[rohrpost] PLAY presents a-side China Girl

[Mirjam Struppek <struppek@yahoo.com>]

PLAY gallery for still and motion pictures / Berlin 
presents:


a ­ side China Girl
ALEXANDER GYÖRFI

download_china.mp3@www.gyoerfi.de

may 19 ­ June 14, 2003
opening sat., may 17, 7 pm 


Yesterday I busted into a club in Berlin, the 'Red
Saloon'. I expected some sort of transgression in this
place, nothing extremely shocking but from the name of
the place it sounded like I should have expected, you
know, something..
When I stepped into the entrance I could hear a
Chinese song from my position, which was three floors
down from the main room with the music. I thought
'Maybe this is an interval'. 

When I arrived in the room I realised it wasn't
Chinese, but German and that the music was far from
being an intro or an interval between two other songs,
it was twist from the 60s.
It's incredible how differently we can perceive things
from what they are in the reality. Most important from
this experience is the fact that a language has become
like any other language. When we talk we use at least
four different languages (as in both speaking and
moving) in one time and everybody understands us. What
I'm trying to say is that it has become very difficult
to distinguish objects, art, music, languages, because
the differences aren't clear anymore, but blurred.

The difference between the art of today and the art
during the 60s (even a little before the 60s!) is that
now sometimes we have this struggle between the
ambiguity and the defined shapes of an art work while
before art was more cleared. For example: the lines
and shapes of a painting or of an art work under any
aspect was much more straight while now artists are
searching for this result in their works but they are
also looking for the the mystery in them. The artist
Alexander Györfi finds himself in this state of
multiplicity. On one side there is the
straightforwardness of his background which underlines
the whole process of his work that brings him on the
other side, where the mystery and ambiguity of the
final result stands. In this exhibition, which is the
artist's first solo show in Berlin, he uses two rooms
to show us the double imagery of his work: the
rational and the passional, the professional and the
accidental. The reason of this double personality in
this show is probably simply because the artist is
conscious of the weight of the meaning which present
the reflection of his gestures in his paintings (the
rational), on one side, and in his videos on the other
(the passional).

In the first room, in fact, you can see his
streamlined, finish, clean paintings of instruments,
recording equipments, objects that take part in the
artist's everyday life. In the second room we see a
video which is conceived with the purpose of
resembling like a music video clip made with two girls
whom relationship and identity remains unknown to us,
especially the position of the 'China Girl'. But still
the image of the individual's duplicity comes up. The
video allows us to look only through the other girl's
eyes, the singer of the song who becomes immediately
more human in our head as we acknowledge what her
dreams and her passions are. She shows us her both
sides, by both sides I mean a girl living her normal
life in one moment and a girl dressing up ready to
perform in the next. We still don't know who she is
and what is she doing in the video. She is not a real
singer, for example, but she steps inside the role of
a singer. This is what the artist is playing with:
normal people he knows who have also a strong willing
to change their lives but, on the other hand, they are
scared to throw themselves into a world, known by
everyone, as 'cruel and beautiful'. So they experiment
it bifore between each other and they play with it to
see how far they can go.

The two rooms have two different languages, we could
say: the rough and the glamorous. The one we are
constantly confronted to and the one we love to take
part of very frequently but it is also the one we need
to make some compromises for. So I guess is better not
to mention any other detail of the show. I will just
leave you with this question, now that also 'Matrix
Reloaded' is coming up. Which pill is more suitable
for you? The red or the blue?


Alexander Györfi, born 1968 in Sindelfingen, lives and
works in Stuttgart and Berlin. 
Selected shows: 2002 Double Touble ­ Frac
Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier (F); 2002 pimui
pictures 'La ballade des gens hereux', Palais de
Tokyo, Paris (F); 2001 pimui telemusic ­ Galeria Sonia
Rosso, Pordenone (I); 2001 Videonale9 ­Kunstverein
Bonn; 2001 Germania - construction of an image,
Palazzo delle Papesse, centro Arte Contemporanea,
Sienna, (I); 2001 pimui telemusic, for Tokyo TV,
Palais de Tokyo, Paris (F); 2000 Turning into a loop-
Galerie Gio Marconi, Mailand, (I); 2000 Transfert
­Biel Bienne (CH); 2000 pimui - soundtracks -
Kunstverein Wolfsburg; 1999-2000 German Open -
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; 1998 Pimui-Mobil-Studio ­
Kunstverein Ludwigsburg.



PLAY gallery for still and motion pictures
hannoversche str. 1  d-10115  berlin
T +49 (0)30 2345 5753
F +49 (0)30 2345 5754
mailer@pushthebuttonplay.com
www.pushthebuttonplay.com


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