergoes a transposition, becoming a reflection on art, the perception of art and the positions of those who act in or in relation to it.
Tina Schulz’s work links materials and objects of diverse origins to form a spatial collage that revolves around the question of the production of sense and significance through the medium of art. Perceived as an open system with constantly shifting boundaries, art is for Tina Schulz a playing field on which signs and images from all walks of life can crop up – when adopted in the field of art, however, their significance undergoes a transformation.
The artist resorts to a strategy of appropriation, through which none of the references she makes is allowed to get away unscathed: objects and images are taken out of their context and modified, to be transferred into new situations that serve exclusively for the generation of significance within Tina Schulz’s work. “Notizen aus dem OBS-Raum”, for instance, includes references to cybernetics as well as to the works of Marcel Broodthaers and Bruce Nauman. The decisive factors in the choice of these allusions are on the one hand Broodthaer’s context-critical handling of language, and on the other the use of the artist’s own body and the way it is perceived as raw material for art, such as we find in Nauman. Tina Schulz assigns a pre-eminent role to language, as a shifter between sense perception and recognized or acknowledged meanings: in her text graphics the viewer is confronted with the diary-like jottings of an I, the subject of which consists in the changes and oscillations within a system that is not defined with any great precision. Oscillating between dry analysis and dreamy digression, there is no final level of meaning offered: the I of the fragmentary text remains open, as do its location and the activity it is engaged in – only language at once evokes and assumes a possible scenery. In combination with the mise en scène of the exhibition rooms and the objects and pictures on view, the textual content however undergoes a transposition, becoming a reflection on art, the perception of art and the positions of those who act in or in relation to it.