Participating Artists:
Elena Bajo (Berlin/Madrid/NYC); Teresa María Díaz Nerio (Amsterdam/Santo Domingo); Linda Franke (Berlin); Katya Gardea Browne (Berlin/Mexico City); Andrea Loux (Bern/Berlin); IngridMwangiRobertHutter (Ludwigshafen/Nairobi); Rachelle Mozman (NYC/Panama City); Raquel Paiewonsky (Santo Domingo); Marta Mabel Pérez (San Juan); Amy Stafford (Berlin/Seattle); Iris Schieferstein (Berlin) and Gabriela Vainsencher (NYC/Tel Aviv).
Alanna Lockward, Curator
truestories.truesuccess explores issues of fiction -domestic, historic, intimate, curatorial, urban, virtual and social. These “real” or performed narratives are reformulated by the artists in different media. From an abstract narration of timelessness (Elena Bajo, “Nothing more than a theatre of fluctuating ideas and echoes of future moments (a new refutation of time) II”, 2009) to direct quotations of specific moments in history (Teresa María Díaz Nerio, “Hommage á Sara Bartman”, 2007), performance, photography, mixed media on paper, installation and video-art will present architectures of moments built mostly on personal experience. Focusing on recent European history, Iris Schieferstein (“Deutsche Herbst”, 2009) articualtes her own account of the success and tragedies of unified Germany, on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Characteristically irreverent and provocative, she embodies a fictional result of this historic turning point juxtaposing symbols and self-irony in a landscape reminiscent of classical compositions.
The current phenomenon of the travelling artist is interpreted by IngridMwangiRobertHutter (“Cryptic. A Traveler’s Diary”, 2007) by means of transforming writing into drawing. Inspired by disgust and fascination, Andrea Loux (“The Way of Life”, 2007) collected, during an artist residency in New York, the omnipresent pamphlets and brochures predicating the conjuration of feasibility: there is guidance available for everything and following these prescribed measures we can achieve everything and anything we want. The promise lurks in every slogan: truestories.truesuccess.
The conjuring of fate is also part of a performance by Alanna Lockward (“Hair A(u)ction – Facebook 15.08.08 – 03.10.09”), curator of the exhibition. Addressing the despair and sorrows that drove her to shave her hair a year ago, she will put it on auction at the vernissage after having transformed a moment of desperation into “art” thanks to the timely Facebook-intervention of artist Katya Gardea-Browne, curator of this piece.
In another Internet-based work by Amy Stafford (“Paris Hilton Fellatio I”, 2004), a digitally produced and distributed image is recycled, appropriated and reinterpreted through the medium of aquarelle, re-injecting human intimacy through the natural flow of the hand made. The voyeurism-exhibitionism and paradoxical connection-isolation of current electronic social networks is addressed with candor and rigor, offering together with the rest of the participants, new insights into the vacuums, vertigos and alliterations of contemporary existence.
truestories.truesuccess is proudly sponsored by VideoArtWorld
