AF/CH

Reading under Tension

When the words, “since I have known” come into contact with an ornamental cup, a sign exclaims REVLOTUION next to a truncated armchair or a phrase about seeing and knowledge is added to an object that at a brief glance appears to be an intact hat, then visual experience and the usual methods of reading and acquiring knowledge are at first irritated. What the exhibition, “AF/CH – Adib Fricke meets Christian Hasucha”, shows is in effect not immediately knowable, let alone at all certain.

This observation applies to not only the exhibited works but also to the elements from which they are constructed. It leads us back to the two artistic positions that encounter each other here in an exciting dialogue. The artists in this exhibition, Adib Fricke and Christian Hasucha, are experts in the staging and challenging of the usual patterns of perception, reading and behaviour via artistic means.

For Adib Fricke, this confrontation takes place on the stage of linguistic combinatorics. For example, his Protonyms (words without semantic meaning) or his artistic investigations into sentence constructions that include neuroscientific and linguistic knowledge invite us to confront those processes that lay between perception and the creation of meaning.

Subtle, formally precise interventions in the daily life of urban or rural areas characterise Christian Hasucha’s work. His Public Interventions develop their presence and power from everyday life and thereby often draw on processes that are generally underestimated as casual. They thus provide a stage for actions like seeing, talking and walking, and with it the possibility for reflection on the supposedly incidental or banal.

The works developed collaboratively by the artists for the “AF/CH” exhibition link these different forms of examining the processes of perception and the allocation of meaning. They place apparently unrelated objects close to each other and thereby evoke flexible, provisional correlations which create tension within the ensemble. The dialogue that unfolds between the components of the works in space generates something new that is more than just the sum of its interacting parts.

—Julia Heunemann (excerpt from catalogue)

Kunstverein Tiergarten | Galerie Nord, March, 24th until May, 5th 2017