Courtesy of ROCKELMANN &
Naked, square and dark brown: Randi Renate chose a bar of Ritter Sport Alpenmilch as the initial image of “Ein Eigener Raum”, her first solo show in Berlin. She placed the piece of chocolate on the grid structure of a cutting mat, not to eat it but to dissect it.
The exhibition title makes reference to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own – an essay about literature and women, and the social spaces they dream up, design and demand for themselves. The art world, today, as the world of literature at the beginning of the 19th century, is also a system with few apertures and multiple closures, acting according to a multitude of codes.
“Ein Eigener Raum”, courtesy of ROCKELMANN &
“Ein Eigener Raum” detail, courtesy of ROCKELMANN &
Food is one of the most powerful means that help us root, carrying notions of identity and ritual, as well as giving energy and comfort, through the way it structures the day. The rooting capacity of food is particularly strong after relocating, when every image, encounter and sublet is fleeting and inconsistent. Thus, the artist used Ritter Sport as an actual tool to root and sooth herself.
The main installation, “Ein Eigener Raum”, is a physical and spatial experience. The large minimal steel cubic structure is glossy and reflective. Clean and almost vacant: the interior consists of a mattress, white bedding, a laptop and a projector. It could represent the essentials of an expat, providing the constant connection and mobile cinema you need for a semi-nomadic existence. Projection also happens in the reflective surface, as the viewer is incorporated and immersed in its walls. The bed invites to lie down and watch the milky lights of the projection go by on the ceiling – footage filmed from an S-Bahn train window, capturing the sky over Berlin and the blurred landscape. The artist presents the ephemeral and transitory images you grasp in new cities before you learn to select and erase, before your eyes adapt to the new light and focus, and before you can leave your own mark.
Courtesy of ROCKELMANN &
“Ein Eigener Raum”, courtesy of ROCKELMANN &
“Having imagined architecture and art of the future, the artist is now proposing solutions for inhabiting them”, Bourriaud stated more than ten years ago. By now we have become used to spaces and situations emerging within art spaces, we are well trained to enter and lie down, and experience dancing strangers, or flashing lights. And while people may meet in the situation the artist creates through her display, it is not encounter that is intended, but introspection.
With this exhibition Randi Renate has created a space that manages to address the notions of place, identity and personal history. She uses the familiar – chocolate, bed, laptop – to illustrate the uncanny of the familiar; and at the same time creates a space where we can project our own narrative of home and (be)longing.
Text by Celina Basra
“Ein Eigener Raum” is on show at ROCKELMANN&, Berlin and runs until 20 September 2015
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