Sasha Auerbakh – Die Austellung

This is not an exhibition. The exhibition is somewhere else. It is circulating, it has no place. It incessantly traps us. We are the exhibits – constantly on display watching shows, counted as statistics by the art industry and intelligence algorithms – content creators, content, JPEG junk haunting ourselves.

How can one escape the ubiquitous exhibition? Maybe here, in an exhibition that is not an exhibition. At the backside of an exhibition. In a show that’s looking back on us.

These works are not on exhibit. They are not there. There are no works of art – there are placeholders. We are in the waiting position. In interspace. In space. Fellow alien Sasha Auerbakh has travelled planet Earth, studied the rituals of an art show and is bringing them home in a grand, revealing failure.
Auerbakh (RU), born 1985 in Moscow, studied at Moscow Rodchenko Art School and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her installations, sculptures and performances challenge visual art’s blind exoticizing routines. She doesn’t let art get away easily. She takes it hostage in temporal assaults, flipping frames, turning the eye on it’s blind spots in cheerful, threatening, destabilizing ways, leading into inextricable double-binds.
This is exemplarily shown in Andrey Monastyrsky (2013) (named after a prominent figure in Moscow Conceptualism). An intimate choice of hair grown on the idol’s body serves as the tip of a paintbrush – a refined luxury object of desire – a fetish – a magical tool carrying the promise to replicate the master’s genius at will.

Auerbakh also shows clay paintings, where brushwork is replaced by clay for an amateurish-as-archaic appeal, like fossils of modern art or a cartoon version of it that one would find in children books. Flat and self-assured versions of modernist sculpture rise from pedestals, providing no clues where they are actually getting at. In an aquarium lamp, (today’s pocket version of 19th century dioramas), exhibition visitors are slowly run in a circle, accompanied by photos of a child sleeping in front of museum pieces – a dream within a dream, an endless feedback loop with no center. A reminder of the interdependency between the viewer and the work, and a mirror of the logistics of the art world that, with works being ever faster shipped and flipped, might soon end up as its own parody, akin to mass-produced plastic aquariums.

Kolja Reichert, Berlin