Picture: Ira Eduardovna, On foreign made soles, 2018; 7-Canal-Videoinstallation, 19 Min., Still; Courtesy the Arstist and Chelouche Gallery Tel Aviv © Ira Eduardovna © Foto: Ira Eduardovna
- Presseconferenz: Friday, 12th of April 2024, 11 am
- Opening: Sunday, 14th of April 2024, 3 pm
- Curatorial Guide with Dr. Fritz Emslander; 28th of April und 7th July 2024, 2 pm
Curatorial
(texts from the visitors‘ guide book)
Introduction
There is no word that can say what I feel ... when I think of my home
(from songtext by Cat Ballou, Et jitt kein Wood, 2013)
One word cannot contain the strong feelings. Is it love, pride, sometimes even rejection? Is it an intimate bond with family, friends, with the place of origin or the place of residence, with nature, tradition, culture, with football and shooting clubs? Everyone will answer the question of what constitutes "home" differently.
Against the backdrop of current crises, it becomes even more explosive. What happens when home is threatened or lost by migration or alienation? What does it take and what does it mean to find a new home, to turn places into adopted homes?
Art approaches the aspects of home, the often conflicting feelings of belonging and demarcation, longing and doubt in a multi-layered way. Five contemporary positions encourage the viewer to engage with this theme.
There is no word ... is part of the annual project das Hiergelände, which provides an opportunity for discussion in exhibitions, lectures, readings and a parcours through the city: about rootedness and common property, about worlds and borders, being here, having arrived and being a stranger.
Exhibition Space 1
Ahmet Doğu İpek
Half nature, half art: The table carved by Ahmet Doğu İpek (*1983 Adıyaman, Turkey, lives in Istanbul) from a found walnut root and decorated with traditional ornaments from his Turkish homeland, shows the process of a metamorphosis. The raw, grown material is transformed into an artfully refined form, a virtuoso piece of craftsmanship that in turn imitates nature: a piece of furniture that consumes natural resources, but at the same time (like the carpet underneath, with its floral design) conveys a closeness to nature to its users.
Nature and culture, two spheres that today are often set against each other as opposing forces, intertwine here. It is an image of uprooting, but also of rootedness, of common origins, of the roots from which both spheres grow, the natural world and the man-made world. People refer to both areas, nature and culture, when they try to describe their own roots, their connection to their homeland.
Just as such roots enclose the inorganic in their growth, small and sometimes even larger stones with a gesture of embrace (Ahmet Doğu İpek came across one such stone while carving), the artist's work carefully builds on the work of nature, integrates it and continues it. The result is a place where people can gather and share a table and food. A place where the question of the possibilities of coexistence arises.
Space 2
Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi
Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi was born in Kiev in 1976 and moved to Israel with her family in 1991, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. In her highly narrative paintings, she borrows from socialist realism, which she became acquainted with as a girl in Kiev. Central to her work are questions of identity and alienation, as well as a preoccupation with various conflicts that arise in the clash of cultures.
In the series My Soviet Childhood (since 2014), she recalls life on the summer streets outside a supermarket in her former hometown of Kiev. She entrusts us with secrets from school breaks (The Long Recess, 2016), in which girls in school uniforms cross narrowly defined boundaries, and lets the gaze of Mother and Son (2018) wander into the distance over the blocks of social housing.
With the wave of immigration from the former USSR, large foreign communities emerged in Israel. Cherkassky-Nnadi shows these people who, even in their new homeland (as they once did in the dacha, the summer house with garden), preserve vegetables for the winter, who meet up and hold on to their culture and who are formed by shared memories: the "coup" attempt in August 1991 against Gorbachev's perestroika is particularly striking. There was nothing to be seen of this on TV; typically, there was a change in program and the ballet Swan Lake was on at the moment of the greatest crisis.
Space 3
Ira Eduardovna
The video installation by Ira Eduardovna (*1980 Tashkent, Uzbekistan, lives in New York and Tel Aviv) shows scenes of setting off for a new home, the sadness of saying goodbye and the fear of the unknown – memories of the day when the artist, who was born in Uzbekistan, departs on a long journey as a ten-year-old girl:
„Following the collapse of the Soviet Union my family decided to emigrate. We had to travel by train to Moscow for 4 days and only there we could board the airplane. I know that this train journey was a traumatic event in my life, but I entirely erased it from my memory.
