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M+M |
The Baukunst Galerie opens on Wednesday, 1 February 2006, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. a great solo-exhibition of the works by the German artist-duo M+M. At the opening speaks Dr. Christoph Schaden. “M+M” stands for the artistic collaboration between Marc Weis, born 1965, and Martin De Mattia, born 1963. In the exhibition will be presented a selection of the series “kurz vor fünf” (shortly before five) and “in front” they have been working on since 2001 respectively 2003.
From April to June 2006 M+M will proceed their artistic work within the “Artists in Residence”-scholarship of the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. They already received an USA grant of the Bavarian Council in 2002 and a one year scholarship at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 1998/99. Before that the artistic duo was awarded a grant of the Bavarian Council (1997). In 2000/01 M+M assumed a teaching position as guest professors at the Adademy of Arts in Munich. Furthermore in 2001/02 they received a teaching position at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst (HGKZ) in Zurich. Their works were already presented in several major national and international exhibitions, amongst others in the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennal, the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Sprengelmuseum Hannover, the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Ludwig Museum Cologne and the Musée d’Art Contemporain Montreal.
The initial point of M+M’s artwork is always the conception: “First there is an idea, and then we are looking for the right medium to illustrate or realize the idea.” Their works represent a complex synthesis of film, photography and “art at architecture”, which cannot be assigned to an individual genre. Thus the extensive photo-tableaus presented at the Baukunst Galerie also combine the disciplines film and photography. Moreover the walls, the works are mounted on, are wallpapered with newspaper and posters designed by M+M. That way every wall becomes a sculpture and the exhibition room a space installation.
In the series “kurz vor fünf” (Cibachrome on Alucobond, 125x238 cm) every “Kurzfilmfotografie” (short-film photography) consists of 4290 tiny, individual, chronologically sequenced frames. The photographic material was taken from an almost three minutes long short-film. Each film was staged by the artists with professional actors, camera and light on location, then cut in picture processing program of the computer and composed to a large photo-mosaic. On closer inspection the details of the sequences can be recognized, but with increasing distance they turn into an abstract array. The radom horizontal stripes are characterized by the dominating colour of the respective film set. Just an anew approach enables the decipherment. Every film shows an individual person in his specific environment. The title draws the attention to the connective element of the works: All stories take place shortly before five at central European time. The consequence is an synchronal section through the life of various people in different cities – from Berlin to New York or Kalkutta. “Kurz vor fünf” does not have a definite plot and is continously supplemented by new acts at further toured locations. Intended, but ostensible accidental links in form and content – colours, persons or requisites, which appear several times – generate a complex network.
The work principle of the series “in front” (Lambda-exposure on Ilfochrome, various dimensions) is also the resolution of a film into thousands of individual frames. Source for these works are not staged events anymore but selected news on television of the last four years. In contrast to “kurz vor fünf” M+M call these works “Dokugraphien” (docugraphies) in order to point out their position between artistic photography and documentation. Material for the presented works at the Baukunst Galerie supplied the television-address of George Bush on 14 December 2003, in which he proclaimed the caption of Sadam Hussein. The works are completed by wallpapered newspaper with photographical and textual fragments of Bush’s speech.
Here the irony of exhibition-title “Man muss auch mal bei der Halbwahrheit bleiben” (“one has to keep at factoid sometimes”) develops its virulence: The artists play with the speciousness of documentation by using images of daily news and public persons respectivly using accidental seeming scenes at real settings, presented in a chronological order. The idea of truth, which the spectator associates with documenation, is immediatly withdrawn by M+M’s aestheticization of the the filmic information. This way the spectator becomes aware of politics and history as non determined, wether linear nor distinct educible issues. Furthermore the disparate information of the mixed media confront him with the problem, how the great amount of data can be handled in our by the modern media dominated world.
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