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Rosemarie Trockel

Untitled (Stommeln Synagogue)

October 12 – December 7, 2003
Rosemarie Trockel shows a moving wall at Stommeln Synagogue, an untitled work. The work connects to the location in a surprising coincidence that the artist discovered in the anteroom of the Synagogue. The pattern of the floor tiling consists of geometries that she had already used in other “moving wall” sculptures. The moving walls are made of rectangular metal plates balancing loosely on rods, and forming geometric constellations that present themselvesf as either two- or three-dimensional shapes and bodies – among them an abstracted Magen David – depending on light angle, air motion, and aspect. This correspondence lends a sense of necessity to the moving wall that is appropriate to the place and its history. In variation of the abstract pattern of the floor mosaic – the only element preserved from the original house of prayer – the moving wall unfolds as an architectonic addendum that opens a space of memory.

n its motility the wall relief presents no fixed image. Each of the pictorial elements it shows remains provisional and in constant flux. The moving wall represents a non-identical gesture that sets rigidified, self-identical, and unquestioned images into motion. A constellation of possible images that reveals every momentarily fixed images as a picture puzzle, deception or illusion. In the process, this polylogue makes do without associative contents, semantic transitions, or references. As it stages an architectonic shift that remains unassailable, the moving wall – within the confines of an in itself abstract constellation in the tradition of minimal art – presents us with optical picture puzzles that unfold a deconstructive energy toward any conceivable binary opposition.

As it refuses to represent specific dichotomies, such as religious dualisms, instead parading all kinds of marginalising binary opposites in stages of dissolution and ex-centricity, the moving wall articulates its artistic quality as a responsibility of form. Thus, Rosemarie Trockel’s polylogue of two- and three-dimensional picture puzzles creates an open-ended and non-identical atmosphere that remains critical of any conceivable associations of identity and delineating dichotomies. The nameless moving wall is a critical image that leaves us with an interstitial space of possible commemoration in the name of an impossible justice.

Wilfried Dickhoff

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Diashow (4 Pictures)

Synagogue Stommeln, Rosemarie Trockel, Exhibition View

Exhibition View