Metal, mirror, string, plastic, paper, wood, LED, video (HD, 12’40 ),
photo (State Archive Hamburg 720-1 151-81= 17 131), wooden crate: 205 x 146 x 166 cm

wandermüde_Hayo-Heye1

Photo: Hayo Heye

Heine-Hamburgkiste

Staatsarchiv Hamburg
720-1 151-81= 17 131

wandermüde_Hayo-Heye3

Photo: Hayo Heye

wandermüde_Hayo-Heye2

Photo: Hayo Heye

The German-Jewish writer, Heinrich Heine, who lived in Paris in exile. Even the 1891 monument to him, ordered by the Austrian empress Sisi, was taken on an involuntary journey from Rome via Corfu to Hamburg, Marseille and Toulon. Heine’s monument was repeatedly set up in these various locations and then diminished, reviled, smeared, or damaged until it was finally hidden in a wooden crate (for 23 years long). “Wandermüde” is a mixed-media installation about the Odyssey of Heine´s sculptural monument. The video shows the currently view of the statue at the Botanic Gardens in Toulon (2014) and the process of the journey the statue.

Exhibition: Galerie im Marstall, Ahrensburg (DE)
Images: catalogue “DELIKATELINIEN” / catalogue “Von Wörtern und Räumen”

Wood, metal, raffia, projector, spotlight, video (HD, 8’06, loop)

Based on an original fetish figure of the Mbete tribe in Gabon, which at the same time serves as alter ego of the artist herself, Naho Kawabe expresses her search for the definition of existence in the room-sized installation Why am I here? Kawabe originally discovered the figure at a Hamburg curio shop called Harry’s Hamburger Hafenbasar & Museum, where it was placed together with other fetish figures from different countries, detached from its original function and significance. The figure had probably travelled accidentally to Hamburg by ship and ended up as a “seafarer’s treasure” at the bazaar on Reeperbahn where it stood around as one curio among others, stripped of its cultural context. In Kawabe’s installation, the figure finds itself in another, completely foreign context. Originally a fetish and transplanted into a constantly changing spatiotemporal constellation, the figure raises questions about the stability our self-positioning that is still possible today. Why am I here? confronts the viewer with questions of cultural belonging, border crossings and, in a general sense, the existential question how the coordinates of space and time help shape our identity concepts.

Text by Magnus Pölcher
in: Fuzzy Dark Spot. Videokunst aus Hamburg. Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg

Exhibtions: Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo (JP) / Ermekeilkaserne, Bonn (DE) / Deichtorhallen Sammlung Falckenberg Hamburg (DE) /Kunsthaus Hamburg (DE)
Images: Broschüre ” Shiseido Art Egg 05″ / Catalogue “Observer Effect” / Catalogue “Fuzzy Dark Spot. Videokunst aus Hamburg” / Catalogue “INDEX 11”