⁰¹ Kai Schiemenz, digital painting presented at Kappatos Gallery, Athens
⁰² Nikos Charalambidis, studies of one of the constructions exhibited at Turner Contemporary, London, 2005
⁰³ Kai Schiemenz, Dwellings of a suspended Empire, installation view, Kappatos Gallery, Athens
⁰⁴ Still from a video by Nikos Charalambidis
⁰⁵ Kuitca’s large-scale paintings featuring city maps and house floor plans, could well have been the work of Schiemenz, outlining the process by which he created the sculptural construction presented at Kappatos Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York.
⁰⁶ Nikos Charalambidis, protest banner from the series Design your house furniture in a way that could serve at the right time the Revolution
⁰⁷ Nikos Charalambidis, picnic basket fitted with a camp bed, from the series of maps of the Via Egnatia
⁰⁸ Map-bearing mattresses by Kuitca. Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York.
⁰⁹ City plan by Kuitca. Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York.
¹⁰ Constructions by Kai Schiemenz
¹¹⁻¹⁵ Drawings by Kuitca. Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York.

Maps and platforms of hospitality: Three cases of convergence/divergence


Christopher Marinos asked me to write a short text on the basis of those elements that my work seems to share with that of Kai Schiemenz’s. The truth is I received quite a number of remarks concerning the similarities that one may easily spot in our respective work; similarities which may even seem hilarious should one compare the specific construction that is the centrepiece of the exhibition titled Dwellings of a Suspended Empire with one of the constuctions featured in my exhibition at London’s Turner Contemporary, 2005. And the reason for this is not so much that both these two instances of a rather monumental type of construction refer to the Cold War period and to the Berlin Wall, employing moreover structures and forms typical of Russian Constructivism; it is not so much that the outer shell is partly covered by graffiti, or that once inside the constructions the visitor is called to watch a video projection by an invited artist, but rather, (and this is where this strange instance of convergence becomes almost anecdotal), the invited artists in both cases are showing a video that presents a group of ballerina-men in action!

Apart from being a set of self-contained sculptural constructions, Schiemenz’s platforms of hospitality can also be seen as scaled down architectural models of stadiums-sports arenas, of amphitheatres or planetariums, or as the additional utility spaces of a museum, as pavilions where visitors may watch a certain projection, or attend a lecture, or participate in some form of discussion. And here lies a crucial difference between Schiemenz’s work and my own. The museum is for me the energy contained in the very space of my home and studio (Rambling Museum), and sculptural constructions are made to serve precisely this idiosyncratic ‘museum space’ in the capacity of utility objects, of furniture or architectural elements (windows, floors, the roof, etc.). My perception of the museum reflects the ancient Greek model of a meeting place, a place conducive to creative activity, a workshop, rather than the Anglo-Saxon model of an exhibition space already established in 1759, the year when the British Museum was founded. The Rambling Museum is but a traveling studio or workshop, a platform for co-operation, where notions of the private and the public intertwine, where the notion of the home extends as far as to include that of the homeland, which consequently means that platforms may be constructed out of the mobile, transportable parts of my home or those of my homeland (barrels from the wall that divides Nicosia, for instance). As the host is exposed, the concept of hospitality acquires a very personal quality, even in its most straightforward, most conventional sense: that of the host’s main concern which is none other than offering his guests a bed and the possibility of a sound sleep.

The ideological failure of the communist system is the subject of mordant satire in both these videos featuring ballerina-men [img. 03–04]. After all, classical ballet was a powerful instrument of propaganda in the service of soviet totalitarianism.

