MICHAELA MELIÁN. Speicher

Michaela Melián is interested in the politics of memory and the ongoing impact of phenomena of contemporary history. She works with (his)stories, with traces of the past, which can gain significance for the present as "unused potentials of a lost future" (Jan Verwoert).

The exhibition centers around the new work SPEICHER. The thematic and formal point of departure for SPEICHER is Varia Vision - Endless Journey, an intermedia work realized in 1965, but missing today, by Alexander Kluge (texts), Edgar Reitz (films) and Josef Anton Riedl (music) on the theme of travelling. Reitz and Kluge taught at the Academy of Design in Ulm, where one of the first electronic studios in West Germany was located beginning in 1963.

For SPEICHER Michaela Melián makes this studio resonate once again. The sounds, tones and noises are recorded and form the basis for a new composition. A polyphonic text collage embedded in it sounds out the theme of traveling and music. There is no linear narrative in SPEICHER, but themes, stories and layers of time are interwoven in sounding loops and spirals with the here and now.

The installation SPEICHER is complemented by a large format mural, works on paper and by RÜCKSPIEGEL, a five-part video installation, for which Melián interviewed the protagonists affiliated at the time with the production of VariaVision. In the interview passages, rendered by actors, there is a reflection on the meanwhile obsolete connection between artistic modernism, technological euphoria and society-changing motivations.

Michaela Melián, born 1956, lives in Upper Bavaria. She studied music and art in Munich and London. Since 2006 she is guest professor for time-based media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg. She is a member of the band F.S.K.

In cooperation with the Museum of Ulm and the Cubitt Gallery, London. A bilingual catalogue has been published for the exhibitions by Koenig Books, London, with numerous color pictures and essays by Jan Verwoert, Brigitte Reinhardt, Stella Rollig and Bart van der Heide.