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KATHARINA JAHNKE – KOSTIS VELONIS
16 November until 17 December 2005
At the centre of the project "Hazards" by Katharina Jahnke are places as the point of departure for certain longings, for particular rules of behaviour, and as a measure for good and evil. Using her three media - sculpture, drawing and cloth banners - she builds an associative web of quotations and images, which circle around mechanisms of fear and their implication in setting limits, in the actual as well as figurative sense.
In a series of drawings Katharina Jahnke lexically puts together covers from old issues of a travel magazine (Merian) to form a picture of the world, which painfully recalls the time it was possible to discover the world in an idealistic and carefree way. In the mean time all the countries illustrated on the cover have been put on a list of dangerous locations to visit. There is not only a narrative factor contained in the process of meticulously copying the covers. For the artist it is also a way of working through her own fears and paranoia.
The sculptures entitled "Barricades" push in-between spaces into the foreground the space separating safety from danger, good from evil. In the choice of materials, such as shards of mirror glass, most of the sculptures involve a direct danger in themselves, they only show details, manipulate and fragment the gaze, and dissolve limits to produce a confusing effect for the viewer. The viewer is left on uncertain ground and finds himself facing a banner giving instructions like: "Keep the Vampires from your door" and
"How to survive 2".
Kostis Velonis in his reference to "Bohemia", which is the literal geographical cradle of the bohemians, functions as the plot that familiarizes the collective as personal and searches for "unofficial" ways of life.
His interest focuses on the question of freedom. Not purely through the literature that comes from such a subject neither through art historical references b ut the actual process of the realization of itself. The "cultural objects" as he calls them, demand the preciousness of freedom, which to people is recognizable though the daily friction of life and beyond history.
The keystone towards the completion of these "objects-events" is the demand for authenticity and the rejection of political groupings. With these works Kostis Velonis condenses the bereavement of history that begins with the juxtaposition of comic and tragic elements. They convey experiences that concern the human nature such as disappointment, loss, humiliation, expectation, loneliness, love and anything else that might synchronize our uncontrollable overthrowing of a scheduled authority.
With the knowledge that anything perfect hides an endless amount of egoism and arrogance within, any reference to an architectural structure, is being embraced as an "event", or more fastidiously as an "object-event". Mistakes and imperfections are hidden within.
Kostis Velonis engages with the notions of play, the unimportant and the dream like whilst creating minimal sculptures using cheap, humble and even disregarded materials. The visual language he employs moves contrary to the modern ideologies of mass consumption and hyper visual stimulation.
