Afterglow 24.08.-14.09.2023
https://www.saasfeepavillon.de/satellit/soloshows/
Vielleicht tun wir, wenn wir etwas sehen und plötzlich davon berührt, betroffen sind, nichts anderes, als daß wir uns einer wesentlichen Dimension des Blicks öffnen, bei der das Sehen zu jenem asymptotischen Spiel zwischen Nähe (bis hin zur wirklichen oder vorgestellten Berührung) und Ferne (bis hin zum wirklichen oder vorgestellten Verschwinden und Verlust) wird.1
Right where heaven and earth meet, where the hours of the day emerge in a variety of colours and dissolve into darkness as time progresses, there lies the horizon. A borderline whose perception - both ideally and in terms of perspective - can vary depending on the viewer's location. According to the cliché, its sight is atmospherically and romantically charged, especially at sunrise and sunset. A phenomenon that Caspar David Friedrich already tried to capture in some of his paintings. The longing gaze into the distance momentarily suggests that anything is possible. It allows the viewer to temporarily escape from the (sobering) reality and dream. In Afterglow, Maria Moritz deliberately breaks with this perception of this spectacle of nature. Her site-specific mural, made with airbrush and acrylic spray paint, captures the so-called "blue hour", but it directs the gaze from the outside to the inside, from the distance back into the exhibition space. Through the iridescent hues that fade into the darkness of the wall, Moritz suggests a flow of time that appears to have stopped. In this way, she freezes the seemingly eternal daydream and its potential to lose oneself in it extinguishes. So what now? Where do the thoughts go that don't want to stay in reality, but also can't lose their way along the horizon? The slowly dawning awareness of the complex of image, depiction and context may at first feel like a reality bump, but on the other hand it enables a better understanding of the painterly strategies of seduction used by Moritz. Coquetting with the sublime, the horizon line, through its reduced and abstracted translation, disrupts the emerging illusionistic space and consciously plays with the rising (dis)illusion, in order to surrender to the moment all over again.
Didi-Huberman, Georges; Sedlaczek, Markus (1999): Was wir sehen blickt uns an. Zur Metapsychologie des Bildes. 1 München: Fink (Bild und Text), p. 150.
For the opening, Nicolas Buzzi accompanied the work with a sound installation. Using an acoustic beamformer, they projected field recordings and electronically generated sounds onto Moritz's horizon as well as onto two mirrors, which thus reflected image and sound into the exhibition space.’
Text: Vivien Kämpf
Teaser 15 July- 19. August 2023
https://deuxdeux.de/Maria-Moritz-Teaser
Maria Moritz‘ malerische Praxis fokussiert sich auf die Artikulation eines Zwischenraums, in dem unsere Wahrnehmung gleichermaßen affiziert und irritiert wird. Zwar ist es möglich, Orte, Gegenstände, Lebewesen und Situationen zu erkennen, eine lückenlose Interpretation ihrer Werke auf Basis der Sujets gestaltet sich jedoch schwierig. Was sich vielmehr aufdrängt, ist ein Nachdenken über die Malerei an sich und ihr Potential, Uneindeutigkeit zu produzieren sowie einen Blick in eine Bildwelt über die Mimesis der Wirklichkeit hinaus zu ermöglichen. Die Ausstellung Teaser greift diese künstlerische Verortung im Dazwischen auf – als Spannungsmoment zwischen Entblößung und Zurückhaltung, tiefer Vertrautheit und fast surreal anmutender Fremdheit, die den Werken etwas Unheimliches zu Teil werden lässt.
