[May 28th 2002]
interview

Conversation between
Kirsten Pieroth and Jacob Fabricius
An interesting new initiative by the organisers of Charlottenborg Udstillingsbygning is the Mellemdækket, a space for soloexhibitions at Charlottenborg Udstillingsbygning in Copenhagen. which will almost continually present exhibitions by danish and international artists all through the year.
Text: Jacob Fabricius Photo: Press photos


Kirsten Pieroth Reise um die Erde in 40 Tagen

Kirsten Pieroth
June 1st - August 4th 2002
Opening Friday the 31th of May 5pm-7pm
Charlottenborg Udstillingsbygning
Mellemdækket
Nyhavn 2, DK-1051 Copenhagen K
Phone +45 33 13 40 22, fax +45 33 14 25 70
Mon-Sun 10am-5pm, Wed 10am-7pm
www.charlottenborg-art.dk
More info: Jacob Fabricius/+45 26 21 01 08

press release

Conversation between Kirsten Pieroth and Jacob Fabricius.
Berlin/Copenhagen. May 2002

J.F.: You placed an advertisement in the Danish Newspaper Politiken announcing a central located apartment rent-free. It sounded so tempting and many people must have torn their hair out noticing that there were neither phone number nor contact address for this fabulous offer. Why did you choose to place this advertisement in the paper and use it as the invitation for the show at Charlottenborg’s project space?

K.P.: I came to this idea by accident. At the time when I started working on the exhibition a friend of mine moved from Copenhagen to Berlin. We went through the flat sections of different Berlin newspapers and marked the ones that sounded interesting just by the image some descriptions created in your mind. You follow your own interpretation of how you imagine it. A very usual process. That gave me the idea to announce the exhibition space in a Danish newspaper as if it would be to rent. There was no phone number in the add since I was more interested in the various interpretations of the add itself instead of really renting the space out. I just shared the information I had about the space with the readers of the add.

J.F.: So the advertisement should create an imaginary space in the reader’s mind?

K.P.: Yes.


Postkarte front (tv), back (th)

J.F.: In the work ‘45 Postkarten aus Berlin’ you do the opposite. You have sent unwritten postcards found in Berlin thrift stores back to their origin. What was the idea behind it?

K.P.: Each postcard was sent to the specific place that is to be seen on the front of the card. You know, you often find these motifs of sometimes a well known, sometimes a strange, exotic location on postcards. The idea was to invert the principle of a postcard that one usually gets mailed from somewhere else and that gives you an image of that somewhere else. So these postcards were in fact posted from Berlin but the receivers saw their own local environment on the image side of the card.

J.F.: Was there a certain criteria to choose specific postcards?

K.P.: I wanted to use postcards from places where I had never been myself. Then I came across those two nice postcards, one from Hamburg and one from Berlin. So I had a problem. I wanted to include them and in the end I found two American cities, which are also named Hamburg and Berlin, and I just sent the postcards to these two American destinations. Shortly after I got an email by the guy from Hamburg/New York. He was asking me if I knew that the city displayed on the postcard was not at all identical to his hometown, the Hamburg in the States. The other postcard I got returned from Berlin/Pasadena. It actually arrived with a delay of a couple of months having a post office stamp on it saying 'MISSENT TO BERMUDA.'



Mein Flug über den Ozean

J.F.: You told me a nice story about the work ‘Mein Flug über den Ozean’. Where has it been previously been shown and what were the conditions of the work?

K.P.: I did that piece on occasion of a group show in a New York gallery. My idea was to do a work about the travel of my work from Berlin to New York. So I was thinking about that and then Charles Lindbergh came to my mind. In 1927 he flew from the States to Europe and he was the first person to cross the Atlantic in a non-stop solo flight. He had published a book on his travel some time later. I used the first German edition of this book entitled ‘Mein Flug über den Ozean’ as my contribution. The book was sent across the Atlantic the opposite route than Lindbergh’s original travel route was. I posted the book with stamps and an airmail sticker glued directly on the cover and so the book travelled from Europe to the States as the actual parcel itself. I went to a Berlin post office to send it and they couldn’t guarantee its arrival because it wasn’t wrapped. I quite liked the idea that it might never arrive at its final destination New York and would just get lost somewhere on the way and failed. Of course I could have asked somebody to take it to New York — and the curator actually suggested that to me, but that was not what the work was about.

J.F.: There is a risk of loosing control of the work in these kind of processes, do you like the risk or the fact that you are not quite sure where it ends up?

