La Fin Du Monde by Costa Vece in the Rotunda
28 July – 05 September 2004
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Romerberg
60311 Frankfurt, Germany
phone: (+49-69) 29 98 82-0
fax: (+49-69) 29 98 82-240
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www.schirn.de
Costa Vece, “La fin du monde”, 2003-04 Courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich SCHIRN RE:SET/3
As part of its program SCHIRN RE:SET, which already saw the presentation of Thomas Hirschhorn’s installation “Double Garage” and Jonathan Meese’s “Kepi Blanc,” the Schirn now shows the Swiss artist Costa Vece’s work “La fin du monde.” Video sequences taken from such films as Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” or Godfrey Reggio’s “Koyaanisqatsi” will be projected in two different directions from the top a 9 m high lighthouse made of cardboard boxes gathered from the garbage of supermarkets and industrial production plants by the artist. The used and discarded boxes reveal traces of their global origins, routes of transport, and former functions. By converting them into components of an artwork, they are removed from the anonymous sphere of the circulation of commodities and transferred into a local context.
“La fin du monde” was produced for the exhibition project “film lokal” of the Siemens Arts Program together with the 49th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen where it was presented for one day in May 2003. By including it in the series SCHIRN RE:SET, this work will now be shown for a longer span of time. SCHIRN RE:SET is an exhibition program aimed at introducing works by contemporary artists pointing the way to the future that have been on display only for a short time and have ended up in inaccessible private collections or museum depots to a wider public in a series of solo presentations.
Costa Vece, born the son of Italian and Greek parents in Switzerland in 1969, became internationally known in 1999 at the latest when he participated in the Venice Biennial of that year. Since the beginnings of his career as an artist, he has preferred cardboard and recyclable materials in conjunction with film. “La fin du monde” in the Schirn Rotunda relies on the Romantic picture of the lighthouse which also alludes to the situation of the cinema itself. Like the cinema, the lighthouse is a gigantic projection apparatus bridging far distances and opening vast spaces of longing. It sends out a guiding beam promising orientation in the dark. Yet, Vece’s installation has nothing to do with the deliverance promised by the traditional Hollywood cinema but rather unfolds an aesthetical apocalypse generated from Kubrick’s “2001″ astronauts floating through space and Reggio’s megalomaniac urban wastelands revealed in “Koyaanisqatsi.” Vece confronts pictures of presumably eschatological catastrophes and the destruction of nature by man with the fragile materiality of the lighthouse. The cardboard boxes emphasize the routes the commodities have traveled from their industrial production places into channels of international trade and from there to local supermarkets. Vece’s present-day inventory discloses everyday things that combine the global and the local as pertaining to man’s last days.
DIRECTOR: Max Hollein PROJECT MANAGEMENT: Martina Weinhart and Matthias Ulrich
OPENING HOURS: Tue-Sun 10 a.m.-10 p.m. FREE ADMISSION
INFORMATION: www.schirn.de
e-mail: presse@schirn.de
