Jasmin Werner at Westfälischer Kunstverein and LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur

Artist: Jasmin Werner

Exhibition title: Unschuldsengel

Curated by: Marie Sophie Beckmann

Venue: Westfälischer Kunstverein, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster, Germany

Date: April 30 – May 14, 2021

Photography: Thorsten Arendt / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist, Damien & The Love Guru, Westfälischer Kunstverein, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur

As part of „Epilog’’, a series of four solo exhibitions by the Residence NRW⁺ fellows 2020/21 (30 April – 11 July)

Spot on. Senorita Latifa Sharifah with angel wings in front of–and inside–the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Facades, columns, steel, concrete, glass. Architectures of power, in which the ideology of national grandeur, or alternatively the belief in a great idea, be it capitalism or socialism, manifests itself. Viewing platforms allow the view from above instead of below, the city becomes an experience, the overview becomes a commodity. Behind the window frames: even more angels of (Un)Schuld (meaning both innocent and free of guilt and their respective opposites) but from other times. Corporate identities, one hand holding the other. Western Union and Remitly, send money online fast.

What we see are smartphone images, logos of money transfer services, and excerpts from archival reproductions of 15th-century paintings from larger sacred representation contexts, donated to the Westfälischer Kunstverein and given on permanent loan to the LWL Museum of Art and Culture, where they are shown in the current collection presentation. A kind of transfer business between those two institutions that the project space connects as an in-between space. The lamenting, mourning, praying angels are fragments from the high altar of the Benedictine monastery Liesborn. As “still usable fragments,” they were sawed out when the rest of the altar was accidentally defiled, according to the museum’s inventory catalog. The four angel fragments are therefore still of value–not least as exhibits and clues for an elaborate reconstruction of the altar, in which various experts, institutions and collections participated.

Printed on protective netting and fixed to aluminum frames, the angels, architectures, and lettering are superimposed by Jasmin Werner to form montages and interconnected on an image surface. Together, the frames hanging from the ceiling and the wall or standing in the room facing the window front of the project space result in an arrangement that in its provisional materiality is also reminiscent of montage: something is (re)built and (re)constructed, something is in the process of being created. Possibly not permanent, but there for the moment, as a sign of promise. Like tarpaulins on a construction site scaffolding, printed with images of a not yet existing–or entirely imaginary–building facade.

Even without knowing the respective history of the pictures in detail,^[1] the suggested connections become perceptible. The image montages create an associative reference system of transfer and circulation: it is about exchange and displacement of both signs and their cultural value and meaning as well as power and morality, guilt and debt. For the question of debt is never only one of money, but at the same time a political one and closely interwoven with–religiously influenced–notions of morality. Particularly in the Middle Ages, the merging of the forming world religions and trade markets produces a logic and rhetoric of debt that has changed little to this day.^[2] When we speak of dependence and freedom, forgiveness and sin, the true and the false in our global capitalist economic and social system, it still boils down to the millennia-old question: Who owes what to whom?

Text: Marie Sophie Beckmann

Jasmin Werner (*1987 in Troisdorf, Germany) lives and works in Cologne. Her work often explores architectures of power and objects of status. In her practice, she draws attention to the desire to align oneself with nature and a pre-modern past, while occupying spaces of production and consumption. According to Werner’s iconology, one could also argue that the structural moments of our shared reality will necessarily remain within a repetitive continuum of time.Jasmin Werner began her studies at the HfG Karlsruhe in photography and completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Rietveld Academy Amsterdam in 2012. From 2012 to 2016 she attended the HfbK Städelschule in Frankfurt, first in the class of Simon Starling and later as a master student of Peter Fischli. In 2013 she was awarded the Tembe Art Studio residency in Moengo, Suriname by Mondriaan Fonds. In 2017, she travelled to South Korea as a fellow of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul. Her work has been shown at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Bärenzwinger (Berlin), Kunstverein Ingolstadt, Museum Folkwang (Essen), Damien & The Love Guru (Brussels), DuMont Kunsthalle (Cologne) and Moengo Festival of Art (Suriname), among others. In September 2021, she will open her exhibition Senorita Latifa Sharifah at Galerie Guido W. Baudach.

„Epilog’’ marks the last chapter of a year in the now beloved ’’Hütte.’’ Describing a moment of reflection, of pausing and looking back, as well as of departure, „Epilog’’ is itself a sequence of diverse chapters. As a series of four solo exhibitions, it offers a glimpse into the approach of each artist, their working practices, visual and material worlds. With new works ranging from sculpture to installation to painting, from research-based processes to explorations of narratives and popular culture, the four Residence NRW⁺ grant holders negotiate the particularities of the project space of LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur and Westfälischer Kunstverein as a means of reflecting on the material and discursive frameworks of their own practice. What conditions underlie it, what conditions does it presuppose? Incorporating the specific spatiality and window frontage of the exhibition space, this series of solos also engages with the idea of what it means for their work to be on display under current circumstances.

30 April – 14 May: Jasmin Werner

18 May – 01 June: Sarah Buckner

05 June – 19 June: Sami Schlichting

23 June – 11 July: Pablo Schlumberger

For the „Epilog’’ series, Residence NRW⁺ is hosted by the joint project space of Westfälischer Kunstverein and the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur.

Residence NRW⁺ is a practice-oriented scholarship program for particularly talented young artists and curators in the field of contemporary art based in Münster. The program is affiliated with the Kunsthalle Münster, an institution of the City of Münster, and is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Kunststiftung NRW and Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council.

https://www.residencenrw.de

^[1] Senorita Latifa Sharifah is the social media alias of Jasmin Werner’s cousin who lives and works in Dubai. Just like many other migrants from the Philippines, she regularly sends money to her family back home–and thus ultimately supports the entire infrastructure of the country. She poses in front of, or rather inside, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest tower at 828 meters, for whose construction steel from Berlin’s Palast der Republik was also used. Where the former GDR building was demolished in 2005, the Humboldt Forum is now being built as a reconstruction of the baroque Berlin Palace.

^[2] See David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House Publishing, 2011).

Jasmin Werner, Unschuldsengel, 2021, exhibition view, Westfälischer Kunstverein, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster

Jasmin Werner, Senorita Latifa Sharifa and mourning angel with chalice, 2021, printed mesh fencing, PVC banner, backlit print, LED lamp, rods, bolts, nuts, aluminium, 100 x 160 cm (frame)

Jasmin Werner, Blue Berlin Palace, 2021, printed mesh fencing, PVC banner, backlit print, LED lamp, rods, bolts, nuts, aluminium, 100 x 160 cm (frame)

Jasmin Werner, Remitily and mourning angel with chalice, 2021, printed mesh fencing, PVC banner, backlit print, LED lamp, rods, bolts, nuts, aluminium, 100 x 241 cm (with stand)

Jasmin Werner, Western Union Burj Khalifa, 2021, printed mesh fencing, PVC banner, backlit print, LED lamp, rods, bolts, nuts, aluminium, 100 x 160 cm (frame)

Jasmin Werner, Senorita Latifa Sharifa and angels adoring Christ Child, 2021, printed mesh fencing, PVC banner, backlit print, LED lamp, rods, bolts, nuts, aluminium, 100 x 241 cm (stand)

Jasmin Werner, Senorita Latifa Sharifa mourning angel, 2021, printed mesh fencing, PVC banner, backlit print, LED lamp, rods, bolts, nuts, aluminium, 160 x 100 x 10 cm (frame)