MUNICH.- Haus der Kunst is presenting the fourth edition of its Capsule exhibitions. With this series, Haus der Kunst presents insights into current artistic productions and methods. It provides young, international artists with a distinct conceptional vision the opportunity to develop and exhibit a new work. This autumn, the London-based artist Oscar Murillo (*1986) and the Russian artist, Polina Kanis (*1985), currently living in Amsterdam, have been invited to participate.

Oscar Murillo
In just a few years Oscar Murillo has developed one of the most exciting positions in contemporary art. Originally focused on painting, he breaks free of the medium’s restrictions by integrating videos, drawings, printing techniques, sculpture as well as installation and performative elements into his presentations.

His installation “signaling devices in now bastard territory” at the 56th Venice Biennial (2015) drew particular attention; for the work Murillo suspended heavy black canvases on the façade of the central pavilion. Also in 2015, these were first shown at a presentation in Bogotá. Expansive and extremely dense, these installations consist of heavy, partially torn and re-sewn linen, painted on both sides with black oil chalk and oil paint. These elements are draped on steel constructions, which are reminiscent of autopsy tables or the frames of bunk beds, or are hung up on clotheslines that reconfigure the surrounding space. Historical, economic, social and philosophical fields of association are present: scales mounted on industrially manufactured hooks represent a system of measuring; a mixture of clay and corn set sculptural accents, like life signs. The floor, walls and visual axes unite to create a vibrating spatial constellation.

The physicality of the black canvases is especially evident when they are hung from one point - like animals in a slaughter house - and touch the ground in heavy folds. They are presented in various ways in Haus der Kunst. They contain many large tears, allowing for contrasting views. Weight, density and blackness are only intensified by these openings.

Murillo's black canvases stand in the artistic tradition of Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square”, as well as the Black Paintings by Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg and Ad Reinhard. Further references for the artist include David Hammons, Sam Gilliam and Jean-Michel Basquiat. With the placement of his canvases outdoors, Oscar Murillo recently took a new direction: the impenetrability and opaqueness can now also be understood as a sign of the integrity of body and soul, as an expression of a state that proceeds brightness and a charge of new energy.

Greeting visitors at the entrance of the exhibition is a mural, an illusionistic drawing of workers in a silk factory. Individual figures stand at gigantic machines. The representation stands in the long tradition of the Latin American murales and presents the “despotism of the factory” (Karl Marx) as an exhausted system from the past. At the end of the staircase visitors enter the actual installation, in which one also arrives at the present.

Oscar Murillo works - together with the producer and political scientist Clara Dublanc, his parents and with pupils aged 10 to 16 years from selected schools worldwide - on the long-term project “Frequencies.” For this, canvases are mounted on tables in classrooms and students are animated to any form of writing and drawing. More than 10,000 students from 100 schools in 30 countries have participated to date. In Munich, the project was held from February to July 2017 in the Abtei Schäftlarn – Gymnasium der Benediktiner, der Erzbischöflichen TheresiaGerhardinger-Mädchenrealschule, the Städischen Rudolf-DieselRealschule, Sabel Schulen, followed by the WittelsbacherGymnasium. The resulting canvases are included in the exhibition. On the action day for this project, Friday, 24 November from 3 - 5 pm, the participating students will discuss their experiences. At the same time, there is an opportunity to participate in an open workshop, during which an expansive wall painting of sewn canvases will be created.

Curated by Anna Schneider

Polina Kanis
For her exhibition in Haus der Kunst, Polina Kanis has created her first three-channel installation, thereby expanding her previous artistic practice.

The protagonists of Polina Kanis's films inhabit closed spatial systems and perform automated and ritualized actions that seem to be directed by an invisible entity. These microcosmic settings show how architectural conditions favor power structures that can influence people and even pervert them.

In her project “The Shift” of 2016, a museum building served as a starting point for reflections on collectivity and division. In her new installation “The Procedure”, created especially for Haus der Kunst, the building is a museum, too, but this time it is in ruins, having fallen victim of an unknown catastrophe. Though measures are taken to find out what has happened, the causes remain vague and silent. All who are questioned respond with the same sentence: “I saw nothing.”

The film leads the viewer into a divided world. The former museum and the surrounding forest have become the restricted area; the zone and its inhabitants are cut off from the outside world. People may only enter the other side after an interrogation at the border, and perhaps only when they have exchanged artifacts from the museum, which they have excavated, collected and smuggled out.

Polina Kanis presents the film sequences on two projectors and one monitor. The narrative threads migrate from screen to screen during the film’s 25-minute playing time. There are six main motifs: a road in the forest with a group of people dressed in light fall clothing; workers who, following the catastrophe, dig up museum objects and store them in plastic bags; a forest through which a young man travels; a corridor that serves as a waiting room; a spartan room that contains several people; and people being interrogated in this room.

In the absence of eye-witness reports, the building itself becomes a silent witness to the events. As one starts to unravel the logic of Kanis’ fictional universe, it becomes clear that the events leading to the situation are, however, secondary to the structures and systems that have arisen in their wake. Using the building as a starting point, with her characteristic laconic and poignant approach Polina Kanis tells a story of exclusion and liminality.

Curated by Daniel Milnes