DARK MATTER

beschichtetes Polyethylengewebe, Styropor, 1000m Tennis Saite, Seilspanner, 800 x 700 x 650 cm, 2010 @Galerie KOAL, Berlin

The installation dark matter, is already the fourth “sculptural system” on which Dennis Feddersen has been working. Once more, much as in his sculpture misfit, the young artist  attempts a “destabilisation of the perceived spatial structure” (Feddersen) that is as calculated as it is open. In doing so, he has conceived his new piece as an indeterminate structure which is neither closed nor, ultimately, determined in its form. Rather, dark matter presents a kind of sketch which takes on different relations to each location as well as the viewer according to the sites at which it is realised.

But one step at a time: first of all, the artist bundles Styrofoam forms and cuttings together and sticks them together with construction foam. These elements are then coated with parts of black truck tarpaulin made of PVC. Finally, these seemingly “torn” sculptural forms are braced by means of black polyamide string – the material used for tennis rackets – into a sombre and tense constellation. The temporary constellation seems to flutter, as it were, in a paradoxical “motion in rest” (Paul Virilio) through space.

Thus dark matter succeeds in raising anew the question of localising sculpture today in the contradiction of open, even dynamic form and seemingly heavy, dark matter. It is precisely the openness of the work which allows for its further physical transformation, be it by pushing, turning or stretching, namely by refusing an unequivocal assignment in allegedly stable spatial order. This is the reason why the sculpture announces just the sort of sense of space which the French curator and author Nicolas Bourriaud has the formulated as the basis of a “radicant identity”: the subjective rootedness in the 21st century is characterised by “practices of transportability” which allow biographies to nest almost simultaneously at different locations and within different cultures.  That is exactly what happens in the piece dark matter for its “destabilisation of the perceived spatial structure” leads to aesthetic transformations which are adequate with regard to the instability of previously firmly fixed (national) localisations.