Die Werke Mühlgasse 8, Haardtring 15, Elbestraße 41,und Elbestraße 20 ließen sich lose als eine Serie begreifen, die ausgehend vom Interieur des Schlafzimmers die Leinwand als Projektionsfläche unterschiedlicher Sehnsüchte und Ängste erforscht: Moritz‘ Betten sind sind zwar leer, die zu organischen Wülsten verknoteten Bettdecken scheinen in ihrer fleischigen oder grünblauen Farbigkeit jedoch wie eine vage Erinnerung an vergangene, darin verweilende Körper. Die Tapete eines Sonnenuntergangs suggeriert die Möglichkeit eines paradiesischen Anderswo im beschränkten Privaten, während die malerische Fläche eines aufgewühlten Lakens als voyeuristischer Imaginationsraum fungiert – was wohl davor geschah? Oder noch geschehen wird? Vor allem in Haardtring 15treibt Moritz dieses Vermögen, malerisch über ein so emotional wie gesellschaftlich besetztes Motiv wie das Schlafzimmer, Unbewusstes auszuloten, an ein kritisches Spannungsmoment.
Im Gegensatz zu dem lebensweltlich noch identifizierbaren Elbestraße 41 verläuft das nicht mehr räumlich klar abzugrenzende Bett nach unten ins Nichts.
Das obere Ende des Gegenstands scheint vor dem pinken Hintergrund zu glühen. So wird der private Raum wider seiner sozialen Entsprechung zur dramatisch aufgeladenen Bühne, auf der eine zusammengeknüllte Decke wie ein bemitleidenswertes Wesen à la Francis Bacon dem Publikum zur Schau gestellt wird.
Diese ungeschützte Bloßstellung des Bildsubjekts wird im Selbstportrait not inward, not close noch ein Stück weitergetrieben und zeigt die Künstlerin als zwischen Kissen gequetschten, schwebenden Kopf vor gelbem Hintergrund. Ihre Augen rollen sich geradezu besessen in den Kopf. Die Figur scheint dem physischen Druck kaum standhalten zu können und gibt sich, mit versteinerter Miene, der Bewegung im Bildraum hin. Die Kräfte, die auf sie Einwirken, lassen sich dabei nur erahnen. Sind es die Kehrseiten des Kunstbetriebs und die Erwartungen eines anonymen Publikums, die untrennbar mit dem eigenen Anspruch verschmelzen?
Während die Serie der Schlafzimmerinterieurs sowie das Selbstportrait den Titel der Ausstellung, Teaser, als assoziativen Raum von Versprechungen, Zuschreibungen und Erwartungshaltungen aufgreifen, zeigt Untitled (sssss) uns einen konkreten Akteur als lockende, verführende Instanz. Eine Schlange bewegt ihre Zunge in Richtung eines Ohres, das den Fluchtpunkt des Gemäldes bildet. Das akkurat drapierte Haar der anonymen Figur verläuft in harter Kante zu ihrem Hals, sodass eine wirklichkeitsgetreue Körperlichkeit zu Gunsten der Form als Form negiert wird. Durch seine Zentrierung wird das Ohr als ein zu deutendes Symbol präsentiert, das durch seine Verbindung mit der
Schlange, den Akt der (teuflischen) Verheißung selbst thematisch werden lässt. Untitled (sssss) eröffnet dabei, über die Interpretation des Visuellen hinaus, einen Raum auditiver Imagination – Möchte sie verführen, manipulieren oder ins Gewissen reden? Macht sie falsche Versprechungen oder sich womöglich über uns lustig? Welche Worte verbergen sich wohl im Züngeln der Schlange, diesem Mischwesen aus Es und Über-Ich, das auf der Schulter sitzt? Eine Frage, die sich, so wird in Maria Moritz‘ Arbeiten trotz ihres malerischen Autonomieanspruchs immer wieder deutlich, nie ohne ein Verhältnis zu den jeweiligen Betrachter*innen beantworten lässt.