The Iron Road reenacts the few moments right before the journey that I do remember, as an attempt to trigger the memory that I somehow suppressed. I built a set of the train room and cast professional actors to play my family members, while I photograph them and create a timeline of my memory.“ (Ira Eduardovna)
Through the effective use of photographic and filmic means, the artist explores the painful feelings associated with emigration. Through repetition and a non-linear narrative, split across two video channels, the installation shows how fleeting and fragmented personal and collective memories can be. The train, into whose rattling the drum rhythm initially beaten by the grandmother merges, becomes a place of transition in which the themes of identity and migration appear to be intensified like a chamber play.
Space 4 (Gallery)
Jody Korbach
Jody Korbach (*1991 Bielefeld, lives in Düsseldorf) initially wrote "THEY WILL NOT UNITE US" on a banner published as an edition, as if it could be taken to a demonstration. Here, she reverses the slogan "HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US", which a much-discussed art project in the USA in 2017 took up in order to address the polarization and impending division of US society following the election of Donald Trump.
Sewn into a collage, Korbach's flag now functions as a curtain in Morsbroich. It discreetly sets its message apart on the outside, but is more clearly visible on the inside, where it looks like a contemporary insertion in the historical ambience of the Morsbroich baroque palace. The artist has transferred the stars from the banner to a new site-specific floor work: a carpet with a waving pile of stars now extends across the gallery of the Hall of Mirrors, which offers a glimpse into the past (a space in which the industrial barons of the 19th century quoted earlier gestures of absolutist rule).
Whether Korbach's slogan and its division of the circle of stars standing for the unity of nations on the European flag is read as a position critical of Europe or, in a figurative sense, as a question of how much sovereignty one gives up when belonging to a group of countries such as the European Union, the USA or even the Federal Republic of Germany, is up to the viewer. It is also the question of the identity of each individual that this softly interpreted passage raises when the stars leave the orderly grouping of flags and with them one's own position is set in motion.
Space 5
Jody Korbach
The affluent society could perhaps be described as the lowest common denominator of what many Germans consider to be the breeding ground for positive feelings of "home". Jody Korbach reflects the pronounced need for order, safety and security in a series of different works in which (life) insurance companies, pharmacies and supermarket chains appear as - perhaps also identity-forming - guarantors of living standards. Logos from EDEKA, where the Mittelstandsmantra (middle class mantra) (2023) today relies on "Unsere Heimat" brand products, or from the relevant discounters become the identifying marks of a Europe that, according to popular opinion, would be "wherever there is Aldi" (2018).
The foundations were laid in the "economic miracle" years, when people in the Ruhr region also afforded high-quality looking (albeit cheaply produced) historicizing furniture as status symbols within the modest framework of the "Gelsenkirchen Baroque". Jody Korbach describes the need for prestige expressed in this way in the style of a graffiti artist: "EDEKA" and "Angie" - the nickname of the "eternal chancellor" written on a battered mirror - seem as if they could label people for a lifetime (2021), impose an identity on them or make them believe they have one – by means of conservative marketing and reliability or simply for lack of better alternatives.
Spaces 6 + 7
Jody Korbach
Soccer stadiums are one of the places where a sense of togetherness is created today and something like "home" becomes tangible - there is no doubt about that in Leverkusen 2024. Jody Korbach grew up in Dortmund, the home of BVB, "the soccer club that makes up 50% of the most famous derby in German soccer", but also "the Nazi stronghold of Western Germany" (Jody Korbach).
In her own words, 10 years ago the artist was "faced with the question of whether I should break off my studies, shattered by my ideas and illusions [...]. That was the moment when I finally recognized my hometown on a Saturday afternoon in Dortmund. Standing at the main station, loud, smelly crowds of people passed me by, each one an imposition in itself, unpleasant, embarrassing and questionable. In the crowd, however, the person disappeared with all their shortcomings. Everything made sense, a common sense. That was the moment when all my defiance and envy and the pent-up loneliness burst out and hardened into a decision: I want that too - and I'm going to get it. I will force the Kunstakademie [Düsseldorf] to give me the home and community that it has denied me all these years and I will force it to face its own stench, its own slurring, its own drunkenness and its own megalomania. Driven by this decision, I founded the EiskellerExport'14 - Football Team of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2014."
