JAKOB KOLDING – MASQUERADES
2014-11-24Taking masquerades as a starting point, the works playfully combine a wide range of influences. From renaissance sculptures to surrealism, psychoanalysis and dream interpretation to modernist theatre, dioramas and classic literature to hip hop culture and pop music, post-structuralist identity theory and back again to pre-modern myths and fables. In the process, a world of constantly shifting, changing and overlapping positions is constructed.
Often using only a few elements–in some works just one or two–a wide range of possible meanings are opened up. What at first hand might look like a symbol with a certain significance gradually turns to suggest multiple readings, oscillating between different positions and seeming contradictions, creating an ambivalent state of radical openness that is, at the same time, liberating as well as frightening–a state of existential drama that is loaded with a dream-like ambiguity.
Central to the exhibition is a large installation composed of individual sculptures of life-sized figures made from prints on wood cutouts. A landscape of people, trees and animals create a scenography that lies somewhere in between theatre scene design, 19th century dioramas and amusement parks. As the spectator walks among the figures, the basic stage prop construction becomes obvious. It’s a scene that can be entered, but which at the same time shows its own one-sidedness. It invites the spectator to become a part of it, while simultaneously introducing considerations on its very construction, making evident the slippery slope between the real and the imaginary. Or indeed, between the “real” and the performed.
Opposite – The Raven, 2014
Exhibition runs through to January 10th, 2015
Galerie Martin Janda
Eschenbachgasse 11
A-1010 Vienna
Austria
