Margaret Raspé: Automatik / They Take It Seriously, I Think It’s Interesting

Margaret Raspé: Automatik
Automatik is a comprehensive presentation of works by artist Margaret Raspé (b. 1933, Breslau). Shown in cooperation with the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, the exhibition elucidates the singularity of Raspé’s artistic production over the past 50 years. Her primary focus is on the balancing of various processes of perception and observation, which she explores via such diverse media as film, drawing, painting, performance, installation, audio, and photography. Other central themes are bodywork and concrete poetry, along with her approach to civilisational critique and a continuous commitment to nature and environmental protection. Her works are experimental arrangements through which she investigates the automatism involved in states of unconscious activity. In 1971, Raspé devised the camera helmet in order to film household activities from a centralised perspective. With a Super 8 camera mounted on a construction worker’s helmet, she was able to film in real time, drawing attention to details and minimal displacements. Washing the dishes, making whipped cream, baking cakes: during all of these putatively banal activities, materials are transformed, and one thing must be destroyed before another is created – like the cream that becomes butter or the slaughtering of a chicken that appears as a live-sustaining act and a metaphor for the rupturing of entrenched gender roles: “When I killed the chicken, I also killed an idea of myself: You stupid chicken. Never again would I be a chicken!” Raspé illuminates women’s unpaid domestic work in a male-dominated environment, but also criticises commodity consumption under capitalism. As early as the 1970s, she was preoccupied with the relationship between nature and technology; her conception of ecology however incorporates technological apparatuses rather than excluding them, as in the installation Videomiel (1990). Sustainability has been a theme from the very beginning; in her work she recycled raw wool and paper mâche, among other materials. In 1990, Raspé called attention to the pollution of water by immersing herself in a river in Łódz, Poland, that had been contaminated by paints and varnishes. This self-experiment is probably her most radical performance to make clear that water is no longer water, but instead a contemporary emblem of an exploited, the human body endangering nature.

Automatik is a cooperation with the Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, where the exhibition was initially presented from February until May 2023 and conceived together with Margaret Raspé.

They Take It Seriously, I Think It’s Interesting
Artists: Annika Audu, Alessa Bürgermeister, Yvonne Duttlinger, Lea Göhringer, Julius Hanisch, Michaela Heigl, Madlen Jäger, Michèle Janata, Amelie Kiener, Miji Lee, Yvonne Schlageter, Sabrina Weißinger, Bettina Winter, Carlotta Wirtl
Guests: CAConrad, Carl Gent, Dynasty Handbag, Sophie Jung, and further participants

They Take It Seriously, I Think It’s Interesting is an exhibition around, through, about, and in spite of performance. Drawing on elements from their respective forms of current artistic practice, students from the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe have assembled a construct of promises, traces, documents, products, materials, gestures, and “silent agents,” which support one another reciprocally to form syntactical and symbiotic communities, before performing, whether in isolation, noisily, or with confused ambition. The project avoids documenting previously staged performances, and lives instead as a polyphonic embodiment of the most diverse forms of performativity through the most varied strategies for sustaining life. Based on group improvisations an installation is created, that delights in ignoring the putatively rigid boundaries between performance and exhibition and explores in a variety of ways how performance can be presented in the exhibition space and the exhibition objects can be shown in a self-determined way. The installation becomes the habitat for all performances: those that have already taken place, those occurring momentarily, and those still to come. A central component is a wide-ranging festival on the opening weekend. The artists are presenting their works and other guests are invited whose practices are of significance for the exhibition.

The project is directed by Sophie Jung, with support of Carolin Meister and Julia Müller.

For the performance festival and other events please visit our website.