According to the motto "Home is where your heart is" (soccer fan scarf, 2015) and with the conviction that soccer can "fill the chasms that have opened up between people", artists come together to form a soccer team with a fan club. Just as in Dortmund, where the losers of the structural change find an home in the BVB, here soccer extends a hand to everyone - whether they can identify with the entrenched structures of the art world or not.
The two sides of their homeland are also reflected in the three beer brand collages from the series Deutschland GmbH (2022). When celebrating, the abbreviation used in the title also stands for Geh mal Bier hol'n (GmBh) and the party wisdom that a drink always helps to make friends with the world (sung by Ballermann singer Mickie Krause since 2014). A political interpretation, on the other hand, would see the title as a reference to the theory spread by the Reichsbürger movement that Germany is just a limited company that serves to exploit the German people. The relevant meandering patterns, to which the green and white beer stamps are arranged, also suggest a connection with right-wing extremist movements.
In a second mirror work, Jody Korbach not only shows us the fox, the long-lived brand figure of Bausparkasse Schwäbisch Hall, but also points a finger at us, turning Sag mir wo du stehst (2022) into a crucial political question. It is reminiscent of the insistent appeal "I want you" on the classic US army poster: what are you prepared to do - even outside your own four walls - for your country, for your "home" (a term that the building society uses aggressively in its advertising)?
Space 8
Jody Korbach
After Jody Korbach graduated from the Düsseldorf Art Academy, the soccer fan club remained (it is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary), "the longing for community remained, but it still hadn't really been fulfilled", the artist admits in her short autobiography:
"So how to carry on? Fortunately, the Rhineland also has its ways of numbing itself collectively and so one fateful evening I stumbled into the pavilion of a town guards festival, cast my gaze to the other end of the marquee and read: Faith, Customs, Homeland. And I knew I had found a new vessel into which I could pour my lonely heart. So in 2018, I founded my own shooting club. Perhaps structure and clear rules would provide the stability my restless soul was looking for. However, I had already had enough of nationalism and marches from Dortmund, which is why I also gave the European Union to the rifle corps as a work assignment [...]."
In 2018, she founded the Schützenkorps Europa, which has set itself the task of "bringing European values to the regulars' table and defending them from there". The EU presents itself as a promise for the future, but at the same time there is no clear vision. The question is what the members can agree on. A future of peace and prosperity (for whom)? The EU as an alternative to nationalism?
The rifle corps is giving it a try: Can diversity thrive in the shooting community, which releases so much energy and conveys such a strong sense of cohesion?
Spaces 9 + 10
Jody Korbach
Westerland on the island of Sylt became a place of longing for many Germans as a fashionable and at the same time natural seaside resort (according to tourism advertising) and their chosen home for the summer months. However, its landmark, the "Sylt cow" with its unusual fur pattern, does not appear in Korbach's painting in the usual triad with lighthouse and sea. Instead, its placement in a white circle on a red background refers to the NSDAP flag and thus to a dark chapter in the island's history, when National Socialists refused to admit Jewish guests and swastika flags were hung in front gardens and on the beach castles.
Korbach's heavy wall mirror Angelus Novus bears a reproduction of a 1920 drawing by Paul Klee, which was long owned by the philosopher Walter Benjamin and became a symbol for him: Benjamin, who had fled from the National Socialists into exile in Paris, used it to develop his gloomy view of history. For Benjamin, the angel looks "as if he is about to move away from something he is staring at. His eyes are wide open, his mouth is open." What we call history would reveal itself to the angel's eyes (deep black with grief and horror) as an unholy, catastrophic event. The storm of progress, the downside of which he could only see, would take him further and further away from his origin - from God.
The watercolor Cry me a River (2023) builds a bridge to current debates about - true or feigned - consternation in the face of hatred then and now: when asked about his role as a Nazi officer in the film Persian Lessons at the 2020 Berlinale press conference (a few days after the right-wing extremist attack in Hanau), German actor Lars Eidinger is overcome with tears as he talks about the hatred spread on the internet and our "poisoned society".
