Susanne M. Winterling untitled(Through the looking glass II), 2010
site-specific installation
Photo: Stephan Baumann

For her solo exhibition "Through the looking glass," Susanne M. Winterling has developed several site-specific interventions which extend across all exhibition levels of the Badischer Kunstverein. They contain a wide range of media: from photography past film, collages and objects all the way to architecture-related installations. With cinematographic and sculptural sensitivity, she arranges these different materialities into constantly new and surprising constellations which react pointedly to the specific spatial situation of the respective exhibition room.

Winterling's new installational works are closely linked to the history and architecture of the Badischer Kunstverein. Bourgeois self-definition - of fundamental importance for the establishment of the Kunstverein and the creation of its impressive building - serves as the point of departure for a journey through the spaces of the institution. Winterling directs the viewer's gaze to the various insignia and traces of a bourgeois culture to which customarily no attention is paid or which otherwise remains hidden beneath the many layers of construction alterations. Her interventions enter into a playful, sometimes also aggressive or imaginative dialogue with the architecture. Elements of the world of cinema, dadaistic references or objects of Trash lay out a concrete, contrasting image to the classical severity of the White Cube.

Closely connected to this question concerning the various sites, forums and hierarchical structures of the bourgeois public is a further motif of the exhibition, namely that of (female) adolescence and the threshold to individuation and self-discovery. What influence do bourgeois conceptions have on the maturing girl and on the formation of her own identity? What alternative self-assertions arise as forms of youthful protest, what strategies of adaptation? Jewellery, porcelain figures and references to Punk and Gothic culture are only a few of Winterling's concrete references to the - also biographically motivated - obsessions from the teenage years. On a formal level, the artist responds to these questions concerning identity and individuality above all through the recurrent utilization of mirrors. The mirror thereby not only represents a module of social and political reflection-dynamics, but also serves as an important instrument for self-investigation and self-reassurance. But the view into the mirror as a search for one's own self is always based solely on an image, a projection: This provides Winterling with the crucial connecting point for her staging of a parallel world which she places in contrast to the customary norms and conventions in the exhibition space.

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