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curated by Dehlia Hannah
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From mid April until June 2022 Fabian Knecht planned to walk from Berlin to Moscow, in order to arrive just in time for his solo exhibition at the city’s progressive Szena gallery. The walk itself would have been the exhibition’s central work—an act of artistic determination expressed through a substantial commitment of time and bodily labor, compressed into the bare form of his presence at the opening. Before Knecht could set off, the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, rendered this plan unacceptable. Instead, by early March Knecht was in western Ukraine, meeting with artists who had become soldiers overnight—friends made in 2016 while producing early works in his Isolation series. What they needed, he learned, was not food and clothing but bullet proof vests, tourniquets, and tactical medical packs. Evacuated of artistic motive by the exigencies of the situation, Knecht returned to Berlin and took up collection for packages of defensive body armor and lifesaving equipment, which he promised to deliver himself. This unsettling request, issued to friends and patrons, accompanied by the legal proviso that helmets and bulletproof vests had been reclassified as humanitarian rather than military aid, yielded over 100 kits, which Knecht delivered to Kyiv and other locations on the front lines during the opening week of the Venice Biennale.
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At our feet there lies a thick rag carpet, tufted with strips of blue, green, black and brown; occasionally warmed by streaks of floral or paisley patterns (...). Every scrap of fabric woven into the war effort, by hands young and old, from across Ukraine and beyond. These ubiquitous camouflage nets are used to disguise potential targets from Russian drones, bombs and surveillance systems. (...) Although their purpose is to render a location indiscernible from its surroundings, they disclose an uncanny intimacy. Some of the nets are already dusty from use. Others, fabricated for Knecht as artworks by volunteers in the village of Pidloztsi, where he stayed on some of his visits, and in his Berlin studio, have been returned to the battlefield for use as camouflage—on aesthetic grounds. Lachen ist verdächtig (Laughing is suspicious) embodies an exchange not just between Knecht and his collaborators, but between art and utility. Even as camouflage, their use is constantly changing (...). Their aesthetic depth arises from this nexus of context and content, generic and site-specific.
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Das gebrochene Ar (The broken are), 2022Roofing sheets106 x 107 x 52 cm | each approx. 100 x 48 cm
Lifting our gaze from the floor coverings, it comes to rest upon a tall stack of rusty green corrugated roofing sheets—pieces of discarded scrap metal left over after a bomb blast. In its dimensions and position within the gallery, Das gebrochene Ar (The broken are) I recalls an empty pedestal, similarly positioning the viewer within the gallery apparatus. The title is a reference to Walter de Maria’s The Broken Kilometer (1979), a minimalist sculpture consisting of five hundred brass cylinders, permanently installed in a New York City storefront. An are is a historical unit of measurement equal to 100 square meters: a domestic measure, in this case, an actual rooftop. In a second version of the work, an equal number of roofing sheets lean individually against three walls of the gallery, bearing visible dents and shrapnel holes. On view in the gallery office and as an Augmented Reality object projected on the lawn of Berlin’s Reichstag, Kukhari Pool, a 3D scan of a bomb crater indicates how the are was broken—a digital objet trouvé.
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Der Tod lässt sich nicht auswaschen (Death cannot be washed out), 2022Hemp fabric, burned tank pigmentseach 192 x 48 cm
In the next room, five lengths of thick hemp fabric, a textile typically used in delicately embroidered Ukrainian formal dress, hangs from the wall. Blackened by paint that Knecht created by scraping rust and soot off of incinerated tanks, they appear as if they had been used to wipe down the wreckage: Der Tod lässt sich nicht auswaschen (Death cannot be washed out). On the wall opposite stands a large-format photograph of a bombed apartment building, Natalii Uzhvii Straße 82, Charkiw (Natalii Uzhvii Street 82, Kharkiv). The special context of this image is that the building was bombed in the earliest days of the war, demonstrating that Russian aggression targeted civilians from the beginning. It is clear from the building’s tilt that the photograph was taken from the ground. Yet, hung at eye level, our vantage point is closer to that of a drone, or a bird. There is something particularly unnerving about the exposed domestic interiors, even as such photos, from Ukraine and other zones of conflict, flash relentlessly across newspapers and screens. Together, the works reassemble material memories in an aesthetic testament to the moral clarity that undergirds the Ukrainian resistance.
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Natalii Uzhvii Straße 82, Charkiw, 30. August 2022 (Natalii Uzhvii Street 82, Kharkiv, 30 August 2022), 2022Archival pigment print170,5 x 165 cmEdition: 3 + 2 A.P.
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Curation and text: Dehlia Hannah
The artist would like to thank Vlad Sharapa, Ihor Okuniev, Viktor Kovalenko, Oleg Yukhimyuk, Markus and Leveke Schütte.
With the support of and to support Livyj Bereh. One third of all sales will be forwarded to Livyj Bereh.
Fabian Knecht: Der Weg des größten Widerstandes (The Path of Most Resistance)
Current viewing_room