“Art is what the world becomes, not what it already is. ” (Karl Kraus, Pro Domo Et Mundo)
Karl Kraus saw art as a way to create an abstraction of the world in order to see it concretely. Um-Kehrungen (About-turn) takes up this idea and presents the strategies of young artists who approach the world we encounter on a daily basis from the most concrete viewpoint possible, i.e. one’s own range of personal experience. The universal, the general is not the starting point of the artists’ investigation; instead they have consciously chosen an artistic approach that concentrates on the private and the familiar. The explicit personal carries the general. Um-Kehrungen focuses on an artistic approach that investigates the atmospheric element of the apparently trite. The production of micro-worlds opens up new views of the commonplace, the familiar, the private. Following Kraus’s idea, however, it is the personal approach of these young artists that inverts our view of the familiar and changes our perspective so as to create the world anew – based on the commonplace, on the world that already exists.
Two approaches to the commonplace are found in the exhibition. The one uses everyday material to investigate unknown conditions. The familiar is sought after in the foreign, the foreign is made comprehensible on the basis of the familiar. The other approach also lets us encounter “what the world becomes” through the about-turn of the familiar. This is achieved by emphasizing the foreign in the familiar, a process which questions, in a fruitful manner, our habitual view of the world. In every case the familiar is removed from its original context, and distance is created. Apart from the strong atmospheric aspect, this principle of distance
is essential to the exhibition. The artists incorporate an element of distance in dealing with what exists in order to read the world or, in Kraus’s words, to let “ the world become”.
A catalogue in German and English will accompany the exhibition with short texts on all of the exhibiting artists and a visual documentation of both the works and the exhibition as well as theoretical text by Lars Bang Larsen on the topic of the personal and private as the impetus for comprehending the world.
