While in today’s society almost everything is unsparingly laid bare and analyzed, the private sphere made glaringly public and the last taboos threatened with extinction, a countermovement can increasingly be observed that takes a step back: as a defense and safeguard, as an alternative model of life or as a form of criticism. In the exhibition “Disguised”, Rotwand presents different positions that take up this theme: in a political, social or private manner.
The figures drawn in Indian ink by Laylah Ali (*1968, Buffalo NY) have something stereotype and cartoon-like about them. Latent behind the slightly abstract, sometimes ‘naïve’ drawing style, are stories that are hinted at but not narrated to completion. The characters—enveloped in exotic-seeming, richly detailed robes and magnificent shocks of hair—are not really legible, remain empty and yet seem strangely familiar to us. Ali’s works often oscillate between affection and violence and deal with questions of race, class and gender affiliation, as well as with the distribution of power.
In their common project “Modern Life of the Soul”, Melanie Bonajo (*1978, Heerlen) and Kinga Kielczynska (*1972, Warsaw) document photographically the existence of a fictional, sacred cult at Poland’s east border. In the belief that today’s achievement-oriented society—with its ‘unequal’ rights of the stronger and an individualism on the way to egoism—has taken a wrong course, the followers of this cult are turning their back on Darwin’s usual theory of evolution. They are convinced that humanity has actually originated from plants and thus, like them, live their own lives in a secluded, primeval forest.
The hidden and sometimes intimacy come to surface in the works by Heidi Bucher (*1926 Winterthur, †1993 Brunnen). The artist has dipped a bed sheet and pillow, a negligee and an ornamental cushion into latex and thus embalmed, disguised and conserved them—frozen in time, yet at the same time fleeting and transient insofar as the material was not made for eternity. Bygone days remain and yet are shed in an ongoing metamorphosis. In the midst of the gallery an unhinged window stands exemplarily for the artist’s flayed living rooms. The window is still shrouded, the latex skin not yet peeled away; the secret of past times is glued tight to the glass.
In her works Yael Davids (*1968, Kibbutz Tzuba) often isolates a specific part of the body, places it in unusual, sometimes humorously absurd situations, and thereby awakens oppressive feelings and associations. In the exhibition, the video work “Face” makes the face its focal point. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the hair moves around the face, covers the eyes, the gaze, uncovers and re-covers it again—in an endless 360° loop. As much as you try to grasp the person, she vanishes again and again under the moving hair. The rotating hair repeatedly allows us various views of the face, sparks many associations while, nonetheless, not allowing us to comprehend it entirely.