Before I met you the world seemed like such a big place… now there is only this shop
Sweetwater, Berlin 5 February – 26 March
The lust for escaping from a life suffused with dull tristesse is a recurring motif that sprawls from literature to art, music, fashion and every other cultural category in which romantic sorrow can be channelled. This four-artist group show seems to stream through a comparable canal. The title is taken from the English subtitles for Luchino Visconti’s film Ossessione (1943), wherein Giovanna, wife of a petrol station owner, tries to escape from her gloomy life and starts an affair with a vagrant. The film closes with Giovanna’s killing; her attempt at freedom ends in an inescapable cul-de-sac, preceded by a short-lived amorous reverie. How long do these kinds of romanticisation of stirring love (affairs) last for the subjects who are involved in them?
While it is obvious that, when seen in cultural forms, they are often terminal and intrinsically not meant to endure, their ephemerality also provokes the presumption that the sheer substance of these relationships might never have been real. They seemingly end up consisting as much of a counterfeit material as Kayode Ojo’s sculptures here, which play with juxtaposing expensive fantasies with cheap realities. For Untitled (2018/2022), Ojo places a square-shaped mirror plate underneath three bottles of inexpensive German sparkling wine, on top of which another mirror is positioned.
The upper mirror is covered with a pyramidal stack of champagne coupes; above them, in turn, hangs a crystal raindrop chandelier whose candles are made of metal. Wandering around the sculpture, first made with plastic glasses and updated with glass champagne coupes in 2022, consists of an unavoidable encounter with endless reflections of yourself caused by the facing mirrors.
In Ojo’s case, as opposed to Giovanna’s, no tragic death transpires, rather an inevitable confrontation with your own, most likely partially wishful, image of yourself, your peers, your lovers and your world. You cannot escape the mirror, or the low-priced, almost tacky
sparkling wine paired with (the dreamy idea of drinking it out of) champagne glasses. after embedding viewers in this mise-en-abyme narrative, the artist’s second exhibited work, He’s younger than you (2016), a few-seconds-long scene from the romantic comedy Alfie (2004), plays every ten minutes, explicitly referencing problematic romances (as the title suggests) and their adhesive long-term effects. In the film, Jude Law’s Alfie is replaced with a younger, and perhaps also longer-lasting, substitute. Yet the relation between – or even identification of – original and replacement in the film is as ambiguous as in Ojo’s chandeliers, which were first exhibited in Berlin at this gallery last year. In the earlier exhibition, however, five out of eight chandeliers were made of acrylic instead of crystal. It was impossible to identify the ‘original’, which might suggest the implication that counterfeits have acquired a status of originality in an age where it is hard to tell if a public romantic relationship is as facetuned as its corresponding Instagram posts. Counterfeits become originals and originals become counterfeits.
In Jesse Stecklow’s work Untitled (10:37:12) (2014) a clock is permeated with air samplers, which at the end of the exhibition will be sent to a laboratory to process the data they collected throughout the exhibition period and subsequently inform future works by Stecklow. In his practice, the artist recontextualises information by letting different people interpret it. These data systems are then encoded in new works. Thereby he underpins the idea that you cannot escape the past – a cultural truism that potentially elicited omnipresent longings for fanciful escapes. Just like the light of Constantin Thun’s lamp Untitled (undated) in the back of the room will always remain on – or at least until the exhibition ends – the beckoning glow of the past cannot be turned off. The repurposed lamp was used before and therefore contains information from the past that now gets intertwined with information from the present to inform the future. The works in the exhibition suggest a romantic perception of the world in a formal attire. While a classic understanding of romanticism is suspicious of science and rationality, and relentlessly glorifies the past, the exhibition only extracts certain aspects from this worldview. It is not a riposte to romanticism, yet partially opposes it due to the visual clarity and reduction. Romantic affairs surely make it possible to escape from one’s life for a fleeting moment, but they are cheap counterfeits doomed to break. Giovanna’s and Alfie’s stories burn like tinder, whereas this exhibition operates in a romantically sober way. Claire Koron Elat