In Between

DEUTSCH

In Between
Claudia Schmitz
June 4 - August 1, 2020 

Vernissage⎢Thurs. June 4, 18 - 21 hr

Schmitz reactivates waste by recycling found plastic bags into wind-activated sculptures. Collecting abandoned plastic bags, she re-forms them as windsocks, windbags, and pneumatic sculptures. Installed in different cities (Berlin, New York, Budapest, Hong Kong and others), they serve as three-dimensional, moving silver screens for her video projections. Projected onto the half-transparent, moving surfaces, the videos take on a reality of their own and create a completely new variety of space – a new layer of reality on the intersection of a changing local urban everyday reality, documentation, video reality, and sculpture.

In Between shows images from the Mediterranean, creating deeply ambiguous impressions of leisure and drowning, referencing the recent refugee crisis, but referring in a much wider sense to the feeling of life with access to privilege versus existence without privilege: About moving and breathing space as opposed to being closed off in an airless space, about options and empowerment as opposed to being reduced to struggle for the barest necessities of survival. It is about privilege and waste, abundance and misery, and geographic and social borders. It returns the city’s waste to the citizens in the form of free, public art.

einBuch # 13

IN BETWEEN - OUVRAGE À LA CARTE
Claudia Schmitz 

OUVRAGE À LA CARTE, 2017

translucent paper, paper, embossing, prints, paper-staples
113 x 215 x 10 mm
Signed and numbered edition of 100

Claudia Schmitz 

“My work starts where the media intersect. I am not interested in the modernity of technology as such but in its capacities for creating new imaginary dimensions.”

As a time-based media artist, Claudia Schmitz explores paradigms of media translation - as a solo artist and in collaborative projects. By passing through temporary stages, by discarding and re-inventing themselves, her pieces explore oscillating stages of being and non-being, of existence inside and outside the image. Relying on the spectators to trigger them, many of her pieces discuss the extent and possibilities of participation.

Artwork List

Exhibition view: Claudia Schmitz, In Between, einBuchhaus. 2020 (Photo: Mikyung Song)