Artists: Ben Willikens, Bernar Venet
Curator: Hasan Bülent Kahraman
German Artist Ben Willikens’ almost miraculously mysterious yet concrete spaces emerge from an emptiness and they each create an emptiness in an of themselves. Emptiness is place and space. Every object exists through a presence in place and space. Since Anaximander, the expanse is known as apeiron, boundlessness. The space created by the human beings fills that boundlessness/emptiness. Place is an enclosed, framed volume in the infinite space. To enclose, to frame is to limit within bounds. Still, since locality is detached from or achieved through the space, it is boundless within itself. No space would allow its mystery to be unravelled. That is why it is elusive and full of mysteries. Willikens dives deep into a space in his imaginary universe and through a Surrealist act of prising, he sculpts his particular mysteries from it. Yet there is always a fiction there leading us to its enigmas. But these places emptied of human beings yet do contain a fiction leading us to their enigmas.
The boundaries of the space that Willikens establishes as a realm of dreams and mystery, develops into a line of revolt in the work of French artist Bernar Venet. Venet’s works do not enclose a mass but they always suggest a volume. These are the volumes of void confined to lines expanding outwards into the emptiness. Venet envelops a boundlessness that points to apeiron. Also in Venet’s work human do note exist. However there they are! This very condition identifies Venet’s work with the pre-history.
While Willikens’ is a response to the mystery of a boundlessness turning inwards, Venet’s is that for one expanding outwards.
Entrance to the fair is paid.
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