Text: Emily Nill
Haunted Bodies – Of Subjects, Cyborgs and Ghosts
07.07.2023 – 04.08.2023
Neven Allgeier & Samantha Bohatsch, Louisa Clement, Un-Zu Ha-Nul Lee, Maria Moritz, Murat Önen, Evelyn Plaschg and Julius Pristauz
The paradox of the body is that there is no outside. The moment we speak and think about it, we always do so from our own embodied position - with and through our body. The self-understanding with which we establish ourselves as subjects is mostly formed through the distinction from the Other: We recognise ourselves and we recognise the other, we know who we are, who belongs to us and who doesn't. This mode also forms the breeding ground for our own bodily position. This modus thereby also constitutes the breeding ground for conflicts. The collective "we" only grows in demarcation from the collective "other". In her monograph "Excitable Speech. A Politics of the performance" (1997), the philosopher Judith Butler considers this as the origin of violence. They are directed at the vulnerability of the body and legitimise themselves through the emphasis on the bodily alien. Another paradox - complicating the latter rather than standing alongside it as an accomplice - is the digital presence of bodies. Through our digital identities, we surrender our corporeality, alienating ourselves from its presence in favour of a disembodied, ghostly presence that takes place within us but also simultaneously outside of us. The idea that body and consciousness are separate and the former merely serves as a shell for the latter is thus outdated for the present, even if it cannot simply be dissolved into the contrary. With the transfer to the digital, we might be moving back into an actual dissolution of the carnal body, towards a digitally expanded corporeality. But this dissolution is certainly not a turning away from the physical body. Back in the corporeal present, the body is nevertheless always emphasised as the main medium of the subjective. We are talking about the optimisation of bodies, disciplining of bodies, projections and reflections on and against them, all of which exist simultaneously, as the body oscillates between body surface and political object. However, instead of the body being autonomous (think of modes of contemplation or the argument that the body functions as a visual communication surface), it is much more the bodily archive of biopolitical power effects. In the net of life, our bodies are confronted with altered capitalist techniques of value creation that haunt our inner as well as outer subjectivity. Thus, the body of the present, in its corporeality, exists as one without sovereignty, as it is shaped by discursive powers, whether through the finding of its own contour by the Other or through biopolitical, scientific, economic or visual practices. The body of the present is one without form, one haunted by ghosts, a haunted body. The body of the present is one that is only formed through the performative living and experience, through the incarnation of the norm, through the existence of organised spaces of action. The interest of the exhibition Haunted Bodies. Of Subjects, Cyborgs and Ghosts is to explore visual representations of specific subject configurations in their mediality and artistic language and to bring them into dialogue with each other. What powers are realised in the artistic identity-body-subject designs? The invited positions negotiate different power structures on and with the body through their sculptural, painterly, photographic and performative practices.
Curated by Seda Pesen, Leon Jankowiak
Text by Seda Pesen, Leon Jankowiak
Afterglow 24.08.-14.09.2023
https://www.saasfeepavillon.de/satellit/soloshows/
Vielleicht tun wir, wenn wir etwas sehen und plötzlich davon berührt, betroffen sind, nichts anderes, als daß wir uns einer wesentlichen Dimension des Blicks öffnen, bei der das Sehen zu jenem asymptotischen Spiel zwischen Nähe (bis hin zur wirklichen oder vorgestellten Berührung) und Ferne (bis hin zum wirklichen oder vorgestellten Verschwinden und Verlust) wird.1
Right where heaven and earth meet, where the hours of the day emerge in a variety of colours and dissolve into darkness as time progresses, there lies the horizon. A borderline whose perception - both ideally and in terms of perspective - can vary depending on the viewer's location. According to the cliché, its sight is atmospherically and romantically charged, especially at sunrise and sunset. A phenomenon that Caspar David Friedrich already tried to capture in some of his paintings. The longing gaze into the distance momentarily suggests that anything is possible. It allows the viewer to temporarily escape from the (sobering) reality and dream. In Afterglow, Maria Moritz deliberately breaks with this perception of this spectacle of nature. Her site-specific mural, made with airbrush and acrylic spray paint, captures the so-called "blue hour", but it directs the gaze from the outside to the inside, from the distance back into the exhibition space. Through the iridescent hues that fade into the darkness of the wall, Moritz suggests a flow of time that appears to have stopped. In this way, she freezes the seemingly eternal daydream and its potential to lose oneself in it extinguishes. So what now? Where do the thoughts go that don't want to stay in reality, but also can't lose their way along the horizon? The slowly dawning awareness of the complex of image, depiction and context may at first feel like a reality bump, but on the other hand it enables a better understanding of the painterly strategies of seduction used by Moritz. Coquetting with the sublime, the horizon line, through its reduced and abstracted translation, disrupts the emerging illusionistic space and consciously plays with the rising (dis)illusion, in order to surrender to the moment all over again.
