Each year, five exhibition booths in the garden hall of the Museum Kunst der Westküste serve to present various contemporary artistic practices. This year’s Changes of Scenery raise the curtain on what amounts to models of theatre stages: on view aremarine creatures lost in the ecstasy of underwater love, fragile snow globes with morbid fairy-tale imagery, a floating coffin on the high seas, as well as word pictures with local colour and shrimp appearing in the role of human beings. The blending of man and animal in role play and the sensual tinkering with scenery and playful manipulating of puppets, objects, scenes and concepts point to a way of appropriating the world through models of sorts. What models have in common is that they are representations of things. Models can also be things that stand in for people. As a model, man with his performances is wholly at the service of things. In architecture and art, the model appears as a design having an indexical relation to the real. Used as as an alternative draft to reality, it can take on idiosyncratic, subversive or utopian qualities and tell a completely different story.
Artists: Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz (USA), Rupprecht Matthies (Germany), Hotel Modern (Netherlands), Isabella Rossellini (Italy/USA).
