We are tanned after a long, rainless, summery heat wave. My Marxist younger cousin bets on the youth. The new building next door on Kurfürstenstrasse advertises itself via a picture of a deserted, deliberately posh furnished apartment with a big, golden Jeff Koons dog inside. On a crowded green lawn in Berlin Mitte, we leave our two empty beer bottles for the fourth bottle collector, after we'd declined the first three. We still want to drink up. You get eight cents for an empty beer bottle at the supermarket. I start a fight with a few pubescent boys who jump the queue at the waterslide, and the little girl in front compliments me: “Otherwise, they think they can do what they want.”. Galleries are closing, not just in Berlin. Photography is a dialectical medium. What do we do with information?
Photographs of food loosely (infantile?) moulded by hand. Vanilla ice cream and strawberry ice cream in the form of penises, rice pudding with more or less cinnamon (Buddhist Sutras state that Gautama Buddha's final meal before his enlightenment was a large bowl of rice pudding), richly-tossed butterhead lettuce in pale sepia colours heaped into figures. To this, one picture of slightly droopy chrysanthemums, from which the colour green --calming-- is filtered out. The photographs are accompanied by text posters. Green is avoided (negated?) or altered digitally. Green is calming - or at least, said to be so. Now and then, the rice pudding blushes.
Rice and ice and butterhead (for the adults?). I bring the flowers.
The gallery comes with a motherly skirt; a huge floor-to-ceiling curtain, to which I cling. It buckles, and is neutral grey - like in school. A flaw?
Nine pictures are framed. This time I lacquered them myself, as well for economic reasons. Five pictures are printed on thinner paper. Like the text posters, they are pasted on the wall, so that the paper sometimes skirts the floor or protrudes from the edge of a wall. The framed pictures are filthy from soot and/or ice cream finger prints. Some also puke a little (acrylic paint at the outside of the glass of the frame), maybe. Not least to hinder their only digital reading. They engage you in a nearly motherly fashion. Whoever buys them can clean them themselves. And we don't take money under the table.
The fun in the figure of the mother.
Side dishes and deserts –no main course; no middle. And death or flowers of death, devoid of green.
Bodies are absent. I am not there. I am hungry for your absence. Photography is passive aggressive, as you might sense. Then again, you may feel my bending, photographing body in the pictures. Is this work? The camera got completely sticky. I did, too. I was on my knees afterwards, swabbing the ice cream drips from the living room floor, as the laundry dried. I work where I live. This you don't see. The rest went down the drain.
The funny (in the) figure of the mother.
It is interesting what comes out of pictures. I like time warps. As a rather loving, motherly, performative gesture, I will reproduce the vanilla ice cream penises from the pictures for the public's pleasure, at the opening. Everyone eating up these cold, sweet vanilla ice cream dicks will then become part of the work - their bodies, anyway. Later they will shit art. And they will be relieved. Nothing will turn mouldy and become consumed by rats (or worms). You make me very hungry.
We are looking forward to seeing you!
_ Lisa Holzer, Berlin and Sikås, summer 2018