ICHTS at Dortmunder Kunstverein

Artists: Sam Anderson, Frieder Haller, Aleksander Hardashnakov, Olga Pedan, Arjan Stockhausen

Exhibition title: ICHTS

Venue: Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund, Germany

Date: August 27 – October 30, 2016

Photography: DOKV, Niklas Taleb, images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Dortmunder Kunstverein

Based on a common interest for the aesthetics of the naive, manual production and the decay, the five artists Sam Anderson (*1982 in Los Angeles, USA), Frieder Haller (*1987 in Freiburg im Breisgau, GER), Aleksander Hardashnakov (*1982 in Toronto, CA), Olga Pedan (*1988 in Kharkov, UKR) und Arjan Stockhausen (*1992 in Alfter, GER) are brought together within the frameworks of the exhibition “ICHTS”. Their works are embedded in a fictional narration which addresses the contradictory nature of reality with its continuous shifts in politics and society. The exhibition does not attempt to offer a clarified and analytical view upon the world, but rather, within a framework set by each individual work of art, to trigger a sentiment which comes from the manifestation of a diffuse uncertainty.

The exhibition title ICHTS already stands emblematically for a displacement: the artificial word “ichts” is composed of the word “nichts”, meaning nothing, and “ich”, meaning I – google translate proposes “Othing” as the English equivalent. The neology thus contains a dichotomy between a manifold identity and a departure from the idea of a singular self. Othing could refer to any formation of people, to a hybrid form, to a mutant, to an always changing digital I, to a personality without a body, or perhaps a new term, which ultimately replaces the self.

Even the exhibition space shifts into the uncertain: a few lopsided office lamps hang from the ceiling, the wiring is deficient. Two newly put-in dry walls crudely rise from the vestiges of their construction, impromptu-like curtains scantily cover the windows, attached to a rope with safety pins. Recalling a neutral, non significant office architecture, the exhibition space of the Dortmunder Kunstverein seems under construction and abandoned at the same time. The arrangement appears to be of temporary nature and the scattered works seem as if they were fragments or relics of events that took place there.

Detached from a temporal allocation, the works of the five artists develop narrations about different forms of the self – partly mythological, mystical, dystopian or even esoteric. Children, demons, murderers, nuns, manga characters, trolls, left and decayed concrete constructions, and a human resting his back on a gorilla evoke fantastical worlds in which emotions like happiness or fear, hope or pain, evanescence and fragility can be openly expressed. Here, the need to see the human as a non-rational being is formulated and, by a visual narrative, to activate this strength.

The exhibition was conceived by Oriane Durand together with Frieder Haller and Arjan Stockhausen.