CLIENT: Art and Exhibitions Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany
1995

Klaus vom Bruch’s work ARTAUD SPRICHT VOR DEN SOLDATEN (Artaud Speaks of the Soldiers) is intended as a discourse about intensity, madness, destruction and delusion. Vom Bruch addresses these themes using a collage of documentary war film, music and the cry of an ecstatic poet.

Four video projectors, one facing another, show contrasting film material: Children from the newly liberated concentration camp Dachau; three soldiers of the Wehrmacht surrendering to the Americans; a concentration camp tattooing scene and an animated rubber skeleton. The intensity of contrast is only exceeded by Artaud‘s writing. An apparently funny game with the rubber skeleton is a macabre allegory for Thanatos, the longing for death; the laughing children in the concentration camp and beaten, desperate soldiers; a tattoo that incorporates lust as well as death and finally the contrast between picture and sound.

The contrast between the fear of death and a desire for love is underlined by romantic Mexican love songs, mariachi bands and rumbas from the 30’s and 50’s. A carnival of death which almost demands you tap your feet to its relentless beat. Klaus vom Bruch uses a backdrop of constantly updated war reportage from around the world in encouraging the visitor to consider the underlying reasons behind our illogical enthusiasm for war. Despite the dramatic presentation the goal is to provoke a sensory dislocation and not to make a profound political statement.

CLIENT: Art and Exhibitions Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany
1995

In her video installation MOVEMENT FROM EITHER DIRECTION, Nan Hoover creates a new space within the exhibition space. The geometrical outlines seem to have moved, the walls seem out of place. Already from the entrance, the view is caught by the opposite corner of the installation where the shadow of an oversized figure moves from right to left. After entering, one realizes that the room is empty and that theres is nothing to cast the previously seen shadow. This fiction, set up by the artist via video projection, is surprising. And Nan Hoover uses this moment of disorientation to abduct us into a world of shadows where the white and blue light projections transform the visitor into a shadow himself, making him part of the installation, causing him to interact.

In MOVEMENT FROM EITHER DIRECTION, the trained painter and drawer Nan Hoover deals again with her central subject, the human body by both letting it act in space and presenting it in a transcendent way through light and shadow. She play on the overwhelming, on strangeness and oversize—which we fear and yet instinctively expect when entering a dark room.

MOVEMENT FROM EITHER DIRECTION continues the happenings, performances and installations with light and video projections that Nan Hoover has continuously developed since the 1970ies. Almost all of her video works are abstract and challenge us to deal with speed, time and movement. They explore the fear of the imaginary and play with fiction and reality.

Nan Hoover describes her work as interactive, because the installation only becomes what it is supposed to be by the presence of the moving viewers and their wandering shadows. By the visitor?s actions, the spaces is filled with ever new variations of light and shadow. This continuous change of the installation is interactive in the classic sense—in contrast to many computer-based installations that are nothing but multiple-choice programmes. In the lightscape so created, both real and virtual shadows meet just as the imaginary meets with the visitor’s physical presence. While one of the shadows grows out of the absence of light, the other appears due to the projected light of a video projector.

“I am part of the darkness that gave birth to light” Mephistopheles, Faust

CLIENT:
April 2012

For ÜBER DEN TOD (“About Death”), Ulrike Rosenbach mixed studies of light, form and motion dealing with the topic of “death”, enhancing the illusion of depth by computer and editing/mixing effects in order to achieve the impression of a three-dimensional visual plane.

A vortex of white salt pulls the observer into the depths, an illuminated steel rod turns in circles with clockwork precision, and a crowned skull wanders over the monitor in a “memento mori” manner.

CLIENT: Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany
September till November 1994

These interfaces are broken and recycled machines and symbolic object of everyday use. The viewer brings them to life through interactivity.

When the visitor approaches the objects, certain sounds emanate from them – symbolic sounds which relate to the histories of the machine users and the meanings of their workplaces. Technically, this is accomplished by the use of the 3DIS-system (Australian designed software) which divides the room into sensor zones. Four digital black and white surveillance cameras register the viewer’s proximity to the object and trigger the sounds from the hard drive of a PC. These interfaces are very appropriate for a Museum or public display atmosphere.

CLIENT: Art and Exhibitions Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany
DECEMBER 1994 til FEBRUARY 1995

Already in the 1970ies, Marcel Odenbach treated smoking as an expression of boredom and, in that context, dealt with the issues of pure pastime and nervousness.

The two opposing double projections of TABAKKOLLEGIUM refer to each other, yet remain opposed. Thus, a confrontation of two cultures is created, a contrast between establishment and underground, young and old, political and apolitical, changing generations with a different consciousness.

The smoking artist’s mouth and a second image of a table with smoking devices and a full ashtray projected below it form one side; oversize eyes and images taken at amusement halls in Berlin and New York the other. The contrast is continued by various fade-ins on both sides. Pictures of the burning of books, violent demonstrations, racist riots or self-cremation form a macabre counterpoint to the speechlessness, boredom and belittlement in the face of these current political tendencies.

Marcel Odenbach confronts today’s youth with his personal experiences and tries to find ways of communication and solidarity. Even if this communication seems to be limited to the non-verbal pleasure of smoking, it is still the common denominator against discriminating, fascist tendencies in our society.

CLIENT: Art and Exhibitions Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany
1994

THE CHEMISTRY OF LOVE explores common and opposed factors in the chemical composition of the human body and the “chemistry” of inter-human relations.

In THE CHEMISTRY OF LOVE, several “specialists” describe the difference between the physical and emotional characteristics of an ideal relationship. These explanations are interrupted by Petry with scientific explanations about the chemistry of the body. The video interviews in German and English can be seen on eleven monitors that are integrated into a bigger spatial installation.

Michael Petry understands this installation as a metaphor of the human body. It consists of 121 laboratory glass receptacles of different sizes, suspended from the ceiling in 11 rows of 11 receptacles each. Each tube contains one of the 11 most important chemical elements that compose the human body.

The attempt at a total analysis of the human existence competes with the sensual experience that is constantly changing and cannot be defined. Out of this tension, an instability of the world is created that will always call for new combinations and their solution. Nothing stays the way it is.

CLIENT: St Peter’s church, Cologne
1987

he video installation ORPHELIA was exhibited in 1987 at the documenta in Kassel, Germany and in St Peter’s church in Cologne.

Three monitors are lying in an object from perspex, showing three video works synchronised to each other. The overall picture of the three monitors show the Orphelia figure revolving slowly around its own axis. The image of Orphelia is overlaid a texture consisting of microscopic images of human blood circulation and blueish-reddish shades. Meditative flute and water sounds underline the iconic character of the installation.

Ulrike Rosenbach uses elements of far-east spirituality as well as subjects based on western ideas of transcendence. The title „Orphelia“ is a composition of the mythological Greek character Orpheus and the literary character Ophelia from Hamlet. Here, references to the androgynous utopia can be found: Orpheus and Ophelia merge into “Orphelia”. As an element in the pictorial code of the alchemists, the hermaphrodite stands as a metaphor for the feasibility of a symbiosis of contrasts.

The two characters Orpheus and Ophelia are connected by their common fate of a love that remains unfulfilled: Orpheus’ love for Eurydice, as well as Ophelia’s for Hamlet, ends tragically. Orpheus and Ophelia both live through the transitory states between life and the afterworld: Orpheus in the attempt to free his beloved out of Hades and Ophelia in the state of madness before she dies in the floods. In her work, Ulrike Rosenbach continues the development right through to the spiritual ideal of the androgynous Orphelia who has reached a destination between here and beyon