Maximilian Flachsenberg – A Dance for Increasing Distances
128
A Dance for Increasing Distances is a sculptural installation that creates an illustrious dance across the entire window front of the sp ce | Muthesius.
The convivial objects and their staging are the result of an intensive examination of aesthetics in industrial slaughterhouses. In the process, they cite the spaces, utensils and bodies that are at work in these places and create a formal tension between clinical-looking sterility and substantial carnality.
The butcher's apron is symbolic here. It functions as a physical-hygienic barrier, as a separating layer between the working body (human) and the processed body (animal). Through it, the encounter between the animal body and the human body supposedly remains without a trace and is lost on the smooth vinyl surface.
In Flachsenberg's practice, a deliberately drastic approach to motifs of the physical and intimate is articulated. Bodies and body images are veiled, blown up, manipulated, and thereby point to their socially constructed character. As a result of this artistic questioning, the categories of inside and outside lose their contours. A diffuse physicality develops, ranging from the curiously amusing to the gloomy.
As the scene of political and ethical struggles, “bodies” are constantly appropriated, interpreted and defined by various ideologies. The installation exhibited here weaves these ambivalent impressions together and exposes all the more tragically the intensity of violence and the underlying mechanisms that make it ‘bearable’, justify it and trivialize it.
