Art

The second group exhibition in the series AND WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IN? im Elektrohaus has dealt with the boundaries between art and everyday life as well as our belief in art.

Everyday materials, objects and situations are naturally included in the arts today and the boundaries between art and everyday life are constantly being renegotiated. How do everyday objects become art? Is everything just a question of context, attribution, perception? Can everyday life also be art? And is art a question of faith? A good 100 years after Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel, the ART exhibition brought together varieties of the readymade – everyday objects, materials and situations, sometimes more and sometimes less transformed.

Vladimir Mitrev captures a randomly discovered scene in east London in his video The Lovely Colour. From the street he observes through a shop window how a woman's hair is being styled with needle and thread instead of scissors and comb, completely changing her appearance. Eugen Becker is filming a much more intimate scene - a very personal portrait of a young woman. This scene does not seem ordinary, although it could be taken from everyday life - the relationship between the people in front of and behind the camera seems extremely familiar. The artistic interventions in image and sound are clearer. His works on the floor are made of simple materials such as iron powder, magnets and water. Although known, they are irritating at this point. The floor doesn't actually rust and the small, dark objects look unusually organic. In the work Dirty Laundry by Jana Müller, the original idea of the readymade is taken one step further. The laundry containers not only come directly from a laundry service, they are only borrowed for the duration of the exhibition. Everyday objects become art and everyday objects again. Can art also only be a temporary state? Sharman Riegger works with found objects. Sunset #1-13 consists of 13 postcards that he discovered while on vacation. The colors of the prints are all altered to varying degrees by the sunlight, which is emphasized by the sequence. Mirror green/white/blue comes from a series in which the artistic intervention is minimal. Blind spots and small breaks - the places that make mass-produced items unique - are highlighted in colour. The works assembled in the exhibition are very different. What they have in common is the potential to sharpen our perspective – not only in the exhibition context, but ideally also in everyday life.
The exhibition was shown in May 2014 in the Elektrohaus in Hamburg.