Elena Bajo (Berlin/NYC, Madrid); Teresa María Díaz Nerio (Amsterdam/Santo Domingo); Linda Franke (Berlin); Katya Gardea Browne (Berlin/México, D.F.); Andrea Loux (Bern/Berlin); IngridMwangiRobertHutter (Ludwigshafen/Nairobi); Rachelle Mozman (NYC/Panamá); Raquel Paiewonsky (Santo Domingo); Marta Mabel Pérez (San Juan); Amy Stafford (Berlin/Seattle); Iris Schieferstein (Berlin) and Gabriela Vainsencher (NYC/Tel Aviv).
Alanna Lockward, Curator
truestories.truesuccess is proudly sponsored by VideoArtWorld and it was exhibited at Freies Museum Berlin from October 31st – November 14th, 2009.
TRUESTORIES.TRUESUCCESS explores issues of fiction -domestic, historic, intimate, curatorial, urban, virtual and social. These “real” or performed narratives are reformulated by the artists in different media. From an abstract narration of timelessness as in the performance and resulting installation of Elena Bajo, Nothing more than a theatre of fluctuating ideas and echoes of future moments (a new refutation of time) II, 2009) to direct quotations of specific moments in history as in Teresa María Díaz Nerio’s historical reenactment of the colonizing view of the Other in her performance Hommage á Sara Bartman, 2007. Performance, photography, mixed media on paper, sculpture and video-art offer architectures of moments built mostly on personal experience. Focusing on recent European history, Iris Schieferstein articulates in Deutscher Herbst, 2009 her own account of the success and tragedies of unified Germany, on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Characteristically irreverent and provocative, she embodies a fictional result of this epistemic turning point juxtaposing symbols and self-irony in a landscape reminiscent of classical compositions.
The current phenomenon of the traveling artist is interpreted by IngridMwangiRobertHutter in Cryptic. A Traveler’s Diary, 2007, by means of transforming writing into drawing.
Andrea Loux organized The Way Of Life, 2007, inspired by both the disgust and fascination experienced during an artist residency in New York. She collected the omnipresent pamphlets and brochures offering the secrets to success with guidance available for everything. If we follow these prescribed measures we can achieve everything and anything we want. The promise lurks in every slogan: TRUESTORIES.TRUESUCCESS
The American Dream (Nightmare?) is approached through inconspicuous aquarelles by Amy Stafford with the title Paris Hilton Fellatio, 2004. Here, a digitally produced and distributed image is appropriated and reinterpreted with fine-arts tools and is re-injected with human intimacy through the natural flow of the hand-made. The voyeurism-exhibitionism and paradoxical connection-isolation of current electronic social networks is addressed with candor and rigor, offering together with the rest of the participant and incisive taxonomy into the vacuums, vertigoes and alliterations of contemporary existence.
looking forward to come see it