museum trip: space / art / territories of me & you / & a selfie

Trying to find the space and time for more mini-trips - that's what I started in January and February, and each time, I was glad for it. So when I went to Stuttgart city last week for a meet-up, I went an hour earlier and visited the independent museum near Schlossplatz, the "Kunstverein".

They currently show an exhibition on “Raum” – “Space”, it’s called “Something in Space Escapes Our Attempts at Surveying“. Might be rather modern and interesting, I thought when I read about it. And it is. Here's the installation you arrive at when you enter: emotional territories of "me" and "you".

Ricardo Basbaum: "Wall Diagrams"

Standing in front of them reminded me of my last visit to this museum, and the "mind maps" they featured back then... can't remember the name of the artist or of the exhbition, though. But I think i blogged about it, too... yes! here: "mind maps, life archives", and the mind map was from exhibiton was from Anna Oppermann, part of the exhibition "on/notes - A Research" and "On Dithering: Motives"...

But back to the current exhibition:
It's a thought-provoking exhibition of artists from different countries, each piece adding a different view or angle on the theme of space: from road trips to gender zones to “the axes of evil”. Here's a part of the introduction, the full text is online at the museum website:

One of the central works was Juan Downey's video installation "Video Trans Americas". a review notes: "Viewers of Juan Downey's "Video Trans Americas" tapes are confronted with the difference between documentary as art or as anthropology.. The tapes document various rituals and moments in the life of the Yanomami Indians of Venezuela's Amazonian rain forest. It's not simply documentation, though: Downey, a Chilean who studied art in Paris and Madrid and now lives in New York City, went to Venezuela to live with the Yanomami  ... and to develop an electronic form of communication with them." (here's the full text: Juan Downey.)

Juan Downey: "Video Trans Americas"

All this also connects to the current Coursera art course  "Live! A History of Art for Artists..:" - the second week had the theme “story”, started with cave paintings in France, and with the larger angle of how humans tell their stories through words and art. And with the question: whose stories remain, and who doesn’t have the means to tell their stories? Whose history remains? 

An art installation that especially moved me was this one:  the material table of Peggy Buth's "Superparadise". the theme of it: the way our culture deals with "others", in this case, with homosexuality. it's a combination of a list of de-humanizing swear words on one side, police reports in the middle, and a collage of photos: they are marking the space a society is willing to give, or is not willing to give to those who are different. 

and another kind of space: a photo documentation of abandoned spaces in Taiwan:

i could go on and on... but i think those pictures and notes give an idea. in an attempt to capture the feeling of being in this art space, and to catch the dialogue between the different artworks in this space, i tried a 360° video:

and so nice that one of the art installations invited a selfie: this is Bill Spinhoven's interactive video installation "It's about time" - what you see on a screen is a transformed version of reality, and of you - a different space.

Previous museum trips 2014:

• Neolithic Museum: layers of time, stone flowers, and a fragile bridge 
• Square museum: old stones & modern shapes, or: square afternoon
• First of 2014: art, selfie & the first exhibition: Baumeister
• more home journeys