Events/Openings

Raphaela Vogel
"Ich gebe euch eine Verfassung" (I Give You A Constitution)
Opening: Saturday, January 16, 2016, 6–9 pm
Exhibition: January 19 – February 27, 2016

With the beginning of the new year, BQ for the first time presents a solo exhibition by Raphaela Vogel.

For her presentation, the artist guts the gallery space: by removing a wall and by replacing the interior wooden façade behind the windows with a dark tinted window film as well as by relocating office and archive, she exposes the basal architecture.

Upon entering the gallery, the viewer immediately becomes part of a scenography consisting of four video installations, unfolding over a sequence of four rooms, transforming the exhibition spaces in a three-dimensional narration. In the main exhibition space, an installation mimics the room’s footprint via a modular aluminum truss system that also serves as a projection screen support structure. A disconcerting tension arises between the distance evoked in the video, where a figure is shot from afar in front of a wide beachscape, and the penetrating closeness sensed by the viewer amidst the room’s stage-scaffolding architecture, commanding sound, and a two-meter tall outdoor urinal.

A characteristic feature of Raphaela Vogel’s videos is the interaction between the artist, who always appears as the protagonist, and the camera that she operates. Within this set-up is the central question – Who wields power over the regime of the gaze? This issue becomes explicitly manifest when a camera-carrying drone attempts to track the artist’s body in the frame. At the same time, the aggressiveness of the surveillance device is contradicted by its fragile construction: as an automaton, a drone automatically seems sinister, but its inherent vacillation between animate and inanimate being is reflected in its form, coming across as clumsy and frail. It seems almost disabled when compared to the able-bodied artist, who often appears equally combative in her actions, like a postmodern amazon, at times winning the upper hand and reigning supreme over the technology by thwarting its agency as an instrument of observation.

The persistence of the corporeal is symbolically alluded to via painted objects assembled from elk and goat hides in which cast plastic rings have been inset as if they were prostheses. These objects, somewhat archaic in appearance, find their formal counterpart in the imposing Dixi urinal modified to serve as the base for two video projectors in the exhibition’s main gallery space.

Raphaela Vogel (born 1988 in Nuremberg) lives and works in Amsterdam. After her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, she currently is a scholar at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. In Spring of 2015, she held her first solo exhibition at Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn. Future presentations include Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund, next March, and riesa efau, Dresden, in August, where another solo show has been granted to her in connection with the Columbus Award of Contemporary Art.