When we were close to the End

Kuo Hsin-Hui, Nikola Kaloyanov and Julia Schäfer

11.03. - 11.04.2020

Opening - 11.03.2020

“Dive deep and stay awake. This is where it begins.” (Kuo Hsin-Hui)
“A snake bites its own tail to form a circle.” (Julia Schäfer)
“I cross the line between self and foreign. This transient perspective makes both sides seem close.” (Nikola Kaloyanov)

Kuo Hsin-Hui major works mainly focus on exploring the vertigo experience through orbiting subjective viewpoints on movement, related to concepts such as aim, axis and balance. These continuous recalibrations and dislocations are not only related to the creator’s daily, inner bodily experience, but also connected to Taiwan’s repeated colonization throughout its history; a restless experience in which the society was forced to readjust and conform to a new externally imposed standard, and still persevere towards “Future”(stability) beyond the country’s suspended situation.

Julia Schäfer’s works formulate a “recherche du temps perdu”, exploiting the double meaning of the word research as sighting and search. While various media – videos, books and the internet – are sighted for recurring motifs, this research work does not simply stop at a cultural-sociological synopsis of the collective pictorial memory. Rather, the search for a memory runs through the repetitions and variations; an attempt to reconstruct this one moment in the always foreign signs that language and the media imagery make available to us. These are moments of alienation. The destroyed biographies in war, the fading out of subjectivity in porn.

In repetition, Julia Schäfer produces a memory that is at once intimate and general, singular and social – she does this in an act of appropriation […]. Instead of the reconstruction of an uncatchable event, it offers a transformation in the delicate fascination of the material and the re-creation of a collective memory in the games of memory and imagination. (Moriz Stangl)

“In my work, I explore relationships that arise and dissolve between people and their environment. The clichés and traditions of my Bulgarian origins and my new, Western and increasingly technological home in Germany are deconstructed and examined from the perspective of a wanderer. The home, the identity, the language – I analyse these social conventions from the position of my changed centre of life. I link my self-written texts with the means of videography and photography. My video works combine documentary authenticity with essayistic narration. Native and the foreign – are these only illusions?” Nikola Kaloyanov