Exhibition: Lukas Einsele, Kota Ezawa, Alexander Schellow

Lukas Einsele
One Step Beyond

“One Step Beyond – Revisiting the Mine” is an art project that reports on landmines and their victims and brings them together in a safe and understandable relationship. For “One Step Beyond” people wounded by landmines remember and describe the course of their misfortune. The portraits were made with a large-format camera, and the victims’ reports were exchanged for a Polaroid print of the image. The victims’ reports, drawings and portraits are juxtaposed with the documentation of a landmine that could have caused the accident. The interviews and research for “One Step Beyond” lead to what are probably most landmine-riddled places on the planet: Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Cambodia.

“One Step Beyond” will also be presented in the Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Martin Gropius Bau Berlin, as well as the Goethe Institute and the United Nations in New York. A book about the project has been published by Hatje Cantz.

Lukas Einsele (*1963 in Essen) lives and works as an artist in Berlin, Darmstadt and Mannheim. The central aspect of his work is memory as action, as an active process that generates images for the viewer to relate and adapt to. His work has been published and exhibited frequently since 1988, and was an Akademie fellow in 1998-9.

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Kota Ezawa
Hardcore & Censored

“Hardcore and Censored” is a new version of Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson’s famous honeymoon video, where Ezawa transformed the original footage filmed with a hand camera into 2-D comic animation. Tommy and Pamela’s voices were then dubbed over with the voices of two amateur actors. The soundtrack is by the southern German rock band Sorrymy Sox. Ezawa replaces the real images with drawn animation, and utilizes censorship as a means to display this amateur video’s visual structure and plot.

Kota Ezawa (*1969 in Cologne) is a professor for Media Art at the California College of Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, California, USA. His 2002 video “The Simpson Verdict” is on view in the exhibition Out of Time: Contemporary Art from the Collection, at the MoMA, New York, from August 2006 until April 2007. Ezawa is a 2006 Solitude fellow.

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Alexander Schellow
Spots

As a counterpoint to Kota Ezawa’s 2-D video, Alexander Schellow will show a film from the “Spots” series. The series is an attempt to restore memory by working backward. As a basis, Schellow uses 36 drawings of the same situation, drawn from memory. The three-second act of the human brain serves as a sequence in the drawing process. The filmic animated (re)production serves to reconstruct a maximally compressed present moment.

Alexander Schellow (*1974 Hannover) studied fine arts in Berlin and Glasgow. He was a master student at the University of the Arts in Berlin in 2002. He works in the areas of drawing, film animation and Performance Installation and has had many solo as well as group shows. Schellow is a 2006 fellow at the Akademie.

The exhibitions are on view from Friday, December 1, 2006 to Sunday, January 14, 2007
Hours: Tues-Thu 10am–noon & 2–5:30pm, Fri 10–noon & 2–4pm, Sat–Sun noon–5:30pm
The exhibitions are closed from December 22, 2006 to January 1, 2007.