Cornelia Schmidt- Bleek

?PONG?

Preview on Friday, 13 December 2002 from 7pm - 9pm
Exhibition runs from 14 December 2002 - 22 February 2003

The gallery will be closed from 24 December 2002 ? 11 January 2003


Galerie Kamm is pleased to present the Berlin based artist with her second solo exhibition in the gallery.

The exhibit, titled "PONG", tells the story of the exotic Durian fruit and the military experiments of a government that uses smell as a weapon to combat civil unrest and disperse large-scale gatherings of people.

The story merges fact with fiction. One indisputable truth is that most westerners find the Durian, with
its prickly, threatening appearance and offensive smell, rather difficult to stomach. Another is that the US military has been conducting tests to develop a global stinkbomb. Has nature got there first? Does fact
become fiction, or fiction become fact?

Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek leaves the viewer to come up with an answer. In an installation composed of objects, odor samples and drawings, she presents all the characteristics of a fruit little-known in the western world. The artist arranges each individual component in the style of a still-life painting, juxtaposing them with a
large-format photograph of an empty street strewn with debris, its shop windows boarded up. What has just happened here? The answer is not imme-diately clear.

In this show, Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek combines two themes already featured in past work: the various phenomena of temporary mass gatherings in urban contexts; and the question of how and in what form the strange and un-known appears to us as a society ? what changes does it provoke ?

Please contact the gallery for further information.