Ayse Erkmen, Netz, 2006
Photo:
Jens Ziehe
Courtesy Galerie
Barbara Weiss, Berlin
Instead of
producing transportable and hence sellable objects, the artist often
creates site-specific interventions that only last for a short period of
time. She often manipulates the preexisting things she finds in exhibition
spaces and underscores them by adding or altering a few select elements:
in 2004, for instance, she mounted lamps onto the cleaning mechanism of
the roof of the Vienna Secession,
transforming the glass ceiling into a playful arena of constantly changing
squares of color. The chief feature of works like these lies in
visualizing the exhibition situation and ultimately art's relationship to
people. The works seldom, however, reveal their humanist component at
first glance. They are above all offers made to the viewer: "I
deliberately try to veil the work’s core so that people have to try a
little harder to get to it."
Erkmen's conceptual approach can
also be noticed in her teaching style. She taught at the Kunsthochschule
Kassel and from 1999 to 2004 at the Städelschule
in Frankfurt. Her Frankfurt class produced a broad spectrum of artist
types like Dani
Gal, Michaela
Meise, and Dirk
Fleischmann. Which is a sign that her teaching method is more about a
particular way of thinking than some established repertory of handicraft:
"Instead of supplying students with ideas, I tried to understand their own
thoughts — even if they seemed uninteresting to me at first. I tried to
understand where they wanted to go. I think that when you teach young
artists, you have to open yourself up to them. And so I was able to
immerse myself in their work and find meaning there. I think that's good
for the teacher, too. I've learned a lot from my students."
|
Working this way naturally entails a great deal of
discussion. "I have a lot of talks with my students about their concepts,"
Erkmen explains. "And the second step is about technical stuff. How they
can express their ideas in the most precise and effective way." Erkmen's
concept-oriented approach extends here to her teaching, and she's
obviously not an artist to teach the technical skills needed to best
design agreeable works of art for moneyed buyers: "I've always told my
students that they shouldn't worry about the market," the artist says.
"Maybe that's bad advice." For her part, she can't think of the art
market. For a long time, Turkey didn't even have collectors of
contemporary art. This prevented her from producing solid, market-oriented
art products.
This insisting on the ephemeral must have driven the
curators of her retrospective to the verge of desperation. How should one
organize an exhibition like this, when all that remains of the artist's
most important works is not much more than the original concept and a few
documentation photos. "First, I made a list to establish what concepts are
best expressed by which works of art," Erkmen says. "And then, together
with the curator, I decided to create the works once more for Hamburger
Bahnhof. With very few exceptions, none of the works were delivered. They
were newly conceived for the exhibition spaces."
Ayse
Erkmen, Under the Roof, 2005
Ikon
Gallery Birmingham
Courtesy
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin
The
result is less a retrospective than an elaborate remix. Fans can keep an
eye out for their Erkmen favorites in a new orchestration. The references
are not always so clear, such as the green lines in Hamburger Bahnhof that
follow the contours of the disabled-persons elevator in reference to the
earlier project Imitating Lines, in which the art student redrew
the corners and niches of her academy in 1977. "For a lot of people, the
exhibition will be a new experience," Erkmen says. And a fleeting
experience at that — one that will dissolve back into the immaterial
following the closing of the exhibition. Perhaps it was like this; but
then again, perhaps it was not.
Ayse Erkmen: Weggefährten
Hamburger
Bahnhof, Berlin
13. September 2008 - 11. Januar 2009
[1]
[2]
|
