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Happy Slapping 3, Frame |
The Baukunst Galerie opens on Wednesday, the 12th of November 2008 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. a large solo-exhibition with works of M+M. “No Education“ is the second exhibition of the German artist duo, whose name stands for the artistic cooperation of Marc Weis (*1965) and Martin De Mattia (*1963). Dr. Doris Krystof, curator at the K21 Kunstsammlung NRW in Düsseldorf, will give an introduction in their artistic œuvre, which embodies a complex synthesis of film, photography and installation. Beside a four channel video installation a “Panic Room“ with current photo tableaus from the series “in front“, violent sequences of mobile phone movies of teenagers and an artist book will be presented.
In 2006 M+M gained a three month “artists in residence“-scholarship at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. This had been preceded by an USA-scholarship of the Bavarian State in 2002, a scholarship of the Villa Massimo in Rome and a grant through the Bavarian Council in 1997. Furthermore in 2008 M+M received a visiting professorship at the Behrens School of Architecture in Düsseldorf, in 2001-02 a teaching position at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Zurich and one year before a guest professorship at the Academy of Arts in Munich. The works of the artist duo were already presented in several major national and international exhibitions, amongst others in the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Pergamon Museum Berlin, the Sprengelmuseum Hannover, the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Museum Ludwig Cologne and the Musée d’Art Contemporain Montreal.
M+M’s mental impetus of the exhibition title “No Education” was the article “Schlechte Manieren” (bad manners) of Slavoj ˇi˛ek in the ZEIT from the 21st of August 2008. The Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst describes in his essay the complex network of unwritten rules in the field of social interaction. Thereby he points out parallels between missing manners in private relationships (exemplified at the model uncle and nephew) and lacking manners of the super powers Russia and USA in international politics (exemplified at the wars in Georgia and the Iraq).
The artist duo visualizes this interconnection of social micro- and macrocosm at the exhibited ”Panic Room“. The walls of this separate architecture in the exhibition space are covered with a newspaper about “Putin 04”, which M+M developed in cooperation with the designer Felix Kempf. Images and text fragments reflect upon the speech of Putin about international security, which gained worldwide attention because of his introduction, that he will explicitly avoid polite forms and diplomatic terms in order to say what he really thinks. On this newspaper photo tableaus from the series ”in front“ (Lambda-exposure on Endura, various dimensions) are mounted. The working principle is the dissolution of selected television broadcasts in its hundreds and thousands of individual photographic frames. From the distance the series looks like an abstract matrix of horizontal stripes, but on closer inspection it turns out to be an analysis of the economic working media of television, which is traced back to its elemental fragments. Besides, M+M establish a connection by the thematic selection of the photo tableaus between the person running amok in Erfurth (2002), the suicide attacker in Pakistan (2002) and Palestine (2004) and the riots at the international soccer match between Switzerland and Turkey (2005).
The subject of the exhibition is also acted out in the relationship between a teacher and his pupil in the video installation “Dance Köln“ (2004-08). The search for personal and social identity of a young Turkish boy in Germany is synchronously staged on four projection walls. Initial point of this work was the banishment of the Turkish teenager Mehmet, which provoked nationwide banner headlines. The Munich author Andreas Neumeister partially developed the script for the film from the vocabulary, which characterized this case.
Moreover M+M reprocessed video material of juvenile brawls, which they found in the world wide web, in an artist film and the photographic series ”Happy Slapping“ (Lambda-exposure on Endura, various dimensions). The term “Happy Slapping” became generally known by the intensive coverage of the English press. It refers to a violent trend, which encroached from Great Britain on Germany about three years ago. It stands for the assaults of unknown pedestrians, but also schoolmates and teachers, which is filmed by the – for the most part – juvenile delinquents by cell or camera and published in the internet or distributed by mobile phones.
An insight into the private cosmos of the post puberty is also provided by M+M’s artist book “Pie Bible“. This erotic compendium is geared to holy bibles and hymnals and is printed in the manner of facsimiles with individual traces of use. Here M+M bring a fictive book of the American movie “American Pie” into being: the collection of experiences and tips in love and sexuality, which is forwarded from one high school generation to the other. Therefore the artist duo asked selected artist to unveil their private experiences, elaborate sexual techniques and erotic fantasies as intuitive and direct as possible. The published contributions range from texts to collages, drawings and photos.
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