Miseenscene – Paper Room Bucharest
Mise en scène | Paper Room
An In-Situ installation by Karima Klasen and Michael Koch
Curated by Denise Parizek
Misé en Scéne
„Misé en Scéne „ was an In-Situ project October 2015 in Bucharest, initiated by 12-14 and ODD.
The two artists, Karima Klasen and Michael Koch, were investigating collaborative practices and the artistic process. Checking out a new city with different rules can be a quite interesting challange, even if it is not easy at all to adapt yourself and your artwork in an uncommon surrounding.
While searching material, the artists discovered the amazing billboards, covered with multi layers of posters, looking like dead bodies hanging from the walls.
The decision to work with posters and extending the material into the third dimension was at that moment quite obvious. To sample the posters, which is kind of illegal action, was the next thrilling experiance. In Bucharest they removed used placards as basis material. Like objet trouvés they resampled not only the material itself, they decoded and interpreted that kind of permanent allurement of consuming in a new way.
So they are not only referring to the neo colonialism in our times and the overwhelming flood of advertising, they are also delaminating the layers of the recently history of the city of Bucharest.
To work In-Situ, with local materials found by coincidence, was a quite thrilling challenge for the artists Karima Klasen and Michael Koch.
Both of them are artists between genres, they are painting, creating installations, doing sculptures and wall reliefs. Karima Klasen and Michael Koch are used in working with the media paper, as a base for drawings, but also as a medium for sculpture and architecture. They are interested to research and work in situ with the given line of infrastructure and architecture.
Together they have realized the installation „Paper Room “ 2012 at Schleifmühlgasse 12-14. At that time they covered the whole space with different kind of papers and transformed it to a archaic cave. The dialog developed through the continuous collaboration of the two artists.
Background
The collaboration between Cristina Bogdan (ODD) and Denise Parizek (Schleifmühlgasse 12-14) has a long history. They have already realized more than 6 projects in Vienna and Bucharest.
„Misé en Scéne „ was the second collateral project with ODD, the 4th in Bucharest (recycled nest, Allegra.Nomade).
ODD and the artist run space Schleifmühlgasse 12-14 are based on different categories, one of them is the collateral section, which enables artists to go to partner institutions in other countries and to collaborate or have exchanges with local artist, curators and gallerists. Therefore artists and curators have to be in site, to meet future partners, to dive in in other cultures, behaviors, procedures and to draw creativity from diversity.
Denise Parizek 2015
The project was intended as an installation in the former ODD space, which functioned at the threshold of private and public, thanks to its residency program. The Paper Room would be a new way of interacting with the space.
In the new location, the installation is the result of a powerful meeting between two artist and the wild city of Bucharest. During their brief stay, Karima Klasen and Michael Koch collected posters from the city walls and brought them to the industrial space of the Tipografia Gallery, where they pasted them in a new configuration. The visitors can thus read them as a diary of both the city and the artists’ wanderings through it.
On the opening day, Klasen and Koch will be available to discuss their own experience of this cultural clash.
Cristina Bogdan 2015