One year later, Olaf Scholz obviously sees the need to act decisively on refugee policy and deliver a headline on the subject. With the statement "We must finally deport on a grand scale", Der Spiegel magazine puts him on its cover, on which the Kanzlerportrait (portrait of the chancellor) (2024) shown here is based. Korbach transfers the harsh contrasts that match the magazine's title into the watercolor, where the shadows draw cloudy formations on the chancellor's face.
In the following cabinet, Korbach once again holds up a mirror to the members of the affluent society. She borrowed the idea of the magic mirror Nerhegeb (2022) from the world of Harry Potter: It shows the person looking at it their deepest heart's desire (mirror-inverted, “Nerhegeb” [engl. erised] reads as "Begehren” [desire]).
Space 11
Ahmet Doğu İpek
Two oversized drawings show an active volcanic island from which plumes of black smoke are constantly rising and keeping the sun at bay. Even if the location in the South Pacific seems far away and the maps depicted may be more than 200 years old, the consequences described are as serious as they are permanent: all life that develops in this forbidding environment is white - an anomaly of nature that gave the island its name Albino Island and for which the volcano that made everyone there (color)blind was called caecus (Latin for blind).
The scenario may be fictional and yet it is disturbingly close to our reality, in which we become painfully aware of the effects of natural disasters. Beyond the fascination with a geological curiosity, Ahmet Doğu İpek seems to be about a kind of thought experiment, also about the search for a metaphor for our lives in general and for the special circumstances during the pandemic lockdowns in particular, when the drawings have been created: What happens when we are deprived of access to light - literally and figuratively?
The drawings in the Construction Regime series (the added S.P. stands for Self Portrait) are also to be understood as a questioning of ourselves and our relationship to nature today - inhospitable, ghostly-looking urban landscapes with skyscrapers towering close together, overgrown satellite cities like nightmarish visions of global capitalism. Apart from a few seemingly lost rocks, nothing remains of nature in this heavily man-made environment.
In the Repair series, on the other hand, Ahmet Doğu İpek attempts to understand the algorithm of natural forms using rocks created by hardening lava and to repair cracks and fractures with small interventions in order to hold the disintegrating pieces together, to heal them symbolically. He thus refers to the Japanese technique and philosophy of Kintsugi, which strives to make something unique and new out of what is broken (originally ceramic).
In a second series, he varies the repair process and replaces a brittle rock with a block of marble, as in a graft. It remains open whether the marble is inserted into an existing cavity like a valuable prosthesis, or whether it is 'grafted on' in a similar way to the process of grafting plants in order to create a new, more robust connection.
Finally, in the installation Subjected (2024), the natural meets the artificial with force, an ancient, spontaneously formed natural stone meets an industrially produced sponge. Hard lies on soft, the boulder weighs heavily on the light foam mattress - and can become a symbol of the pressure that weighs on us.
Ahmet Doğu İpek sees nature and culture as two spheres that actually belong together, but which are sometimes incompatible in our time: "I think that the crisis our planet is in is precisely the result of this disharmony." The friction in the clash between nature and culture gives rise to energies that could bring some disaster, but also alternative solutions. If this planet is to remain our home, one could deduce from this, it is important not only to view the forces of nature as an overwhelming threat to which we are powerlessly exposed (Subjected), but also to redirect and utilize these energies.
Space 12
Ira Eduardovna
Ira Eduardovna's video installation recreates a very personal but widespread fantasy of people who have never seen their old home again after leaving it: to return there once, just to be there for a while. In 2015, Ira Eduardovna travelled back to her hometown of Tashkent in Uzbekistan for the first time in 25 years. Seven local actresses play, as she says, "versions of me". They immerse themselves in the tense moment of this homecoming – each one first as an actor, then as a director. They improvise and interpret the scene again and again, whereby the controlling perspective 'from the outside' and the clearly delimiting "cut" prevent them from becoming too sentimental.
