5. Christian Odzuck
Mondovisione
2 September to 1 October
Moltkestr 81, Cologne
Images / Text
The film opens in a forgotten city, continuously ravaged by the wars of time and man since a period we can only understand as ‘immemorial’. It was a center of learning, it was a center of culture. Yet for all its faded icons and historic attractions, its topographical fabric is filled with too many dark holes to count.
Nothing ever remains in these fissures very long. Anything placed there vanishes almost as soon as it materializes, their contained nano-economic condition at the mercy of the unforgiving macro seas. In a gap, change is demanding, continuous, but strangely calm. It is normality that is a violence.
So one entity begets another, and another. They each incorporate the same set of elements, reconfigured in number, scale, or position. These evoke memories of non-existent epochs when civilization was reputedly great, or powerful; when humankind was the master of itself. Instead we have a succession of small humors – temporary fallacies, perhaps – resembling one another not so much in form or a reference to constructed antiquity but in the self-assured insanity of creation within the void, particularly in the full knowledge of its assured impermanence.
Scale is deceptive. Where there is stone, there was also an idea, maybe more of a whim, through something hand-made and fragile. While the void is a beast which eats all its sacrifices, the concept carries a spark of energy to be reproduced and spread to even darker crevices.
Mondovisione is a tangential project of Christian Odzuck emerging from his research into a multi-part regenerative architectural commission, currently in development for Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017. Rather than a purely formal building practice, typically manifested in public installations, Odzuck’s idiosyncratic research, self-publishing, graphic design, and extensive prototyping support a more playful and nuanced attitude in manipulating the common expectations of a contemporary artist inhabiting a masculine, modernist archetype.
Christian Odzuck was born 1978 in Halle/Saale, Germany and works in Düsseldorf. He is currently a lecturer at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he was a student of Rita McBride until 2010. He additionally teaches at the FH Düsseldorf, where he studied communication design and as a guest in the Peter Behrens School of Architecture. In addition to next year’s Skulptur Projekte organized by Kasper König, Odzuck is participating in the Mies van der Rohe retrospective at the Ludwig-Forum in Aachen. He has also completed projects at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, Goethe-Institut Chicago, Simultanhalle in Cologne, as part of Urbane Kunst Ruhr in Dortmund, and a public choreography in Boxmeer, Netherlands.