Olaf Nicolai
Faites le travail qu’accomplit le soleil
Larry Sultan
Katherine Avenue
11 June – 22 August 2010
Opening: Thursday 10 June, 7 pm
Goseriede 11
30159 Hannover, Germany
www.kestner.org
At the center of Olaf Nicolai’s exhibition is the new installation Faites le travail qu’accomplit le soleil (2010), which concentrates the main themes of the exhibition such as formalism and its connection to social utopia as well as the relation between subjectivity and perception. The large walk-in sculpture at the center of the multipart installation is covered fully in mirrors, its form recalls the deconstruction of a diving platform, setting up associations of falling, precariousness and orientation. The title of both the installation and the show fragmentarily quotes a sentence from Jean-François Lyotard’s text Libidinal Economy: “You have to do the work that the sun or grass does when you bathe your body in them.” The conjunction of nature (sun) and artificiality (work) refers to the paradoxes that exist in relation to desire and society, need and development or work and pleasure, all of which Olaf Nicolai has repeatedly dealt with in his work.
This installation is accompanied by the photographic work Zabriskie Point (2010). It came about at night at the observation point in the Californian Death Valley National Park which has become a mythical place since its appearance in Michelangelo Antonioni’s eponymous film. While the monumental landscape remains invisible, Nicolai’s images mirror the mediated nature of reality, as well as the utopian moment in Antonioni’s film. The exhibition is completed by the installation Samani (Some Proposals to Answer Important Questions) (2008). The moving spotlight gives rise to the impression of a living being that is looking for something, perhaps contact to the viewer. Samani operates here like an echo of the themes of the other works, while also literally turning on the relationship, given in the title of the exhibition, between sun/light/vitality/nature and work/artificiality. What is at stake in all three parts of the exhibition is an actualization of one of Nicolai’s main concerns: to set up complex relations between abstract form and content, between the perception of a surface and the social implications it evokes.
A publication with an introduction by Veit Görner and texts by Anne von der Heiden, Kathrin Meyer and Monika Szewczyk will be published in August 2010 by spector books.
On the occasion of the opening Olaf Nicolai’s artist book Zabriskie Point (published by spector books) will be presented.
Larry Sultan – Katherine Avenue
This exhibition brings together three of Larry Sultan’s best known series: Pictures from Home, The Valley and Homeland. Made principally in the San Fernando Valley, where the artist grew up, Larry Sultan mingles the idyllic spaces of his childhood with socio-political issues, creating contradictory worlds of imagery that echo in the viewer’s perception for a long time.
Pictures from Home (1984-1991) combines photography, amateur film stills and texts. It enigmatically exposes the network of relationships between the artist and his parents. Originally a politically motivated examination of the image of the family during the Reagan era, the series develops into a poetic narration about the boundaries of documentary practice. In The Valley (1998-2003) Sultan explores the typically middle-class locations rented by the Californian porn-film industry. His artistic focus is not a moral judgment of pornography. Instead, he is interested in the domestic life of the suburbs as a symbolically loaded setting. Homeland (2006-2009) brings the myth of the Californian landscape to the fore. In picturesque and painterly images Sultan works with Central American day laborers undertaking prosaic tasks on the peripheries of suburban sites.
In Sultan’s trilogy the Californian suburbs appear as a metaphorical prism reflecting global themes, which are interwoven throughout each series: work, desire, family. The recurrent return to the places of his childhood points to a concern for the promise of his homeland, yet his work also resonates with a mistrust of the seductive power of images. The artistic bridging of the gap between the conceptual approach, which questions the context of photographic images, and the emotionally backed interest is characteristic of Sultan’s special position in contemporary photography. Larry Sultan had conceived large parts of this exhibition before he passed away in December 2009.
A publication with texts by Larry Sultan, an introduction by Veit Görner, and an essay by Martin Germann will be published by Steidl.
Opening hours:
Tuesday through Sunday 11 am to 6 pm
Thursday 11 am to 8 pm
For more information please contact Silke Janßen at presse@kestner.org
The kestnergesellschaft is supported by the state of Lower Saxony.
The exhibition with Olaf Nicolai is supported by Sparkasse Hannover and Stiftung Niedersachsen.
Both exhibitions are supported by the patrons’ circle of the kestnergesellschaft.
