"One two seven" (14.09. - 20.10.2001):

Participating Artists: Haleh Redjaian Camilla Rosberg Jakraphun Thanateeranon Hentie van der Merwe Samuel van Ingelgem Jethro Volders. The title stands for the diversity we encounter every day of every week. The quotidian and the strange, the private and the public, historical or social changes and existing systems all yield a wide field for artistic activities. ONE TO SEVEN is conceived as an open structure and brings together young artists of various origins. Haleh Redjaian‘s (born 1971 in Frankfurt/Main) drawings and objects deal with the human figure as an individual and in different groupings. Her works often refer to or are based on pictures in newspapers, magazines, or books. First Redjaian makes drawings, watercolours or spray-paintings that she then develops into objects and installations. A fine-tuning of line and form marks her work. It suggests meditative moments and seems to hover in timeless silence. For Cologne, she has built strange, fragile objects out of stretched and sprayed threads of nylon. Camilla Rosberg (born 1967 in Falkenberg, Sweden) links private and public topics. She hangs personal objects of a single colour on a „red wall“ and a „yellow wall,“ and then invites the public to supplement the installation with objects of their own. Recently, Rosberg presented her complete unedited archive of photographs in a gallery and tore those 3207 personal photos into tiny bits, which took on a new context as heaps of memory. In Cologne, she will show recent paintings and drawings. Jakraphun Thanateeranon (born 1977 in Tak, Thailand) is also concerned with his own identity and his social environment, especially with ecological problems regarding drinking water or saving the Asian elephant. He links photoinstallations with projections and parallel actions. Samuel van Ingelgem (born 1976 in Mechelen, Belgium) moves between music, especially folk, and visual arts. For several years now, he has been concerned with the social phenomenon of the military. Documentary photos and objects such as military dummies, uniforms and guns are basic materials for his installations, videos and performances, which combine motifs of military marches with folkloristic drumming and speech. He is a member of the Belgian group Fluxus, which arranges its own songs for historical instruments. Jethro Volders (born 1974 in Herkdestad, near Hasselt/Belgium) plays in a current Belgian band as well. Fragments of rock and pop music and text flow into his artistic production. His photographs and performances take an ironic look at male behaviour, in a sometimes highly spectacular way: in stuntlike actions Volders has set himself on fire or hung from a rope attached to a moving car – events where the odd fracture is factored into the equation. Hentie van der Merwe (born 1972 in Windhoek, Namibia), a participant in the 1995 Johannesburg Biennial, uses traditional icons and examples of his southwest African homeland to analyze the personal and political aspects of male identity, especially those of the soldier or warrior. Van der Merwe produces edgings which he fastens as lines on the wall or like badges and ribbons on self-sewn uniforms: insignia with which he examines male groups and roles. Jårg Geismar, an artist of the gallery, curated the exhibition. Some of the artists selected are students or graduates of the HISK (Hoger Instituut voor schone Kunsten / Higher Institute for Fine Arts), Antwerp, where Geismar taught, others he got to know through his workshops in Sweden, Japan and Thailand. Our thanks to: Jårg Geismar, the HISK, Antwerp, Umeå Univeristy and the Thalibu Gallery, Bangkok.