ZOOM

She has charged on our everyday life. 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 eer has left her traces - usually only temporarily. 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. The procedure employs dual modes: actionistic and analytical. More than anything else, eer is a meticulous observer of her environment. Her sight is particularly set on the significant decoration of urban landscapes such as street signs, water markings, firehydrants, scaffolds, or fire extinguishers. Photo series of these individual groups emphasise the disparities and similarities between the objects, also 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. This analytic observation of the artist as collector usually leads to transformation of the dormant object, in the 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 the urban arena in order to perform her cosmetic treatments: she cleans heavily polluted rubber plants - afterwards polishing their leaves with beer - in order to bestow on them a special gloss (Leaf Gloss); she invents a volume control switch which is able to adjust the noise of the car horns in 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 surpri sing 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 an accidental audience renders them spectators and hence 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 and imbues it with new meaning, also opening possibilities of interpretation to the participants.
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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 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
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