2021-22
Brücke Museum Berlin
Weserburg Museum of Modern Art Bremen
Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe-Ettlingen
video (5:11 min), various textiles, copper pipes, wood, wire rope hoist, hoop skirt, costume pieces, dadamachines, cembalo, posters
score for one performer and a wire rope hoist (15 min)
Documentation video of performance at Weserburg Museum of Modern Art Bremen, 2021
Fehr’s Meisterschüler work Movements That Are Hard To Replicate is a cross–media installation that takes the form of a camera obscura, a darkroom for the production of images of the outside world through light.
The metaphor of human perception attached to the form is offset in the installation by a multimedia intervention. Instead of an image of the outside world projected in real time through an aperture, film sequences that have a complex relationship to the artist’s past and present are projected inside the room. These projections interweave different themes: paranormal activities, time travel, fairies, masculinity, soccer, trap and folk music. The leitmotif of the film sequences are U.S. Navy videos showing unexplained phenomena in the sky that make us imagine another, alien life outside our planet.
Fehr connects this visual material with questions about one’s own biography and the desire for other, fluid ways of living beyond unambiguous attributions of gender, origin, and sexual identity. Parallel to the film sound level, programmed mini–robot arms make sculpture and space vibrate as part of an abstract composition. Fehr juxtaposes the phenomena in the sky with a fragile narrative of his own longings that poetically connect past, present, and future.
Text: Alejandro Perdomo Daniels
The installation is augmented by a performance in which Fehr is dragged through the space and lifted into the air by a wire rope hoist. In doing so, Fehr becomes an ephemeral, shapeshifting sculpture, expanding on the themes and revealing to us more of the work’s interconnectedness.
A catalogue made in collaboration with the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff foundation, Stahl-R, and featuring an essay by Anna Wlach can be downloaded here (32 pages, PDF)