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Inner workings
Remember how you used to build pillow fortresses as a child? The Memory House (2023) in the first room is similarly comforting (at first glance at least). Inside, electric outlets and a notebook made up of ceramics are draped in white bed sheets. A sketchbook peeks out. The outer shell of the house is full of images: naked cats, artworks, anatomic illustrations, product designs, porn.
Several drawings of messy beds bear titles alluding to the installation My Bed (1998) by Tracey Emin (Baby Boomer, British). Both artists put a spotlight on the intimacy, shame, and mess connected with one’s own bed, publicly displaying what is otherwise taboo.
Black watercolor paintings hang on a red thread like photographs in a lab. They outline ambiguous shapes: faces melt into ulcerations, brains dissolve into guts. Isabella (Millenial, German) paints fluid lines between reason and intuition as represented by the two organs.
More ceramic remotes with organic buttons are neatly displayed on a table and in a cupboard. Earthenware game boys are stacked up in a pharmacy cabinet. These remotes are everywhere. Little tools that give you control over what to see, what to skip, what to ignore. But the overall number of internet images spread across the show suggest that there is no escape from overwhelm and control is a soothing illusion. There is a longing for a time before visual and virtual overstimulation. A craving to reconnect with instincts.
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Jennifer Braun on Inner workings, Clages, Cologne