Karwath + Todisko at L187, Offenbach
16.10. – 06.11.2020
“Suddenly a rustle and whistling, then a deafening detonation, everyone screamed and the whole basement was full of dust.”
My father about his experiences as a child around 1943.
The title of the exhibition refers to the artist’s deeply autobiographical approach to her practice which is presented here as an overview of her development as an artist so far. Her conceptual practice comprises room installations, mixed media collages, moving image work and the use of documentation in the shape of found and reappropriated objects. Some of her early works have never been shown publicly before and now tie in as an intimate insight into her personal history, also illustrated through her changing artist signatures from Ingrid Wöllert to Inna Todisko to Inna Wöllert and finally to Kawarth + Todisko.
Architectural photographs taken by her father are reworked, extracted and pasted onto large scale surfaces, showing a profound connection to her roots. The video installation of her now deceased mother discusses themes of mortality, identity as well as memory. It is accompanied by a photograph alluding to her mother’s tendency of hoarding, which stands in stark contrast to the meticulous documentation of her everyday life. The artist’s early drawings and photographs from her time at art school allow a vulnerable insight into the exploration of her own – the female – body. The works shown revisit various stages of the artist’s emotional and physical heritage which could be seen as an illustration of her search for identity both as a human being and as a creative practitioner until today.
Text by Vivien Kämpf & Lucy Rosen Nixon.
Karwath + Todisko (*1973, Darmstadt, Germany) lives and works in Darmstadt. Inna Wöllert studied Stage Design and Sculpture at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin in the class of Prof. Karin Sander and Prof. Roland Schimmelpfennig. In 2006 she became Meisterschülerin under Prof. Roland Schimmelpfennig. Since 2009 she teaches at the Department of Design at the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt.
Eleni Wittbrodt
15.01. – 29.01.2021
CONCEALMENT CREATES ANTICIPATION.
UNDER CONSTRUCTION, WORK IN PROGRESS, A SIGN OF CHANGE.
INTERCEPTING GLANCES AND VIEWS,
CLEAR DIVISION BETWEEN EXTERIOR AND INTERIOR,
MEMBRANE-LIKE, BUT PHYSICALLY NON-PERMEABLE.
LIGHT IS ABLE TO PASS THIS MEMBRANE
WHICH CAN VARY FROM TRANSLUCENT TO OPAQUE
LAYERS FILTERING THE DEGREE OF INTENSITY.
IS THIS BOUNDARY EVEN A BARRIER OR
IS THE MEMBRANE ITSELF WHAT THE OBSERVER IS TRULY ANTICIPATING?
BACK IN A JIFFY, A VERY SHORT SPACE OF TIME.
A MEASUREMENT IN QUANTUM PHYSICS
THAT RELATES TO THE SPEED OF LIGHT.
NEWS DIGITALISED FROM PAST ISSUES
PRINTED ON PAPER ANEW.
CAN THE PAST BECOME THE PRESENT AGAIN?
SHIFTED TEMPORALITY.
PHOTOGRAPHY DECOMPOSES TIME BY CAPTURING FRACTURES OF A SECOND.
INFINITELY REPRODUCING A MOMENT THAT OCCURRED ONLY ONCE,
RECORDED BY THE MECHANICAL EYE.
400 VERSIONS OF THE SAME ON PAPER.
A REPLICA WITHIN A REPLICA.
ROCK AS WITNESS OF THE PAST
FORMED BY COMPRESSION.
FROM GRAVEL, SAND, AND MUD.
IT’S ALL SMOKE AND MIRRORS.
OPTICAL ILLUSIONS CREATING IMPRESSIONS,
ON THE RETINA, IN STONE AND ON PAPER.
Newspapers, pragmatically hung on the gallery‘s large window front, obscure the view — an indication of construction and a sign of change. The layers of pages consciously separate the inside from the outside, like a membrane, which is primarily permeable to light.
Almost invisible at first glance, the newspaper material is native to the urban environment. On closer inspection, however, it can be registered as something out of the ordinary. Mirrored screenshots of a digitalised newspaper, originally printed in 1998, depict a poem by Wislawa Szymborska and are positioned next to found images of rock damages caused by drilling to extract geological samples. In dialogue with photographs of a book demonstrating camera flash techniques, the work discusses the fragmentation of time and space in relation to human perception.
Jiffy, the title of the exhibition, colloquially describes an unspecified short amount of time while also being a measurement in quantum physics, which precisely defines the time it takes for light to travel one fermi, which is approximately the size of a nucleon. One fermi is 10−15 meters, so a jiffy is about 3 x 10−24 seconds.
The juxtaposition combined within the single word Jiffy embodies the difficulty of grasping time.
Layers of stone which have accumulated for thousands of years, photographs that capture a fracture of a second and newspapers as contemporary witnesses — while the subjective perception of time does not offer a point of reference, the aforementioned mediums manage to present time as objectively measurable and translate it into something tangible.
Texts by Vivien Kämpf & Lucy Rose Nixon
Louis Baca & Fabian Riemenschneider
01.02. – 15.02.2021
Weaving the past into the present and projecting into the uncertain future the finalexhibition at L187 ties several levels of temporality shifts together before leaving thispremise.
Positioned at a crossroad in the centre of everyday life on Ludwigstraße in Offenbach,the shell of the building stands out with its large glass fronts just as it blends in withits surroundings. A cored room, dusty concrete floors, lined by piping and remnants ofa tiled wall. Having been abandoned for many years, traces of previous tenants havebeen mixed and layered over time. The building remains in a state of limbo.
In the centre of the space stood a long counter, especially made for L187 as a recognisablefeature. During the seven months of its existence, when seven contemporaryartists exhibited their work, the counter even became part of art installations attimes. Now it has caved, crumbled under enduring power and what remains is theecho still resonating within the walls. The rubble lies in a formation that is reminiscentof its original shape. The steel skeleton forms a wave, a symbol of the recurringtides that have washed over the space.
An assembly of found objects from the past life of this building is placed amongstthe remnants of L187. Tiles of different sizes and colours, arranged in a rectangularshape, seem to hover above the dusty ground and an old fashioned record sleeve ofItalian folk music pays tribute to the history that previously unfolded at Ludwigstraße187. The retrospection of what occurred thus far stands in contrast with what is tocome as it is already making itself felt in the back room where the new tenants havestarted moving in.
Untouched by the changes around it a mural stands amongst the bare walls, a relic ofthe past. It depicts an ocean view with a stranded rowing boat titled Aurora, like themorning dawn.
Text by Vivien Kämpf and Lucy Rose Nixon
Ludwigstraße 187
63067 Offenbach am Main
info@L187.de
L187
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