LARA DHONDT / MARTIN MLECKO - Photography

OPENING: 08 June 2011, 6 - 9 p.m
EXHIBITION: 09 June - 30 July 2011

BOUROUINA GALLERY Charlottenstrasse 1-2 10969 Berlin

The exhibition Photography presents work series of long-time Berlin based artist Martin Mlecko and for the first time in the gallery, works by young belgian artist Lara Dhondt.

For her series Shelters of Refuse Lara Dhondt installs and photographs constructions of personal space - shelters - in urban landscape, that she creates from waste materials and drifting garbage. The resulting photograph functions as a static, monumental document of an ephemeral action in the public space.

Martin Mlecko's The Things of Life, a since 1994 ongoing series of black and white photographs, shows pictures of everyday objects that appear specific and private as individual object and in the photographic view to each particular object, whilst in their installative joint presentation, they maintain the character of the universal and timeless. The exhibition will be complimented by two new large scale libraries from Mlecko's work series Evidence.

"The Shelters of Refuse fashioned by Lara Dhondt from various civilisational materials and other found objects discovered during her wanderings through urban and suburban areas constitute constructions which recall without fail the remarkable immediacy of the appropriation-methods employed by children. Residing within the firsthand recollection of well-nigh every adult, the childhood predilection for building huts, forts and caves both indoors and outdoors stems from that same archaic longing for shelter and safety that Dhondt pointedly addresses in the title of the present photo-installation series. Indeed, just as the perspective of a child allows—thanks to a capacious power of imagination—visual images to be juxtaposed with mental ones, Dhondt’s works afford us with the supposition of an interior gaze that is integral to the artist, which nonetheless remains concealed from the beholder. What we see instead, are the moving and fragile constructions comprised of now unclaimed and functionless industrial products—often revealed as having acquired a rather precarious condition and presented in respectively perilous environments—, spontaneously arranged by Dhondt and subsequently photographed in black and white—as though in an effort to preserve an unusual encounter in the form of a memento. With shrewdly employed equivocacy, the photographs from this series presented at the current exhibition have themselves become part of a ‘constructed’ object. With her pictures, Dhondt reveals to us the materialized results of an appropriation—the visible traces of an attempt at forming a temporary habitat that, under the circumstances presented, is entirely unexpected. With ‘her’ abandoned objects, she appears to engender melancholy dialogues from which unassumingly resistant sculptures emerge to provide shelter for the artist herself, along with one or the other like-minded companion. Shelter from whom or from what? Presumably from the lifelessness and soullessness of a ready-made world consisting of places and products which speak to us solely in the form of advertisement blurbs and instruction manuals."

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