The heart of Lena Henke's 'An Idea of Late German Sculpture: To the People of New York' exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich was a machine.
With a winch set into the walls of the exhibition space, large pieces of chain mail were pulled through the room. However, this material made of aluminium rings did not protect virile bodies in close combat. Instead, it glided across the surfaces of sculptures, sometimes setting them in motion. The armour did not protect the surfaces from the outside and instead opened up the possibility of a cool touch, which it itself paradoxically performs.
The exhibition was divided into two extremes: the archive and a topological machine that activated the space. Both poles were contrary to the normal function of the institution, which otherwise showed objects but neither made it possible to use them nor to see their archiving. The sculptures shown twice in the exhibition attested to precisely this contrast. On one side, they seemed abstract: peculiar postmodern mishaps between Surrealism and Minimal Art. Henke's approach did not simply destroy the ideologies of modernism: it induced a new, polymorphically perverse afterlife for sculpture.
In connection with Lena Henke’s exhibition An Idea of Late German Sculpture: To the People of New York in 2018 at the Kunsthalle Zürich, the work Totem and Tabu, 2018, was donated with the MAMCO, Geneva, to the Kunsthalle Zürich.
ON VIEW: 3rd March – 13th May 2018
