Florian Slotawa selects the objects that he employs in his installations and photographic works not according to aesthetic criteria, but rather to what’s at hand – or to put it another way, the situation in which he finds himself. His personal belongings, or the possessions of other people, institutions, or places which he comes across in his work – for example collectors, curators, museums, or hotels – all serve as material for his work. In Heimatrelief (Homeland relief, 1997), one of his “Besitzarbeiten,” or property works, Slotawa constructed a sculptural presentation of the area by the Alps in which he grew up, made from everything he owned. Slotawa similarly fuses concrete, material possessions with immaterial and idealistic concepts like “home” and “sense of security” in his Hotelarbeiten (Hotel Works, 1998 / 1999), in which he arranges the furniture from hotel rooms to form cave-like sleeping areas, documents them with photographs, and afterwards returns the objects to their original use, as if nothing ever happened. In more recent works like Bonn ordnen (Organizing Bonn, 2004), Slotawa helps himself to objects he finds in various exhibitions spaces, and puts them into new contexts. In 2002 the Sammlung Haubrok bought one of Slotawa’s property works; this marked the end of Slotawa’s artistic engagement with his own belongings. In a kind of exchange, Slotawa constructs his latest work for the 4th berlin biennial with private possessions culled from the house of one of his collectors, loaned for the exhibition’s duration.
installationview
Of Mice and Men,
4th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
installation with objects
from the household of Barbara and Axel Haubrok
height 731 cm
In such scenarios Slotawa creates a process of exchange and reevaluation between art and the quotidian, between public and private. In the same move, with a gesture toward institutional critique, he exposes these spheres’ characteristics and singularities. Moreover, his works with private property in particular function in the sense of an economy of loss: Through the strategic redefinition of private and even intimate everyday objects as art, he creates physical and psychological moments of abnegation. In their objective beauty and their size, his works simultaneously show the act of misappropriation, the deprivation entailed, and the emptiness created elsewhere.
http://www.sieshoeke.com/article/Florian-Slotawa/
