Jun 26 2017

Highlights from Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017

by Andrew Stooke

Münster, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, is a worthy contender for the title of bicycle capital of Europe. Visitors heading to the city’s decennial event, Skulptur Projekte, saw bicycles parked or abandoned immediately outside Münster Central Station, a telling sign that the event and city is best experienced on two wheels, and on a leisurely schedule that draws together the project’s more far-flung sites that can only be accessed by traveling long, meandering stretches through its six districts.

The city itself is a lovingly recreated facsimile of an idealized landscape before its original civic center was flattened in wartime air raids. It is not a place where time has stood still, per say, but where it seems permissible for one to shuttle back and forth through the ancient and the modern. It aspires to be a fixed point where the accelerated movements of social, philosophical and political change can reverberate and settle. This small-city environment, coupled with Skuptur Projekte’s occurrence once every ten years since 1977, has formed a wonderful incubator for observing the effects of public sculpture and the durational practices in public art. Previous Projekte classics, such as Bruce Nauman’s photogenic, crator-like Square Depression from the 2007 edition, remain in situ, while several new works in the 2017 edition were installed temporarily but inhabited unusual places, as was the case with Pierre Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead (2017), an archeological dig site teeming with living matter that sprawled across a disused ice rink.

Firmly rejecting the breakneck pace and relentless, consecutive succession of other art biennials and fairs, the Projekte’s aim is to examine one thing at a time slowly, building incrementally on its legacy. This fifth edition was organized by artistic director Kasper König along with the curators, independent exhibitions organizer Britta Peters and Marianne Wagner, curator for contemporary art at the Museum of Art and Culture in Münster. Here are some highlights.

On Water (2017) by AYŞE ERKMEN is a fully functioning footbridge installed just below the waterline in the harbor of Münster. All images by Andrew Stooke for ArtAsiaPacific.

This fake structure, formed of photographic images of somewhere else, was an explicit reference to the fact that the buildings in Münster are all reproductions of the originals destroyed by bombs in 1943. It is by the artist duo PELES EMPIRE (Katharina Stöver and Barbara Wolff) whose name is taken from Peleș Castle, a palace in the Carpathian Mountains that displays a collage of architectural styles, from Ottoman to Renaissance to Fin de Siècle.

For this fifth edition, the Projekte has teamed up with the nearby town of Marl for a collaboration entitled “The Hot Wire.” This sign, Angst (Fear) (1989) by LUDGER GERDES, has been displaced from the facade of the town hall in Marl.

Outside the Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History was the work Benz Bonin Burr (2017) by COSIMA VON BONIN and TOM BURR, ready to be picked up or dropped off. This was just one of the works that spoke to the transitory nature of the event, which suffused even seemingly “fixed” works of public sculpture with a sense of movement and fluidity.

A mix of sunshine and showers at the opening weekend. Some of the more remote works, such as OSCAR TUAZON’s Burn the Formwork (2017), didn’t provide much shelter for the stewards.

For KOKI TANAKA’s Provisional Studies: Workshop #7 How to Live Together and Sharing the Unknown (2017), the artist subjected eight Münster citizens to a ten-day workshop on the theme of how to live together. Video documentation of the event was screened in the same place where the workshop took place, and reveals an uncomfortable and subterranean environment that the subjects try to make the best of.

THOMAS SCHÜTTE’s monumental Nuclear Temple (2017) had a more formidable and solid presence than much of the work at this edition of the Skulptur Projekte.

In a meadow at the limit of Münster’s Aasee lake was EI ARAKAWA’s Harsh Citation, Harsh Pastoral, Harsh Münster (2017), the most remote work in the show. In keeping with its location, the installation evokes meetings at border territories through low-definition images of famous artworks, including, most notably, Gustave Courbet’s The Meeting (1854) where the artist depicts himself as an itinerant condemned to wander the earth. The images appear on hand-fabricated screens of loose hanging LEDs scattered across a meadow.

Arcadia meets vagrants drinking in a park in NICOLE EISENMAN’s Sketch for a Fountain (2017).

HITO STEYERL is wont to slightly upstage everyone and her contribution to the Projekte, HellYeahWeFuckDie (2017), was no exception. By turns tragic and humorous, the multimedia installation of videos features a cast of robots being tested for stability as well as the distraught citizens in the Turkish city of Diyarbakir, the center of which was destroyed in a flare up of aggression relating to Kurdish autonomy in 2016.

MICHAEL SMITH’s Not Quite Under_Ground (2017) appeared to be a fully functioning tattoo studio, differentiated only by the inclusion of tattoos designs contributed by other artists involved in the Projekte, and discounted tattoos for those over 60 years old.

An impromptu performance by SCARLET YU as part of the collaborative work Still Untitled (2017).

Several works invited visitors into unconventional or hole-in-the-wall venues. BENJAMIN DE BURCA and BÁRBARA WAGNER’s Bye Bye Deutschland! Eine Lebensmelodie (2017) was screened at the Elephant Lounge, a windowless bar in the center of town.

JEREMY DELLER first engaged with the users of these allotments ten years ago. The journals they kept over that period, which were available to read in one of the allotment cabins, are touching documents of their lives and time passing.

Skulptur Projekte Münster is on view throughout Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, until October 1, 2017.

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