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SKIN IN THE GAME presents seminal prototypes from the personal archives of six acclaimed artists, dating back to the nineteen-seventies and crossing over into the present. These include experiments never previously shown, from paintings to banners, video works, photographs, collages, costumes, books, drawings, and concept notes. The six artists are not connected through a common theme, style, or political stance. What links them to one another is that moment of skin in the game, when each of them decided to become an artist, to enter the Hades of an uncertain existence, and the Heaven of aesthetic experiment.
With Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Rosemarie Trockel, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Andrea Zittel
A photograph captures Bruno Pélassy, freshly emerged from the deep blue of Nice’s Coco Beach, wearing a starfish like a living brooch on his chest, consigning him to some secret maritime order. ‘The blurred distinction between plant and animal that exists so obviously in the sea, as if it offered a perfect metaphor for the philosophical limits of all binary distinctions: good and evil, male and female, night and day, black and white’,[1] cast a deep fascination on the artist, as Laura Cottingham, curator and close confidante, recalls. It is exactly this dissolution of binaries that is at the heart of Pélassy’s artistic practice.
Nasan Tur explores the political and social conditions that define our times. His works are experimental arrangements that draw attention to ideologies, social norms and behavioural codes and expand our options for individual action. To this end, he examines statements, gestures and images found in the media or in the public space and distils them into miniatures reflecting current social crises and discourse. In particular he asks how we are influenced by established role models and what drives us, in the light of oppression, powerlessness and manipulation, to break out from these boundaries and change the social paradigm.
For his show at the Berlinische Galerie, Tur has produced new works that address the exercise of power and rationales for its legitimation. Why do people kill? How much violence do we harbour within us and under what circumstances is it triggered? The visual impact of Tur’s spatial arrangement conveys ambivalent attitudes to death and life. The elements range from a confrontation with inner demons to interviews with hunters about the act of killing and a respectful mise-en-scène of lifeless animals.
In her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations, the British artist Emma Talbot (* 1969 in Stourbridge, lives in London and Italy) explores existential questions. For the 20-metre-high Kesselhaus at the KINDL, she is developing a site-specific installation consisting of paintings on silk, sculptural ensembles, and hanging objects, in which archaic voices are brought back to life: Furies, sirens, oracles, witches, and spirits warn of the environmental and political disasters of our present. They tell a story of toxicity and healing and point to alternatives that make a positive future conceivable.
The German sculptor Ulrich Rückriem donated one of his major works to the Nationalgalerie in 2013: the work “40 Floor Reliefs”. The installation, which can be seen as a homage to Mies van der Rohe, consists of forty square granite slabs. With each installation, these are distributed in a chessboard pattern over the entire area of the upper hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie. The dimensions of the sculptures refer exactly to the dimensions of the floor plates of the building.
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