While you are still finding your way in the entrance hall, you are occupied by a woman's voice.

“I feel so different, I'm between two worlds,” a voice sounds from the loudspeakers.

"My thoughts are different from those of the others around me." Sentences that take you captive and make you listen more closely.

They belong to the sound installation "SMW - Shine with me" by the Berlin artist Samantha Bohatsch and are the first work to get in the mood for the exhibition "Theoretically I'm fine" in the Kunsthalle Mainz.

Katharina Deschka

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

  • Follow I follow

As a rule, whoever answers the question "How are you?" Means something else.

I might be fine, but actually it isn't.

And in fact, the spokeswoman in Samantha Bohatsch's installation reports that her boyfriend has left her and is now left alone.

This is a time of change, not only due to Corona, but certainly exacerbated by it, says the curator of the show Lina Krämer.

Changes affect changing working conditions, the advancing digitization, but also social constructs such as couple relationships and family, and the question of what is considered the norm and how one wants to live, and not least the role of art and artistic work in society.

The five young artists in the exhibition take on the change in a multimedia way.

They include the human body - "as a material that can be explored, that allows limits to be felt and that can be understood as a projection surface for one's own expectations or those of others".

Expressing doubts and fears

Like the British artist, author and activist Hannah Black, born in Manchester in 1981, who looked behind the boastful armor of steely muscles in her impressive video work “Bodybuilding” in 2015.

She juxtaposes the rhythmic images of training men with music, statements from chats in which the bodybuilders express themselves surprisingly vulnerable, expressing their doubts and fears that they may never be able to meet their own demands.

How deeply human uncertainty is is also pointed out by Johannes Büttner, born in Frankfurt in 1985, with his work “Higher” up in the tower of the Kunsthalle. Its red ticker across all windows can be seen from afar outside. It is the text for the presentation, but it is permanently "improved" by an artificial intelligence. Büttner provided the supports of the LED screens with feet so that something human sticks to the machines.

But like programs, people should also learn permanently, continue to optimize themselves and exploit their potential to the limit. For his disturbing work “Potential”, Büttner asked more than a dozen coaches, experts and service providers, who actually find their audience on YouTube and Instagram, to advertise themselves and their products for this exhibition. On a screen set up in the center of the room, these videos now run like a performance show: They are exclusively men who self-confidently and equipped with the insignia of success (car, pool, vacation landscape) demonstrate how the customer can make full use of his possibilities in financial and professional terms could, he would just follow their path.

The opposite of this sense of mission is offered on the floor below by the hermetic-looking Room of Reduction, designed by the artist Benedigte Bjerre, who was born in Copenhagen in 1987. Her work "Libero (eat, pray, love)" reflects 15 months of withdrawal from the pandemic. The domestic isolation is presented as readymades by a washing machine and the worktop of your table on the wall. The washing machine is pasted with small packages: the bronze casts of their daughter's diapers refer to role expectations that young mothers are still exposed to.

In order to celebrate the end of the lockdown and the fact that joint work is finally possible again, the Kunsthalle is expanding the exhibition into a space characterized by leisure and sport and showing works of art in the Taubertsbergbad in Mainz. Above all Bjerre's installation “Remake of 'Bar sous le toit'” - a project that Bjerre is implementing with students from the Mainz Art School. The mobile bar will initially stand at the edge of the swimming pool and then appear in other locations in and outside the city; a sculptural object that refers to the “Bar sous le toit” by French designer Charlotte Perriand and that is also intended to serve as a place for art and exchange.

Huge body parts made of flat aluminum rods look like they have been scattered on the lawns of the pool: body surveys in a place that could hardly be more suitable.

The thoughtful video work “Workers' Forum” by the Finnish artist Pilvi Takala may require too much attention in a turbulent environment, but the sound installation “BB” by Samantha Bohatsch, monologues about the dissolution of physical boundaries, intimate descriptions of encounters is in its quieter place find their audience under a tree.

The exhibition can be seen until August 22 in the Kunsthalle Mainz, Am Zollhafen 3–5, Tuesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Wednesday from until 9 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The Taubertsbergbad, Wallstrasse 9, is open daily from 6.30 a.m. to 8 a.m., from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m.