Markus Feiler (*1977, Rotenburg an der Fulda) ist ein deutscher Konzeptkünstler. Mit seinen Arbeiten hinterfragt er Routinen und öffnet ästhetische Räume, die zum Denken, Wahrnehmen und zur eigenen Positionsbestimmung einladen. Seine Werke umfassen vor allem Objektkunst/Installationen, Fotografie und Malerei, ohne sein Schaffen jedoch auf einzelne Techniken zu beschränken. Feilers Arbeiten sind in zahlreichen privaten Sammlungen vertreten und werden in Ausstellungen in Deutschland und im europäischen Ausland gezeigt. Er lebt und arbeitet in Berlin.
Last year Olga Mos moved from Berlin to Hamburg and is working on her master’s thesis at the HFBK and Jorindes Voigt class. After five years of nomadism, moving into the institutional is not easy. Much is thrown overboard at her new place of residence, the port city. New territory is explored – but her work doesn’t seem to be as wild as it was a year ago. But Olga explores new possibilities, formulates new goals.
Where did halos originate? What do they tell us, what are they like?
At the lecture, Julia Katan (artist) will reveal the evolution of halos from Ancient Egypt through the Renaissance to the present day in mosaics, illustrations and paintings.
Listeners will learn why gold dust is sprinkled on their hair, how to distinguish a full-fledged saint in the hierarchy of righteousness, and why halos go to sinful scoundrels.
Synopsis
Nimbus in iconography and painting appear not only as a golden circle above the saint’s head; the symbolism of the divine light is broken with the change of eras, and the form is subject to fashion and the internal currents of religions.
It appeared for the first time as an attribute of the solar deities of Iran and Egypt, it wanders from coins to stone, and sounds in Homeric hymns, where the gods descend to earth in a cloud of radiant ether.
The nimbus is picked up by the Roman rulers to denote the radiance of their genius. Julius Caesar is identified with a shaggy star, and Nero’s „face shines with the people.“
Christianity, having turned the halo into an attribute of the all-good God and his saints, gives it a powerful ethical vector. Square halos distinguish living benefactors from those who are in eternity with a round one; a triangular halo is honored only by God the Father; the halos of saints turn into business cards – names and prayers are inscribed in their circumference.
In the Catholic world, the halo becomes a field for experiments for Renaissance artists: on the one hand, openwork wires, glass disks, on the other, weighty crowns in precious stones, strings of objects around the head of Christ or a round fireplace screen behind the Virgin Mary.
Gradually, from the twelfth century, in order to cut down popular cults, the popes of the Church arrogate to themselves the right to canonize saints. Some of the blessed have been waiting for their halo for years, others, like St. Dionysius the Martyr, are even honored with two: one around the severed head, the second over the empty neck.
And further, while Orthodoxy keeps the tradition of icon painting almost untouched, in the West the Reformation abolishes the cult of saints, churches are cleared of images. At the same time, artists strive to portray the world believable, and halos only break the illusion of reality. So in painting, halos are gradually fading away.
However, they didn’t disappear. Haloes seep into modernity under the guise of police caps and bizarre hoops on the heads of fashionistas, in a Roman style surround the tops of politicians. In the new reality, where the concept of holiness has been greatly eroded, the halo has partially turned into an accessory, but its sacred symbolism has also been preserved. At least as long as the historical memory and faith lives on.
„Freedom“ is a sweet word laced with electric current. An unattainable ideal, glorified in every art form. Yes, that’s exactly how it loomed on the horizon of my life – a red sunset, music penetrating into the depths of an altered state of consciousness, eternal youth, an unlimited choice of pleasures with minimal responsibility.
How to achieve this intoxicating joy? Where to run? How to throw off the shackles of everyday life? How to finally escape? Paradoxically, these questions make human a hostage, a slave to a chimera. This notion makes a person unfree.
Looking back, I understand that freedom is opportunities, it is a space of options in which one can act. And only by making decisions and taking responsibility for them this space of options can be expanded. And this is work – to be able to objectively assess circumstances, take into account other people, abandon infantile ideas, take responsibility. It’s hard, you have to learn it. But only then, and from a sweet chimera on the horizon, „freedom“ will turn into a fulcrum inside.
