In Eugène Ionesco’s play Les Chaises an ominous doorbell rings incessantly, announcing the arrival of invisible guests. Entering Romeo’s eyes, Simon Lässig and Vera Lutz’s first institutional exhibition at Kunstverein München, our arrival is certain, but the bell doesn’t chime. The show opens with Vera Lutz’s installation Z T U ⅃ , a doorbell, mounted between two flights of stairs, and cables. Wired into a closed circuit, its system is trapped in a mute loop, a stoic proxy for a former function. But still an aftersound lingers, and expands: Z T U ⅃ is a catalyst for an interplay of guiding and framing, that interlinks the works that follow.
Tucked into corners and edges along the floor and ceiling, the cables lead us upstairs, where they enclose the first room. Here, we encounter two sculptural reading situations conceived by Simon Lässig, each consisting of a table and a stool. On top of each desk is a stack of loose pages: heavily edited research material–texts and images–drawn from various sources. Underlined, cropped or crossed out, what remains initially suggests a viewing organized by the artist. Behind thick strokes of black marker, parts of the original texts are still faintly decipherable. Yet this is where a shift in perception happens: once the compulsion to unveil the material’s sources eases, connections begin to form between the loose fragments. Leafing through the pages, what unfolds is less a linear than a spatial and modular process–an amplification of what Michel de Certeau described as a “tactical” reading: flexible and fragmentary, allowing skipping, jumping, and pausing (1). Gradually, passages seem to interweave with each other: their coherence not semantic but tonal, unfolding in a momentarily poetic register that takes up the show’s underlying examination of seeing and showing–and withholding.
A series of seven photographic prints by Lässig expands from the first room into the main gallery: grainy black-and-white stills from 1970s Hungarian “quasirealist” films, selected by the artist via frame-by-frame analysis. Each image shows body parts–legs, the curve of a chin and nose, lips–in close-up or within interiors, on the edge of recognizability. Though static, the stills carry movement, an inward pull that occurs less from what they depict than from how they relate to our gaze. Beyond a pondering of cinematic seeing, they emanate a physical sense of intimacy: a closeness not only to the actors, but to the camera and the person behind it. This bodily gaze links all six images, creating emotional resonances and references that reach beyond their frames. As with the research material, the original sources of the stills are of little significance. What unfolds is a dynamic that plays out both within and between the images–like a network of connections that weaves an open scenography, reconfigurable as we move through the space.
This physicality culminates at the rear end of the Kunstverein: Vera Lutz’s immersive multi-channel video installation The Happiness Experiment is set in a dark chamber conceived by the artist through significant alterations to the architecture. It consists of looped, overlapping projections of footage showing piles of miscellaneous objects. Momentarily lit by hastily moving flashlights, the rapidly succeeding views have something strangely baroque about them, as if caught in a fleeting chiaroscuro. The footage is projected across all walls by the very camcorders that recorded it–devices now acting both as receivers and transmitters. Like the flashlights striking the objects, they now spotlight us and blend our silhouettes with the projections. Relentless rustling sounds evoke rummaging, but no hands are visible; it is the handheld camera that shakily sifts through the objects, our gaze moving along. Here, the instability of perspective becomes fully embodied.
On my way out, I find myself thinking about this slippage–or perhaps folding–of subjectivity that runs through the exhibition. As perspective fractures through the camera lens, so does the self: fragmented, shifting, and ultimately, never quite settled. A line by Clarice Lispector comes to mind, as she contemplates the difficulty of grasping the real: “We desperately try to find an identity of our own and the identity of the real. And if we understand ourselves through the symbol that is because we have the same symbols and the same experience of the thing itself: but reality has no synonyms.” (2)
(1) Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life [1984], translated by Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London. Particularly in the chapter “Reading as Poaching”, de Certeau discusses reading as a form of resistance that appropriates text through movement, repetition, and personal strategy.
(2) Clarice Lispector, Água Viva [1973], translated by Stefan Tobler, Penguin, London, 2012.
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Simon Lässig (*1992) and Vera Lutz (*1992) are artists who both live and work in Berlin. Their occasional collaboration began in 2015 and has since included formats such as the organization of exhibitions, film screenings, readings and project spaces. Lässig and Lutz’s artistic exchange goes beyond a dialogue between their own practices, but often incorporates, invites, and builds upon the work of other artists.
Sophie Huguenin is a writer based in Berlin.
