amplify your thoughts #2 - open eyes 2017

during the exhibtion konsens - kein konsens
at City Gallery KUBUS, Hannover GERMANY

duration: 15 minutes

Photos: Wolfgang Schunck

Ilka Theurich's works combine an installation with a performative approach. The artist, who is primarily active in the field of performance art, has previously focused intensively on international trouble spots and the narratives that are involved in such extreme situations. In her artistic work, she thinks about the questions, what basically moves people in such situations? Which topics are of absolute importance to them and what promises they give their hearing and their hopes? Or more precisely, what is essential, what all wish for?

Her installation "Amplify your thoughts # 1 - liberty 2017" is based on a quotation by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian and resistance fighter against National Socialism. He coined in thinking about freedom the following sentence. "Obedience follows blindly, freedom has open eyes". On the white cloth, she, therefore, printed the word freedom in nine different languages and hung them as flags on thin flagpoles. The abstract concept of freedom becomes a literal object in space, a material appeal to reason and humanity. A flag is always an assertion, a sovereignty that proclaims a place, a land for itself. The flag is, therefore, a representative of a larger cause, which in this case proclaims the museum space in countless languages the place of freedom. That is precisely the function and significance of the museum and art.

In her performance "Amplify your thoughts # 2 - open eyes 2017", Theurich fully explored the possibilities of performance as a direct, ie physical medium that can visualize complex topics and psychological processes. She combines the abstract concept of freedom with selected personal biographical events of the nine cultural language areas and brings the viewer back from the general concept of freedom to the private, personal space of reflection.

Text: Frank-Thorsten Moll, Director of IKOB - the museum for contemporary Art in Eupen // English translation: Ilka Theurich (2017)