Angelika Nollert
Frontier Crossing
A young woman dressed in black enters the white picture plane from the left. She reaches up and pulls down a swing. She walks around the swing, sits down and, in so doing, falls out of the bottom of the picture together with the swing.
The events shown in the video reveal no more about the location than they tell us about the woman, who is seen exclusively from behind. The unexpected movement of the swing, which only descends, is irritating. However, a standard back and forth swinging motion doesn’t appear possible as the swing is too close to the wall. As a result the original purpose of this gymnastic apparatus is suspended, and its inversion introduces a destructive impulse.
The Swing Video (2002) is typical of Ulrike Möschel’s works, be they installations, videos, drawings or text pieces, in dealing with questions of space and movement, insularity and transformation, danger and fragility. She creates situations in which she gives everyday objects new significance by modifying them in some way.
One of the motifs which crops up regularly in Ulrike Möschel’s work is light and its spatial presence. One of her earliest works was the Dancing Light Bulb, which swung back and forth just above the floor, propelled by a motor. The perceived risk of the bulb smashing registered as a threat, also to the viewer. In a video from the same year burning light bulbs were actually thrown on to the floor and trampled underfoot, one after another. Contact with a live electric circuit posed as great a threat as the growing number of glass splinters. Trampling on Light bulbs is the title of this work and, as is often the case, serves as a brief summary of its contents.
In other works, such as Loreley(2003) or Eccentric Lamp (2002), neon lights are placed on the floor instead of the ceiling and receive electricity by means of long cables or wires. So the visible object contains the invisible phenomenon of electric current. Again the ambivalence of objects is a central issue: the neon tubes look as if they have fallen out of their ceiling attachments, they lie defenceless on the floor, one could easily step on them and break them. On the other hand touching them and the wires could prove life threatening. And when bulbs are left burning in a cardboard container (Light in the Box, 2004), heat becomes trapped and there’s a risk of fire.
Ulrike Möschel also tackles the revaluation of light, whose everyday function is to illuminate spaces. The video installation Lights Off (2003) documents a nocturnal walk through different rooms from the perspective of the camera. The viewer follows the artist’s path as she steps from a dark room into a lit one, switching off the light the moment she enters.
Inverting this almost instinctive reaction - switching on the light when entering a dark room - and turning it into its opposite - switching off the light when entering a light room - frustrates the very possibility of spatial orientation. Progress towards light, illumination as goal, leads to absurd results as the light is switched off immediately. The viewer, unable to recognise what the rooms contain, feels uneasy and helpless in an unfamiliar situation. Despite the physical movement of the camera, the viewer is unable to grasp either the dimensions or designation of the rooms: the only way of getting one’s bearings is the instinctive movement towards the light that misleadingly promises a way out of the darkness.
In two further installations Ulrike Möschel uncovered elements that had originally been part of the visible architecture. She used her fingernails in one exhibition space in which wooden panelling had been plastered and painted over to scratch away around the old seams along one wall. The Scratched Wall (2002) allows one to surmise about the original state of the room while destroying its incarnation as a “White Cube”. The space now shows both traces of its past and those of an individual, who invested it with a new unsettling reality by means of intensely painful labour.
The video installation Breaking Down Doors, (2003) consists of a projection of a door on the whitewashed wall of a room. It is a photograph of the door to the artist's studio projected over the precise spot where an existing door has been concealed and painted over so as to be barely visible. In the film the door is being kicked in from behind. The former real door can be experienced anew through the projected representation of a different door, in order then to be reopened by force itself. The viewer does not learn what is in the space behind the door in this instance either.
Similar to windows and door, radiators also number among the permanent fixtures in rooms. Having already revived a disused radiator in an earlier work by means of water circulated by a pump (Radiator, 1999) in Cress from the Radiator,(2004) she grows said plants in a carmine-red varnished radiator. The radiator, a vessel containing both heat and water, becomes a flower box. Still, it’s only a question of time before the plants wilt. Has nature (briefly) reconquered the space or does the organic reference to outside only emphasise the insularity of the interior as the installation I deceived Frau Rosalie von Tümmler, implies? The title of this work, unusually for the artist, refers to the story “The Deceived” by Thomas Mann, which is set in Benrath Castle in Düsseldorf. Ulrike Möschel placed moss and green and black lingerie lace on the radiators and around the windows in her installation in that very building. With its closed door and shuttered windows the space appears completely sealed and morbid: it doesn’t reveal its amorous secret.
Ulrike Möschel develops her artistic projects in conjunction with the sites at which she works. She incorporates objects that belong to the essential fittings in the room, queries their function, supplements them with materials, reassesses them and gives them a new threatened or threatening existence. Materiality and immateriality experience a synthesis in Ulrike Möschel's works. Her installations, which are invariably defined by certain events, resemble a performance. They open up new realities for the viewer.
