Spatial Compositions
(2014)
Materials: fabric, foam, plywood, MDF, square section steel tube.
Dimensions: 115 x 115 x 80cm (Large), 45 x 115 x 40cm (Small).
Produced by Lars Bergmann and Michael Hahn.
November 2013, a group of five arrive at the café of the Galerie fur Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig. They are artist Céline Condorelli; Franciska Zólyom, director of the GfZK; producers Lars Bergmann and Michael Hahn; and artist and performer Valentina Desideri. They are discussing a redesign of the café interior. As they enter the space, Franciska is in midsentence “… the general assumption of Unism is the unity of a work with the place in which it arises, or with the natural conditions that had already existed before the work of art was made. For example, Wladyslaw Strzeminski’s 1948 ‘Neoplastic Room’ in Museum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland. A functional space for the exhibition of artworks including Katarzyna Kobro’s ‘Space Compositions’. In 1950 — just two years after its installation — the room’s polychromes, alluding to constructivist-neoplastic aesthetics, were deemed inappropriate to the official style of social realism and painted over, and its contents entirely removed.”
Preparations for the renovation are already underway. There are no tables in the space, so the five gather around the kitchen and bar area. The floor and wall coverings have been partially removed. Samples of paint finishes and printed wallpapers mark the wall, and floor tiles are stacked in the corner. The only furniture is a curious steel bench constructed from an angular space frame supporting flat planes painted in primary colours. Two of the group carry the bench toward the bar and turn it onto its side so that it can function both as seating and as an ad-hoc table.
Excerpt from ‘Afterwards in the Refectory’, in A School for Design Fiction, by James Langdon, Spectorbooks (2014).
The work can be seen everyday 12AM-12PM in bau bau, permanent museum refectory by Céline Condorelli, Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, Germany.
