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Offshore

text by Kolja Kohlhoff, arthistorian Berlin

Ute Vauk-Ogawa mostly places her multi-part sculptural works expansively on the ground, but here she transforms the walls into her stage.
At first glance the glowing red figures seem to have been drawn onto the wall, but soon it becomes apparent, that they were actually bent out of wire and then hung in front of it, which makes them even more unstable. The title of the work is OFFSHORE, which in nautical language means a place beyond solid ground. Instability becomes a structuring theme of the work as the figures either seem to be driven to motion by some unseen force or seized by free fall: a skyfall that calls on both, ancient mythology and biblical narratives. In these figurations however, we do not encounter titans or fallen angels, so collective imagination comes into play in a different way. It ist that archetypal of falling, as it appears to us in dreams – a falling, the cause of which often remains in the dark and from which we are only saved by waking up. In contrast to such dreams, the luminous figures here are not isolated but they crash towards each other or even into one another in order to tangle into inextricable configurations.
In the here shown silkscreen print the figures are superimposed so strongly that they become an impenetrabel network which makes the individual disappear into it : „Offshore“ thus becomes an archtypal image of fear.

 

 

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