No Swimming
Klaus Hohlfeld, Henrik Olesen, Pia Rönicke, Sean Snyder
25 August – 01 October 2000
The exhibition No Swimming brings together Klaus Hohlfeld, Henrik Olesen, Pia Rönicke and Sean Snyder, four artists of different generations who deal with forms of social, linguistic, urbanistic structuring of meaning. Against the background of Michel Foucault's definition of critique as "the art of not being governed", the exhibition focuses on a subversive form of artistic practice that subverts existing systems, as they appear in society, language, urbanism, architecture, etc., in the sense of a shift in signification. Politicization is understood here in the sense of a de-functionalization of meaning-occupation. The exhibition title No Swimming comes on the one hand from the field of administrative language, but on the other hand also refers associatively to the question of how to deal with the absurdities of reality and to what extent releases from existing conditions are possible.
Klaus Hohlfeld (born 1950-1994, Hamburg; studied at the HdK Hamburg) has hardly ever been seen outside Hamburg. His work was last honored on a larger scale in 1996 in a solo exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and at the Künstlerhaus Weidenallee, Hamburg. Hohlfeld's attitude towards so-called reality is characterized by a doubt about everyday and social phenomena and specifications. His quiet and concentrated photo, text and paper works are characterized by the artist's enigmatic humor. In his photographic works, he laconically links image and text. Words and terms are composed of black Styrofoam letters, placed in the motif and photographed. In this way, very different connections of signifier and signified are created. Sometimes the terms designate something present in the picture, name something absent in the picture, or situate rather associative terms in the picture that provoke chains of thought. Since the beginning of 1993, small works on paper have been created, in which drawn and reproduced set pieces from industry, architecture and park-like nature result in complex ensembles. In a combination of geometric, functional-looking elements with curved surfaces and paths, topographies are created that leave the viewer's expectations of rules in the dust. The miniature collages prove to be similarly disfunctional. Layered and glued cardboard, paper, and rubber snippets are combined by Hohlfeld with pencil drawings to create models that recall industrial plants, track systems, but also circuit boards or computer chips, whose function, however, remains hidden.
In contrast to Klaus Hohlfeld, whose doubts are expressed in relation to the rules of bourgeois reality, Henrik Olesen takes a concrete approach to political conditions. The American view of the Federal Republic's administration, the worldwide penal legislation with regard to homosexuality, or the displacement of poverty in a globalized world are topics that are at the center of his argument. Henrik Olesen (b. 1967 Esbjerg, DK, lives and works in Berlin; studied at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen and at the Städelschule, Frankfurt a. M.) recently presented a solo exhibition at Galerie Klosterfelde, Hamburg, which made his artistic practice, which pushes for social reference, visible. He is currently working on new works on location for the Kunstverein München. Olesen repoliticizes site-specific art by searching for ways to make social problem areas, as they occur in the context of globalization, visible in the exhibition space. With simple gestures, Olesen recodes the exhibition space, proportions are altered, territories are marked out, and boundaries are drawn. Olesen explores this being included or excluded not only by means of changes in architecture. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, his compilation of "Homosexual Rights Around The World" provides a powerful picture of how in most parts of the world, homosexuality is still legally restricted, persecuted, and punished.
Pia Rönicke (b. 1974 Roskilde, DK, lives in Copenhagen and Los Angeles; studied at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen and the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles) has recently been involved with contributions to What if, Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Momentum, Nordic Biennial, Moss. Her two video works "Outside the Living Room" (2000) and "Somewhere Out There" (1998), which will be on view as part of No Swimming, find their point of departure in modernist architecture. If, however, in the case of Klaus Hohlfeld, functionality is already led ad absurdum within the framework of the graphic constructions, and in the case of Sean Snyder, disfunctionality is sought in the motif, Rönicke links the idealistic design of a utopian modernism with an ecological utopia in which nature reclaims "the city." In her video films, she uses a kind of collage technique to combine found material consisting of photographs, comic elements, or drawings into staged scenes with strong narrative elements. Her form of critique moves on a more poetic level, suggestively captivating the viewer.
Together with Hohlfeld, Olesen and Rönicke, Sean Snyder (b. 1972 Virginia Beach, VA, lives in Berlin; studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt a. M.; contributions to Manifeste 2, Luxembourg; Junge Szene, Wiener Secession, Vienna; Berlin/Berlin, Berlin Biennale, Berlin [1998], among others) combines a critical consciousness "with a humorous approach to sometimes absurd aspects of life" (Sanne Kofod Olsen). At the Kunstverein München, he presents for the first time the complete sixteen-part photo series on the Brazilian capital Brasilia, one of the most radical urban planning reestablishments of the late 1950s. Snyder visits the site in the late 1990s and traces how the original idealistic concepts of ideas are transformed by pragmatic decisions made in the aftermath. Crucial to Snyder's working method is the situationist notion of the "derive" - with Guy Debord, "a walk through different ambiences." The "Piano Piloto," Lúcio Costa's land-use plan, resembling a bird with outstretched wings, has long since lost its symmetry; after all, three times as many inhabitants now live in Brasilia as were originally planned. In Snyder's fluorescent photographs, marked by the light of Brasilia's red earth, the residential machines of the quadras appear as in a brochure for vacation homes, and the new foundations like the many negative examples of the current prefab renovations.
The exhibition is produced with the kind support of the DCA Danish Contemporary Art Foundation, the Bavarian State Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts and the ACC Kunstagentur, Hamburg.