18/02/2023 – 16/04/2023,

Triple is funny, but double makes the money: Soya Arakawa, Nicola Gördes & Stella Rossié, Olga Holzschuh, Magdalena Los

, Kunsthalle Münster

Since 2020, the scholarship programme Residence NRW⁺ has been affiliated with Kunsthalle Münster. Now the second run of the programme comes to an end with the exhibition Triple is funny, but double makes the money.

Triple is funny, but double makes the money refers to a dart slogan that was evoked one evening while fellow artists and curators of Residence NRW⁺ were playing darts in Nicola Gördes & Stella Rossié’s studio, an old taproom in the Residence building, af-fectionately known as “Hütte”. The residence in Münster's Kinderhaus district is located in a former clubhouse of SC Westfalia Kinderhaus. Surrounded by football and tennis courts, sprint tracks, a long jump pool and a beach volleyball court, the hut has become a place of residence and work for the fellow residents, whose six- or twelve-month stay comes to an end with the joint exhibition at Kunsthalle Münster.

It is not surprising that the new works on display here by artists Soya Arakawa, Olga Holzschuh, Magdalena Los, and the artist duo Nicola Gördes & Stella Rossié, ranging from sculpture to installation to drawing and digital paintings, encompassing research-based processes, various narrative forms of fictional or biographical circumstances as well as pop-cultural elements, all deal with spatialities, perspectives, changes of perspective and affects on different levels. At times affectionate, personal, enveloping, evanescent, pausing and activating, humorous or biting, a state of immersive power spreads through the Kunsthalle. In very different ways, these four artistic positions all oscillate between a search for traces, a need to cast anchor, and the impulse to shake it all and leave it all behind.

In his work 鏡板/Kagami-Ita, Soya Arakawa thinks about how a comprehensible relationship between performer and the intention of a performance could be established. In the course of his research, he has begun to look into Nō theatre. A special feature of this Japanese music and dance drama is its reduced, largely unadorned stage design, in which only a mostly painted pine tree adorns the back wall of the stage. The consistent appearance of the pine tree in the stage design of the Nō Theatre in always the same shape has increasingly fascinated Soya Arakawa. The stage-side image of the tree represents a particular pine tree, named Yōgo no Matsu, which is imagined to be at the front of the theatre (in the audience seating area). In other words, the pine tree that the audience sees on stage at the back of the actors' action space is merely the mirror image of an imagined pine tree that the performers align themselves with in the midst of the audience. That is, the performer performs in the direction of the pine tree – a meeting of illusion and hallucination. 鏡板/Kagami-Ita approaches these questions and phenomena in a processual manner. In the course of the exhibition, he has developed a performance for the three pines: a Japanese black pine in Hamamatsu (Japan), a Macedonian pine in the Matka Gorge (northern Macedonia) and a black pine in Münster (Germany). Soya Arakawa's work provides the visitors with three instructions for their own performances, inviting them to experience the performances themselves and to share them with others.

hide and seek is a site-specific installation by Olga Holzschuh. One wall of the Kunsthalle is coated with a UV-sensitive emulsion that reacts to daylight, capturing it and, in an evolving process of many hours, bathes the affected surface in a nuanced blue. Cyanotype – one of the oldest photographic processes for creating and fixing images – allows traces and layers of earlier wall treatments to shine through and form an immediate connection with another element of the installation: the fragile aluminum scaffolding penetrating the wall horizontally, like a cannula, and reaching up vertically into the Kunsthalle ceiling. The façade of the house in which the artist spent a good part of her childhood served as a model for the sketchy construction. The memory of places left behind is a unifying element that appears in several of her works. This is also the case in the photograph untitled (48°32'27.0 "N 22°59'40.7 "E), made of soap using the transfer print process developed by the artist. As if under a transparent layer of skin, the material conceals the image of the house of her childhood, like the fading memory image conceived in the attempt to capture. The desire to preserve or conserve through photography or cyanotype and at the same time the realization of loss and emptiness mark a dialectic that is reflected in the stability and instability of the provisional architecture as well as in the evaluation of security and danger, which takes place through an audible signal in Olga Holzschuh's sound work. Since the 14th century, a horn signal has sounded from the tower of the St. Lamberti Church in Münster as a sign of safety and peace – blown by a:n Türmer:in (currently by the Türmerin Martje Thalmann). However, the signal sounds only in the directions of the south, west and north. The east has always been left out. The fragile house construct of Olga Holzschuh's installation is located in the east of the Kunsthalle. Opposite it are three large sculptures, bent in the form of hollow cones made of aluminum. Distributed in the room, they mark the three cardinal directions mentioned above: South, West and North. More than three meters high, they are reminiscent of monumental mouthpieces, archaic-sounding in-struments, or even large shields predestined for hiding. Every half an hour, the horn signal of the Türmerin resounds in the midst of the installation, alternating between warning and security.

The digital paintings Madgalena Los created in the summer of 2002 for the exhibition Heiße Hütte and its accompanying publication Kalte Hütte form the starting point of her new works presented here. Realized as UV-prints on imitation leather, they play with the idea of samples, fabric swatches, and material specimens that can be used to test the texture, quality, design, and color of a fabric for a particular suitability. The oversized sample sheets, mounted on finely colored wooden panels and seemingly light-footedly placed in the expansive space of the Kunsthalle, are in a supposedly ongoing selection process. Only at first glance do the sample sheets consist of a compilation of individual samples; only upon closer inspection do they reveal themselves as trompe-l'œils, a digitally painted picture consisting of drawings, color gradients, and sentence fragments. The haptic distinguishability that is so decisive for sample cards is suppressed here, and instead the focus is placed on sifting, comparing, selecting, and assembling material. The representations fixed for the works in the Kunsthalle, whose occasion was the common life and work in the hut, seem to be able to be transferred into new constellations at any time. The reference to temporary togetherness in the context of the Stipendium – sayings that were said, furniture that was moved, nails that were hammered into walls – lends the oversized pattern tableaus both seriousness and playfulness at the same time. In the next season gather other colors, other patterns, there are other stories in the composition.

The film Letzte Nacht (Last Night/Dernière Nuit) by Nicola Gördes & Stella Rossié, set in the aforementioned taproom aka the Hütte's notorious bar Darts & Dates, encompasses a scenario of absolute escalation that ends in drunkenness, murder, and death. The single-sequence shot keeps the viewer’s eyes circling through an increasingly desolate setting, furthering the spiraling climax and contributing to a general sense of vertigo. The mockingly contemptuous, misogynistic remarks of some of the protagonists drive the immoderateness and transgression of boundaries ad absurdum. A harmless disco fox accompanied by innocent smiles develops into a boisterous polonaise that sets everyone's nerves on edge and manoeuvres the evening into an unexpected turn, the last night in a dystopian world that turns against man in a dangerous and cruel way. The installation at Kunsthalle Münster that surrounds the film projection depicts an outdoor space, perhaps a dilapidated sidewalk in front of a bar, with dingy awnings, beer crates for seating, and an overpriced condom vending machine.

Curators: Lisa Klosterkötter + Alicia Reymond