05/06/2021 – 19/06/2021,

Epilog: Sami Schlichting, The Walls Have Ears

, Projektraum von Westfälischem Kunstverein und LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur

Epilog marks the last chapter of a year in the now beloved ’’Hütte.’’ Describing a moment of reflection, of pausing and looking back, as well as of departure, Epilog is itself a sequence of diverse chapters. As a series of four solo exhibitions, it offers a glimpse into the approach of each artist, their working practices, visual and material worlds. With new works ranging from sculpture to installation to painting, from research-based processes to explorations of narratives and popular culture, the four Residence NRW⁺ grant holders – Jasmin Werner, Sarah Buckner, Sami Schlichting and Pablo Schlumberger – negotiate the particularities of the Projektraum of LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur and Westfälischer Kunstverein as a means of reflecting on the material and discursive frameworks of their own practice. What conditions underlie it, what conditions does it presuppose? Incorporating the specific spatiality and window frontage of the exhibition space, this series of solos also engages with the idea of what it means for their work to be on display under current circumstances. Each chapter is accompanied by an event conceived as a response to or continuation of the practice of the artist in question. Sami Schlichting solo presentation The Walls Have Ears is the third of the exhibition series.

Equally elegant and precarious-looking figures and forms populate the space. Their sketchy silhouettes and spiky outgrowths stay on weathered pedestals. Walls and platforms are placed at their side – and it is unclear whether they serve as backdrops or are themselves sketchy props that are possibly still waiting for a completely different appearance and have only found their way here by chance. Cables snake across the floor, functional neon tubes set accents with their cold light, and protruding cable ties cast ghostly shadows on the wall, which in this scenario could itself be haunted by some kind of ghost.

The sculptures and wall pieces in The Walls Have Ears are largely reappropriations of the artist's earlier work. Destroyed, discarded, or deposited in places no longer accessible, they exist only in the image archive or as memories. Such a remix practice, however, should not be understood as mere repetition, in the sense of a digital reproduction logic in which original and copy are identical. Rather, the processes of reappropriation follow an approach that confuses the linear sequence of temporal levels. As if the past was something waiting for its still imminent discovery or realization, it inscribes itself where memories pair with current influences to produce new artistic works.

From everyday moments and any area of entertainment, Sami Schlichting collects visual notes like fateful clues in a treasure hunt, which at first seem banal and yet anchor themselves in the mind, often even remaining sensory in the body's memory: The movement of a cartoon character, the motif of a record cover, the shape of a bulky waste find, the smallest image details from news broadcasts, scenes from body horror films such as David Cronenberg's The Fly, Ridley Scott's Alien and Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, or precisely that pop-culturally often quoted phrase that gives this exhibition its name.

Such references are abstracted in Sami Schlichting's works in such a way that they, at most, evoke vague associations. This may also be due to the materials used: organic elements like hay and unfired clay meet standardized, commercially available metal, wood, wire, Styrofoam, and plastic parts. Wavering between chance and intention, excess and reduction, organic-looking form and formlessness, the sculptures stop at none of these poles. One could understand them as embodiments of the impossible, as spawns of an in-between world.

In this respect, remix could also be understood here in the sense of mutation, and mutation in turn as a perpetual possibility of variation that always holds both the potential of openness and plurality as well as a latent danger–of the monstrous, the contagious, the unknown, the formless, the boundless. Not for nothing does the figure of the alien function as an "allegory of the apocalypse caused by the absence of a boundary between the world and the otherworldly, order and chaos, technology and nature, human and non-human life.“ (Gaia Giuliani) And principles of origin and authorship, innovation and originality become obsolete at the latest when these new forms give birth to new variations, in a potentially endless game of simulation, repetition and deviation. Nothing is ever new, nothing is ever lost–it only changes form, appearing again and again and always differently.

Text: Marie Sophie Beckmann

Sami Schlichting (born 1987 in Cuxhaven, Germany) lives and works in Düsseldorf. His sculptures dwell in ambiguity. Some of them are boisterous with extended limbs, reaching out like dendrites. Others look up with mutual curiosity, as if peering back. Organic, unruly materials like straw and white, unfired clay are often combined with wood or metal parts, or wire that is bent to form an internal skeleton. This is where notions of juxtaposition and disjuncture come into play, and where a third thing arises: In a sense, it is a form of alchemy, a process whereby the material acquires another, and indivisible immaterial status and presence other from what it was. These sculptures are reminiscent of automatons, but with a form that is more organic, more disorderly than we have come to understand the physical rules and forms of artificial life. Sami Schlichting graduated from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2016, where he studied with Andreas Schulze and Rebecca Warren. His recent exhibitions include Dungeons & Dasein, Lucas Hirsch, Düsseldorf (with Elin Gonzalez) (2020), Spoilage #2, curated by Wschod Gallery, Warsaw, SALTS, Basel (2019), Hereafter, Mélange, Cologne (with Cezary Poniatowski) (2019), RAW, Dumont Kunsthalle, Cologne (2019), Where Do Streams Run To?, Damien & The Love Guru x Lucas Hirsch, CFAlive, Milan (2019), Prati bagnati del monte Analogo, Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen (2018), Jokes to run a family, Lucas Hirsch, Düsseldorf (2018).