K.P.: It depends on the intention of the work. ‘Mein Flug über den Ozean’ and ‘45 Postkarten aus Berlin’ for instance are both works where the possibility of failure was part of the process. I found it exciting that there was a part of the realisation of the work, the travel, where I had no influence anymore of what is going to happen with it before it becomes a final work.


Die Farbe der Meere

J.F.: The work ‘Die Farbe der Meere’ seems so clear and on the other hand so absurd that I can not grasp it. Could you tell me about the work? Why did you start to collect the water?

K.P.: It is indeed clear in the true sense of the word. There is four seas in the world that have names referring to colours, namely the Red Sea, the White Sea, the Black Sea and the Yellow Sea. So I simply got water samples from all the Seas to check out if they really have different colours. Of course, they were looking pretty much the same.

J.F.: What would you like the viewer to obtain from your cultural mappings and altered objects?

K.P.: That's for the viewer to get something out of it or not. The maps shown in the exhibition follow three different types of systems: alphabetical, according to size and a more chaotic system. I derived the islands from their geographical location by rearranging them by preferences that I was more interested in. These maps appear to look unfamiliar compared to what a map of the Greek islands for instance usually would look like. They still are the Greek islands or a representation of them; it's just that the perspective, which I focused on, makes them appear differently.
The objects deal with a similar approach. I worked with the indications of the items and twisted them in their usual function. So one could say that I work with certain kind of displacements, alterations and structural break downs in order to investigate the character of the very object itself or its iconographical representation.

J.F.: The works comments on how society often tries to frame things or put things in the right logical order - is there a hidden social critique in the works?

K.P.: In general I tend to work with the cultural implications of prefabricated objects and how those objects change if they are derived from their regular destination. I alter the already existing context and structure and usually the work retains its original identity. These multiplied readings of what it represents are coexisting or rather parallel existing.


Reise um die Erde in 40 Tagen

J.F.: There is a feeling of travel in the exhibition; the ocean, the water, the islands, the postcards not to mention the work ‘Reise um die Erde in 40 Tagen’. You have ‘shortened’ the travel in Jules Verne’s novel ‘Reise um die Erde in 80 Tagen’ by cutting the book in half. How do you consider the dream-escape-travel theme?

K.P.: I see the 'travel topic' as a framework - in terms of location and exchange, and as a way of raising questions of origin and identity. A title like ‘Die Farbe der Meere’ for instance suggests a romantic image yet the actual work is four ordinary plastic bottles filled with seawater. So the work is in juxtaposition to what the title projects.

J.F.: How does the work ‘6.90 DM’ stand in relation to exchange?

K.P.: ‘6.90 DM’ is a work that I did in spring 2002 just at the time when the Euro was introduced as the new currency in Germany. There was a short time when one could pay with either DM or Euro, which created some confusion about the currencies. People were of course more checking out if the new Euro notes were fake rather than paying attention to the old DM notes they knew very well. So I shortened ten 10 DM notes for 1,5 mm on each side of the note. Then I put those altered notes into trade to pay with them as if they were regular sized 10 DM notes. One almost couldn’t see that they were slightly smaller, only if you took a very close look at them. So nobody recognised that I paid with customised notes. After I had given out all the altered notes the only leftover was the 10 frames of 1,5 mm that I had cut off from each note. I calculated how much value those leftover frames would have according to their customised size. They had altogether a value of approx. 6,90 DM. That became the title of the work.

J.F.: You are squaring the circle and you turn objects meaning inside out and outside in. The work ‘ ‘ is visually and conceptually a Pandora’s box. Why the Chinese title and what does it mean?

K.P.: ‘ ‘ is a Chinese cardboard box with a Chinese vase in. I thought if I combine two Chinese items in that work wouldn’t it be the most natural thing to title the work in Chinese? Actually the title is very descriptive and plain it is just that you have to know Chinese to read it.


Griechenland Coast lines (tv), Griechenland Islands (th)

J.F.: In Solaris Stanislaw Lem wrote: "[…] The decision to categorise the ocean as a metamorph was not an arbitrary one. Its undulating surface was capable of generating extremely diverse formations which resembled nothing ever seen on Earth, and the function of these sudden eruptions of plasmic ‘creativity’, whenever adaptive, explorative or what, remained an enigma". How do you consider enigmas within the objects?

K.P.: I am interested in the various possibilities of representing the same thing in a different way than one usually experiences it. The items I work with are originally located in the everyday and according to that have a cultural and functional background. My starting point is to work with that background and refer to it in the work under a different perspective…..