Invitation to opening the exhibition Claire Waffel (GER) – PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE CEILING

K.A.I.R. Košice Artist in Residence / Košice 2013 n.o. invites you to the final exhibition of our artist Claire Waffel. The opening will be on the 9th of May 2012 at 6 pm, East Slovak Gallery, Košice. The exhibition shows the result of the three-month K.A.I.R. residency of the artist and is supported by the Goethe-Institut, Bratislava.

The exhibition PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE CEILING re-frames the theme of past ideologies and their traumatic repression into the forms of architectonic signs that symptomatically appear in culture through the visual repetition in time. In a conceptual manner the artist Claire Waffel who often works with various time structures found as simultaneous or dislocated fragments in a person, landscape or architecture deals with the site of House of Arts in Košice – a Jewish synagogue converted during Communism. She reveals the nature of the covering over of the religious ornamental ceiling from the late 1950´s reconstruction in the Socialist-Realism style as a symbol of cultural amnesia. Uncovering the original synagogue cupola the artist not only makes the sedimental layer visible but by the work in situ that finds the same architectural residues in the recently reconstructed gallery ceiling, she literally lets the sky or the horizon of our perception of the world fall down. This happens in front of the eyes of the post-communist viewer used to the obsessive practice of lowering the ceilings both in public and private spaces since the times of Communism. The story illustrates the changing relationship between topography and identity, a collective identity of Košice post 1989 that instead of opening a discourse on the Holocaust as was expected in post-communist places, strongly adhered to the popular discourse on Central Europe with the idealized version of multiculturalism and the life of minorities. Just a few days before the opening of the exhibition the historians publicly declared the Holocaust in Košice and southern Slovakia that were a part of Hungary during World War Two to be a blind spot. This followed media information that the Simon Wiesenthal Centre announced Laszlo Csatary, a police commander in Košice responsible for the transport of more than 15 000 Jews to be the most wanted living Nazi collaborator in the world.

Claire Waffel (1978), a Berlin-based artist studied Media, French and Photography at the universities in Norwich, Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier and London College of Communication. She works with video, photography and installation examining their potential to transport and reflect a sense of history, time and place. Her pieces range from very personal storytelling pieces to abstract, analytic and minimal installations. For her video piece “Inventory” she won the „Sproxton Memorial Prize”, her work „Close Family” was exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Since 2008 her series “War Veterans” has been a part of the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum in London. Other exhibitions include amongst others Yaffo 23 and Goethe-Institut in Jerusalem, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin, Meetfactory in Prague and Kunsthaus Dresden.

Ivana Komanická (1973) is art theorist and philosopher with a background in a “radical philosophy” from Middlesex University in London. She is interested in a post-communist situation with the emphasis on the critique of neoliberalism. Her curatorial work includes the exhibition on social inequalities in a contemporary art world “See you there” for the European Cultural Congress in Wroclaw and the exhibition on the transformational processes of home after 1989 “Home edition” at East and Central Slovak Gallery (together with Gabriela Kisová). She teaches at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Košice and is the editor of a Slovak literary journal Romboid.

K.A.I.R. Košice Artist in Residence is a programme in the frame of Košice 2013/INTERFACE to invite international artists to Košice and to send artists from Košice abroad.