| EINATMENAUS breath-in - breath-out Waltraut Kiessner and Ina Schlafke Text of speech: Sigrid Puntigam Dear guests.
I am pleased to have the opportunity to welcome You to the exhibition breath-in-breath-out by Waltraut Kiess- ner and Ina Schlafke. The artists pick up the subject of the year of EINSTELLUNGSRAUM, the fourth of a bar motor pro- ject, in their installations and present different posi- tions. They put the mechanical rythm of the motor technics in analogy to the rythm of the organic to, which the title breath-in-breath-out refers to, the rythm of the motor technics as in the four beats of the Otto-motor - suck/compress/spark, work/exhaust, a metabolical pro- cess during which the explosion of the petrol-air mixture develops warmth and is transferred into move- ment. On the ground floor you see the work of Ina Schlafke , which I will present to You here. The window of the EINSTELLUNGSRAUM puts itself like a membrane between the noisy, moving outside world and the breath- less, still inner world without movement. The contrary to the still life, the other truth of the installation becomes clear instantly. Birch stems span across and fence in the room like a mesh and by that make it conciously possibly to experience. Nature is taken inside and the room appears like being supported by it, which irritates us as on first sight this questions our picture of the see- mingly so strong and stable built architecture. pictures of the origin of architecture like the "original hut" of Abb Laugier or of the gotical cathedral (Goethe in front of the Cathedral of Sta§bourg) which was compared with forests of pillars and tree come to one's mind. Aiming, proud they stream vertically towards the ceiling, like trees which grow towards the sky. |
But
this clear direction, this arching is disturbed,
under- mined through horizontally placed transversales. They hinder, interrupt this upwards growing. Some form blocks, borders, others run like lost letters into the void, loose themselves in the nothing. Some meet and cross paths with others on their way. It comes to branching out. The tree as a carrier of meaning in art and art history offers a broad field of associations, be it as the tree of life, tree of knowledg, as a goddess of nature etcetera. But such harmonical comfortable ideas about forest as 'green lung' or of the tree as protective roof do not appear when one looks at Ina Schlafke's installation, because dead stems, which could be from a sour forest, form this bizarre scaffold. They do not carry leaves any longer, they are bald and brutally reduced to their scaffolding structure. As if a graphical linear struc- ture of a drawing has been transformed related to the space and changed into a three-dimensional plastical sign. The stems do not stand unorganized around the room but form groups and spaces in the room amongst themselves. In the farend part they form a circle, in the front area a triangle. Associations with magical spaces, cult spots and ritual rooms appear. Proud and with aim they aspire like trees, which grow into the sky, towards the ceiling which they seem to go to stick through. But trees do not only have an 'up', the visible part above the ground, but also a hidden part 'a down under'. The root, the essential, not-to-be without connection to the earth is underground, not to be seen. Out of mother earth the trees get their nutrition and energy for growth, the stability with the ground and the support. The stems of Ina Schlafke's though sit smooth and sharp on the tiled floor, are brutally capped, robbed of their roots and their connection to earth. They form an unstable scaf- fold construction, in which we move about and which bears the constant danger that balance, the fine even- ness, is lost with the slightest disturbance and every- thing falls apart. |
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