Nick Crowe

Galerie Traversée Türkenstrasse 11 80333 Munich Germany (city map, hotel accommodation) Send E-mail tel +49 (0)89 - 1800 6663 www.traversee.com

Traversée is very pleased to present the exhibition Periodic Table curated by Katalin Timár.

The exhibition Periodic Table shows the work of five internationally recognized and accomplished artists: Nick Crowe (GB-D), Dora García (E-BE), Stefan Nikolaev (BG-FR), Nika Radic (HR-D), and Martin Schmidl (D). These works, brought together and put on display within a context that they mutually create for one another, end up producing a new element in the existing "periodic table" of artistic practices and production. The discovery of a previously unknown substance (copernicium) and its addition to the periodic table of already known elements earlier this year makes us quite aware of the questionable limits of discovering nature, which can be taken as a metaphor for the unlimited potentials that exist in artistic production yet to come.

This new element has other metaphorical implications for the show. It is named after one of the most important scientists of modern history, Nicolaus Copernicus, who fundamentally changed the way in which mankind had seen its own position within the universe. Moreover, this new element resembles most closely mercury but exists only for a split fraction of a second thus speed and mobility are also its important characteristics. The discovery of any new element (or the appearance of a new work of art for that matter) retrospectively redefines the existing system of chemical substances (or art) thus it is capable of redefining the ways in which we perceive different aspects of reality.

In one aspect, however, Periodic Table is fundamentally different from the periodic table, namely that in the latter, every element may have only one possible position. It is, in fact, the reason for the establishment of such a scientific system that its components have a fixed and stable place within the structure. In the exhibition Periodic Table, works may have one physical position within the exhibition space but unlimited possible interpretations and meanings within the visitors' mental "charts".

Nick Crowe's installation (The Witkowski Collection, 2008) is based on the collection of alcoholic miniature bottles that the Polish-born, London-based engineer Wojciech Witkowski assembled during his lifetime (1930-1997). In Crowe's interpretation of the collection, the private and idiosyncratic interest of an average individual is intertwined with the publically known history of the 20th century with its complex geo-political consequences, and with an emphasis on their absurdity.

Dora García's opening performance (The Artist without Works, a Guided Tour around Nothing) takes the form of a monologue, disguised as a guided tour, so common in contemporary museum and exhibition practice. As the tour unfolds, however, its provocative and philosophical character is revealed - two means that are meant to engage the spectators into thinking about the current system of art and artistic production which very often takes the form of producing "yet another object" for happy consumption. Yet, the paradoxicality of the piece lies exactly in its existence.

Stefan Nikolaev's series of diptych's combine various layers of textual and visual information. These different layers don't get to be unified as images though, but retain their particular signifying specificities and enter into a dialogue with one another. The various representational modes - in terms of both style and physical appearance - in which the work addresses the spectators create a dynamics of uncertainty that is underlined by the fragmentary character of the components.

Nika Radic's site specific night projection (Office Cleaning, 2009) establishes an oblique relationship between the spectators and what they are exposed to see since the video shows cleaning women working in the space. The spectators' vision can be termed as 'displaced' for several reasons: they are offered the possibility of peeping into a room when they are not supposed to, looking at people working while they (i.e. the spectators) have their leisure time, and they get to look at an artwork with people who attend the gallery not for pleasure but for work.

Martin Schmidl's series (/uni-ball eye mitsubishi 3 / Common Design - Lectures) comprises of 180 drawings the artist made or was inspired to make at lectures. These images cleverly blur the boundaries between the documentary and the fictitious, between realism and the caricatural, and between visual and verbal representations. They are personal impressions that take the form of a socio-cultural research on highly coded and contextualised behavioural patterns.

Katalin Timár

Katalin Timár is curator and theoretician. She works as curator at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest. She curated the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007 that received the Golden Lion Award for best national pavilion.