BALLAST PALAST

In today’s world, ruled by high technologies, there is an overwhelming number of consumer goods of all kinds; things of daily use like clothes, toys, beer, planes and cars as well as those things that challenge or satisfy our aesthetic indulgence. In addition to the micro and mega crises, which repeat themselves in fast cycles, as well as to the various political, cultural and social deficits, which we perceive as unwieldy, yet, as ethical burden, especially the ecological downfall of planet earth is threateningly conceivable. A downfall that haunts us everywhere under the trite term “climate change”.

Many of those current little or big catastrophes may appear abstract or provoked by media. Thus, to not be petrified with fear, we need, oh surprise, stories that are lavishly full with facets and nuances. Stories that are able to make the unfathomable comprehensible and tangible in order to defuse the burden from drama. When it is about the objective being of things, the question whether you can identify the burden as a palace, in other words as state of relief or even salvation, is again not necessarily assumed as equalisation of the significant and the implied or of appearance and reality. Furthermore, in its alleged paradox, the language game with the German words for burden and palace, Ballast/Palast, also plays with the repeatedly debated conceptual pairs like for example nature/culture or the differentiation sex/gender, which originates from the feminist deconstructionist theory.

The six artists who are invited to the exhibition in the “Kunstverein Schattendorf” currently and intersubjectively deal with this linguistic poetics with its many-sided concept of signified and signifier. In their new works, the artists also indicate a plurality of interpretations and manners of use of the conceptual pair Ballast/Palast.

text: Goschka Gawlik
translation: Stefan Thyri