Industrial tarpaulins, wood, red floor marking tape, yellow light. The fields marked out in the room house works by ten artists who temporarily linger in places defined for them. It actually seems to be more of a lingering than a permanent installation, according to the impression that creeps up on you when you enter the exhibition and is deliberately intended to evoke a feeling of unease.
The staged storage situation suggests that the works are in transit, in a state of limbo between construction, exhibition, and dismantling. The instability of the exhibition situation, the supposed view behind the scenes into the storage room of the exhibition, which is normally carefully shielded from the public’s gaze, contrasts familiar modes of art presentation. Enterprise: Manifests sheds light on the fact that the classic exhibition situation is ultimately an artificially created vacuum that thrives on the elimination of all traces of the work that led to the presentation of the artwork, and on the fact that the circulation of artworks, the paths they have taken and will soon take again, are faded out. With the form of presentation chosen here, it is once again made clear that works of art, like any other commodity, are part of a global trade and transport network. As part of this, they spend a large part of their time in crates and boxes, are shipped in trucks or by air freight, and stowed away in storage rooms before being sent on their way again.If the logistical reality of the exhibition business is negated on a visual level in the tidy white cube, this also perpetuates an understanding of art that stylises artworks as detached from pragmatic references to the world, or locates the references only on the level of content.
In contrast, the exhibition thematises its own transience and short-livedness and the underlying conditions that are the hallmarks of the contemporary art business. Materials such as industrial tarpaulins, familiar from the construction and transportation industries, are placed in such a way that they divide the exhibition space into different zones and function, as it were, as an independent artistic element when they immerse the space in a fascinating play of light and shadow. This artistic adaptation of structures geared to functionality, to the smooth and rapid handling of goods whose storage would incur unnecessary costs, is here set in relation to the duration of the exhibition and the presence of the artworks. The latter, in particular, always seem to offer the promise of a sphere defined not only by economic interests, but here they remind us above all that art, too, is subject to these rules and that the exhibition is merely a brief slowing down of circulation before the journey continues, while the place of origin as well as the (destination) remain unknown to the viewer.
Text: Elsa Himmer