RECRUITMENT for BIG OWL – Dirk Van Lieshout & Klara Adam

August 30 – September 16 2015

Curator: Hans Kuiper and Tiny Domingos

You’re standing in front of the window and look into a cave like space. There is something like a big bed. An old tv set shows a movie with characters like Plant, Woodpecker, Oxygen, Plankton, Crocodile, Turtle among others. There is a fridge with peculiar ‚ice creams‘. The entities move around, lie on the bed, wear masks. Who is ‚ inside‘, who is outside? And why?

Some ‚outsiders‘ are allowed to lie on the bed, others have to stay outside. The art space, once a white cube, transformed in a magical space. The movie as a left over of the ritual of the ‚Entity Defence People‘. Rituals, remembrances of shamanic healing, showing a group process where beings help one another. The film shows a parade in a mythical forest and around fields, where characters roam around with masks, dancing, moving, making sounds. The ‚art hierarchy‘ is undermined, action originates in nature, in ‚forgotten‘ public space, out of the white cube, out of the institution.

Both artists have realized sculptures in public space and worked in renowned institutional contexts. This time they decided to take over an independent project space, in this case in Berlin Wedding.
Recreating art contexts, redefining ‚art hierarchies‘, artists keep on questioning art practices, definitions and strategies, institutions and ‚reputations‘. Independent project Spaces and art initiatives offer them a basic infrastructure and frame for research, experiment and questioning. Within a minimal institutional context and supplying networks of artists and genuine ‚art aficionados‘, these plattforms are the watch towers into the verge of art horizons that come to be, showing us directions for the now.

Dirk van Lieshout and Klara Adam’s ‚Recruitment fo Big Owl‘ invite us to go off the beaten track and go beyond our own rational frontiers. Maybe that’s where art originated: the artist as shaman striving to establish a bond with the beyond. Where myth becomes alive… Those who accept this challenge will discover the beauty of imperfection and the poetry of the semi-failures.
This could be a way of liberation. Without a doubt it is a path of hope.

Hans Kuiper and Tiny Domingos, Amsterdam and Berlin, August 2015