Transient Matter

Opening:

Anne Büscher & Sanne Vaassen curated by Sophie-Charlotte Bombeck

Vernissage 10/9/2020 Exhibition 11/09. – 11/10/2020

The exhibition deals with the transience and momentum of matter.

Matter is no longer understood only as a carrier of form and idea, but emphasizes its episdemic but also cultural significance for the present or examines its semantic and historical relevance.

For both artists, contact with nature is crucial, with the artists acting as alchemists, whereby their works are an expression of artistic research. By investigating, analyzing and documenting natural phenomena, they create compositions between chance and control. While Anne Büscher works with various materials such as glass, marble, ceramics, photography, silicon, stone or immaterial energetic and at the same time volatile substances such as light and air and explores them in her artistic work. Sanne Vaassen investigates the relationship between material, object and language. The artist materializes ephemeral conversations, memories, time and their interrelations with real references to the history and immediate events of our time, opening up to the viewer forgotten traditions as well as new perspectives on social and societal phenomena.

At super+Centercourt the two artists present their works together, the materials they use are witnesses of their stay in the Villa Waldberta. Findings and objects from the immediate surroundings of the Bavarian lake district or abstracted forms of language as a momentary impression confront us. Together they escaped forms and ways of presentation, between object and exhibition furniture the works intertwine and act on the place as exhibition space itself.

Anne Büscher shows the viewer* the lightness, flexibility but also fragility of the medium glass.

The glass mobiles or hanging sculptures protrude from the ceiling. Filigree silver bubbles are connected with threads of pure silk that level out until they float in perfect balance. Gentle air currents cause the mobile to oscillate again from time to time, modifying the arrangement of the object.

Both artists make the properties of air their own. While Anne Büscher makes use of the technical properties in the form of movement and in the interaction within the production of the individual mouth-blown glass objects, Sanne Vaassen works with the aesthetic effect of matter in which a mixture of distilled water and natural essences dissolved in it are distributed through the air. The inverse matrix, the invisible, takes shape, a kind of alchemical keynote that allows intellect, emotion and senses to become the activating potential in and of the work. Not only is the visionary inherent in the new materialistic tendencies, but rather an analysis of the present, the reflection of the past and a speculative approach to the future.

As a place of contemplation, as an archive of our memories, Sanne Vaassen creates an encyclopedia of the flowers she finds in the garden of Villa Waldberta, transcribing the flower symbolism from flower to word or from word to flower.

Today, the language of flowers has been somewhat forgotten, but flowers were once the code for what one wanted to say or ask but did not dare to say. Thus, as early as the middle of the 18th century, a system of signs emerged that is almost as multifaceted as a foreign language.

In her work, the artist draws on the communication system of flowers and creates three perfumes based on three different addresses by Angela Merkel (Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany), Hassan Diab (the recently retired Prime Minister of Lebanon) and Narendra Modi (acting Prime Minister of India). A perfume in the strict sense is a fragrance composition that serves the personal well-being of a person and its presentation to others. The use of aromatic substances was considered a source of inspiration and was already in the ancient advanced civilizations of Egypt and India in the use of craft tradition, spirituality and medicine. They were understood as an expression of the pictorially aesthetic beauty ideals of their time. Thus the artist uses the speeches of the individual speakers as a kind of recipe and transcribes the words, depending on their frequency, into an instruction for the fragrance compositions .In this way the visitors* get an olfactory impression of the individual speakers and their words. An expression of a social-political aesthetic society?

As the French philosopher Michel Onfray wrote in 1999 in “The Forms of Time”: “In a world that is entirely devoted to the delights of the chronometer and industry, the garden is a kingdom of peace and balance, a kingdom of harmony and tranquility. … It is always an enclave of an ironic time, a time of peace, which is included like an outgrowth in the tragic time.“

The scent of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel is based on the speech about the corona spread in the Tagesschau on 18.03.2020. Hassan Diab’s scent is a transcription of his speech of 10.08.2020 in which the Lebanese Prime Minister announces the resignation of the government after the explosion in Beirut.

The third perfume is a transcription of the speech of Prime Minister Narendra Modi who, on July 3, 2020, speaks to the Indian troops in Ladakh, the disputed Himalayan region in which China and India have been fighting for supremacy in Central Asia and its borders since 1962.

Sanne Vaassen examines the social structures, dynamics and cultures of mankind and plays with constructed compositions of established symbols and traditions.