HOMESTORIES

Positions on the interior

17 September to 29 October 2006

Achim Bitter, Kristin Calabrese, Andreas Gefeller, Rita Kanne, Clay Ketter, Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer, Susanne Kutter, Moonho Lee, Alexandra Ranner, Ricarda Roggan, Hiraki Sawa, Günter Wintgens (in bold: at the Kunstverein)

Curator: Dr. Stefan Rasche

The exhibition "HOMESTORIES", a cooperation project of the Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim in Neuenhaus and the Galerie Münsterland e.V. in Emsdetten, deals with the interior, a traditional theme of art, which was examined for its topicality on the basis of 12 selected positions from the fields of painting, photography, video, sculpture and installation.

The interior as a theme of art deserves renewed interest because the relationship between private life and the public sphere is subject to far-reaching changes of socio-political relevance. Keywords such as "New Homing" or "Cocooning", for example, stand for this, expressing a joyful return to the advantages of comfort and cosiness within one's own four walls.
What the pictorial language of advertising and magazines accordingly celebrates as an expression of happiness in living and private joie de vivre can, on the other hand, also be interpreted as an escape movement, as a defence against unresolved fears and conflicts in order to seal oneself off from the outside world and its impositions. For as much as the interior is suitable for contemplation and contemplation, it also tends to collapse.
Contemporary artists respond to this complex mixture with means of irritation and alienation. Hybrid models and constructions, procedures of montage and sampling, manipulations and cross-fades also formally testify to the multiply broken reality that speaks from contemporary "room pictures". For all the individuality of the artistic strategies, the offensive visualization of those ambivalent forces that dominate the interior at the threshold of inner and outer perception, of beautiful surface and substantial crisis of meaning is thus always at issue.

The Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim presented six positions on the topic.  Moonho Lee makes a "dormitory" the subject of exemplary spatial questioning, while the large-format photographs by Ricarda Roggan take us to a remote place of the house, the attic. Günter Wintgens' series of photographs "Homes" is based on a radical reversal of interior and exterior space, just as Rita Kanne provokes a constant change of function and perspective with her furniture sculptures. Irritating events up to and including catastrophe ultimately also determine the two video works, for while Hiraki Sawa transforms his London apartment into an international airport, Susanne Kutter places a living room under water in "Flooded Home".

At Galerie Münsterland, Achim Bitter showed an installation conceived especially for the space using building materials and products from the domestic sphere, while Alexandra Ranner showed a video project in a sculptural dwelling that a group of immobile actors presented in a discussion. Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer's interior collages moved between photography and painting, just as Clay Ketter chose his own path between the classical genres with his furniture object "burned kitchen". Also represented were Andreas Gefeller, whose "Plattenbauten" are based on an unusual perspective in the sense of photographic space measurement, and Kristin Calabrese, who paints destroyed interiors of idiosyncratic beauty on life-size formats.

A catalogue has been published to accompany the exhibition.

The project was supported by the Kunststiftung NRW, the Gesellschaft zur Förderung westfälischer Kulturarbeit (GWK), the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe, the city of Neuenhaus and the state of Lower Saxony, among others.