ALL THINGS PROJECT is pleased to work with Berlin-based artist JENS REULECKE: PRODUCTION OF SPACE to realize and present a six-week collaborative series and exhibition using the storefront church as just one starting point. The planned activities, both migratory and discrete, anticipate topics from Henri Lefebvre’s classic book by the same name; this manifestation includes collaborators from such disciplines as video and sound, experimental dance, and ruminates upon present controversies in urbanism, religious belief, sociology, and cultural studies.
Following an entrancing performance in 2007 at East Houston’s Le Petit Versailles, Reulecke was interested in embarking on an even richer, more collaborative enterprise, again in New York. Reulecke writes: “I am bringing people together. Artists and participants gather experiences while interacting with one another. Our platform is New York City. Entering public space activates our imagination to the point where transformation occurs, resulting in spaces of opportunities. Sharing these realities with the public inside and outside the gallery allows each person to receive unique perspectives, born right out of our known life with its various realities . . . As in my recent sculpture, a tower assembled of architectural elements unfolds and carries a person further up and inside. A transformation implementing a shift from monumental images to luminescent shapes.”
gallery organized by curator Samuel W. Kho
All Things Project @ NCGV
269 Bleecker Street
New York, NY 10014
Day after day I was walking around Greenwich Village looking for stuff people have dumped. Some of it draw my interest, so I brought it to the gallery and let it sit there untill I was ready to use it for my installation. These very simple objects made me think about a life focused on big gestures, great and precious things. – Did I use that trash because art can turn even rubbish into gold? At least that wasn‘t my intention. So what else was behind my concept?
I think my concept has much to do with NYC. This city of glamour, wealth, indestructible material goods, it‘s breath-taking strength sweeping away everything that possess not that victorious presence, sweeping away the weak and the insignificant.
But my material? Weak and insignificant! I picked it and used it, until it‘s strange appearance revealed something else.
Behind it‘s blank appearence something else seemed to exist. It‘s lightweighty appeal did impact the scene clearly. Not by shouting, not by force, not by significance and not by self-importance. But rather by some kind of low-key representation. Rather intimate like a touch, like somebody recognizing you silently, like opening up a space to be, where evaluation is of no interest because of that other reality, that other space already attracting you.
My installation emerging during my three-week-stay is reflecting more and more that hidden world. Hidden inside that glamourous world of NYC. Speaking quietly while everybody else shouts. Communicating via worthless recources about significant constellations of the hidden and the exposed, the strong and the weak. That other reality talking about opportunities appart from the established, normal life.
Looking at some of the pictures I took from the site of “occupy wall street“, the signs of people sleeping and living on the street since middle of September, this improvised camp scenery – all that appears very potent and present to me, inspite of it‘s fragile, loose and limited nature.
I regard myself preferably as somebody provoking awareness and asking questions, instead of presenting answers, by initiating something so that unusual and unknown qualities arise. – And sometimes it‘s just about leaving traces behind.
Jens Reulecke
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