Didi-Huberman, Georges; Sedlaczek, Markus (1999): Was wir sehen blickt uns an. Zur Metapsychologie des Bildes. 1 München: Fink (Bild und Text), p. 150.
For the opening, Nicolas Buzzi accompanied the work with a sound installation. Using an acoustic beamformer, they projected field recordings and electronically generated sounds onto Moritz's horizon as well as onto two mirrors, which thus reflected image and sound into the exhibition space.’
Text: Vivien Kämpf
Haunted Bodies – Of Subjects, Cyborgs and Ghosts
07.07.2023 – 04.08.2023
Neven Allgeier & Samantha Bohatsch, Louisa Clement, Un-Zu Ha-Nul Lee, Maria Moritz, Murat Önen, Evelyn Plaschg and Julius Pristauz
The paradox of the body is that there is no outside. The moment we speak and think about it, we always do so from our own embodied position - with and through our body. The self-understanding with which we establish ourselves as subjects is mostly formed through the distinction from the Other: We recognise ourselves and we recognise the other, we know who we are, who belongs to us and who doesn't. This mode also forms the breeding ground for our own bodily position. This modus thereby also constitutes the breeding ground for conflicts. The collective "we" only grows in demarcation from the collective "other". In her monograph "Excitable Speech. A Politics of the performance" (1997), the philosopher Judith Butler considers this as the origin of violence. They are directed at the vulnerability of the body and legitimise themselves through the emphasis on the bodily alien. Another paradox - complicating the latter rather than standing alongside it as an accomplice - is the digital presence of bodies. Through our digital identities, we surrender our corporeality, alienating ourselves from its presence in favour of a disembodied, ghostly presence that takes place within us but also simultaneously outside of us. The idea that body and consciousness are separate and the former merely serves as a shell for the latter is thus outdated for the present, even if it cannot simply be dissolved into the contrary. With the transfer to the digital, we might be moving back into an actual dissolution of the carnal body, towards a digitally expanded corporeality. But this dissolution is certainly not a turning away from the physical body. Back in the corporeal present, the body is nevertheless always emphasised as the main medium of the subjective. We are talking about the optimisation of bodies, disciplining of bodies, projections and reflections on and against them, all of which exist simultaneously, as the body oscillates between body surface and political object. However, instead of the body being autonomous (think of modes of contemplation or the argument that the body functions as a visual communication surface), it is much more the bodily archive of biopolitical power effects. In the net of life, our bodies are confronted with altered capitalist techniques of value creation that haunt our inner as well as outer subjectivity. Thus, the body of the present, in its corporeality, exists as one without sovereignty, as it is shaped by discursive powers, whether through the finding of its own contour by the Other or through biopolitical, scientific, economic or visual practices. The body of the present is one without form, one haunted by ghosts, a haunted body. The body of the present is one that is only formed through the performative living and experience, through the incarnation of the norm, through the existence of organised spaces of action. The interest of the exhibition Haunted Bodies. Of Subjects, Cyborgs and Ghosts is to explore visual representations of specific subject configurations in their mediality and artistic language and to bring them into dialogue with each other. What powers are realised in the artistic identity-body-subject designs? The invited positions negotiate different power structures on and with the body through their sculptural, painterly, photographic and performative practices.
Curated by Seda Pesen, Leon Jankowiak
Text by Seda Pesen, Leon Jankowiak