SCENOGRAPHY OF EXISTENCE
Jürgen Klauke & Sissa Micheli
2020
curated by Günther Oberhollenzer
Alessandro Casciaro Art Gallery
10.10. — 12.12.2020
https://www.alessandrocasciaro.com


With works by Sissa Micheli and Jürgen Klauke, the Alessandro Casciaro Gallery presents an inspiring duality of two extraordinary contemporary artistic positions. The South Tyrolean artist has asked the German Documenta participant to be her dialogue partner. There are a number of points of contact to be discovered in her photographic work: the staging and aestheticization of human existence and identity, the play with presence and absence, with materiality and sensuality, the desire for the extravagant and surreal, the enigmatic and humorous.
Sissa Micheli questions the everyday and the familiar in a variety of photographs, video works and objects, opening up new perspectives and points of view. The surface of the image often refers to something else, something behind it, a hidden story that can only be guessed at. Curious and inquiring, she approaches her fields of investigation and creates a sensual as well as enigmatic microcosm that moves between reality and fiction. Beyond functional attribution, Micheli lends objects charged levels of meaning with surreal radiance. Thus the artist shows photographic works from the series "Museum Rapsody - Objective Correlatives", in which she combines objects with each other without their compelling relationship to each other. Through a sensitive poetic and humorous arrangement, however, they are charged with new meaning. The staging is an essential part of Michelis work, the moving, dynamic image a constant companion. Using flying garments, she creates fascinating temporary sculptures that celebrate the ephemeral and transitory in a sensually dynamic play. In the new photographs created especially for the exhibition, powerful textiles float before the face of a female figure. Man thrown into the world is vulnerable, at the mercy of finiteness and death.
Since the 1970s, Jürgen Klauke has dealt with the human body and its gender identity in photographs, drawings, video works and performances. He radically questions conventional gender roles and analyzes their social conventions and constructions. In theatrical settings he deconstructs sexual typologies and their effects on identity and subject. Selected photographic works from the 1990s and 2000s are shown in the exhibition. They revolve around the aestheticization of the existential, around the inadequacies of existence and the conditions of life, around the structure of the world, society and inner contexts. The paranoid structure of our present world is presented in a melancholic aesthetic. Against dark backgrounds, the actors in this choreography appear frozen and mask-like, sculptural and in an erotic state of suspension. With bed and table objects, chairs or objects hanging from the ceiling, Klauke works his way through world designs, arranges typical people with and on them and makes inner experiences visible and tangible. A poetic and melancholic view, enigmatic and highly aesthetic, but always garnished with fine humor and subtle irony.
Klauke's works of art were created before the pandemic and, like Micheli, seem more contemporary than ever. Under the impression of our current uncertain times, they experience a new attention and reading.

Curator and text: Günther Oberhollenzer