4 min 30
In New York City’s Chinatown, subject Suat Ling Chua’s morning exercise is to practice the hula hoop. When Christian Jankowski first saw this woman he immediately got the idea to shoot Rooftop Routine . In the short video, Chua leads the group and dictates the movements that each participant has to repeat. Only one person of the group can directly see Chua and thus each person mimics another from roof to roof, altering the choreography after each passage like in a play of “Chinese whispers.” With this performance, Jankowski explores the social organization of a specific context. It brings together people of several buildings in the same project beyond isolation and social barriers of the urban environment. “In a work, new things, unknown things can happen. The important thing is to initiate a project to bring together the right people. Then the mechanism takes unpredictable paths. Until…voila!..the work is done,” says Jankowski.
Christian Jankowski’s practice ranges from photography, films, and performances, involving audiences or often people unfamiliar to contemporary art. He claims that his “main drive always comes from the pleasure of meeting people and working with them.” Through the manipulation of humor, collaboration, popular culture and magic, Jankowski creates links between art and people with a certain simplicity and relevance. Meeting with participants and making negotiations are an integral part of his work, as well as the elements of chance and accident. Jankowski’s work is about life as it is lived. His way of juxtaposing different worlds and subcultures as a way to explore social systems and their organization is both attractive and serious. In one of his early work My Life as a Dove (1996), the artist was transformed into a dove by a magician. This performance introduces one of the recurring themes of his work – transformation and how the artwork may change the way we perceive the world and its organization. Christian Jankowski was born in 1968 in Göttingen, Germany. He lives and works in New York.
9’oclock (my time is not your time) pertains to a series consisting of three numbers: 5, 10 and 11 works were made for the exhibition “Signs and messages from modern life” at the Kate McGarry Gallery in 2007...
Eight opens with a close up of a painting by Hubert Robert of the Chateau de Chamarande where the film was shot...
Martin Kippenberger’s late collages are known for incorporating a wide range of materials, from polaroids and magazine clips to hotel stationery, decals, and graphite drawings...
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Die Siedlung is a filmic documentary about the recent shift in housing developments in Leipzig-Grünau in former East Germany and its consequences on some inhabitants...
Percent for Art is seemingly concerned with “art enrichment” by state or city arts agencies role in it, managing the artist rosters, maintaining public art collections, commissioning artworks, selecting installation sites, among other things for aesthetic and cultural enhancement in both public and private real estate developments...
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The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations...
Die Siedlung is a filmic documentary about the recent shift in housing developments in Leipzig-Grünau in former East Germany and its consequences on some inhabitants...
Percent for Art is seemingly concerned with “art enrichment” by state or city arts agencies role in it, managing the artist rosters, maintaining public art collections, commissioning artworks, selecting installation sites, among other things for aesthetic and cultural enhancement in both public and private real estate developments...
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This untitled drawing was part of Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition Sung Hwan Kim: A Still Window From Two or More Places , which took place in tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010...
Die Siedlung is a filmic documentary about the recent shift in housing developments in Leipzig-Grünau in former East Germany and its consequences on some inhabitants...
These two images come from the series called “State of Control” which Kilpper made in the building formerly occupied by the Stasi in Berlin...
Eight opens with a close up of a painting by Hubert Robert of the Chateau de Chamarande where the film was shot...
Silberhöhe , directed at Halle, located in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), is the name of a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, which was built in the 70’s and could accommodate more 40,000 people...
For Immersion , Harun Farocki went to visit a research centre near Seattle specialized in the development of virtual realities and computer simulations...
Things Entangling Edited by Che Kyongfa and Elodie Royer Designed by Toshimasa Kimura Published by Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) and KADIST The publication is available in pdf — see links on the right side of this page Things Entangling was published on the occasion of the eponymous collective exhibition presented at MOT, Tokyo from June 9 to September 27, 2020, the culmination of a long-term curatorial collaboration between MOT and KADIST...