Claudia Kapp
21 - 27 Jul 2013
CLAUDIA KAPP
Within You Without You
20 - 27 July 2013
We look forward to hosting Claudia Kapp's performance "Ardent Spirits" at SCHAU ORT. Please join us for this surely memorable event on July 19th from 6 - 10 pm. From 20 - 27 July, you are very welcome to visit the gallery for Claudia Kapp's subsequent exhibition "Within You Without You".
Claudia Kapp creates stage-like spaces in which plots unfold according to the orchestration of a minimal choreography, and where an atmospheric blurriness assures that familiar perceptual patterns cease to function. There are often performers, but also an audience which is involved in the framework of the plot. The site decides about the scenario implant- ed within it; the given context assimilates, distorts or enhances. The fact that spaces are variously-deter- mined constructs which are defined above all by their functions numbers among the fundamental insights of modernism, and is today considered to be obvious. The mechanisms through which social contexts are transformed into symbolic representational fields and built-up environments take on the function of imparting identity are, however, both diverse and subtle. Claudia Kapp investigates them in her installational works, which combine light, sound and movement, by creating unstable zones in which the intentionality of prevalent spatial constructs and of the behavioral conventions linked to them is subvert- ed and, not infrequently, replaced by physically palpable irritations. Subsequent to her interventions, the spaces become in a certain sense suspect. They are subjected to a mise-en-scène whose scenario we can only vaguely surmise, even though it would not function without our presence.
In »Ardent Spirits«, women wrapped in black clothing serve liquor from five hundred black glasses. During the vernissage, the guests stand in small groups, converse, are invited to drink. Glasses which have been set down on reflecting serving-carts and mirroring consoles along the walls of the space cast shadows which are refracted prismatically and which seem to partially dematerialize the space. The arrangement which is formed by the glasses set down at random during this evening remains just as it is for the entire course of the exhibition. In this way the ritual of the exhibition opening becomes itself an exhibited object, and the behavior of the public orchestrates the installation. The worldly nature of the schnapps-tasting session, whose tradition of blind tasting is referred to by the black glasses made specially for »Ardent Spirits« , comes into contact with the art-space and its social conventions: Following upon the Apollonian artistic expectation is the prospect of Dionysian intoxication, which discretely seduces the public without initiating the participants into its intentions.
The minimalist aesthetic of the works of Claudia Kapp, with its stark reference to conceptual gestures, should not hide the fact that an essential part of these arrangements consists of the complicated interweaving of social and real desire along with its psychological effects. The material conveyors of these visual transformations—which charge spaces atmospherically, alter them into fields of symbolical representation, and aim at setting in motion the fine mechanisms of uncertainty and longing, participation and refusal—may very well be familiar, but their respective effects summon up a broad repertoire of not only filmic references. Claudia Kapp’s works produce both emotional atmospheric values marked by interiors and the patterns of social behavior connected with them, above all as hermetic systems oriented towards the interior of the subject. Here there cannot and should not be any uninvolved spectators.
(Vanessa Joan Müller from: Behind The Mirrors, Claudia Kapp/The Splash Is Bliss)
Within You Without You
20 - 27 July 2013
We look forward to hosting Claudia Kapp's performance "Ardent Spirits" at SCHAU ORT. Please join us for this surely memorable event on July 19th from 6 - 10 pm. From 20 - 27 July, you are very welcome to visit the gallery for Claudia Kapp's subsequent exhibition "Within You Without You".
Claudia Kapp creates stage-like spaces in which plots unfold according to the orchestration of a minimal choreography, and where an atmospheric blurriness assures that familiar perceptual patterns cease to function. There are often performers, but also an audience which is involved in the framework of the plot. The site decides about the scenario implant- ed within it; the given context assimilates, distorts or enhances. The fact that spaces are variously-deter- mined constructs which are defined above all by their functions numbers among the fundamental insights of modernism, and is today considered to be obvious. The mechanisms through which social contexts are transformed into symbolic representational fields and built-up environments take on the function of imparting identity are, however, both diverse and subtle. Claudia Kapp investigates them in her installational works, which combine light, sound and movement, by creating unstable zones in which the intentionality of prevalent spatial constructs and of the behavioral conventions linked to them is subvert- ed and, not infrequently, replaced by physically palpable irritations. Subsequent to her interventions, the spaces become in a certain sense suspect. They are subjected to a mise-en-scène whose scenario we can only vaguely surmise, even though it would not function without our presence.
In »Ardent Spirits«, women wrapped in black clothing serve liquor from five hundred black glasses. During the vernissage, the guests stand in small groups, converse, are invited to drink. Glasses which have been set down on reflecting serving-carts and mirroring consoles along the walls of the space cast shadows which are refracted prismatically and which seem to partially dematerialize the space. The arrangement which is formed by the glasses set down at random during this evening remains just as it is for the entire course of the exhibition. In this way the ritual of the exhibition opening becomes itself an exhibited object, and the behavior of the public orchestrates the installation. The worldly nature of the schnapps-tasting session, whose tradition of blind tasting is referred to by the black glasses made specially for »Ardent Spirits« , comes into contact with the art-space and its social conventions: Following upon the Apollonian artistic expectation is the prospect of Dionysian intoxication, which discretely seduces the public without initiating the participants into its intentions.
The minimalist aesthetic of the works of Claudia Kapp, with its stark reference to conceptual gestures, should not hide the fact that an essential part of these arrangements consists of the complicated interweaving of social and real desire along with its psychological effects. The material conveyors of these visual transformations—which charge spaces atmospherically, alter them into fields of symbolical representation, and aim at setting in motion the fine mechanisms of uncertainty and longing, participation and refusal—may very well be familiar, but their respective effects summon up a broad repertoire of not only filmic references. Claudia Kapp’s works produce both emotional atmospheric values marked by interiors and the patterns of social behavior connected with them, above all as hermetic systems oriented towards the interior of the subject. Here there cannot and should not be any uninvolved spectators.
(Vanessa Joan Müller from: Behind The Mirrors, Claudia Kapp/The Splash Is Bliss)