Invited Artists



Pawel_Althamer | Michael_Asher | Nairy_Baghramian | Guy_Ben-Ner | Guillaume_Bijl | Martin_Boyce | Jeremy Deller | Michael_Elmgreen und Ingar_Dragset | Hans-Peter_Feldmann | Dora_Garcia | Isa_Genzken | Dominique_Gonzalez-Foerster | Tue_Greenfort | David_Hammons | Valérie_Jouve | Mike_Kelley | Suchan Kinoshita | Marko_Lehanka | Gustav_Metzger | Eva_Meyer und Eran_Schaerf | Deimantas_Narkevicius | Bruce_Nauman | Maria_Pask | Manfred_Pernice | Susan_Philipsz | Martha_Rosler | Thomas_Schütte | Andreas_Siekmann | Rosemarie_Trockel | Silke_Wagner | Mark_Wallinger | Clemens von Wedemeyer | Annette_Wehrmann | Pae_White

 


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Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf

*1950 in Freiburg, Schaerf *1962 in Tel Aviv, they live and work in Berlin




Project: Sie könnte zu Ihnen gehören

“It could belong to you,” the city of Münster – is that a threat or a friendly offer? Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf will not say but leave the decision to their spectators. She is a Freiburg-based philosopher; he is an artist from Tel Aviv. Together, the couple has set up camp in the Mauritzhof Hotel to show their visitors Münster from an unusual perspective – not as it normally appears in front of their eyes, but as the camera sees it. As Eran Schaerf notes, “We will approach Münster as if it were a film, and we will approach the film as though it were Münster.” The town becomes a cinematic sculpture in which the artists create a yet another film by using a montage of three films that were shot, or set, in Münster. The three films are Alle Jahre Wieder [Next Year, Same Time] by Ulrich Schamoni, shot in December 1966, Desperate Journey by Raoul Walsh, filmed in 1941/42 in Hollywood, and the documentary Zwischen Hoffen und Bangen [Between Hope and Fear], made from private footage of the Jewish family Gumprich from Münster, filmed between 1937 and 1939. The montage of scenes from these films and footage they shot themselves creates a new cinematic dimension – a cinematic Münster in which the boundaries between fiction and documentary dissolve and each viewer can create his or her own Münster.


Biography

Eran Schaerf studied architecture, urban planning, video, and photography. He moved to Berlin in 1985, and began to develop an art, which encompasses different media and genres at the interface of narration and play. For the 'Schneider und Sohn' exhibit, hosted by the Berlin-based Zwinger Gallery, the artist designed in 1991 an environment consisting of everyday objects combined in manifold ways with components of images and words. He was, consequently, invited to participate in documenta in 1992, in the Venice Biennale of 1993, and the Manifesta in 1998. German is not his mother tongue, and due to this distance, Schaerf can treat language as if it were a piece of sculpture. Schaerf's works are rarely easily accessible. They are "bulky", escape the simple concept, and the artist prefers connections with new contexts to pre-determined, fixed notions. This focus led to the cooperation of Eran Schaerf and the philosopher-writer Eva Meyer in the early 1990s. Their scientific and artistic projects run parallel, and are interlinked in many different ways. Meyer has committed herself to the feminist movement. After having written her doctor's thesis ('Zählen und Erzählen. Für eine Semiotik des Weiblichen', 1982/83), Meyer became a visiting professor at many universities in Europe and the USA. Since 2003 she is a professor at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo. In her last book, 'Von jetzt an werde ich mehrere sein', published in 2003, Meyer tried to determine a relationship of image and writing without the usual hierarchies. The philosopher describes, how to read texts with the help of the theory of the motion picture. Thus, she questions the status of the image, which shows her close ties to the art of Eran Schaerf.

Both have increasingly focused on radio plays and film productions since 1997. In a silent movie version of 'Europa von weitem' (1999) they present everyday scenes from Brussels. In a third version these are combined with a radio play by the same name. The radio play was composed, while the pictures in the film were unknown to the authors. The synchronous perception produces synergies. Schaerf and Meyer create new contexts in their works.

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