English
Deutsch
until 20.04. | #4173ARTatBerlin | Taubert Contemporary shows from 16. February 2024 the exhibition the expansion of possibilities by the artist Dieter Kiessling.
“Is the glass half full or half empty?” is a well-known question that refers to a fundamental attitude of life. But who would argue for the latter? According to the Greens politician and Federal Minister Robert Habeck, it’s more about “expanding possibilities”. And it was precisely this fundamentally optimistic attitude that he represented with great commitment, emotion and rhetorical determination in his speech at the Greens Party’s state conference in Karlsruhe in November 2023.
Dieter Kiessling’s (b. 1957) latest video, “the expansion of possibilities” (2023), also displays this energy and self-confidence, transferring it from the field of politics to art. While the Berlin-Düsseldorf-based artist is otherwise known for his self-referential, sometimes even circular videos and photographs, this work marks his first foray into political art – and emphasises both components. His expansive work is not content with the acoustic documentation of a political opinion. Rather, in its size and unexpected motivic concentration on the speaker’s water glass, it creates a tension between the political and the aesthetic. His interventions are both small and serious: in addition to shortening the text, it is the detailed concentration on an oversized, almost painterly enlargement of the water glass that fragments, reflects and (ironically?) refracts the speaker in black, green and skin tones.
Dieter Kiessling, the expansion of possibilities, 2023,
Video installation, 8 min., loop, sound | height approx. 220 cm | 86.6 in | 5 + 1 AP, 1/5
The fact that the professor of media art at the Kunsthochschule Mainz has also made other very intelligent, media-specific films with everyday and contemporary references is demonstrated by the videos also presented in the exhibition, such as “red train” or the equally complex and clever work “mobilphone” (both 2023), which shows a seemingly limitless deepening of the image space on the surface of a smartphone, which surprisingly leads to an end after all.
Kiessling’s first exhibition at Taubert Contemporary also includes numerous photographic images, which form another pillar of his work. In many cases – as in the ‘Body Series’ or the ‘Direct Series’ – they reflect the process, a performative process of photography in which the individual, in this case the artist’s self-portrait, seems to disappear behind the medium. Even in these earlier pictures, an alienation of the documentary is evident, which takes on a political charge in the most recent ‘expansion of possibilities’.
So is it ultimately just our binary thinking – half full/empty, art/life, aesthetics/politics etc. – that is a false construct? Kiessling shows us that possibilities obviously point beyond this.
– Stefan Gronert
Dieter Kiessling *1957 born in Münster, Germany
lives and works in Berlin and Düsseldorf, Germany
Vernissage: Friday, 16. February 2024, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition period: Friday, 16. February – Saturday, 20. April 2024
To the Gallery
Titelbild: Dieter Kiessling, dice pixelated, 2010, FineArtPrint, Alu-Diabond, Diasec | 5 + 1 AP, 2/5 | 64 x 64 cm | 25.2 x 25.2 in
Exhibition Dieter Kiessling – Taubert Contemporary | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
