KELLERABTEIL - ANALYSE DES ALLTÄGLICHEN
(Cellar Compartment - Analysis of Daily Occurrence)

Technique: Installation, Mixed Media

Whole content of the cellar compartment of the artist, old wooden laths, 465 nails, half cigarette, cellar lamp, concrete floor

Size 470 x 172 x 196 cm


(Photo Installationviews Martin Weiand www.fineartservice.de )



“To paraphrase the words of Franz Kafka:

One morning, as Sandra Hauser was waking up from anxious dreams, she cleared her apartment in Munich and stored all her things in her cellar. Rocking horse, dolls, children’s bike, tree trunks, exercise books, clothes, drawings, pieces of stage designs, photos, projects, finds… and put them in the narrow room made of wooden slats. She put all of her things there – her whole life. She locked the cellar compartment and drove to Rome.

In the Kunstverein Rosenheim Sandra Hauser now rebuilt this cellar compartment and brought all her things – her whole life – into the third floor in the exhibition room.

The packing away and giving up of her childhood turned, in the course of the exhibition, into an unpacking and a laying out. The forgetting and archiving turned into a remembering and drawing up of plans. The cellar compartment in Munich was emptied during the construction of the exhibition, and the replica of the compartment in the exhibition space in Rosenheim was filled. The door to the basement compartment, the door to childhood and to memories is open.

The cellar compartment symbolizes the chaotic collection of memories, of lost connections, and many other things, which Sandra Hauser uses and from which she creates her art. Memories are being pulled out of the darkness of the cellar and being organized and staged in the light of the exhibition. This process resembles a birth, a birth of poetry from the chaos of memory, or, also, a process of metamorphosis, to return to Kafka.

While effective lighting that takes objects out of the dark usually plays an important role in Hauser’s work, this time the objects are standing almost as if lost in the bright, dim light of the exhibition room.

(...)

Sandra Hauser’s art and her texts thus also lead us to ourselves, to our memories, to our lives. And with her, we open up chaotic cellar compartments and bring stories and poetry to light.

What Nietzsche wrote: “One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” It is an act of creation, and we are taking part in it when we visit this exhibition.“

Excerpt from „The Door to the Cellar, the Childhood, the Memory“

Peter Weigel, Curator