VESSELS

MARUYAMA Junko and Kaj Osteroth meet in the HilbertRaum for a reason, but not on the level of aesthetics nor on the level of content. Their works are extremely different, testifying to different approaches, (everyday) conflicts, research, principles and practices. The common thread, however, can be found in their encounters. They go back to a high school year in the deepest bible belt, in Georgia, USA, in the 1990s. Somewhere here, impressions and irritations are put down on paper, worked on, suffered through and altered together. Much later a reunion follows in Yamanashi, then Tokyo, Kyoto, Beckum, Berlin, NY, Berlin, Freywalde, Berlin. It is against this background that VASSELS / 器, their first joint exhibition, was realized. It celebrates the simple fact that both are still creating and working as artists.

As a daily routine MARUYAMA Junko has been producing „Silent Flowers/無音花“ made from used plastic bags over the last 28 years. With these flowers, she has observed and transformed various spaces. Interested in human life and its environment, her flowers and the process of their creation mark a unique place between everyday practices, such as the kitchen, and artistic productivity, overlapping and entangling those realms.

For HilbertRaum she arranged flowers along with a door that was once used at a home. The exhibition space presents the never-ending sorrows and healings that lurks in the daily life of each individual who lives in society.

MARUYAMA Junko further takes us for a walk through Berlin. She carries „Silent Flowers/ 無音花“, which she places at various spots in the city. Informed by previous stays, she follows the well-known „Stolpersteine“ (stumbling stones), paying attention and spending time placing her flowers in front of the doors of buildings that once were home to the people named on the many stones she finds. She also pays attention to a recent conflict over a sculpture erected to commemorate the forced sex work of women (so called „comfort women“, „Trostfrauen“) of Fascist Japan. A matter of politics in Berlin these days, and a complicated, long-standing issue in the Japanese culture of remembrance. (see: taz.de/Trostfrauen-Mahnmal-in-Berlin)

Picking up a routine from previous encounters, a series of drawings was created during the artists joint residencies in Berlin and Freywalde.

While MARUYAMA Junko takes us on her walks through Neukölln, which manifest themselves in quick sketches, curious approaches with an almost voyeuristic gaze, Kaj Osteroth takes us to Freywalde, a tiny town 100 km South of Berlin in Brandenburg.

In her dated and located sketches, reminiscent of automatic drawing or mental mapping, Kaj Osteroth reflects on her positioning and discomfort in Brandenburg, shaken by the recent election campaigns. She takes up motifs from her new paintings, visualizes „The Hulk Self“ as a possible empowering gesture, and asks which scenario is actually driving her fear.

In her paintings Kaj Osteroth tracks down allies and ghosts, conjuring up scenarios motivated by accidental isolation and cultivated despair. In her new paintings, Kaj Osteroth examines her increasingly right-wing environment and develops the figure of the „glitch“ („temporäre Fehlaussage in logischen Schaltungen, Filmfehler, Störimpulse“) as a translation of the slow and uncanny shifting of social structures and belief systems. She places her figures astonished, outraged, or simply unaware, in between worlds, caught off guard, confronted with a shift in perception, already standing or sitting knee-deep in brown sauce or referencing an increasingly fascist mindset.