Islands
Niklas Goldbach
10 de Enero > 28 de Febrero 2009
Bendana-Pinel Art Contemporain is pleased to present the first individual exhibit of the works of Niklas Goldbach. Living in Berlin, this young German artist has been creating for several years, universes inhabited by mysterious clones evolving in a totally dehumanized world.
Resident at the Pavillon, the creation laboratory of the Palais de Tokyo, in 2008, Niklas Goldbach retains in his mind the transit spaces of Paris. In “Habitat”, his characters are trapped in a public space and behave like caged animals. “In front of these large long takes where the only movement is the one of the body, the spectator wonders about the place and role of these strange living creatures: are they here to control us like militias, or, on the contrary, are they controlled beings, the reflects of an entirely standardized society? Niklas Goldbach in front of our eyes.” (Ange Leccia, director of the Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo, Paris)
Filmed in Japan in 2008, the video-triptych EMPIRE references three pillars of power in Goldbach’s fictional society inhabited by “placeholders”: religion (The Anticipation), executive authority (The Conditioning) and economy (The Increase). Devoid of free will, the protagonists in these disquieting rural landscapes are trapped between time and space in a post-neoliberal nostalgia. Dressed in the uniform of an urban archetype, they occupy their temporary terrains as thought they were the first and last inhabitants of a thoroughly pre-arranged world.
The uncomfortable familiarness of the utopian architecture presented in Goldbach’s “buildings series” (2008) is intended: the imaginary high-rises are based on photographs taken from real existing hotels and apartments buildings in a Spanish holiday resort. In his video, sculpture and photographic works, Niklas Goldbach is focusing on the dystopic elements of the postmodern urban experience. He is working with architectural elements to produce the ambiguity of reality Foucault conjured in his text “Of Other Spaces”, (Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits 1984, Des espaces autres (conference at the Cercle d’études architecturales, March the 14th of 1967), in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n°5, October of 1984) spaces that are waiting to be re-defined.
Working between reality and fiction, Goldbach’s artistic works focuses on the role of the individual in an ever increasing homogenized world and questions how the subjective experience is processed and characterized by feelings of disorientation, melancholy and rising asociality.
