Before entering this exhibition of Berlin-based artists Martin Ebner and Kitty Kraus, curated by Audrius Pocius and Nicholas Matranga, one might have spotted a dark object piercing the concrete facade of the Contemporary Art Centre’s monolithic modernist building. It was a telescope aimed at the North Star—the only apparently fixed celestial body in our sky. During the day the star is not visible, of course, but Kraus invited the viewer to sit on a wooden park bench placed in the exhibition space beneath a circular spotlight that functioned as a stand-in for the star. The position was a good one from which to watch a pulsing door of light—a vertical rectangle projected onto a side wall. The door, the telescope, the spot of light: Each is a portal to the imaginary. And yet, at a certain point in time and space, the imaginary may become visible, physical. The North Star appears in the sky as day rolls into evening, and, with no other artificial illumination in the exhibition space, the spot on the bench and the door of light became the only sources of visibility guiding the viewer toward the telescope to see the emerging star.
A viewer too impatient to wait for the North Star to appear might have chosen to walk around under Ebner’s Two Large Metal Tables, 2016, seemingly weightless structures resembling architectural models made of wire, legs thin as drawn lines, with flat, green roofs that cast flickering shadows on the ground and sheltered the viewer in an imaginary urban landscape. This landscape was framed by minimal, linear paintings from Ebner’s series “Desire to Consume,” 2016, depicting single-line contours of city walls with architectural elements, objects, and graffiti. Together with the architectural structures, these paintings served to sketch out a possible site for action, which the viewer had to fill with her own imagination.
The oscillation between the imaginary and the visible also radiated from the collaborative piece (Untitled, 2016) Kraus and Ebner had installed in the open atrium at the heart of the CAC. Here, a sprinkler spat water onto the glass walls all around the atrium. The meeting of two transparent, often unnoticed, materials rendered them visible, physical, vibrant. Programmed in unpredictable yet precise cycles of activity, the sprinkler continually took you by surprise. But isn’t that how reality works? We go through the day effortlessly, as in a dream, until a glitch, some sort of dysfunction, interrupts this thoughtless movement and reveals some element of the real that usually passes unobserved, ignored.
Handles of shopping carts can be one such element. Since 2009, Kraus has been collecting them from local supermarkets and transforming them into kinetic, pole-shaped sculptures that turn on their axes like autonomous planets. Displayed next to these sculptures in the foyer of the CAC was a photograph of Ebner’s rodlike sculptural grouping Film Without Film (after The Evil Faerie by George Landow, FLUX Film No. 25, 1 min., 1966), 2013. The color patterns of the works in this series are taken from scenes in experimental films from the 1960s and ’70s, evoking potential cinematic scenarios in the viewer’s mind. Even a simple ruler can disrupt our oblivious perception of the world: At CAC, visitors had to enter the exhibition through an oversize foldable ruler placed in front of the entrance door—Ebner’s Greeting Arch, 2013, made in collaboration with Ariane Müller. As the distances between the marked millimeters in the enlarged ruler no longer correspond to the established measuring system, the system is broken: The fixed points of the real are actually fluid, just like the North Star, which in reality is slowly drifting away from our planet.
The exhibition did not end with the North Star, however; it also spilled out into the city. The artists transformed billboards into trompe l’oeil photographs: As one walked by, each photograph would momentarily match up with its surroundings—seeming to disappear and then emerge again. Using mathematical precision, the artists managed to create delicate poetry. Yet again, the everyday was disrupted by something imaginary becoming momentarily visible.
—Neringa Černiauskaite
