Birds love fish.Neither from the point of view of a bird not a fish)
(Group Exhibition)
A project organized by Niels Trannois
25 July – 22 August 2009

a project organized by Niels Trannois

Hap Grieshaber
Lothar Hempel
Zora Mann
Roseline Rannoch
Niels Trannois

Or some birds love fish, is the history of an impossible love separated by a surface of water and air, one reflecting the other while being permeable to it. The space where this play is performed resounds under the soft vaults of a former mechanics workshop, gently drama/friendly pressure. Here what could be some props replace what would have been some spect/actors, passing from one scope to an other, from this role reversal, even the stage seems this to give way beneath our feet. Time, such as what is visible here,is hanging on materials, an image, a veil, some inks.

These artefacts have as an intention to convey their own myths, may they be obscure or clearly readable, their representation is nonetheless the base of the dialog from which they are the authors. Their radiance, projected according to a potentially infinite curve, is stopped when the spectator conceives of the mental image and comes to its meeting. Then, this point of focussing draws a sensitive as much as reflective surface, Birds love fish is built as an allegory of this surface.

Each piece finds, on its own level, an echo with this allegory, a melody of things sometimes orchestrated by the beginnings of narration whose matrix, engraved in wood or metal, will remain invisible in aid of its mirror like image captive of paper; sometimes by gathering objects which in their confrontation seems amnesic of their former function, hang upon a close and far-off present, escaping their own historical symbolic system. Brought back unrelentingly to their materiality they draw a perpetual poetic motion where the passage of a familiar object in the field of abstraction takes place through a semantic and formal slip.

Other slips, other surfaces, who of Charon or Anubis have the monopoly of passage, the one with the boat, the other with the cross and the scepter. The objects are plinths as much as vehicles, their convergence points to the image of a myth that floats on temporalities. This Styx is a screen which reflects but can’t be penetrated. Veil of crystalline paper sound on which elements try to fix themselves, are stuck between the limpidity of their birth and the opacity of their decay, Suhail Al Muhlif would be thus the keystone of this constellation dedicated to a wandering glance.

Niels Trannois