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PRELUDE TO THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN
Neither here nor there, Neither fish nor fowl
2015


It’s too early for her taste and she is in the shower. She glances down at a bottle of upmarket shower gel - organic rice milk & cherry blossom - and reads: “Celebrate each day as a new beginning.”

The object is speaking perhaps. But its attempt at pithy wisdom cum marketing ploy seems to her only sad. Instead of celebrating, she daydreams of sleep. She pauses on something she had just read: a call for a new paradigm of exhaustion within social life.[1] She finds herself staring at the bottle again. It seems to her that objects aren’t speaking with a language of information or manufactured wisdom. Or at least not the objects that interested her. Instead they seemed to express a sensibility that couldn’t be captured via explanation or information.

The press of cognitive labor remained. The shower off, she opens her laptop and starts typing. This is what will happen: (1) there will be two exhibitions; (2) they will overlap in time and space. The exhibitions will begin on 23 April 2015 at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Siegen, and end on 12 July 2015 at Schloss Ringengberg in Hamminkeln. The two exhibitions express a desire to embrace our inability to grasp something in its entirety and to find joy in the redundant and banal. It is an attempt to escape from a rational transfer of information, and inhabit a non-language of withdrawal and refusal. (1) Franco Bifo Berardi, The Uprising, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 68.

Angela Jeradi, Antonia Lotz, 2015



Christoph Westermeier was invited to make a new work in conjunction with the request from the curators to produce the sole visual documentation of “Neither here nor there, neither fish nor fowl”, accumulating a record of the projects pair of iterations at Schloss Ringenberg and the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen. 


Artists Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen:
Ausstellung 1/ Exhibition 1: Bernd und Hilla Becher, Simone Forti, Hans Haacke,
Hans Hartung, Candida Höfer, Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Jochen Lempert, Bruce Nauman,
Simone Nieweg, Sigmar Polke, Charlotte Posenenske, Yvonne Rainer, Fritz Winter

Ausstellung 2/ Exhibition 2: Olivia Dunbar, Karin Hasselberg, Kitty Kraus, Christoph Westermeier



Artists Schloss Ringenberg:
Ausstellung 1/ Exhibition 1: Simone Forti, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman

Ausstellung 2/ Exhibition 2: Olivia Dunbar, Chris Evans, Karin Hasselberg, Ingrid Hora,
Will Holder, Kitty Kraus, Christoph Westermeier

Curated by Angela Jeradi and Antonia Lotz
April 23 – June 14, 2015


PRELUDE TO THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN
wood, metal, glass, inkjet Prints, C-Prints, acrylic binder, 2015
Installation view “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun”,
Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (background Fritz Winter).
Single images "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun"
Installation view “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun”,
Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (background Hans Haacke).
Installation view “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun”, Schloss Ringenberg.