AF/CH

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Questions about perception, sign systems and staging are the focus of the conceptual and mostly installative works of the two artists Adib Fricke and Christian Hasucha. In their exhibition at Galerie Nord | Kunstverein Tiergarten, the two address the mutual conditionalities of these central aspects of contemporary artistic practice. From their specific perspectives and their respective working methods, they develop a productive synthesis in the form of artworks created in direct collaboration.

Although they had known each other’s work for a long time, the two met in person for the first time in December 2014. The subsequent exchange in 2015 led to the idea of exploring the potentials of artistic cooperation and working closely together for an exhibition at Galerie Nord | Kunstverein Tiergarten. In their works resulting from this collaboration, they move towards each other, linking their approaches and testing the possibilities of what they call “combination works”. In their exhibition AF/CH – Adib Fricke trifft Christian Hasucha, the artists present the results of this special artistic interplay.

Adib Fricke (*1962 in Frankfurt/M.) has been dealing intensively with linguistic combinatorics since the early 1990s, when he founded The Word Company, a company that invents words without meaning and offers them for sale. In addition to his interest in semantics that have not yet been established, his so-called protonyms already anticipate later works by the artist in terms of perspective: for example, his works designed in the Bedeutungslabor (Meaning Laboratory), which deal with neuroscientific findings and the interactions of perception and the creation of meaning.

The formally reduced and substantively pointed works by Christian Hasucha (* 1955 in Berlin) are also characterised by his experimental interest in the relationships between perception and the attribution of meaning. Within the framework of his public interventions, he repeatedly makes his addressees – often passers-by in public spaces – pause. Through targeted and subtle irritations, he gives everyday and mostly unquestioned, thus supposedly banal actions such as walking, seeing or sitting a stage and thus puts them in the light of reflection.

The combination works developed jointly by Adib Fricke and Christian Hasucha for the exhibition AF/CH oscillate logically between such forms of engagement with the word, the creation of meaning and the stage. By repeatedly questioning their schemata in various exhibition situations, they throw perception back on itself.

Anyone who walks past the window front of the Galerie Nord during the exhibition, for example, and wonders how the monumental double-T beam might have got into the gallery rooms is already involved in the artistic questioning and is well on the way to questioning their own perception as well. For the word, which has been visibly milled out of the beam and makes the space behind it visible, shakes superficial certainties.

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