MUNICH.- Home is an ambivalent place: On the one hand, it offers protection and refuge; on the other, family expectations can make it seem oppressive. The exhibition "No Place like Home" explores the vast range of family relationships.
The term home is often associated with a place where one feels protected and accepted, where traditions are lived and identity can unfold. Yet home can also be a site of power struggles, where unspoken hostilities make life difficult. The ninth media art exhibition in the former air-raid shelter of
Haus der Kunst presents 14 works from the Goetz Collection that explore the home environment and emotions associated with it. The works focus on a variety of intra-family conflicts, revealing social conventions and plumbing the depths of human relationships.
It is primarily in the works of Sue de Beer, Gabriel Orozco and Anri Sala that home is depicted as a comforting place. Sue de Beer presents a female teenager in a pink room. The girl tries different poses in front of a Polaroid camera, whereby her long hair is magnetically charged, briefly revealing a magical, independent movement. Gabriel Orozco delivers simplicity and the ordinary: the camera - unsteady, as if directed by a curious tourist or amateur - is focused on a pair of hands that wash corn and cook flat cakes in a simple beach restaurant. A crab and a beetle - the latter sits on a pair of pants hanging on a clothesline - are transformed into a minor sensation. Hands also become a pars pro toto for the female protagonist in the work of Anri Sala. They pull the byrek dough, shape it, add the filling and roll it into a horn. These routine movements have been repeated infinite times over the course of a life, but they reveal nothing personal. Only when the camera pans towards the window, revealing a plane in the sky, is there some indication that other ways of life exist, but not the implication that these are any more desirable.
In contrast, the film "Eight" by Hubbard/Birchler addresses themes of expectation and disappointment. In the film a young girl watches as the guests of her eighth birthday party are driven away by heavy rain and her carefully planned celebration falls to pieces. All that remains are soggy streamers and table scraps. Ten years later, the two artists shot a new film with the same protagonist: In "Eighteen" the girl now stands at the threshold of adulthood. At her job in a fast food restaurant, the young woman confronts table scraps on a daily basis. Daydreams form the haunting contrast to the hardships of her everyday life and lead her into the protection of a bourgeois environment: the warmth of a birthday party with decorated cakes, guitar playing and ballet. Caught between the sheltered parental home and her independence, the protagonist tries to find her own place in society.
Matthias Müller takes viewers back to the 1960s with his film "Alpsee", filled with emblematic childhood images. Dressed in a starched blue dress and pumps, the mother irons, bakes and washes the floor. Everything in this perfect world is ordered and respectable to the point of rigidity and emotional coldness. The child compensates for this lack of warmth with fantasies of floods wreaking havoc. The integration of scenes from TV series (Fury, Lassie) transforms the events from an individual to a collective experience.
An idyll also forms the dominant theme in Veronika Veit's film. Accompanied by the sounds of a piano etude, the mother, seated in a 1960s living room, holds strands of wool, which her daughter rolls into neat balls. Their work is disrupted by a live trout flopping up and down on the table. After the mother has repeatedly put the fish into a porcelain pot and tried in vain to remove it from sight, she bites off its head, chews and swallows it. She protects the idyll with brute force; her daughter reacts with revulsion.
In Patricia Pearson's work the mother-child relationship becomes destructive. Once again, handiwork sets events in motion. The mother knits with the same red wool that makes up the form-fitting dress worn by her daughter. The camera follows the un-making of the dress in close up shots, as the mother unravels it with her knitting. Stitch by stich, she strips the adolescent, subjecting her to the shame of nakedness.
The eponymous film "No Place like Home" by Karen Yasinsky deals with sexual violence using animated dolls made of fabric, polymer clay and wire. The male doll is much smaller than the female, which - as a symbol of the lustful gaze - consists only of red pumps, legs and a skirt. When the woman stops dancing, her pumps are still and she lies motionless on a beach; the man approaches her and quenches his desire. The camera now focuses on his face. He looks amazed, as if he cannot believe his good fortune. The title may allude to "The Wizard of Oz", in which Dorothy expresses her wish to return home while clicking the heels of her ruby shoes.
A slide projection by Lorenz Straßl presents unpopulated spaces where inhabitants have left perplexing traces, and where dilapidation has set in: pipes leak, flooding entire areas; objects smolder and burst into flames. Some of the furnishings are arranged as if forming a chain reaction test - thus, the destruction is presumably planned. Home here is no longer a place to live, but a reflection of personal structures.
