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A DRINK FROM A LAKE OF MEMORY AND TRUTH

Place: Kunstverein Ruhr, Essen

Date: -

Artists: Isabella Fürnkäs

Works: The Memory House, The Red Drawings, my room, The River or Memory, Medusa’s Kiss

Isabella Séville Fürnkäs critically probes the overwhelming visual culture of the 21st century through performative, installative, and time-based techniques. Her work examines, on the one hand, the current impact of digitalization and the unceasing torrent of images on our interpersonal relationships; on the other hand, she harnesses the vast, often bewildering reservoirs of our cultural image memory — made newly accessible through the Internet — to recontextualize them in surprising and incisive ways.

The head of Medusa appears beside a contemporary nude photograph; the sublime and the fearsome encounter the everyday, the familiar, and the benign. Yet these juxtapositions reveal enduring truths about our present moment and our own histories. For this exhibition, Fürnkäs transforms the Kunstverein Ruhr into an immersive, image-saturated spatial installation, opening up aesthetic experiences that can emerge only within this particular space.

EXTENSION & ARTIST TALK | Isabella Séville Fürnkäs in conversation with Dr. Noemi Smolik | Friday, 16 January 2026, 7pm

A further intervention within the exhibition and an artist talk with Fürnkäs are conceived as an integral, deliberately placed component of the broader multimedia project. The exhibition additionally includes — true to its title — a real, solid fountain as a readymade, in which water actually bubbles, as well as a folding screen (paravent) designed by the artist through drawing and painting. These two sculptural elements are conceived as integral and meaning-generating components of the immersive installation. In other words, as visitors we do not merely perceive the images, sculptures, forms, and colors before us — and our historically developed relationships to and with them — but, in a self-reflexive sense, also ourselves, and thus the conditions under which we see and think at this very moment.

Dr. Noemi Smolik grew up in Prague and studied art history, history, and philosophy in Cologne and New York. She taught at the art academies in Hamburg and Dresden and conducted workshops on art criticism at the universities of Cologne, Bonn, Düsseldorf, and Münster. Her writings on Russian and contemporary art have been published in FAZ/Frankfurt, artforum/New York, frieze/London, e-flux/New York, and Kunstforum/Köln. In 2020, she received the Art Cologne Prize for Art Criticism. She is a co-founder of the platform Hope Recycling Station in Prague/Berlin, which addresses questions of racism, colonialism, and postcolonialism in post-socialist countries.

Additional accompanying events and mediation formats have been developed, as well as an online video and a small edition created in connection with the exhibition. A dedicated catalogue will continue the Kunstverein Ruhr’s ongoing publication series, providing a deeper insight into this installation.

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