15.11. – 10.1.04
“Silent Screams Difficult Dreams”
With works by Louise Bourgeois (F), Sophie Calle (F), Maria Marshall (GB), Mathilde ter Heijne (NL) and Susan Turcot (CAN)
Group exhibition at Arndt & Partner, Berlin

Press Release

The "Silent Scream" and the "Difficult Dream" - the stroll between dream and reality is the red herring in the works of five artist that will be shown in the exhibition Silent Screams Difficult Dreams at Arndt & Partner from 16. 11. 2003 to 10. 01. 2004.

With Louise Bourgeois, the most significant woman-artist working today and the one-and-a-half generations younger Sophie Calle (whose work will be on view at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris from 18th of November), two of the most important contemporary artists are represented in this show. Maria Marshall, Mathilde ter Heijne and Susan Turcot represent the younger generation of artists, who currently establish their names with unsettling imaginary or psychological worlds. All the works meander on the borderline between the subconscious and social norm, reason and intuition, between surrender and protest. Intuition and intensity of emotional perception runs through the works like a connecting thread and merges into a "Silent Scream" of five artists.
Inward orientation, psychoanalysis and the subconcious are prominent in Louise Bourgeois' (born 1911) works.In her small drawings, a selection from 1946 to 1998 will be shown, she comes to terms with traumatic childhood experiences and existential anxieties.

French conceptual artist Sophie Calle (born 1953) merges categories of reality and fiction in an attempt to retrace her Self. In "Dream Weddig" - a wedding that was planned, but never took place, authentic and pseudo-autobiographical elements blend into a fictitious collage.

The Dutch artist Mathilde ter Heijne (born 1969) dissolves the distinction between the Self and fiction even further. In F.F.A. L #1,#2,#3 she projects the images of three fictitious characters onto life-size doubles of herself and thus approaches their conflicts in search for their own identities.

In contrast the British video artist Maria Marshall never explicitly refers to her own biography, not in her new, elaborately finished video loops, either. She does, however, refer to her own life in having the protagonists of her disturbing dreamlike scenes performed by herself or her sons.

The most recent works of Canadian artists Susan Turcot (born 1966) recourse to intuition. In her series "Transmission" she deals with world political issues but disturbs the depicted reality through the act of drawing: the delicately drawn out representational elements are ,in a second step, attacked by lines that appear to be the sudden or explosive outburst of the subconscious or a feeling of inner protest.