In the organizer's words:

With What do we want that seduces us and The Anecdote, the GAK presents the first institutional solo exhibitions by Mara Wohnhaas (*1997, lives in Düsseldorf).

In her works, Mara Wohnhaas deals with the mechanisms of thought, language, perception and spatial structures, whose logics and contradictions she takes up, expands or reduces to absurdity. An event or a brief, performative moment is often the starting point for Wohnhaas' sculptures, performances, drawings, photographic and video works. Language also plays an important role for the artist: it produces expectations, promises rapprochement and is at the same time a slippery system of distance and abstraction.

In What do we want that seduces us, two replicas of an illusory stage face each other. With the sculptures, Wohnhaas approaches the original object as faithfully as possible, right down to the fabric of the stage backdrop and the wooden veneer. Only the outer sides and their respective surfaces are visible. The magic trick itself is permanently present and absent as a latent possibility of something that could have taken place or will take place. Between minimal sculpture and stage space, technical logic and illusion, What do we want that seduces us raises questions about what we see, what we believe in and what we want to know.

The Anecdote presents itself as a more intimate space in which Wohnhaas addresses questions of value and meaning creation. Strategies that attempt to create unambiguity prove to be unstable projections. The Anecdote brings together snapshots and symbolic impressions of events, but does not deliver the punch line so typical of the anecdote. Instead, the exhibition balances between logic and coincidence, veracity and blurriness.

In Mara Wohnhaas' works, supposed connections give rise to relationships in which the circulation and relativity of knowledge, reason, truth and appearance collaborate seductively and humorously. They reflect a desire placed within them and translate it into form and material. While the objects in What do we want that seduces us are clearly and geometrically delineated and the inner life remains hidden, in The Anecdote the subjective gaze literally forces its way into the picture as an interface between inner and outer life and obscures the edges. This elimination of the conceptual separation between psychology and empiricism, the invisible and the visible, the imagined and the factual relates to artistic practice as well as to the relationship to the environment and the forms of communication and media that shape it.

Price information:

2€ reduced admission