Pandora Motel

Klaus Killisch, Mikael Eriksson

November 28, 2007 _ January 15, 2008,
Guardini Galerie, Berlin

The Pandora Motel by Klaus Killisch and Mikael Eriksson provides an image of the complete secularization of the original narrative of the beginning of civilization as a set of plagues. The motel metaphor reveals an ideological or religious construction of meaning as a station on a long journey without a recognizable destination, as well as its change of meaning in the history of ideas. In this motel, as we see, there is everything that has to be there; we have settled perfectly into a transitory state of being freed from certainties. Killisch’s collages, which should not be confused with psychedelic exsanguinations of a certain euphoria, nevertheless vary iconographic patterns of Pop Art, the entry of the cold world of commodities into art. But where Warhol applied the car accident to canvas as a media image, Killisch transforms it into an abstract image that appears like a precious icon against the background of the coarse grids of our image consumption. And Mikael Eriksson, who has been feeding his computer with self-generated realities for some time now, shows here the large mobile, which is not a late reflex to Calder’s poetic spaces of movement, but a literally weighty machine for the production of visual impressions, which are questioned by electronic processing according to hidden laws, as it were. The result is not an unresisting painting in the virtual, but a step behind it: The illusion of the illusion in order to regain the object… Matthias Flügge pdf

Two years later, this exhibition developed into the Pandora Motel video project.

A catalogue is available.