PROLOGUE

Galerie vom Zufall und vom Glück, Hanover 2017

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“The exhibition moves, not without quiet irony, on the edge of its own abyss.”

ROOMS TO LET PROLOGUE happened in 2017 in the gallery „Vom Zufall und vom Glück“. The artists chose the venue because of its particular architecture and conceived a site-specific exhibition on that basis.

Mareike Poehling and Andrea von Lüdinghausen met in 2014, shared a studio soon afterwards, and discovered fundamental commonalities in terms of their biographies and the content of their art.

Both showed a deep interest in the countries of Central Asia, in theory and in actual travel. They conducted photographic research – the one in 1992, the other fifteen years later – the results of which demonstrated unexpected parallels in the formal language used by each. Both had independently researched similar themes such as absurd architectures, spaces for the dead, overland routes, museum spaces and the language of public signs.

The artists set out questions regarding the form's exhibitions take, the conditions of working productions and the relation between found objects and finished sculpture as the issues they wish to deal with in ROOMS TO LET PROLOGUE.

ROOMS TO LET PROLOGUE works directly with the exhibition space as material. The realization of the exhibition has the artists living in the gallery for three weeks, working with the spaces and the patterns of movement which the visitors inscribe within them. Lüdinghausen and Poehling close off paths and stairways and create access to back rooms such as the broom closet and the chair storage room. Carpets are hung vertically, allowing a new spatial system to arise, while architectonic elements such as walls, beams, awnings and artificial stone are added. The material is either found in situ or is sourced from the studio storeroom. The artists weave their own stories into this reworked, transformed space in the form of sculptural elements, drawings and photographic images, both moving and still.

ROOMS TO LET appropriates the spaces, transforms and adds to the material at hand, after which the space is opened again to visitors.

This method of artistic production mirrors directly that which the artists wish to express. This is the starting point for ROOMS TO LET as a series of exhibitions and as a method of working.

The conventional studio form is called into question and long-term hiring of exhibition space is rendered obsolete.