| About 50 miles from Berlin, Germany’s capital for the arts, the tiny village of Groß Leuthen in Brandenburg hosts the annual Rohkunstbau festival. It was brought to life by its artistic director, Arvid Boellert, thirteen years ago. Given the very beautiful rural setting of the lakeside castle of Groß Leuthen, it poses an alternative to the urban public exhibition gallery. Every summer international visual artists and performance artists are asked to show site-specific art on a certain topic. |  |
Blue Blue Blue – Susanne Köhler
About 50 miles from Berlin, Germany’s capital for the arts, the tiny village of Groß Leuthen in Brandenburg hosts the annual Rohkunstbau festival. It was brought to life by its artistic director, Arvid Boellert, thirteen years ago. Given the very beautiful rural setting of the lakeside castle of Groß Leuthen, it poses an alternative to the urban public exhibition gallery. Every summer international visual artists and performance artists are asked to show site-specific art on a certain topic. While last year’s exhibition dealt with the castle’s history as an orphanage and the leitmotiv of Robert Schumann’s famous Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), this year 12 artists will examine the ambivalence of longing for what has become one of our fundamental democratic values: freedom.
British curator Mark Gisbourne invited Mona Hatoum, Langlands and Bell, Gregor Schneider and others to explore the many facets of freedom such as the desire to free oneself from physical boundaries, the appeal of anarchy, the temptation to change one’s identity and the difficulties involved in navigating between artistic freedom and societal constraints.
Rohkunstbau XIII, titled “Three Colours – Blue”, follows the trilogy, “Three Colours: Blue White Red,” by Polish-French filmmaker Krzyzstof Kieslowski and marks the beginning of Rohkunstbau’s own trilogy along similar lines. Just as Kieslowski examined the problems of the intense desire for freedom, equality and fraternity through the portrayal of individual destinies, so too will the Rohkunstbau projects from 2006-2008 illustrate these values for individuals and their societal interactions through art.
Once a year for two months the castle is revived by the artists who show their work in one room. For the artists it’s a challenge to deal with the permanent features of the spaces and the castle’s status as an official monument. Going through the exhibition in Groß Leuthen resembles a circuit passing one room after the other. Whereas artists usually show their work exclusively in the castle, Monica Bonvicini will make an exception this year. She plans a work in the palace garden, which can be seen best from the empty Sportraum (Sports room) on the second floor.
Given the focus of aesthetic freedom this year’s exhibition will open up with a large installation by German artist Gregor Schneider who will transform the grand foyer of the castle into a black cube. Visitors who will enter the space are caught by darkness and will lose their orientation and freedom to move around as usual. Schneider’s work for Rohkunstbau is the culmination of his project on the black Cube he has pursued now unsuccessfully for more than two years. The Cube, which was inspired by the Kaaba, was first planned for the Piazza San Marco for the Venice Biennial and then in front of the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart (Museum for Contemporary Art) in Berlin. Both times it was denied just before installation for political reasons related to potential terrorist attacks and the anxiety of possible misinterpretation by the Muslim community despite the fact that the project was inspired by a Muslim friend of the artist and was never be intended to be provocative. Schneider who was never given the opportunity to comment on this, will be given the first possibility to show a work of the Cube project. In terms of Rohkunstbau’s topic of freedom, Schneider’s project is a perfect example of censorship and the constraint of artistic freedom.
Whereas Schneider’s project initiated a discussion of global issues, Melanie Manchot concentrates on the local. For her Rohkunstbau project she has asked teenagers of a theatre group from the region to play in her new video dealing with personal freedom. It will be projected on the two sides of a wall built in the middle of the huge Speisezimmer (Dining Room) of the castle. Visitors will be forced to perform a circular movement around it which will be similar to the movement of the teenagers in the film. The young people will be shown in a dressing room in which they get changed and slip into the roles of futuristic freedom fighters. Melanie Manchot thus makes reference to the worldwide phenomenon of virtual reality, provoking audiences to take on new identities and the always returning fight for personal freedom, whether in reality or in a fictitious game. She deals with the future as well as the present and the past. By working with teenagers from the region, the castle’s past as an orphanage immediately comes to the fore.
The search for personal freedom is also subject of several works by French artist, Sylvie Barré. Her art is based on already existing material, such as novels by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and film scripts by Krzyzstof Kieslowski, which she transfers to a new context. Words are deleted, added or isolated to endow the text with new meaning. For Rohkunstbau Barré will create an installation in the Musikzimmer (Music Room) comprised of 23 glass lenses. Each of them will magnify a single word from the first part of Kieslowski’s Décalogue (1988-89). Put together, these words form different sentences that are connected to the quest of freedom which is one of the main issues of Kieslowski’s “Three Colours Blue.” The lenses themselves will constitute the word SPI which gives the work its title and means She is Sleeping in Polish. It’s a reference to one of the key moments in “Three Colours Blue” when protagonist Julie (Juliette Binoche) opens her eyes for the first time after the accident during which she lost her husband and daughter and realizes that her whole life has changed. Barré uses existing texts as a starting point for her own writing dealing with the experience of one’s own limits.
The group of artists dealing with the topic of freedom will transform the atmosphere of the castle from a former representative summer residence into a place of contemplation of existential values. This will confront visitors from the region and beyond with a global discourse within a local scene.
