A green room, two door openings and a drying rack with three towels. This image in three different angles. That is what the Georgian artist Lado Darkhvelidze (1977) shows in his Star (2009) series. But there is more to it. The towels on the drying rack together form different flags. From one angle you can see the Dutch flag, on the opposite side you can see the French flag and if only the red and white towels are visible the viewer can recognize the Polish flag. 
 
The series of three paintings is part of the project 'State Symbols', which Lado started in 2007. He plays with our idea of one fixed identity. With his works, performances and actions he shows the arbitrariness hidden behind the desire of one identity. “Usually state symbols are represented as highly important, powerful symbols. But I want to show that the position of these images also changes.”
 
He explains that the use of State symbols can be dangerous in certain situations: “Georgia is part of the Caucasus. The relationships between the different countries are often problematic. You never see a Georgian flag next to a Russian flag for example. That’s just not done.”
 
Regardless of that, all these countries can coexist next to each other without any problems in Darakhvalidze’s work. He mentions Rubik’s Cube (2008) - also part of State Symbols. He placed the famous cube on the street of the city Bisjkek in Kyrgyzstan. The cube of the artist contained ninety different elements in different colors. By moving these elements around, fourteen different flags could be assembled from regions and countries, like the United States and Russia.
 
“I didn’t even have to explain anything, people just started to play with the different elements. A group of American tourists for example immediately tried to assemble their own flag. When they got it they took a picture of themselves with it.” There was a Chinese boy who made extra cubes to be able to produce his own flag.
 
The series State Symbols is a political work. But Lado doesn’t make work to provoke. It’s actually the subtle and playful character within a heavy theme as ‘nationalism’ and ‘identity’ that are appealing to him. “It’s political work but it’s not directly subverting, it’s not asking for any problems. But in the end I could make my point: flags can change. And in the end the Rubik’s Cube was spread all over the city”
(RM)

In the hallway of artist Laurence Aëgerter hangs a photograph from her series ‘Hermitage, the Modernists’. A blond woman is depicted, she wears a classic white blouse. She stands up close facing the Andre Derain’s ‘Girl in black’ painting: you can barely see Derain’s girl in the chair anymore. “There’s a moment every day that I look at this image. The special thing about it is: it never becomes dull.” Aëgerter says, sitting at her kitchen table.

“Get that woman out of the way”, people would instinctively say if they saw the woman standing in front of the work of Derain. In ‘Hermitage, the Modernists’ Laurence Aëgerter places spectators or objects in front of masterpieces of well known masters. Her images put you in a state of restlessness. You keep filling in what is hidden behind the spectator in the photo. “It’s unfinished, that’s what makes it interesting to me. If I look at it myself my brain is kept busy, trying to fill in what’s missing.”

Aëgerter plays with the obvious meanings that we have assigned to the well known masterpieces. By breaking into these works Aëgerter poses questions about the original. Reality imposes itself on us; we watch along with the museum visitor and so a new artwork has been created.

In the Hermitage in Amsterdam the artist spent two long evenings to make 1300 photographs of different artworks; obstructed by models or objects. She photographed two simple ladders in front of a famous work of Kandinsky and a work of Picasso (Seated Woman) with a plastic air curtain in front. Aëgerter had previously worked in the Louvre and Rijksmuseum in this same kind of manner. The difference is that the figures and objects in the Hermitage are photographed without the illusion of perspective. The paintings of the famous modernists are ‘flat’. While it seemed like the models in the Louvre immersed in the ‘landscape of paintings’, in the Hermitage there is an interaction created between areas in the foreground and background.

“The air curtains are a memory of my childhood in Marseille. The curtains were on my mind while I was busy with this project. Paintings from the baroque often have draped curtains. ‘Tadaa’, is the feeling that you get from it. That thought was what I wanted to take with me. The air curtains are a wink, to me they symbolize the theater of life.”
(RM)

In his search for “forcefully communicative forms” Hayosh more or less coincidently stumbled upon the power of symmetry. “I had made a video out of six different installations with flashlights. Only the last one was arranged in a symmetrical way.
That one really stood out from the other five, it was far more powerful.”

He began researching symmetrical presentations of things and discovered the phenomena called ‘armament display’, a distinct genre of photography depicting an airplane with all its ammunition on the foreground, spread out symmetrically. “Actually, I rediscovered the armament displays. As a child in Israel, I had always been surrounded by air force magazines that also contained these photos. But I had never looked at it this way before.”

He spent months collecting these images on the internet of weapon displays from all over the world. “I wanted to make these images alive, so I decided to use the same lay out. I made a dot map for every photo, and replaced the airplanes, missiles and bullets for other objects. Still, I wanted to keep the image as dangerous and threatening as I could. I am very interested in this border between horror and beauty.”

