The Ringkirche floats. On the central wall of the Kunsthalle Wiesbaden, the city landmark rises in the middle above a somewhat shaky panorama of multi-storey historical house facades. The gray lines that give the towers, turrets, the main entrance decorated with rose windows and other characteristic details of the Protestant church, initially look like a pencil drawing. But if you take a closer look, you can see delicate shadows that reveal that the large-scale motif is spreading a few millimeters above the ground. In fact, Ankabuta did not “draw” the Ringkirche with pencil, but with wire. The artist, born in Korea in 1980, not only takes the weight off the yellow, neo-Romanesque, massive sandstone walls of the central building. A sweeperwhich is also part of the composition, but has no real task on an immaculately white surface, also ironizes the grandeur of the building ensemble.
Staging of the son
Ankabuta, whose real name is Songie Seuk and is named after the Arabic word for female spider, was trained in Seoul and Kassel and has been living in Wiesbaden for a long time.
Her current exhibition is linked to the Christa Moering grant that the city awarded her last year.
Since then, the artist has primarily checked the local architectural monuments for their suitability as tourist advertising and calendar sheet motifs.
In the wire versions of the portals from Kurhaus, Theater, Biebricher Schloss, among others, many antique columns catch the eye, and you have to look very carefully so as not to confuse these parts of the building that have been detached from their context.
Ankabuta's interpretations of Wiesbaden's showcase buildings “breathe” a lightness that is untypical for the historicist city of Wiesbaden and thus also explain the exhibition title. “Breath” is it and becomes even more apparent when you look at the series of portraits that show the sleeping son of the artist and that has been growing almost daily since he was born three years ago. 150 non-chronologically ordered sheets that fill another wall of the Kunsthalle do not necessarily focus on the child's growth. Rather, sleep appears as life reduced to breath. Empty spaces that sometimes open up between the individual portraits and in this way incorporate the natural rhythm of breathing in the rows of images reinforce this impression.
Naturally, Ankabuta's current works take up the greatest possible space.
Of course, they reveal a direct relationship with those small-scale and expansive installations, the production of which requires the greatest meticulousness and dedication and with which the artist became known a good ten years ago.
Among other things, 15,000 ants populated entire museum rooms and a sky was created from almost 8,000 needles.
In Wiesbaden, however, a number of aluminum stars barely the size of a fingernail no longer fill any showcases, but rather large plastic bags and are reminiscent of that phase of the work.
A special sense of humor
Strictly speaking, the exhibition is a retrospective. The exhibits even include an earliest video from university days. It shows the artist drawing a maze in the snow-covered university courtyard with her footprints. A wonderful counterpart is from recent times. In this video you can see her son who - according to his possibilities - sweeps a yard. Less than the overloaded mother-and-child topic, the double is simply about two people working in a yard. With a view of the courtyard of the Kunsthaus it could not have been placed more appropriately.
Last but not least, Ankabuta's work stands out due to its special sense of humor. Even when portraying her son, she once abandoned the realistic path and smuggled a cartoon of a baby into the series of pictures who pees itself in the face. This implicit meaning becomes even more evident in the case of small interventions in large spaces. For example, one does not know whether the figurines that one encounters on fire alarms, above emergency exit signs or other technical building details are angels or strangely subversive beings. Ankabuta is one of the few artists like Erwin Wurm or Fischli / Weiss, in whom wit and substance are not mutually exclusive.
■ “Ankabuta. Breath ”at Kunsthaus Wiesbaden, Schulberg 10, is open until February 26, 2022 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays to Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. The Kunsthaus Wiesbaden is taking a Christmas break from December 23, 2021 to January 3, 2022. It will be open again from Tuesday, January 4th.