+++ extended until April 28th. +++
From March 12th until April 09th.
visiting hours: every Wednesday 17-19 o´clock
My Favorite Game…
Hakan Eren
Hakan Eren is a sculptor who works in a variety of media, primarily in the form of sculptures, objects and collages, but also of drawings. For the exhibition at Baustelle Schaustelle, Eren has conceived a compilation of objects together with a series of drawings. This includes a tricycle with a horn and an axe blade, a type of model that is reminiscent of a stage with spider-like marionette control arms or perhaps of a parcel distribution center, as well as a series of drawings depicting serious Harlequins. Eren’s works share the temporal immediacy of handcrafted toys that have been precisely constructed while at the same time leaving room for improvisation. Thus oscillating between creative playfulness and the sinister control of mechanical necessity, these works present a logic that is characteristic of the form of games: games usually have a fixed framework of rules within which the free process of playing unfolds. Nevertheless, the answer to the question of who is playing — is it the player or the rules of the game — is less obvious than it might seem. Who is acting, who is watching, what is happening? Regarding Eren’s drawings, they all show children dressed as clowns, none of whom look particularly friendly or even happy. The sad soul of a Pierrot has never been of interest for its own sake. Therein lies its tragedy, which only the daftest romanticism may dare to indulge in. Eren’s clowns, on the other hand, possess a character of resistance that is about to unfold. You might be looking at me, but I don’t like what you see; that is why I have my own sore spot, which I think you might be imagining wrongly; just you wait, just a little longer… Then there will be tricycles with an axe, and we’ll go to war with these contraptions like Mad Max! If it was Busch who set a disciplinary memorial to the naughty child of the 19th century, it is now Eren who imagines the latter’s post-apocalyptic return. When the object begins to speak, the gaze is called into question. Eren’s works seem to make this step thematic — this step beyond all rules, before all rules or the first step after the rules. Thereby, these works call into question the conditions of a game that has lost its indisputability. They pose the question of a game whose rules have yet to be determined.
