Rivane Neuenschwander
28 May - 02 Jul 2005
RIVANE NEUENSCHWANDER
[...]
May 28th 2005 – July 2nd 2005
Gallery Klosterfelde is very happy to announce an exhibition with Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander. It is her second solo show in Germany after her presentation at Frankfurt Portikus in 2001. Neuenschwander, who was born in 1967 and lives in Belo Horizonte, has over the past decade developed a poetic artistic vocabulary of installations, sculptures, photography and video by mixing her interest in serial conceptualism and influences of the Brazilian Neoconcrete movement of the 1970s with a sensual awareness of quotidian materials from her native Brazil and a devotion to the realm of the everyday in general. To a great extent her work is concerned with language, be it oral, written, or gestural, and the translatability of it, as well as its non-ordering and meaningless principles as often found in speech games or chance encounters.
For Gallery Klosterfelde, Neuenschwander has divided the gallery in three rooms defined by the position of its original columns, creating three spatial sculptures that accentuate different parts of the space: its floor, volume, and walls. The first room is dominated by a vast floor installation called "Wer da kommt bin ich (Alarm-Floor)". The piece was inspired by an old Japanese floor construction seen by the artist in the Ninomaru palace in Kyoto in which a floor was prepared in order to function as an alarm system. When one stepped on the wooden walkways heading toward the holy chambers, the cramps underneath it moved up and down, creating a friction between the cramps and the nails that caused the floor to squeak like a bird`s chirping. The floor was reconstructed in collaboration with the musicians of the Brazilian duo O Grivo, who created different "instruments" made out of cans and metal sticks which are spread underneath the pine boards covering the whole gallery floor. When walking along the floor, with every step creating a sound the visitors become aware of their movement and own presence in the space. For the two drawings in the back of the room entitled "First Love (Spoken Portrait)" Neuenschwander asked people to describe their first loves to a professional police sketch drawer. An individual memory of a once loved face was thus transformed into an identikit picture as used in police tactics. This contradiction corresponds to the floor where an alarm system turns into a participatory system of sounds imitating nature.
In the second room, the installation "Crossed-Info" is suspended from the ceiling and forms a giant and confusing three-dimensional crossword puzzle. The sentences are ready-made sentences taken from street banners that one finds everywhere in Brazil: sentences that communicate or advertise, from selling a house to the opening of a beauty salon or a dog that got lost. Cut in its individual letters and painted by professional bannermakers on pieces of fabric, the colorful letters create a spatial net of non-information, where the rich overlapping of image-information results in an abundance of letters and words that ultimately communicate nothing. For the piece "[...]" in the last room, a table with a typewriter and a bench invite visitors to sit down, write a letter and pin it on a green felt wall. The typewriter however is modified so that all the typed letters are substituted by dots, apart from numbers and punctuation marks. What is left is a beautiful formal accumulation of dots and numbers on white pages, senseless repetitive notations hiding their author`s intimate messages. As a result of the visitor`s participation, the green felt pinboard will over the course of the exhibition turn into a wallpainting that conveys meaning only to the people that contributed to it.
For further information and images please contact the gallery.
opening May 27th 2005, 6 – 9 pm
duration of the exhibition May 28th 2005 – July 2nd 2005
opening hours Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 am – 6 pm
© RIVANE NEUENSCHWANDER
Crossed-Info, 2005
street banners paint on linen, cotton strings
Installation view, Klosterfelde Berlin
May – July 2005
[...]
May 28th 2005 – July 2nd 2005
Gallery Klosterfelde is very happy to announce an exhibition with Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander. It is her second solo show in Germany after her presentation at Frankfurt Portikus in 2001. Neuenschwander, who was born in 1967 and lives in Belo Horizonte, has over the past decade developed a poetic artistic vocabulary of installations, sculptures, photography and video by mixing her interest in serial conceptualism and influences of the Brazilian Neoconcrete movement of the 1970s with a sensual awareness of quotidian materials from her native Brazil and a devotion to the realm of the everyday in general. To a great extent her work is concerned with language, be it oral, written, or gestural, and the translatability of it, as well as its non-ordering and meaningless principles as often found in speech games or chance encounters.
For Gallery Klosterfelde, Neuenschwander has divided the gallery in three rooms defined by the position of its original columns, creating three spatial sculptures that accentuate different parts of the space: its floor, volume, and walls. The first room is dominated by a vast floor installation called "Wer da kommt bin ich (Alarm-Floor)". The piece was inspired by an old Japanese floor construction seen by the artist in the Ninomaru palace in Kyoto in which a floor was prepared in order to function as an alarm system. When one stepped on the wooden walkways heading toward the holy chambers, the cramps underneath it moved up and down, creating a friction between the cramps and the nails that caused the floor to squeak like a bird`s chirping. The floor was reconstructed in collaboration with the musicians of the Brazilian duo O Grivo, who created different "instruments" made out of cans and metal sticks which are spread underneath the pine boards covering the whole gallery floor. When walking along the floor, with every step creating a sound the visitors become aware of their movement and own presence in the space. For the two drawings in the back of the room entitled "First Love (Spoken Portrait)" Neuenschwander asked people to describe their first loves to a professional police sketch drawer. An individual memory of a once loved face was thus transformed into an identikit picture as used in police tactics. This contradiction corresponds to the floor where an alarm system turns into a participatory system of sounds imitating nature.
In the second room, the installation "Crossed-Info" is suspended from the ceiling and forms a giant and confusing three-dimensional crossword puzzle. The sentences are ready-made sentences taken from street banners that one finds everywhere in Brazil: sentences that communicate or advertise, from selling a house to the opening of a beauty salon or a dog that got lost. Cut in its individual letters and painted by professional bannermakers on pieces of fabric, the colorful letters create a spatial net of non-information, where the rich overlapping of image-information results in an abundance of letters and words that ultimately communicate nothing. For the piece "[...]" in the last room, a table with a typewriter and a bench invite visitors to sit down, write a letter and pin it on a green felt wall. The typewriter however is modified so that all the typed letters are substituted by dots, apart from numbers and punctuation marks. What is left is a beautiful formal accumulation of dots and numbers on white pages, senseless repetitive notations hiding their author`s intimate messages. As a result of the visitor`s participation, the green felt pinboard will over the course of the exhibition turn into a wallpainting that conveys meaning only to the people that contributed to it.
For further information and images please contact the gallery.
opening May 27th 2005, 6 – 9 pm
duration of the exhibition May 28th 2005 – July 2nd 2005
opening hours Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 am – 6 pm
© RIVANE NEUENSCHWANDER
Crossed-Info, 2005
street banners paint on linen, cotton strings
Installation view, Klosterfelde Berlin
May – July 2005