Nastya Svoboda
In prison there was no access to canvases and paints, all that was in my right was a pencil and paper. I found salvation again in my own safe world, I painted. In addition, I also revealed myself to prose, and wrote the texts of those „9 commandments of freedom“ that became an addition to the drawings.
I sent all the originals to Kyiv, where my friends began organizing the exhibition. As you already know, the exhibition was supposed to take place on February 25, 2022.
One day before On the 24th of February Russia drops missiles on our home. I was still in jail and everything that happened with the double shot killed me. I stopped believing, and did not know whether there would still be a house when I left, whether there would be somewhere to return to each of us.
But completely unexpected On April 9, 2022, since I am a citizen of Ukraine, the President of Georgia pardoned me. And that meant only one thing, I’m getting out of prison right now. Now my new pseudonym is Nastya Svoboda. After being in prison for 1 year and 9 months, I entered a world that turned upside down and will never be the same.
Alica Khaet
In the video work “Es ist nicht so sicher wie es scheint”, the veil on the dark side of partnerships, with their hidden hopelessness and borderline experience of potential aggression and violence, is sort of lifted.
The prison of ideas introduces the heroes into the cycle of creation and destruction, attraction and rejection, bodily lack of freedom and rebellion against it.
However, a certain element of comicality, the friendliness of the characters, gives this struggle a touch of self-irony, an optimistic ambivalence. Maybe it’s their inner smile and self-acceptance that makes them free?
Maria Akinina
Navigating the reality is challenging since it is hard to predict what laws and restrictions come upon us tomorrow. The way we speak and express ourselves here in Europe would bring us trouble in Russia. Yet today the pressure to express an opinion is high and becomes a matter of honor. Often what feels right to do, has huge consequences, which not everyone can take. If we let ourselves indulge in the paranoia, gruesome pictures come to mind: every move we make is already registered, there is a file on each and every one of us in a dark basement and evil clerks just wait for a command to get us. Let’s say you post something bold. Would they stand by the airport gate with a huge butterfly net, just for YOU? It is not that easy to differ mere paranoia and justified concerns anymore, because the reality is more surreal than a government clerk with a butterfly net. Can you look yourself in the mirror with a clear conscience, and not imagine the sacrifices it can ask of you?
Denis Esakov / Lector
At the opening of the exhibition there was lecture and discussion by Denis Esakov:
Freedom is like a network of connections
One of the significant events of the past is perspective. With the help of a perspective look, a person can look into the future, into the unknown and look for answers to his questions. Maybe once it was freedom. Invent, travel, fight monsters, conquer the world. Now, looking back, it is clear that this mechanism was freedom for some and a heavy burden for others: conquered, killed, erased. The freedom of imagination and action of some was very expensive for others. Freedom became a privilege, officially supported by the structure. Who needs freedom and can it be reliable?
Denis Esakov is a multimedia artist and writer from Berlin. Denis expands the space between Knowledge and the Unknown, the way and methods of cognition, how to keep in this space.
Was born in Moscow. Graduated from the theater department of GITIS (Russian Institute of Theater Arts). From 2015 to 2018 she worked at the Moscow School of New Cinema as a producer at the theater workshop of Yuri Muravitsky. She also supervised the theatrical part of Moscow festivals: „Archstoyanie“, „Art-ravine“, „Territory“.
Since 2018 she has been working as a film producer. She shot a large number of advertising projects for brands such as Loreal, Pepsico, Vogue, McDonalds, as well as music videos for SBPCh, Black Seed Oil, Husky, Scriptonite, etc. d..
In 2020, she made 6 documentaries about various ethnic cultures in Russia together with Pierre Christian Brochet. She also produced a feature short film by Alina Nasibullina „Objects in the Mirror“.
In 2021, she entered the Anatoly Osmolovsky BAZA Institute of Contemporary Art, where she continues her studies to this day.
We almost made it, but then everything turned out quite differently. A form moves from one place to another. It reproduces itself, meets each other, connects. A spatial-morphological process that becomes explorable through the works of Olga Moș and Markus Feiler. Displaced, to another time in another place. Now everything is made up for, caught up and brought into place piece by piece. The postponement is now cancelled, only the present applies. For the first time, Olga Moș and Markus Feiler present their works together at the exhibition VERSCHIEBUNGEN, which runs from 29.07. to 12.08.2022 at the BAS CS Gallery of artist and curator Igor Zaidel.
