ZOOM
She has foreseen it in our everyday life. However [delete?] [Not] not as a destructive attack, not as a military offensive, and without wreaking havoc, the artist Elke Reinhuber – eer for short - takes aim at everyday life. Her quiet interventions, which are always site-specific and thus never arbitrary, appear almost gentle and caring. Cairo, Berlin, Edinburgh, Sydney, Braunschweig and the Internet are some of the numerous settings where eer has left her traces - usually only temporary. Her weapons are photography, video, performance, interactive installations and animation. With these media she assails urban banalities, renders them visible for a limited period - perhaps raising an ironic grin - before releasing them back again into the rush of the daily grind [¿too many mixed metaphors?].
The procedure is split into two [employs dual] modes: activist and analytical. More than anything else, eer is a meticulous observer of her environment. Her sight is particularly set on the significant [curious?] decoration of urban landscapes such as street signs, water markings [urban ideograms?], fire-hydrants, scaffolds or fire extinguishers. Photo series of these individual groups emphasise the difference of the objects among themselves [disparities and their similarities], which is as well based on invariance, and become an ornamental network, which displaces their original significance. (cf. Bin it, Trolls with Twinges of Conscience, 4x4 in 101).
Iridescence emerges from coloured patterns, multicoloured sequences of similar objects and the nearly encyclopaedic displays of species, hitherto unnoticed [overlooked until now]. This analytic observation of the artist as a collector [This artistic analysis?] usually leads to transformation of the dormant object. in a context of action.
For this the artist slips into different identities (for example, Me and Myself), of which “The Urban Beautician” is only one. Dressed in a white smock – as signification of authority and scientific seriousness - she goes into urban space [the urban arena?], in order to perform her cosmetic treatments: she cleans heavily polluted rubber plants - (ficus elastica (delete this?)) afterwards polishing their leaves with beer - in order to bestow on them a special gloss (Leaf Gloss); she invents a volume control switch to be able to adjust the noise of the car horns in the dense traffic (Volume Control); she hangs fire extinguishers in forest areas, to counter the risk of fire (Pyrophobia); she makes a noble wig of white felt for the bronze-cast head of Karl Marx, to give his cool existence as a statue some warmth and humanity (Flip Your Wig).
These mostly absurd and sometimes ironic appearances in public space have, above all, the effect of astonishing and surprising passers-by, drawing their attention, upon which they might react with a smile, a curious glance, or a shaking of the head. Their sudden, spontaneous and unexpected confrontation with the Unusual engenders a reaction, an answer. The coincidental confluence of an artistic event and passers-by [an accidental audience] renders them spectators and hence to part of the performance.
eer transforms an everyday situation into a special event with understatement and with few means. With her performative interventions she alienates something ordinary, singles it out from the insignificant rush [foregrounds it amidst the throng?] and imbues it with new meaning; also opening possibilities of interpretation to the participants.
eer’s work is characterised by the use of different media. Employed primarily are photography and video, which are used in part for their documentary quality during the performances, and partly as independent works. But the boundaries are fluid: a performance transforms into a video, a film is interactive, a photographic series becomes an animation and finally the different pictures come together again in an installation. These images are sometimes representations of foreign places and cultures. At the same time they refer to and evoke an idea of this other place, bring it closer to the present, without actually making it tangible. eer imports the place as a picture to Germany (Damensalon, (=Beauty parlour)), but the place stays faraway; it remains a shadow and at the same time reflects the interest of the artist in the ordinary beyond the borders of her own culture. As a changeable identity, she integrates herself with the performances and installations. For one moment she allows objects to shine, to stand out; those things which are either unknown or already in the shadows of oblivion, and hence invisible. Thus eer makes it visible.
Michael Fürst