Vernissage: 25th of May 2012, Kunsthall Charlottenborg (Copenhagen)
This exhibition, a major installation by German artist Thomas Kilpper was originally created for the group exhibition Speech Matters at the Danish Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. The work took the form of a raised wooden platform attached to the exhibition building and into the wooden floor where the artist carved 33 portraits of leading figures around the world. These are the people Kilpper believes have been directly or indirectly responsible for promoting censorship, social exclusion or intolerance. His main focus is freedom of speech and censorship, but which is also extended to the freedom of travel and migration.
Kilpper said that doing the printing of woodcarving technic forces you to go slowly, through the need to cut into this material — the block of wood — before you are able to make a print from the wooden template as opposed to the digital printing which pretty much sums up of the current lifestyle with its extremely accelerated levels of production and consumption.
In Charlottenborg the visitor can stand on the floor between the negative images in the matrix, whilst seeing the positive counterpoint of these images in the actual prints installed in the space and be presented with the choice to chart between these positions.
Photographs by Amir Zainorin
Thomas Kilpper was born in 1956 in Stuttgart and lives and works in Berlin. He was trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. His work has consistently investigated the relationship between history, politics and collective memory, often taking the form of large-scale site-specific installations and floor carvings. Kilpper has exhibited both across Europe and America and has since 2006 run the Berlin-based project space After The Butcher.
Date: 25th of May – 5th of August 2012
Artist: Thomas Klipper
Place: Kunsthall Charlottenborg, Nyhavn 2, Copenhagen
Konsthopp 