“Closer” at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen
A schematic diagram of short-term partitions demarcates the six axes of “CLOSER,” a bunch present curated by the Kunstverein’s new director, Kathrin Bentele. Scaled to suit a 16:9 picture projection, the oblong panels are put in as a sequence of partial enclosures, like miniature cinemas, warranting a proximate encounter with every place. The chosen works orbit the concept of intimacy throughout interpersonal and technological dimensions, providing correspondent takes on the situations of communication by proxy.
James Benning honors the legacies of seven American outsider artists and an imagined prehistoric cave painter with PLACE, 2020, a homagic set up together with a letterpress guide, seven replicated work, and a movie during which Benning’s lens stares from the roadside at every of the artists’ properties with unflinching placidity. Across the nook, in Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos’s Scores for Carolyn, 2019, a recitation of educational scores is slowed and slurred to the purpose that one may doubt whether or not it’s language in any respect. Like PLACE, Scores for Carolyn begets closeness by means of focusing the viewer’s consideration, although, in contrast to the previous, it calls on the dependency of that viewer.
Josiane M.H. Pozi addresses the connective dissonance of video communication within the newly commissioned movie 2, 2022, which sees the artist’s mom goal a handheld digicam upward at her face throughout her commute to work. Inversely, Alejandro Cesarco’s silent documentation of a reunion along with his first images instructor, Mirrored Portrait, 2015, and Steffani Jemison’s Determine 8, 2021, stage unmediated encounters between filmmaker and protagonist. (Within the latter, athlete and dancer Alexis Web page holds the digicam at arm’s size and swings her physique round in determine eights for eighteen minutes, then asks, “This doesn’t make you sick, Steffani?”) Culminating in an infinitely looping seven-channel reconfiguration of A Street Film Is Not possible in Hong Kong, 2021, by Tiffany Sia—CCTV-like movies of Sia’s dawn hikes throughout Lamma Island—“CLOSER” circumnavigates the breadth of scrutiny in an exacting debut by Bentele.
— Olamiju Fajemisin
