Untitled (Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone)
The work Untitled (Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone) was created for the exhibition “A Room of One’s Own,” a reflection on Virginia Woolf’s essay of the same name from 1929. In it, Woolf writes that a woman, in order to write, needs “money and a room of her own” – the material and intellectual freedom to carve out a space for herself.Building on this idea, the work explores the space that memory occupies. The cube of thin, lacquered steel rods outlines a volume filled only with air: a body without mass, a form that holds itself.
On all sides hang brown shimmering fringes, reminiscent of lametta door curtains. They are magnetic tape from old audio cassettes – unraveled. They come from the collection of an anonymous person, purchased on eBay: hundreds of cassettes that trace a life through music. The title of the work borrows the name of one of these cassettes, Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone, pointing directly to the individual traces hidden within the collection.
By transferring the tapes into the space, the private sound archive dissolves. From this material of memory emerges a permeable space – a room of reflection between presence and absence, between form and dissolution, where music becomes an emotional archive.
Exhibition Booklet (PDF)
a room of one’s own
kunstverein tiergarten | galerie nord
01.08. – 06.09.2014
jana engel, franziska, jyrch, ari merten, marike schreiber
in cooperation with anna jehle and julia kurz
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