Open Air Distance Exhibition #2 - Developing The Green Cube

OADE #2 - Developing The Green Cube takes up the concept of the Open Air Distance Exhibition and further develops the idea of the Green Cube. OADE pursues the goal of realizing art spaces as places of open encounter and aesthetic reflection despite physical distance. 

As a Green Cube, the garden becomes a place of art-production and art-reception in one. An atypical exhibition space that challenges new lines of sight and perspectives on pressing social issues. The open blue of the sky, the green of the plants and the protected garden space adapt the idea of the White Cube to the current situation. The growing and wilting of the plants reminds us not to return hastily to our accustomed order and institutional normal operation. The Green Cube seems to fit better into times of social transformation than the static and closed museum space. Here one can continue to meet without fear and exchange ideas about art. In it, aesthetic experiences for a new era become possible. 

OADE is a place that does not accept the "new normality" without reflection or comment. In it, the new behaviors, structures and habits introduced in the context of the pandemic are aesthetically and intellectually examined. In OADE, the power of art reveals cracks in the old and possibilities of the new. It reminds us: to stay in motion, not to be lulled, to find niches, not to fall short of our own possibilities.

An important part of the artistic practice of Maria Anisimowa is the creation of portraits. She does not create classic images of faces, but rather surreal-looking sculptures that are formed, painted and rearranged from everyday objects, textiles or found objects. The artist intensively deals with the portrayed persons as well as with the mode of operation of the genre portrait. The titles of the works consist of first names and refer to specific persons, whose characteristics Anisimowa visualizes in a new way with selected materials. This method succeeds in creating moments of great intimacy.

For OADE #2 the artist Maria Anisimowa has created the work Be silent like deep water. She negotiates the results of her Pinterest algorithm or the stubborn profile that the algorithm has calculated for her and from which she can no longer free herself. It is a female profile with which the artist does not identify, and which motivates her to investigate the why of this algorithmic attribution.

Be silent like deep water translates advertising objects, DIY instructions and beauty tips into an aesthetic and ironic context of its own. The work consists of three wooden gates placed at different locations in the garden. Two of the gates are covered with advertising posters, which the artist created from the image data of her Pinterest profile. In one gate hangs an improvised curtain of wax objects. These objects comprise various everyday objects that are recommended for the good life of the always cheerful and available woman of tomorrow. The artist has cast them in wax, thus making visible in a humorous way the absurd and pseudo-sexual forms of these objects. 

Humor and fun also characterize the motivation stones at the foot of Tor No. 3. Anisimowa collected stones on site, which she inscribed with motivational slogans such as "thank you", "do what you love" or "this is your day". These motivation stones are part of an edition that the artist presents to the visitors of the exhibition as a gift.

In the context of OADE #2, the artist Yana Tsegay invites us to enter into a dialogue in the fictional institution The White Hut. It is located in an abandoned garden hut, which stands at the edge of the OADE area like an outpost and a guard. The hut's façade seems dilapidated and it is unlikely that it will exist for long. The White Hut deals with the following topics: Self-empowerment, visibility, claiming all rights, doubts about the institutions of art. Criticism of the denial of structural racism and admonition to the center to endure its own, the "white fragility".

Yana Tsegay creates installations and spaces between reality and fiction from paintings, sculptures or found objects. Her works unfold a broad spectrum of questions concerning institution, cultural appropriation and artists' internal identities. While her artistic work is always accompanied by the question of how painting, especially abstract painting, can exist anonymously, without identity and without being fixed or ascribed, her work for OADE #2 deals decisively with questions of identity politics and the current debate about the painting "Ziegeln***" by Georg Herold. 

In order to bring these issues into consciousness, the artist has written postcards, invited people from established Frankfurt art institutions to enter into conversation with other artists and BIPoC activists, and reflected on the acts of latent and structural racism in Frankfurt art institutions and the questionable appeal to the freedom of art. The discourse on the artist's questions will continue throughout the exhibition.

Caroline Danneil searches in her poetry for the counterpart in nature, for beginnings, understanding and correspondence. Her work is a daily countermovement, a search for what at first seems incomprehensible, overwhelming, and then hidden, obscured: it does not come to light in one fell swoop, but rather surprisingly, shyly and delayed. At the vernissage she reads from her new Gartereigen, which was created at the beginning of 2020.

Artist biographies:

Maria Anisimowa (1984, Oryol, Russia) completed her art studies at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach a.M. in 2015. She lives and works in Frankfurt a.M.

Caroline Danneil (1971, Karlsruhe) studied German and English language and literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and at the University of Cambridge. She lives and works in Frankfurt a.M.

Yana Tsegay (1991, Moscow, Russia) graduated from the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach a.M. in 2019. She lives and works in Frankfurt a.M.

Photos: Ivan Murzin

Curated by KVTV, the exhibition was supported by Kulturamt Frankfurt a.M.