30.9-30.10.2010

oracle

Participants: Eva Ohlow. Thomas Reifferscheid. Rita Rohlfing.

Curator: Linde Trottenberg

Mankind cannot help but to wonder what the future will hold. Such quintessential and universal questions (if not their answers) about human existence are/can be addressed through art. What motivates people? What are the invisible forces that influence and steer them? How can they improve their lives? In this sense, art takes over the role of the Pythia of Delphi. Art asks questions, revolutionizes and shatters mankind’s illusions and perceptions. Art has been able to foresee scientific change. Art has always questioned the limits of our natural perception. Perception and trance as a perceptual state are equally the conditions of art. In this spirit, the artists Eva Ohlow, Rita Rohlfing and Thomas Reifferscheid gather in Athens, besides Delphi another important cultural place of prediction, knowledge and wisdom. With their art, they want to reload the oracle idea with new artistic magic. The artists plan to celebrate the spirit of the oracle by creating different sculptures and drawings.

Rita Rohlfing’s interior installations move along the dividing line between sculptures and painting. They consist primarily of materials such as matte Plexiglas, aluminium and colours such as blue and red. Although the structures are very clear, they irritate our perception, they lose their clear and sharp contours. Depending on how you approach the object the colour from the inside changes from being intensive to fading away. There remains an ambivalence between clarity and a mystery, a secret you are never able to solve, an insecurity which remains no matter what.

Thomas Reifferscheid uses dark and light-coloured beams ordered in an invisible circle, a loose pile of non structured sticks. In one single intersection there is a stick of stone vertically erected. It is up to the visitor to either enter the installation or keep a distance from it. The artist calls it “a needle in the hay” which indicates chaos but also something worth finding, if you are lucky. These days people are flooded by information and have to discover for themselves what is important to them, meaning it is up to you to find the needle in the haystack.

Eva Ohlow’s work is about numerological cast places where the seer has to interpret the position of stones, shells, bones or pieces of metal. In her installations she combines various materials with different concrete geometrical forms. On the basis of archaic structures and their view of the four elements water, earth, fire and air, she mirrors our way to go about nature and questions the balance between nature and culture. From the artists point of view the definition of culture means respectfully treating nature as a substantial basis of the future. In this way her art takes over the role of Pythia challenging people who seek for advice to find their own answer.

What remains over the centuries is this: a substantial insecurity and therefore a desire to be in control of our lives. The three artists point their fingers to this very human problem which -independent of scientific progress - never seems to lose its actuality.

Linde Trottenberg