Thus, the motif of the bed as a sculptural platform recurs in my work with almost obsessive frequency, contrary to Schiemenz’s platforms, which though often alluding to the womb-like spaces of the Situationists and Archigram, do not in the end espouse the philosophy of the travelling shell, of a home-of-the-snail type of space, of cocooning and the architecture of the Cushicle. The spaces he creates do not seem to encourage isolation and reflection (with an aim at regrouping and taking meaningful action); instead, they invoke the practice of assembly for the purpose of participating in a discussion or witnessing a certain spectacle, which is in fact a way for the artist to express his criticism of the endless discussions, the ostentatious publications and lectures that sought to describe the art scene of the ’90s as this developed alongside the radical political and architectural change witnessed in the span of this decade.

Beuys’ call for a direct democracy and his social sculptures are challenged by this epigone of his, a native of Berlin. And though the concepts of Eurasia, of partition, of the Wall, should take on an academic or formalist dimension in the work of Sciemenz, in my work they still hold a vital role. Beuy’s activism and the hellenocentric discourse to which he adhered are a constant point of reference. Bed-platforms, for example, seem to have their origin in an installation titled I want to see my mountains, 1971, for the purpose of which Beuys transported his bedroom furniture from the family home in Kleve. Conversely, around the end of the ’80s, I would construct the iron display cases for the maps of the Via Egnatia — the first international road to unite West and East — based on the dimensions of my own bed. As a result, the transparent maps seemed to be replacing the mattress in an iron bed. Against the background of the junta’s oppressive regime, Argentinean artist Guillermo Kuitca does exactly the opposite.

In his case, bed mattresses (those of children’s beds in particular) become the canvas for his work. On them he maps imaginary stories of cities, insisting on the traditional process of painting, so that the resulting installation — a multitude of strewn mattresses — should allude to Beuys’ blackboards, though clearly possessing a Kiefer-like expressionist painting. Sharing a common thematic concern with Schiemenz, Kuitca creates his own platforms of hospitality — amphitheatres, sports arenas, conference centers, etc. — on two-dimensional painting surfaces. At a time when Kiefer’s ‘school of painting’ had reached a peak of popularity, Kuitca was beginning to attain international recognition as an artist, to arrive today at being the favoured child of major galleries and art events (Documenta, the Venice Biennial). His obsessive preoccupation with the art of mapping is complemented by an interest in depicting house-floor plans, urban topographies and street grids. However, though Schiemenz bases the design of his sculptural construction (in the current exhibition) on an outline of the floor plans of houses torn down to be replaced by the Berlin Wall, while avoiding to present the map in question, Kuitca seems to persistently focus on highlighting precisely such cartographic evidence …


Home assignment: Create a Schiemenz-esque sculptural construction, based on the outlines of houses that Kuitca has marked with dark colour on the city-plan, left.


Born to Jewish parents in Buenos Aires (though his persistent concern with maps should not be construed as a sign of the Jewish quest for a return to the ancestral lands), Kuitca experienced the brutality of the dictatorship and began his mapmaking on beds in 1982, a year marked by the fall of the military regime and the Falklands War. Nevertheless, as much as critics and scholars who attempt an analysis of his work may like to link the beds, as symbol, to Argentina’s tumultuous political history, Kuitca himself denies this interpretation. He maintains that his maps refer back to childhood traumas (influenced perhaps by his mother, a child-psychologist?) and are not specifically related to Argentinean history, but rather with a more universal experience. Indeed, they do not correspond to any real topography, but appear to be more of a series of psychographs, elaborate devices for documenting the nightmares of childhood … However, the more the viewer approaches these dreams recorded on children’s beds with the intention of decoding them, the more they create the illusion of being far away, due perhaps to their small size. In fact, the distance between the viewer and Kuitca’s maps seems to augment as the viewer approaches! It is perhaps this latent sense of perspective, present in many of Kuitca’s works, this game of deception based on scale, and, more importantly, this conscious intention to disorient the viewer, that are the main points of convergence between these three distinct visual practices; points on which the three seem to collude without the slightest degree of deviation …


Kai Schiemenz
Dwellings of a suspended Empire
Kappatos Gallery, Athens
16 January – 23 February


Nikos Charalambidis is an artist

Translated by Maria Skamaga