Now at the SCHIRN:
In a Silent Way. Episode 2

Denise Mawila’s works bear witness to the decay of elegance. The artist combines an awareness of form and beauty with a sense of the fragility of the moment and explores how everyday phenomena shape our perception. As if announcing a celebration or else serving as its remnant, “Prise’s” shimmering material is deliberately arranged by Mawila in a public “non-place,” next to the parking lot on the north side of the former Dondorf printing factory. The curtain’s mirrored strips, in constant motion and flux owing to the effects of light and wind, are exposed to the weather, which “marks” the curtain over time. Curtains like these are often seen in temporary settings like stage sets, parties, or storefront displays.

A new iteration of an idea more than twenty-five years old, “Prise” transforms public space into a site of encounter and joy—following in the spirit of relational aesthetics, which understands art as staging a social exchange between people. Mawila originally developed the minimalist sculpture, made from tinsel, with a fellow student at Offenbach University of Art and Design (HfG). The use of readymades—industrially manufactured everyday objects—has since become a constant in the artist’s works, reflecting her interest in the rearrangement of existing objects and their relationships.

After dark, Paul Spengemann’s laser projection “spin jump crawl climb dream bite hunt” illuminates the SCHIRN’s north facade in Frankfurt’s Bockenheim district, causing an unusual figure to appear that constantly takes on new forms. Out of fine white lines, it forms spiderwebs that transform into grotesque faces, or the shapes of letters and words that remain largely incomprehensible. Time and again the threads snap, and it has to start all over.

Paul Spengemann uses lasers as a tool for exploring spaces and telling stories. The spiderlike creature not only crawls, climbs, jumps, and hunts, but also dreams and expresses fears and desires. With the help of its threads, it shares emotional experiences with the audience as it tries to form a connection. The repeatedly failed attempts at communication and the ambivalent soundtrack create an underlying mood of melancholia, which sometimes veers toward the unsettling. Occasionally the English word “gobble” can be discerned, which means, among other things, “to devour.” Whether the creature uses illusions to lure prey or is itself seeking companionship and support remains unclear. The same goes for the question of how reliably feelings can be interpreted and how secure our connections are.

What traces do we leave behind? How reliable is our memory? Ian Waelder’s facade sculptures can be found at several locations around the former Dondorf printing factory. They are based on a clay sculpture modeled after the nose of the artist’s father, Juan Waelder, depicting what the artist deems the “Waelder Nose.” It is an ironic self-portrait that will gradually disintegrate over time. The papier-mâché works, studded with birdseed, are subject to destruction caused by birds and the elements. Referencing the 1969 sculpture “P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (Portrait of the Artist as a Vogelfutterbüste [Birdseed Bust])” by the Swiss artist Dieter Roth, they convey an anti-monumental gesture: rather than being treated as something stable and unchanging, memory here is constantly exposed to external attacks and forgetting. Waelder’s work challenges what we think we know about the past.

“Self-Portrait As My Father’s Nose” confronts the viewer with a historically charged motif. The stereotype of the “Jewish nose” is a central part of a long history of antisemitic depictions. In 2017, the artist became the first member of his family to return to Germany. His grandfather, Friedrich Wälder, fled from a concentration camp near Stuttgart to Chile in 1939, where he went by the name Federico Waelder. He was his family’s sole survivor. His grandson never met him and knows him only through historical, material traces, such as cassette recordings of piano music and, indeed, his father’s nose. Waelder deliberately takes up this physical feature that, due to its racist instrumentalization, is typically avoided, and then imbues it with a personal reference. In a formal language that embraces brittleness and fragility, Waelder creates artistic reflections on biography, memory, and remembrance.