Laura Ziegler

The flexibility of wordplay and slapstick sensibility of Laura Ziegler’s solo exhibition “Kartoffel Jazz” crafts a network of historical and personal entanglements that course underground rhizomatically, like unruly filaments. Miniaturized narrative scenes, complete with theatrical lighting and simple special effects (a gurgling fountain, a spinning canvas) are placed alongside sculpture, publications, collages, and video works often made in collaboration with others, including the artist’s brother and father. Ziegler’s playful borrowing of the preindustrial and quotidian iconography of European genre painting—including crude marionettes made of salt dough or Styrofoam, clutches of gold coins, and, naturally, the titular Kartoffel (German for “potato”)—proposes a “revolutionary politics of the everyday.” By peeling apart visual and linguistic tropes of labor and struggle, Ziegler encourages a more rebellious vernacular to emerge.

Framed by the Kunstverein’s two gigantic picture windows, fourteen new and recent works illustrate stories that are at once independent and tethered together by repeated visual cues. Four sculptural Lamps (all 2020–21) mix work, performance, and repose, functioning both as intricate tableaux and as set pieces featured in the half-hour video die-arbeit.info TV, 2021, a puppet talk-show interview with the former editorial staff of the short-lived leftist cultural magazine Hilfe (Help). As the group reflects on their self-organizing practices and the fractious political climate of the then newly reunified Germany, the camera roves around the modular sets, closing in on the puppets’ angular features, felt clothing, or Susan Sontag hair. Such a heady discussion led by a group of bobbing puppets—meticulously styled as a group of German intellectuals—positions the illogical and the carnivalesque as a fitting representational system for small-scale and overlooked histories.