Bernhard Rüdiger at Summer School as School 2017
Wednesday, 12 July, 2017, 19:00
Venue: Boxing Club, Mark Isaku Str. 10000 Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo
Stacion - Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina is pleased to introduce the presentation of Bernhard Rüdiger, part of the Public Program of Summer School as School 2017.
We feel more and more uncomfortable in our contemporary art world using notions as form or shape. What does this notions mean if we can no more define clearly what is the place and the time of our creative action?
An original shape is always unexpected, but never really new. It produces something that did not exist before, but it is the consequence of preceded shapes. We cannot look at those forms of the past, which the original shape revises and changes radically, as something static and defined once forever, even if they are older than a hundred years old.
No art-history will end the reflexion on a given form. The new form, the one a contemporary artist produces now, behaves like the hurricane’s eye. Its new position is the place of immobility from which are replaced and scrambled all preceding shapes, opening a new horizon where all forms we knew are changed and replaced. Artistic shape works constantly on the rewriting of its own history.
How can we think about our relation to creation in a world paying so much attention to the present which becomes more and more contemporary, being more and more out of any temporal perception? Is it possible to reflect on art without any relation to time and to what the word “avant-garde” defined clearly as a problem of generation?
In the modern western world a generation after the other has defined the phylogenesis of the artistic forms and the constant rewriting of their history.
It is this essential report with former artists and their shapes (that are of the generation immediately previous or another one more distant) which made possible the idea of future and guaranted the extraordinary evolution of the invention in art.
If we can no more think about time through its genealogical progress, how will it be possible to reflect on the place of art, its dialectical and critical space? If we observe the problem of the shape only since the ultra-contemporary condition, we will have to work in a space without horizon. Pushed outside the biotope and without root, the problem of shape is placed in nude, it is a form out of context, driven away from the public space, this Renaissance Piazza in man's measure which was the place and the future of art.
Wasn’t Luciano Fabro right when he declared in 1986, in reaction to the explosion of the nuclear power plant of Chernobyl: "I wished to give a genealogical dimension to the space and to the sense of objects. After Chernobyl all this seems ridiculous. The genetic mutation destroys any humanist will ".
This desert of a new kind (the one, that Marguerite Duras describes as the one which was never seen when she talks about the ruins of Hiroshima) this place which cannot give any space to the human being, did it change definitively our relationship to the problem of shape? Can we produce art works with new shapes in a place beyond the human being, in a place which is no more political? And if it is so, where is this place? How can we describe it?
Bernhard Rüdiger’s works confront visitors with a physical experience involving object, body and space. At once sculptures, monumental models and architectures, through their meticulous spatial and acoustic arrangement, his works seek to make history ring out, and in particular the history of places: in the semi-private garden of the Antonin Perrin residence in Lyon, Rüdiger installs a model scaled down to 1:20 (5 x 2 m.) of the two old low-rise buildings destroyed in 2004 during the zone’s renovation, and thus recalls the history of the site, and its industrial culture which underpinned the neighbourhood’s whole logic. In Sonne Mond und Sterne vom 13 bis zum 15 Februar 1945 (2010), a German nursery rhyme and the position of the stars in the Dresden sky, during those three days of bombing, establish liaisons between the form of the revolving structure, and the meaning which is released by it. Rüdiger’s works also propose direct physical experiences: in Ku Klux Klan (2007), suspended hollow sculptures offer both the protective space of the hat - you can slip underneath them and put your head in them - and the dark and hidden place from which you can look at the world through holes. The possibility that the work can react to the visitor’s presence or to natural elements, and that it sends the echo back to it, also underpins the artist’s approach. In Trompette No 7(Petrolio) (2002), the footsteps and voices of passers-by act on a powerful organ-like structure with horizontal pipes, whose vibrations, on the other hand, penetrate the exhibition venue and the visitor’s body. All Rüdiger’s projects are systematically accompanied by studies and models in cardboard, wood, iron, etc., as well as drawings. But they are far more than mere stages in a creative process: they constitute parts of the fully-fledged work, and are involved in specific presentations in an arrangement encompassing some 30 display stands.
(Nadine Labedade, FRAC Centre Orléans)
Bernhard Rüdiger was born in Italy, (Rome, 1964), and lives and works in Paris. He graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan with Luciano Fabro, and teaches today in Lyon, after stints as a teacher in Tours and Valenciennes. Since 1986, he has taken part in many group shows (Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea Milan 1989, 1998, Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato 1990, 1998, Museum Moderner Kunst Vienna 1991, Magasin de Grenoble 1992, Contemporary Art Museum Caracas, Bogota and Buenos Aires 1992, the Venice Biennale 1993, 1999, 2011, the Rome Quadriennale Palazzo delle Esposizioni 1996, 2008, PS1 New-York 1999, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille 2006, Ostrale Dresden 2013, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel 2013, Museion Bolzano 2014, Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri Città di Castello 2015, Triennale Milan, Ennesima 2015). and solo exhibitions (Christian Stein Gallery Turin and Milan, Michel Rein Gallery Tours and Paris, Krings-Ernst Gallery Colone, Traversée zeitgenössische Kunst Munich, Bernard Bouche Gallery Paris and in the Centre de Création Contemporaine, Tours 1996, les Abattoirs de Toulouse 1997, Centre d’art La Galerie de Noisy-le-Sec 1999, Museo d’arte moderna di Bologna 1999, Château des Adhémar centre d’art contemporain Montélimar 2006, FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon and ESBAMA de Montpellier 2015). He is editor of the magazine Tiracorrendo and was co-founder of the artists’ gallery Lo Spazio di Via Lazzaro Palazzi, a busy venue in the Milan art scene from 1989 to 1993.
Full schedule of The Public Program of Summer School as School 2017 can be found at: http://www.stacion.org/en/Public-Lectures-and-Presentations-2017
Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina and partner institutions with Summer School as School have created a unique international educational platform, based in Prishtina, as a progressing model; developing an interdisciplinary curriculum and engaging practitioners from the region and beyond in sharing knowledge and expertise with international students and the public.
The project’s larger context responds to the art education systems of Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia.
Summer School as School 2017 is organized in cooperation with Allianz Cultural Foundation, supported by ERSTE Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding(TMU), Federal Chancellory of Austria, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung office in Prishtina, Ministry of Diaspora of the Republic of Kosovo, Municipality of Prishtina, Independent Curators International (ICI), The Office for Contemporary Art (OCA), Norway and RIT Kosovo. Complete list of donors and cooperation partners will be announced in due time.