ART CITIES:Basel-Raphaela Vogel
Raphaela Vogel’s work is located in the meeting of sculpture, video installation and performance and is characterized by an acute study of the relationship of the body to space, closely linked with her utilization of digital technologies.Ultimately, she creates a hybrid form in which her relationship to space, object, technology and machine is displayed in a dynamic field of motion, from the process of its development to the self-reflective treatment of her own work.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kunsthalle Basel Archive
Raphaela Vogel’s exhibition “Ultranackt”, hosts impressive sculptural installations, mostly poised in precarious balance, often in combination with pulsating sound or videos that feature the artist herself. Her series of new works in this first solo exhibition outside the artist’s native Germany unfurls a world at once thrilling and dystopian. The videos, which play a central role in her work, consist of filmed actions (mostly featuring Vogel herself), documentations of her own installations and collages from her archive of images. These videos then become part of her sculptural constructions where dimensional space, decor and the corporeal merge into an organically woven structure. She treats the projectors and the other technical equipment as active protagonists: for example, by removing their casings or by suspending them in unexpected ways, thus revealing their fragility and somatic character. Ultimately, she creates a hybrid form in which her relationship to space, object, technology and machine is displayed in a dynamic field of motion, from the process of its development to the self-reflective treatment of her own work. Throughout the exhibition, the artist privileges a sculptural practice, showing herself to be as much a maker of objects as she is a maker of moving images. A rearing stallion in the exhibition’s first room, its virility is evident even if the artist pierces the beast’s head with a spray of red cables ostensibly caused by the gigantic (now broken) end of an “arrow” of aluminum trusses that appears alongside it. Then twenty-four dripping plastic forms standing like waiting, male supplicants, cast from the Dixi-brand urinal that is featured in the next room. Video footage of Vogel, clutching a plastic infant in a uterine fantasy, can be spied, in a sly retort to Marcel Duchamp’s “Etant donnés” (1946-66). In her other works, notably in the exhibition’s last two rooms, the “male principle” is embodied by a riff on the phallic rise of Constantin Brâncuși’s “Endless Column” (1918), here serving as a series of wooden pedestals supporting projectors, as well as a massive electrical insulator weighing several tons, framed by aluminum truss elements, simultaneously a monumentally erect plinth and a visual obstacle.
Info: Curator: Elena Filipovic, Kunsthalle Basel, Steinenberg 7, Basel, Duration: 18/5-12/8/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:30, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.kunsthallebasel.ch
