The Hard Way to Enlightenment - Stephan Dillemuth

Preview: 25 September 2010, 7pm

Transmission Gallery is pleased to present The Hard Way to Enlightenment, a new video and installation by Stephan Dillemuth commissioned by Transmission and Manifesta 8. Dillemuth has worked with Transmission members, the committee, a Glasgow-based academic and a live goat over a five-week residency period. This time in Glasgow has allowed the production of the work to be truly experimental and responsive to its context.

Stemming from Dillemuth's work as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, the video is a mise en scene of a lecture transcript which critically examines the privatisation of the public sphere and its implications within the realms of art, research and education. The lecture - The Academy And The Corporate Public - progrates self-organisation and "bohemian research" as resistance tactics for artists, teachers and students. With a light and playful touch, the text is dramatised as an exchange between an artist and a prisoner, both played by Dillemuth. Performed within an impressionistic stage set - at once an artist's studio, a prison, a stable and the basement of an artist-run gallery - the work simultaneously demonstrates and investigates the politics of producing artwork in relation to modes of research and models of learning. Creating this film within the context of Transmission, a gallery founded and sustained through self-organisation, lends another dimension to the conversation enacted within it.

Stephan Dillemuth (b. Büdingen, Germany, 1954) is an artist and academic based in Munich. He studied at the art academies of Düsseldorf and Nürnberg as well as at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, where he has held a professorship since 2006. Dillemuth has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally for two decades. Recent exhibitions include: Marktverficktes Sein, Galerie für Landschaftskunst, Hamburg (Solo); The Avant-garde: Depression, Marres Maastricht, Maastricht; You Have Been Misinformed (with Nils Norman), Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York/Goethe-Institut, New York; and Erfolg, Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne (Solo).

The Hard Way to Enlightenment
Stephan Dillemuth
New work created during a month long residency at Transmission Gallery.