Haus der Kunst

Jan Erbelding

Still No Guides

10 Jun - 31 Dec 2022

Jan Erbelding. Still No Guides
Installation view at Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2022
Photo: Judith Buss
Curators: Luisa Seipp und Damian Lentini

"Not being able to understand the things that so often elude and fascinate and all the time until the rupture and even after the rupture, which will not be a real rupture, still in fact. Facing this in a friendly way initially, with curiosity. Wanting to understand, wanting to observe, wanting to feel what language is doing, what conception of the world is being created, what other things are being constructed. Sensing one's own boundaries in thought, touching them. Feelers. Simply shifting that boundary. What cannot be thought or simply cannot be thought yet. Paying attention to this. Opening up to the unknown, to emptiness. Simply catapulting oneself over it, writing, thinking, dreaming. Or music. Singing. Dancing. Or whatever. Plants. Substances. Breathing. Sleeping. Painting. Wanting to live in truth and to be in the world, fully. Concrete work on reality. Wanting to step over it and beyond. Inconsistencies. Still no guides. Becoming world oneself. Perhaps finding a language while searching, perhaps for the unknown, the not yet conceived, the 'utopia' "

Jan Erbelding is an author, photographer and conceptual artist. His artistic practice is predominantly text-based and takes the form of performances, spatial installations and his own publications. Erbelding combines personal experiences and ideas with historical facts and figures, literary references and socio-political commentaries in order to create poetic narratives. For Haus der Kunst, the Munichbased artist has written a new text work that revolves around the life and work of the French philosopher Simone Weil. In this room-encompassing installation, spoken fragments of the text can be heard over loudspeakers, creating a dialogue with the printed text, which is kept on a bookshelf. In the poetic and narrative installation still no guides, visitors are presented with an interplay of different levels of perception: hearing, seeing, feeling, and reading. Visitors are invited to pause and empathise with the life and work of Simone Weil as narrated by Jan Erbelding.

About Jan Erbelding

Jan Erbelding is an author, photographer and object artist. Together with Leo Heinik and MariaVMier, he has been running the Munich Off-Space and the magazine Ruine München since 2017. His artistic practice is text-based and communicated through performances as well as in his own publications. Erbelding combines his immediate surroundings as well as personal sensations such as emotions, dreams or dialogues with literary references, historical facts and figures as well as socio-political commentaries into poetic first-person narratives. After training as a photographer and studying media art and photography at the University of Design in Karlsruhe, Erbelding studied fine art with Olaf Nicolai at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts from 2012 to 2016. The artist lives and works in Munich.