Past exhibition

Confluentes III. Breaking through boundaries

29.07.2018 – 12.08.2018

Not only the Ludwig Museum, but numerous other exciting locations have been integrated into the project. Unusual sites such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial, the cableway across the Rhine, and Koblenz jail are being given a temporary makeover by the artists.

The Ludwig Museum is presenting a number of individual artists, including Zhang Fangbai (China) and René Böll (Germany), both of whom give a new and individual interpretation to the classical Chinese art of ink painting. Be it portraits, landscapes, or dreamlike visions – the work of each of these artists proclaims his own creative confrontation with tradition, identity and aesthetics in the context of the global village. On the second floor of the Ludwig Museum, two further artists are exhibiting their work: Jiny Lan (China/Germany) and David Hardy (Koblenz/Paris). Jiny Lan – conceptual artist and co-founder of the first feminist artist group in China – is staging the live painting performance ‘Rent a Third Experience’: for seven days, she will be creating portraits of volunteer male visitors. In his large-scale maps, which he overpaints to the point of unrecognizability, the Koblenz artist and self-styled ‘Suisse Marocain’ David Hardy addresses the theme of a life as nomad between cultures and advocate of artistic otherness.

One particular climax will be the colour change planned by Lydia Nüüd & Johann Thiessen (Estonia/Russia/Germany) for the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial at the Deutsches Eck, where the Moselle flows into the Rhine. Here they will symbolically break through the erstwhile boundaries. The monument stands for the confrontation with the historic legacy which continues to represent both a burden and a source of strength down through succeeding generations. The two artists will be on the spot for the duration of the installation, explaining their concept to interested visitors.

Three Italian artists of international stature – Sylvia Cibaldi, Leonilde Carabba and Marco di Piazza – are displaying their work in the medieval basilica of St Castor and in the Ludwig Museum’s sculpture garden. When illuminated with black light, Leonilde Carabba’s canvases, painted in fluorescent colours, unfold a transcendental symbolism, celebrating a space that knows no yesterday and no tomorrow. In the search for a new poetic form of expression, Silvia Cibaldi works on one of her basic themes: ‘being’ and ‘appearance’. The Florentine sculptor Marco di Piazza, whose work was exhibited in the Italian pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, is exhibiting two steel sculptures thematizing movement, dance and human togetherness.

The Cologne artist Cony Theis is concerned with communication inside and outside prison walls. Her participatory work ‘Imaginary Communication’ has been developed in collaboration with inmates of Koblenz jail. Her works consist of a series of digital pictures, excerpts of texts, or pictures of the detainees. The result is an interplay between the unsaid and the touched on.

In the context of the exhibition, the video-artist and photographer Ilya Pusenkoff is staging the installation ‘Soul in the Hole’ – an interactive video-sculpture in one of the cars of the Koblenz cableway across the Rhine. Here, on a hologram disc, the beholder can see variations on talking faces, consisting of elements from three facial features (the foreheads, eyes, and mouths of different people) randomly put together to form a new, defamiliarized whole. The people filmed by the artist become anonymous narrators, who, in an act of liberation, reveal personal, hitherto guarded ‘secrets’, thus opening up to the beholder penetrating insights into their souls.

Boundary crossing, metamorphosis, and change are also the themes of the Koblenz artist Elias Maya. In his luminous pictures he represents the extent to which life is subject to time as a result of progress, transience and recurrence. In the atrium of the Dreikönigenhaus, Elias will be realizing a performance together with musicians and at the same time integrate authentic life stories of older people into his art. In addition, students from the Schönstätter Marienschule will be working on the topic of ‘Time Passenger’.

Catalogue (german only)