Productive Set-Ups

curated by Andrei Siclodi
09.11.2012 to 24.01.2013, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen

Exhibition opened as part of Premierentage 2012

What does it mean to be productive outside of an economic or commercial context? How is “productivity” manifested when artistic practices focus not on results but on processes? Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen fellows Kevin Dooley, Marcel Hiller, Dominique Hurth and David Rych pursued precisely these questions. Specific projects included those aimed at finding new, productive possibilities for self-organization (Kevin Dooley), a reflection on collective practices (Marcel Hiller), writing in the form of an exhibition (Dominique Hurth) and enactment and documentarism (David Rych).

In the context of the exhibition Productive Set-Ups, each of the artists presented one current work related to his or her fellowship project. The exhibition also included a documentation of presentations held as part of the 2012/13 Start Up Lectures series.

Marcel Hiller showed a video that, to some extent, emerged as the byproduct of an exhibition by Magic-gruppe Kulturobjekt. In cleaning we see a male person (a member of the group of artists) vacuuming the floor in the middle of an exhibition situation. The concentrated act of necessary cleaning is jarring at first—a breach of common clichés regarding attributed and distributed roles. But the scenario also references the process of reflection inherent to the group’s collective practice, which would proceed and develop at Büchsenhausen in the course of the 2012/13 fellowship year.

Kevin Dooley showed a collection of material connecting earlier (collective) works to current questions, thus visualizing the state of the debate: two collaborative drawings by the Nomanden Group (How To Survive the University, Schularbeit), the so-called Hexendiary (in conjunction with Barbara Wilding and Ruth Weismann) in zine format and a transcript from his presentation Who I Am and What I Hate—Therapy Session—A Social Factory Worker’s Inquiry.

Dominique Hurth’s contribution reconfigured images from her book language in the darkness of the world through inverse images. The book is a montage of pictures Hurth collected over the course of many years, some of which served as source or reference material for her sculptural works, texts and installations. Hurth translated the physical act of page-turning and technique of image-processing into her own, medium-dependent narrative by means of a double slide projection. The vibration of the projectors lent the sequence an acoustic rhythm that addressed, among other things, the concept of montage itself.

David Rych showed his video installation Encounter (Encuentro), a work produced in the context of Manifesta 8 in Murcia, Spain in 2010. The project’s emphasis on the processual and collaboration is also evident in the project Border Act, which was to be realized during Rych’s stay at Büchsenhausen. Encounter (Encuentro) stemmed from two workshops the artist did with male inmates from two different prisons in Murcia—facilities so close to each other that one is visible from the other. Facilities included Sangonera la Verde, where long-term sentences are served, and Las Moreras, a lockdown for young offenders. The title of the work is derived from an encounter between the two participating groups. The film documentation follows an encounter between the men in a specially-provided room. The content was largely left to the protagonists. During this encounter, the prison inmates—individuals familiar with long bouts of isolation who had spent many years entrenched in their own parallel-society hierarchies—could share not only their empirical experience but also issue personal directives to young men. The men discussed their view of real-life conditions should the juveniles ever find themselves in an adult prison.