München, 2006
Frontier Crossing
A young woman dressed in black enters the white picture plane from the left. She reaches up and pulls down a swing. She walks around the swing, sits down and, in so doing, falls out of the bottom of the picture together with the swing.
The events shown in the video reveal no more about the location than they tell us about the woman, who is seen exclusively from behind. The unexpected movement of the swing, which only descends, is irritating. However, a standard back and forth swinging motion doesn’t appear possible as the swing is too close to the wall. As a result the original purpose of this gymnastic apparatus is suspended, and its inversion introduces a destructive impulse.
The Swing Video (2002) is typical of Ulrike Möschel’s works, be they installations, videos, drawings or text pieces, in dealing with questions of space and movement, insularity and transformation, danger and fragility. She creates situations in which she gives everyday objects new significance by modifying them in some way.
One of the motifs which crops up regularly in Ulrike Möschel’s work is light and its spatial presence. One of her earliest works was the Dancing Light Bulb, which swung back and forth just above the floor, propelled by a motor. The perceived risk of the bulb smashing registered as a threat, also to the viewer. In a video from the same year burning light bulbs were actually thrown on to the floor and trampled underfoot, one after another. Contact with a live electric circuit posed as great a threat as the growing number of glass splinters. Trampling on Light bulbs is the title of this work and, as is often the case, serves as a brief summary of its contents.
In other works, such as Loreley(2003) or Eccentric Lamp (2002), neon lights are placed on the floor instead of the ceiling and receive electricity by means of long cables or wires. So the visible object contains the invisible phenomenon of electric current. Again the ambivalence of objects is a central issue: the neon tubes look as if they have fallen out of their ceiling attachments, they lie defenceless on the floor, one could easily step on them and break them. On the other hand touching them and the wires could prove life threatening. And when bulbs are left burning in a cardboard container (Light in the Box, 2004), heat becomes trapped and there’s a risk of fire.
Ulrike Möschel also tackles the revaluation of light, whose everyday function is to illuminate spaces. The video installation Lights Off (2003) documents a nocturnal walk through different rooms from the perspective of the camera. The viewer follows the artist’s path as she steps from a dark room into a lit one, switching off the light the moment she enters.
Inverting this almost instinctive reaction - switching on the light when entering a dark room - and turning it into its opposite - switching off the light when entering a light room - frustrates the very possibility of spatial orientation. Progress towards light, illumination as goal, leads to absurd results as the light is switched off immediately. The viewer, unable to recognise what the rooms contain, feels uneasy and helpless in an unfamiliar situation. Despite the physical movement of the camera, the viewer is unable to grasp either the dimensions or designation of the rooms: the only way of getting one’s bearings is the instinctive movement towards the light that misleadingly promises a way out of the darkness.
In two further installations Ulrike Möschel uncovered elements that had originally been part of the visible architecture. She used her fingernails in one exhibition space in which wooden panelling had been plastered and painted over to scratch away around the old seams along one wall. The Scratched Wall (2002) allows one to surmise about the original state of the room while destroying its incarnation as a “White Cube”. The space now shows both traces of its past and those of an individual, who invested it with a new unsettling reality by means of intensely painful labour.
The video installation Breaking Down Doors, (2003) consists of a projection of a door on the whitewashed wall of a room. It is a photograph of the door to the artist's studio projected over the precise spot where an existing door has been concealed and painted over so as to be barely visible. In the film the door is being kicked in from behind. The former real door can be experienced anew through the projected representation of a different door, in order then to be reopened by force itself. The viewer does not learn what is in the space behind the door in this instance either.
Similar to windows and door, radiators also number among the permanent fixtures in rooms. Having already revived a disused radiator in an earlier work by means of water circulated by a pump (Radiator, 1999) in Cress from the Radiator,(2004) she grows said plants in a carmine-red varnished radiator. The radiator, a vessel containing both heat and water, becomes a flower box. Still, it’s only a question of time before the plants wilt. Has nature (briefly) reconquered the space or does the organic reference to outside only emphasise the insularity of the interior as the installation I deceived Frau Rosalie von Tümmler, implies? The title of this work, unusually for the artist, refers to the story “The Deceived” by Thomas Mann, which is set in Benrath Castle in Düsseldorf. Ulrike Möschel placed moss and green and black lingerie lace on the radiators and around the windows in her installation in that very building. With its closed door and shuttered windows the space appears completely sealed and morbid: it doesn’t reveal its amorous secret.
Ulrike Möschel develops her artistic projects in conjunction with the sites at which she works. She incorporates objects that belong to the essential fittings in the room, queries their function, supplements them with materials, reassesses them and gives them a new threatened or threatening existence. Materiality and immateriality experience a synthesis in Ulrike Möschel's works. Her installations, which are invariably defined by certain events, resemble a performance. They open up new realities for the viewer.
München, 2006