Hayosh made arrangements with blenders, fans, aggregates, flash lamps, chainsaws. In many cases the objects are moving and making earsplitting sounds, often adjusted by a sensor. The fans for example - without any shielding against the propellors - begin to rotate whenever someone enters the space. Hayosh also installed microphones into the small motors of the ventilators to strongly amplify the sound.

One of the installations consist out of symmetrically presented gas cylinders. “In this space you hear this ‘sssssssss’, as if gas is leaking”, Hayosh explains. “This installation may not be that loud, but it is still appears very dangerous. I like to play with the suggestion of danger.”
(CS)

Benedikt Fischer’s brooches look like something living. When you look up close, you feel the need to touch them, you instantly get the urge to do so. For his graduation work 2011 he made a range of beautifully finished brooches, made of sawn slices of plastic safety helmets. Bit by bit he engraved patterns into the plastic. Black and white, bright yellow, blue and orange plastic. Because of the strong colors and unfamiliar shapes you don’t exactly recognize what you are looking at.

A year before he graduated, Benedikt stumbled on to the safety helmets as a material for his work. He began to experiment with it, but it wasn't until a year later, in his graduation year, he picked up the helmet again. He started to engrave it with a graver resulting in a rather time consuming, but perfectly fitting technique he would later apply in his series. The idea that his objects has served a purpose earlier interests him. “To me objects that once had a function have some sort of power. The helmet protected, and I tried to keep that.” 

His brooches can be seen as guardians. You wear it on the chest, or right beneath the shoulder. As a child the Austrian Benedikt sometimes wore a guardian angel on the moments he thought he needed one: “I always wore that guardian when I needed it; for example when it was difficult at school. A piece of jewelry can give you that kind of feeling, in this case I felt protected by it. That intrigues me. For my graduation project I researched what protection means in jewelry.”

It’s no coincidence that the engraved patterns make one think of animal fur. “I have this strong connection to the animal. For my graduation project I wanted to make an animalistic piece of work, something which feels as if it has been given shape by nature, but I didn’t want it to be too specific, I only wanted the direction to be visible.” 

His work was noticed during the graduation show last year. After that he exposed in Munich, Hamburg, Arnhem, Nijmegen and Amsterdam. 
(BF)

“This montage more or less originated by coincidence”, Rogier Taminau tells. “I made a slideshow of found images. The images of the table and the image of the man came one after another. This is when I felt that they fit together.” The airplane engine came later. “I wanted to add something that had a connection to movement, so I looked through my archive boxes with images in the category ‘transportation vehicles’.”

“What you see is some kind of testing table. No exact idea what kind of table it actually is, but it looks like there is a mirror standing on the top right of it, as if something is being projected. The man is stuck, he has problems moving. He looks at the airplane engine. My work is often about progression and stagnation.” A pulse disappears into the engine and appears again on the other side in a fragmented form. “For these fragments I used an image of food packages that were dropped out of the planes during World War II. How I got to the idea, I don’t know. Also coincidence.”
(CS)

It began with a boyish idea: Let’s cut down a tree. Kristinn Gudmundsson (1984) and Peter Sattler (1981) were instantly enthusiastic. They could already imagine themselves going through the Amsterdamse Bos forest as thieves in the night. Then they figured: why not do it the legal way? “We thought it would take a lot of bureaucratic hassle, but in the end it was only one short phone call and two e-mails”, Peter says. The city hall didn’t seem to think it was a weird question whatsoever, and shortly afterwards they sent a mail with a picture of a linden tree in the north of Amsterdam. Peter and Kristinn sent: ‘We would like this tree.’ “Like we were adopting a child”, Kristinn says.

The two were there when the city workers sawed down the tree. Because the tree was much bigger than Kristinn and Peter had asked for – the city hall completely disregarded the only demand that the two had made – they decided to saw it in pieces. The city workers were waiting with their chainsaws in their hands until the artists would point out to them where to make the cut. Peter and Kristinn coded the ends with numbers and letters, so they could reconstruct the tree again later on. “We didn’t even come up with that ourselves”, Kristinn says. “One of the construction workers suggested we should mark the branches. When he saw that we had no clue how, he went to his truck and got us some tape and pens.”

In the exhibition space they reconstructed the tree like a puzzle. Now that the exhibition is over, the tree doesn’t disappear, Kristinn and Peter ensure. “We just change it”, Kristinn says. “The bundles of little branches will be made into paper, the big logs will be brought to Peters home village in Austria, where it will be sawn in a saw mill. The sawed planks will be brought back to The Netherlands.” Peter: “After that, they go by boat to Iceland. Kristinns grandpa will make frames of them. It's a collective work: a lot of people collaborate. We leave the instructions open for interpretation on purpose.”

All steps are carefully being documented. Peter: “The work is not about Kristinn and Peter cutting a tree. The work is a reconstruction of a tree. That poses questions. Why was it cut? What is it doing in that big exposition space? Why the letters on the branches? We do not explain. The tree is what it is.”
(CS)