Anja Fußbach | CANDY LAND
Opening : 24/08/2018, 6 p.m. – 9 p.m.
Exhibition : 24/08/2018 – 10/10/2018
Artist talk, midissage and performance: 29/09/2018, 7 p.m. – 10 p.m.
Anja Fußbach commits her Berlin solo debut and presents a comprehensive work show in the form of a room installation. Most diverse media and materials are deployed, held together by the characteristic handling of Fußbach, who operates with a free combination of objects and merges them with her artisanal craft. On the one hand the title Candy Land reports on a curatorial overall concept, on the other hand it imparts a first access to the dimension of the show in terms of content. Artificially built places like amusement parks often use an exaggerated symbolic language of a deceived positivism, which turns quickly into fiction and disillusionment by its exaggeration. Places where enacted sweetness rules mostly contain just as much bitterness in reality and reflect human needs along with their attached oddity in a complex way. Fußbach transforms this vocabulary into her own language thereby using the formal capability and placing disconnected autonomic statements about the human in society. The contained ambivalence of pretence and essence of being can be relocated within the stressed relationship which unfolds between the works and work groups.
A six meter long Venetian gondola with three armed punk dolls which are wearing the face of the artist cause disgust, appeal and initiative. For themselves and regardless to defined standards these women realign towards self-determination, give up to their devotion and do no longer search for recognition within determinate systems. Fußbach provokes the institutions and asks for the necessity of a constant ingratiation with reference to the Biennale in Venice and the traditional under-representation of female positions in the world of art caused by established patriarchal structures. The change begins but considering the details there are still many questions unanswered yet especially when it comes to the oppression the prior female generation of artists had to go through and the impact that invisibility had on the market, the art and the development of both. Fußbach gives an overstated face to the feministic self-confident, which is needed for not losing sight of the goal of free equality in times of social pseudo progressiveness.
Nevertheless not all solutions exist in the extrovert faces which promenade loudly and colorful through the streets. The silent thought and also its immaturity are likewise important in the process and debate. The welded torsos of opinions position themselves into moving compositions using soft pastel shades. They report from injuries and fears, show off their mistakes and in that respect the necessity of transparence. Fußbach does not like to construct or suggest a new artificial image of expectations, but rather exposes the versatility of positions and conditions of such complex themes.
Finally Fußbach ensures the access to that debate by a liberating sarcasm, a snappy irony and unbiased humour. The self-criticism of being an artist and the reflection about the own being is omnipresent in Fußbach’s works and provides truly a face to the anonymous mannequins.
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