Rita Ackermann: Jump On Me
Insert: Andro Wekua
April 30 – July 3, 2005
“Feast of the Beast”: Thursday, 28 April, 7 pm
Opening and Party: Friday, April 29, 6 pm
Following the opening at the Kunstverein, at the Kunstmuseum Bonn the Videonale 10 and the exhibition Keeping up a Good Mood’ – Art of the 70s from the Ingrid Oppenheim Donation will open at 8 pm
Bonner Kunstverein
Hochstadenring 22
D-53119 Bonn
T +49 (0)228 693936
F +49 (0) 228 695589
kontakt [at] bonner-kunstverein.de
Opening hours: Tue/Wed/Fri 11am-5pm, Thu 11am-7pm, Sat/Sun 11am-5pm
www.bonner-kunstverein.de
Rita Ackermann: Jump On Me
Talk in the exhibition: Tue, June 21, 7pm with Prof. Dr. Anne-Marie Bonnet (University of Bonn) and Christina Vegh (Director Bonner Kunstverein)
The exhibition “jump on me” will present a film, a drawing room, and a dinner installation “the feast of the beast”, which is created by Agathe Snow, guest artist from New York, honoring the Cocteau-ian inspiration of the “beauty and the beast” as sublime narrative of this exhibition.
The elements of superior loneliness, surreal love affairs, indulgent melancholy and tragicomedies will build throughout the atmosphere of the three rooms, leading through the viewer by an imaginary hand, in the fashion of the bleeding red tango, the never-ending dance.
In the film room, “jump on me”, a dance musical sequence, will be projected on four walls, wall to wall, ceiling to floor. It was specially created for this exhibition, inspired by the grandiosity and the history of the space. The film is based on a dance performance (choreographed by Nami Yamamoto) and musically complimented by Michael Portnoy and Rita Ackermann. It features a couple dancing, their figures transforming into the lights of flames and lighting up the entire space with their movement and the color of passion. They jump at each other, violently embrace, fall and let one another fall. The aggression of violent embraces, the grace of whipping, the falls and jumps have no end and no beginning; the film is running in a loop and never stops.
Their dance is as immortal as the dinner of the “feast of the beast” is mortal. The objects are still but alive on the table, frozen gestures of human hands creating serving bowls. The supplicant hands express their desperate affords against loneliness. They offer an invitation to eat, but also want to hold captivated the “object of desire”. The table is a scream of exaggeration with its deluge of offers.
The drawing room will be strictly and simply storytelling; pencil drawings animate the fictional life of our heroine “the beauty”. Her story is “the eye for eye, tooth for tooth” story. The drawings illustrate her moments of blissful ignorance, fable-like experiences, an unfortunate accident, a “happy ending”, some failures: all everyday encounters with cliches and archetypes from anyone’s life. Eventually she will dance out of her own reality into the fantasy that the “beast ” created for her.
INSERT: ANDRO WEKUA
Andro Wekua (*1977 Sochumi/Georgia, lives in Zurich) constructs a concept of the world with drawn, collaged and filmed pictures, a world that denies any firm access. His memories and fictions are as precise as they are fabricated. Memories and fictions – such as his childhood on the Black Sea or biographical touches in the figure of his younger brother – repeatedly turn up in fragments. Small manipulations in official documents have the goal of upsetting systems of representation and identification.
Starting with the drawing, Wekua has created in the past years also video works and film installations. Here too, the theme of the journey between unnameable places in the east and the west is taken up. At the Bonner Kunstverein Andro Wekua will present his latest film Neighbour’s yard (2005).
Since 2002 Andro Wekua and Rita Ackermann have collaborated. Both have in common a tendency to the mysterious, a play on the biographical, and the dark shadowy world. Their artistic collaboration is expressed in mutually published artist’s books, which up to now consist of three sequels, Chapter 1-3.
For further information please visit our website: www.bonner-kunstverein.de
