The text should be short. Short like a poem with a few words that really count and really say what it’s about. “Can’t we arrange the space in a more collaborative way?” is one sentence from the three dialogs in the movie painting hybrid Everyone Wants It.
Everyone is excited about the second part before they have seen the first. That sounds curious but it is true I can tell you in a few words like a love poem. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds…”, Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 116. This phrase fits well because I would like to show the popular elements in the work without telling what will happen. The play is text and picture based and has a time frame in which we can follow three dialogs on a LED display while the movie is built up like a multi-layered stage in the window.
The storylines are clearly separated from each other in terms of content, but spatially they are drawn together in such a way that the LED font can be reduced to a purely visual element. The dialogs light up other immaterial conversations taking place.
With the precision of the nature studies by Maria Sibylla Merian and a phantasy of Carl Barks, who is the creator of Duckburg and most of its dwellers the conversations between the protagonists, the materials, the different spaces, inside and outside, glass and textile, A and B, street and window, you and me are overlapping and through visible.
With other words: “Oh, yeah, no, let’s keep it physical. This is for productivity’s sake!” one character says to another in this first phase. And in 1982 Protect me from what I want was lit up on a big electronic scoreboard in Times Square in New York.
It is one of many phrases from Jenny Holzer’s Truisms-series, which at the time began to work on a larger picture of opinions in society and deconstruct the flatness of advertisement that continues to grow today. But they remain abbreviations and the time of truisms is over.
Everyone Wants It could be one of those truisms, but it zooms into an ever-growing picture that focuses on zwischenmenschliche relationships and their absurdity, which always shows singularity even though everyone can relate to the characters speaking. We are all thrown into this world. How do we deal with involuntariness when everyone wants it?
Manuel Kirsch
Please read the dialogs of the first phase of the exhibition here.
Thanks to Marie-Louise Arndt for the German translation and to Gökce Koray and
Berke Yazicioglu for the Turkish translation and proofreading.
A second phase of the exhibition will start on 12 January 2023.