Doug Aitken

An exhibition by Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in cooperation with Kunst-Werke Berlin

Doug Aitken assembles in his installations a variety of film, video, photography, architecture and sound. His video installation Electric Earth, which brought him the international prize at the 1999. Venice Biennale, as well made him known to a larger public in Europe. Aitken´s video installations and films are obsessed with the idea of the present; he himself describes them as pure communication.

The techniques and styles used for production, those that are in a position to allow this communication to arise in the first place, refer to the movie made according to the pattern and myth of Hollywood. In his works, however, the mechanisms of accelerated media are examined in a sensory, empirical and conceptual way. Doug Aitken uses the cinematic vocabulary of Hollywood, inserts its stereotypes into his visual language, implements its dramaturgical arguments and thematic motifs.Thus, he secures himself the recognition factor while luring the viewer into a visual world that is an established authority of our image inventory, nearly co-existing as reality exposing it to criticism at ist most vulnerable point. The contents and arguments of these mainstream narratives are examined according to the impression they make on the viewer. They don´t expose themselves to any other discourse (foreign to the genre).

Doug Aitken