I’m in the house Schwarzenberg visiting the Neurotitan Gallery. First of all, I walk through the first large room to get into another, a little smaller one. In front of me, there are three overhead projectors. On top of them, white objects that at this point I can’t quite make out yet. I walk closer to the installation. Many small pieces of paper are spread on the floor. I stand directly in front of them and realize that different sentences are written on them. Questions, answers, quotations – it reminds me of a dialogue.
I don’t understand the installation yet, but I think it is exciting and I would like to learn more about it. At one of the overhead projectors, I can see a big elephant tusk. Not real, of course, just fake. So, what is this installation about?
The artist, Marie Kirchner, is working with colonial objects and with all the questions they raise. Why were they kept in families, and not in museums, for hundreds of years, many generations, and two world wars? The object performance was created in the context of her research on colonial heirlooms.
In the performance, the objects are also meant to become actors, a game with perspectives takes place: am I looking at the objects? Are the objects looking at me? Since overhead projectors were used in the Neurotitan Gallery for the first time (normally the objects were always at the eye level of the viewer), I have the feeling of “looking down from above” – which makes me feel more superior.
In this gallery, Marie Kirchner focuses on the object in light and the shadows it creates. This light/shadow play triggers me. There is something threatening and at the same time mysterious about it, and I ask myself, what the elephant tusk must have seen or experienced? If he were able, he could tell me perhaps so many things. Here it happens: the feeling of superiority disappears and the object becomes an actor. A dialogue takes place in my head. I have to smile a little when I think about it because I imagine myself talking to an elephant tusk. A little fun is necessary.
Now that I know the whole background of this installation, the meaning of the objects and how they treated me in the way of thinking and seeing, I like this installation really much. Unfortunately, there was no piece of paper in the gallery itself through which one could have learned more.
Marie Kirchner was born in 1980 and grew up in Hamburg. She studied fine arts and has her studio on the RAW GELÄNDE in Berlin. She belongs to the “Freie AusstellungsKollektiv FAK Berlin”. Come and have a look at it.