The actresses involved are aware that migration was a controversial topic in Uzbekistan in 1990 (as it was in the rest of the collapsing USSR). Some accused the emigrants of 'betraying' their country, others were sad and frustrated at being abandoned by the migrants. According to Eduardovna, there was a sense of trauma on both sides, combining the idea of return with the hope of reconciliation or healing. Like Eduardovna's second video work shown here in the exhibition, The Iron Road (2021), this re-enactment of a return in the footsteps of a stranger (On foreign made soles) is part of a trilogy on the subject of migration and identity, the third part of which Eduardovna is currently working on.
Space 13
Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi
After several years in Berlin (then still the European metropolis with the cheapest rents), Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi returned to Israel in 2010 and moved into a studio in Tel Aviv. She combined the idea of returning to plein-air painting with socio-critical themes and began to capture the life of Tel Aviv's African community on her doorstep - people who came as migrant workers and set up their everyday lives in the neighborhood, with restaurants and Afro hairdressing salons (Lucy Hair, 2022). A small world in which people live together, but where the immigrant strangers are also under suspicious observation and control of the authorities (Emigration Policeman, 2013) and often experience racism.
It was here, while painting portraits on the street, that the artist met her future husband Sunny Nnadi and married into a Nigerian family. Cherkassky-Nnadi's scenes of family gatherings or birthdays show a mixture of people from a wide variety of backgrounds, including Jews, Ukrainians, Arabs and African Igbo. The fact that this togetherness can disintegrate at any time if their homeland is threatened (again) is something that people in Africa, Ukraine, Israel and Gaza experience. As an artist, she deals with the current crises that have shaken our world view by painting and drawing. After the invasion of Putin's troops, she juxtaposed her childhood memories with new images of a lost generation of children in Kiev.
Side buildings and left facade of the museum building
Yevgenia Belorusets
„Ich war ein Mal in Kyjiw …“ (I was in Kyiv once…”), 2024
Outdoor project Leverkusen, Courtesy the artist
With an intervention in billboard format, Yevgenia Belorusets (*1980 in Kiev, Ukraine, lives in Kiev and Berlin) brings voices into the public space of Leverkusen: remembered quotes from conversations over the last two years with people who told the artist about their visits to the Ukrainian capital Kiev. Uninhibitedly and obviously unsophisticatedly ignoring the current situation in Ukraine, they rave from a first-person perspective about large parks, blossoming chestnut trees and friendly people, about a city full of treasures.
Written against the sky in each case, these innocent, naïve lines set on power lines just do not go together with the dreary atmosphere of the city in the black and white photograph - and even less with the horrific images of war in our heads, with the experiences of the people from Ukraine. Although they may seem harmless at first, these tense text-image montages, which the artist has placed on the facades of Morsbroich and on large billboards in various parts of the city of Leverkusen, are irritating at second glance. They seem like a swan song for a country. Reality is fragmented, and in the face of the impending loss of the homeland, rapturous memories feel false, and a blue-eyed view of a possible future is difficult.
Courtyard / Gate banner
Yevgenia Belorusets
„Danke, dass ihr für uns sterbt!“ (“Thank you for dying for us!”), 2024
Outdoor project Leverkusen, Courtesy the artist
Yevgenia Belorusets works as an author and photo artist at the intersection of art, literature and social activism. As early as 2022, she developed her first billboard as an intervention in public space: she responded to the sentence "This is not our war" sprayed on a wall in Berlin with her own lettering "This is my war", crossing out the first "my" and replacing it twice with a "my" written in a different handwriting, thus raising questions about our being affected (in both senses of the word) and our solidarity.
In Morsbroich, it continues a dialog that was started by the museum in 2022 with a quote from the Lithuanian-French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Until recently, the words "Thou shalt not kill me" were written above the entrance to the palace courtyard (and on the reverse, as a counter, the question of what would happen if one acted only out of love). Belorusets now puts "Thank you for dying for us!" („Danke, dass ihr für uns sterbt!“) into the mouth of a political activist with a view to Ukraine. From the other side comes a strangely friendly and determined "Here you go! Here you go! You are welcome" („Bitte! Bitte! Sie sind willkommen“) - and we suspect that we can also understand this seemingly empty phrase as a question to us. Conversely, how would we ourselves be "welcome"? As friends, as sympathizers, as sufferers, as supporters, as activists: what can we do?