A group exhibition titled “Das Augenblickliche Paradies” with artists 
Benjamin Appel, Frank Fischer, Elke Hennen, Jan Hoeft, David Jungnickel, 
Tae-kyun Kim, Ben Öztat, Christoph Prasch, Freya Richter, Jessica Twitchell, 
Simone Wackershauser and performances by Ichiigai (D).
October 2009 in Dresden, Saxony. 

Author and curator: Lona Gaikis

SHALLOW HANGOVER / FOAM / ON THE FLOOR AND ON THE WALL /
A SPACE FOR THE LEFT CORNER / STARS AND STRIPS / CONCORDE /
TWO APOSTILES / ALADIN / DAVID / ABSTRACT WITH FOIL / THOMAS
SCHÜTTE EXPLODES / GALAXY ANT
ANT, PONY and PELT.

In Christoph Prasch‘s memory, fragments are what remains of his constant travels between places and stories. In an instant these broken bits collide, constructing a personal and associative logic. We are given the opportunity to step into someone else‘s world. Prasch combines abstract painting with objects from his sphere of interaction, be it a soccer ball he had just played with in Volkspark Friedrichhain or his mom‘s old fur coat. The objects are snatched from their original surroundings and re-arranged. The combinations develop new meanings. We encounter a parallel world in which any common and objective coherence is suspended.

The exhibition An Instant Paradise is an attempt to observe tendencies in the visual arts under the influence of growing acceleration. Be it larger and faster means of transportation providing us with greater mobility or economized and automated operating procedures clocking our every day life. The consciousness accumulates these patterns and images. They are implemented into our aesthetic sentience.
In the works of Christoph Prasch, hyper-sensuality seems to contribute to his phantasmata His head works like a video camera. His eyes scan the world and anything triggering his attention lets his brain turn the record button on.
/ off / on / off / on
What remains are fractured pieces shaping his reality.

My little digital camera with its 4GB memory card holds up to 4000 images (2009). The filmstrip screens the illusion of motion with a speed of 25 images per second. Two minutes forty seconds.

“What happens is so far ahead of what we think, of our intentions, that we can never catch up with it and never really know its true appearance.” This sentence by Rilke describes the overpowering of man by the newly discovered acceleration already in times of the industrial revolution.

The first train travellers‘ accounts describe the panic they felt. To us, such testimonies seem absurd considering the real speed of those trains, which was only approximately 20 miles per hour, today ICE trains are licensed to speed up to 180 miles per hour.
We are used to speed. What we feel is excitement testing the limits of speed. Simultaneously the human is constantly reminded of his/her own fragility since the risk of technical failure, of accident increases with acceleration.

Is it overexcitement and the awareness of mortality putting us under time pressure and blinding us from a majority of impressions?
The exhibition will try to trace this question and show possibly lost paradises.

Konfrontabsence is the title of one of two presented works by Freya Richter. An analogue film sequence is confronted with an equivalent digital recording. Its subject is daylight. Two monochrome projections of different color and quality stand against each other.
The body of the analogue camera CAPTURES light on the skin of the film material. The digital camera RECORDS the light with a sensor converting the information to digital codes. To do so, the picture information is reduced to squares – pixels. The image is economized. The quality of the image has been altered.
The specific moment of interest in this piece lies not only in revealing the difference in quality. Further aspects of deconstruction are of interest. The film loop in the projector is not conducted through the spool, but through a metal hook on the ceiling. It is led through the exhibition space, irritating the the beamer‘s projection and tracing the shadow of the celluloid loop onto the opposite wall. The looping motion scratches the skin of the film material and dissolves it, bit by bit.

Disappearance, grids and the act of slicing/cutting appear as central themes in Freya Richter`s work. The coordinate system mapping the world on paper functions as a cutting
pattern for the collage WELTAUSSCHNITTE. The grid locating our world is figuratively abscised from its context. The piece is completed by unpredictable mistakes happening through deliberate accuracy while cutting the thin lines by hand.
What remains are a fragile lattice and a cluster of unfixed clippings of the world map.

The experience taken from acceleration and the physical overcoming of space, is the cognition of the transience of imagery and geographic impermanence.
What separates New York from Frankfurt is seven hours: an airplane meal and a nap, perhaps a film.

The artist Tae-kyun Kim addresses exactly this in his installation G10. Ten wooden forms shaped after the outlines of the world’s largest airports are laid out on the ground. One sees organic contours tracing the terrains of the airports pervaded by the asphalt runways of planes and trucks. The fragments are crossed geometrically through rows of lights indicating the airstrip. Cardinal directions are not distinguishable within the cluster of
the installation and a smoke machine filling the room leads to further nebulization of orientation skills.

Disorientation, the notion of the fragility of impressions, is carried on into the materiality of other artworks. Failure becomes a core element of the artistic working processes, indicating a critique of the economization of capitalist art production in which the distance between artist and artwork has grown through outsourcing and conceptualization. What becomes obvious is a new awareness for the artist’s role within his/her work and production strategies.

Material is strained to its physical limits by repeating the same individual operation over and over again, meaningfulness and significance is questioned through excessive repetition of symbols and shapes. Jan Hoeft’s Lange Latte debugs the moment of collapse by joining single, simple cut wood pieces (each 50 cm long) to a vertical sculpture reaching up to the maximal dimensions of the exhibition space and/or stability of wood. The beam, becoming too long, threatens to bend and collapse under its own weight.

Ben Öztat‘s objects are held together by the tension and flexibility of thin strips of wood and elastic fabrics. This indicates the fundamental elusiveness of form itself. These fragile structures can collapse at any time. By bending and fixating the components skillfully, Öztat manages to prolong a moment of stability.

Everything being in motion and transient leads to a variety of action strategies. Accumulation, collecting, conserving on one side, but also drawing from the potentialities of volatility, on the other, are the solutions of the artists work displayed in the exhibition.

Only the work of Thomas Geiger is enclosed in the catalogue as a leaflet. He addresses the monetary circle. We encounter its fluctuation and vitality every day. Import Export depicts the act of purchase and is to be read as a poem:

Step One: Buy a book in a bookstore of your choice. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being € – 9,95 / Step Two: Return the book to a Thalia chain store. Now one receives voucher. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being € + 9,95 / Step Three: Buy a new book with the voucher at the Talia chain store. Nicole Kraus, A Man Enters the Room € – 9,95 / Step Four: Return this book with the receipt. Now you receive your money back. Nicole Kraus, A Man Enters the Room € + 9,95.

The chain store has now bought a book from the independent shop.

Thomas Geiger reveals how profits are shifted in trade, which is a common principle in today’s finance world. He is the middleman between the small bookshop and the giant
retail chain and uses the unified product pricing on the book market to implement a deal – a subversive act against but in the structures of corporations.

Our consciousness cannot perceive what we constantly bypass physically in our speeding through the world. At the end, what remains is the urge to absorb and imbibe EVERYTHING.
It could be the dental imprint of the ravenous mouth that stands for THE NEW, which we are all awaiting. (David Jungnickel, Der Literat)