Marcelline Delbecq / Nora Schultz

Marcelline Delbecq (Born in 1977) Lives and works in Paris

Marcelline Delbecq has gradually moved away from photography to focus on the cinematic potential of writing. She uses both narrative and narrator (the voice) to create a singular universe where writing turned into sound generates a series of mental images, which move back and forth between description and pure fiction. Her own voice — which she often uses in sound installations, publications and readings — acts like a voice-over for various ‘invisible cinema’ projects where words, transformed into visions, call the whole act of beholding into question. Her film Close, presented for the first time at the Johann König Gallery, is significant of her recent return to the use of images after a period of time devoted to writing.

Close is a slow travelling allowing the viewers to go for a walk in a beautiful garden, partly following "desire lines" — wild paths created by people wishing to follow their desires by walking away from straight and traced lanes — as they move. While the almost-on-ground-level camera calmly strolls through the grass, plants and flowers, a voice-over narrates the architectural description of a house that will never appear on screen. The story of la Maison Rose (the Pink House), located in Monet’s Giverny, was actually inspired by long-time rumours asserting that the house used to be a whorehouse, after being a family pension and a hotel hosting more or less famous guests. Marcelline Delbecq used a combination of fake and real facts and fictions to create an « in situ » piece that engages both the imagination and the gaze : as the viewer happens to find himself hanging around in a garden, to an extent where he might get lost, he simultaneously pictures a house through the voice-over’s depiction. Written as a guided visit through a house supposedly used for illicit activities, the narrator’s text acts like an invisible film in the film, spreading subtle clues and allowing the viewer to wonder what is has really foreseen in the end : the garden viewed from the house or the house viewed from the garden ?

Still is the voice-over’s text printed together with a film-still of the garden in another season. As if the story and History could only repeat themselves, no matter the birth and death of vegetation in a garden overlooked by a house whose mysterious past will never be entirely revealed.

Nora Schultz Born in 1975, the artist lives and works in Berlin.

In this exhibition, Nora Schultz shows a group of works that she places in constellation, directly relating them to each another.

An archive of independently produced left-wing political newspapers from the 1970s provides the source for this collection of revolutionary fist symbols. The fists are all drawn, and were produced for various activist newspapers. In their arrangement, the newspaper fists, formed into paper sculptures, produce a mini-choreography. A small black and white photograph shows the fist in its applied context: spray-painted onto an interior wall, the fist serves as a badge of identification for a group of young people. They refuse photographic identification by cloaking their faces. The resistance that is doubly manifested in these images—the refusal of the camera’s gaze on the one hand and the fist on the other—illustrates an important level of the material presence of drawing: that of its acute significance in a particular (now historical) context.

In the second work, this significance is explored using the materiality of the sign and physically reconstructed. A spray-paint stencil was developed that could be identical to the one that was used for the sprayed fist of the photograph. Contrary to its proper purpose, the stencil is used as a tool to create a graphic, apparently abstract wall painting. The shape of the wall painting produced in this way is in turn based on another “image,” a natural scientific diagram that is to lead to the production of a particle accelerator. This diagram is part of Nora Schultz’ third work. The tracing of the electrophysics diagram seems awkward and rough due to the special use of the stencil. The illegibility of the wall work hints at the incompatibility of the two opposed sign systems—on the one hand the symbolism of natural science, on the other hand activist political symbolism.

Since the diagram, like the stencil of the spray-painted fist, is intended as a tool or instrument for electrophysics. this suggests continuing this method of working, using the tool to create a new condition or state. A particle accelerator embodies this possibility of creating a new state on a scientific and a utopian level.

Common to all three works is their treatment of the reconstructability of existing visual systems, exploring the question of a direct artistic reaction of their own without actually manifesting this state.

Pressetext

Marcelline Delbecq / Nora Schultz