Exhibition Run: 17 January - Sunday 16 February 1997

Artists: Sally Barker, Peter Land, Raimund Luckwald, Tobias Gerber, Bernadette Schwering.

For its forthcoming project ‘Shift’ Cubitt Gallery has invited the German writer and editor Gregor Schwering to curate an exhibition. This will be the third in a series of exhibitions featuring the work of young European artists and curators. Raimund Luckwald, Tobias Gerber and Bernadette Schwering live and work in Cologne, Peter Land in Copenhagen and London and Sally Barker in London.

The idea of the transformation of the self within its experience of reality is relevant to the practise of the artists in the exhibition. If the subject is never totally itself and the reality is not a real one either, what impact does that have on the artists perception of the outside and how is that reflected in the artistic production?

Peter Land shows a video of himself stripping in his living room, dancing to tacky disco music; Schwering shows a slide installation featuring herself both naked and dressed up at the same time, turning the dress as a strong image of power into a metaphor for its opposite. To escape from all this Sally Barker invents an alter Ego called Teela, a strong figure from outer space; the subject dresses up in order to create expectations that allow it to execute power by means of the disguise. Raimund Luckwalds drawings refer to that peculiar internal malice possessed by the object. Again and again it withdraws from its one-dimensionality and reveals its ambivalence. The viewer is confronted with a surface which transports the lack of a consistent reality. Tobias Gerbers installation based on Fibonaccis mathematic insights insists on the same point. He shows that even a mathematical structure is not what it seems to be.

On Friday the 7th February special guest Andreas Schlaegel will sing Elvis songs.

Andreas Schlaegel lives in London and has exhibited and performed in Austria,Germany and Denmark. He is a regular act at Paul Chan’s Gracelands Palace, Old Kent Road, London.