Markus Hansen - Other People's Feelings
15 Sep - 21 Oct 2006
BISCHOFF/WEISS is pleased to present "Other people's feelings are also
my own 2001 - 2006" a five-year photographic and video work
consisting of a series of double portrait by Markus Hansen. In what the
artist calls an exercise in empathy and evocation, Markus Hansen (b.
1963, Heidelberg, Germany) pairs portraits of himself with men, women
and children of all ages. Adopting the facial expression of his
partner-subjects, Hansen strives to re-enact their emotions, inner
postures, completely transcending the need for, or the importance of,
physical resemblance, highlighted by the often radical physiognomic
differences.
In a totally new approach to portraiture, Hansen incarnates the sitter
and vice versa thereby creating a tension through the relativism of
interpretation, oscillating between absurdity and truth, pushing Hansen's
understanding of the other and of himself.
Hansen chooses people of diverse genders and races, friends and
relations, in an attempt both to erase and to critique the artificiality of
the concept of "difference." These portraits, he says, are about "how
we inhabit each other, reside in each other, and how we always leave
traces in each other. They go against the grain of the squeaky clean
'individual', idealised in our capitalist system, by generating fear of the
other".
The work reflects Hansen's interest in the emotional implications of the
unspoken traumas passed on from post-war generation to generation in
Germany. Presented as three slide shows of 23 portraits each, it will be
the first time that they will be shown together.
This ongoing project is now part of the Guggenheim Museum collection
in New York and has just been shown at the MIT List Gallery. Other
recent projects have included the site specific staircase to nowhere on
the Tapis Vert at Versailles, Versailles off 2005. Markus Hansen lives and
works in Paris. He has been showing internationally for over fifteen
years.
Markus Hansen would like to thank Bruno Scotti for his collaboration in
this project.
my own 2001 - 2006" a five-year photographic and video work
consisting of a series of double portrait by Markus Hansen. In what the
artist calls an exercise in empathy and evocation, Markus Hansen (b.
1963, Heidelberg, Germany) pairs portraits of himself with men, women
and children of all ages. Adopting the facial expression of his
partner-subjects, Hansen strives to re-enact their emotions, inner
postures, completely transcending the need for, or the importance of,
physical resemblance, highlighted by the often radical physiognomic
differences.
In a totally new approach to portraiture, Hansen incarnates the sitter
and vice versa thereby creating a tension through the relativism of
interpretation, oscillating between absurdity and truth, pushing Hansen's
understanding of the other and of himself.
Hansen chooses people of diverse genders and races, friends and
relations, in an attempt both to erase and to critique the artificiality of
the concept of "difference." These portraits, he says, are about "how
we inhabit each other, reside in each other, and how we always leave
traces in each other. They go against the grain of the squeaky clean
'individual', idealised in our capitalist system, by generating fear of the
other".
The work reflects Hansen's interest in the emotional implications of the
unspoken traumas passed on from post-war generation to generation in
Germany. Presented as three slide shows of 23 portraits each, it will be
the first time that they will be shown together.
This ongoing project is now part of the Guggenheim Museum collection
in New York and has just been shown at the MIT List Gallery. Other
recent projects have included the site specific staircase to nowhere on
the Tapis Vert at Versailles, Versailles off 2005. Markus Hansen lives and
works in Paris. He has been showing internationally for over fifteen
years.
Markus Hansen would like to thank Bruno Scotti for his collaboration in
this project.