Means are matters of practice, things to do things with. A mean is a mean to fulfill a certain task. They are a category of things that carry potential: instruments, tools, stages, spaces, infrastructures, resources, strategies, ideas. Means are volatile and ambigous things, that have some other than the current state of things enscribed into them. But „mean” carries a multitude of other, almost contradictory meanings as well. It refers to a common characteristic or an average. In its negative form, it means mean, devious or malicious.

 

The exhibition “ideal means” ties in with the history of the NKW premises, which on the one hand served to represent noble vehicles in its showroom, while its huge workshop was dedicated to work, production, repair and interaction. A place where automobiles remained dynamic and transformable as objects. The works of the five artists, curated by Julian Siffert and Sebastian Quast, take up this moment of incompleteness and changeability to open up an imaginary or fantastic space in the former workshop.

 

Isa Schieche’s objects can be activated by the audience and, with an ambivalent tension between wanting and needing, passivity and activity, power and powerlessness, open up the question of how bodies, movement and actions take up space: What remains of them, how are they reported, observed and passed on? The white bouncy castle in “This must be the Play” by Hanna Kučera parodies both the white cube and art institutions as castles in the air. For the finissage, it becomes the playing field for a performative reading by Kučera and Andreas Lorck. Puddles of small bells, placed into the room by Julian Siffert seem to point to a sort of infrastructural leakage. His works refer to the Joker as an ambivalent trickster figure. Cæcilie Heldt Rønnow’s “A fantasy of a self discussion“ is a performance, inspired by the ancient art of storytelling practised before fairy tales were written down in the end of the 18th century. Here, storytellers used rhythm, rhyme, repetition, sound and movement to tell their tales. In the space, she is showing part of the costume, which is going to find its use during the finnisage. “We all Shapeshift” by Valentino Skarwan is a multimedia project that combines environment, performance and gathering. The body is presented as a place of metamorphosis, a transforming being as a porous skeleton, as a rising cocoon, as a sweaty intimacy where we feel at home.

 

The exhibition “ideal means” invites visitors to engage in collective fantasizing between sculpture and performance, art and labour as well as production and reception.