08.11.2002 - 21.12.2002, Karlsruhe

Daniel Roth

Schatzhauser Wald

 

We are very glad to present Daniel Roth’s exhibition “Schatzhauser Wald”, with which we are opening our new showrooms and also celebrating our gallery’s five year anniversary.
Real places and harmless objects compose the basis of Daniel Roth’s installation narratives. But they are just one element within his narrative networks, which create complex stories between fact and fiction via drawing, photography and sculpture. Mysterious spatial situations, characterized by the interlacing of architectural and organic fragments inevitably awaken a suspicion of fairy tale adventures or criminal activity.
The narration of the exhibition “Schatzhauser Wald” in our gallery integrates the “glass man” from Wilhelm Hauff’s fairy tale “The Cold Heart” as the protagonist of the storyline. While in the original story the “glass man” had to fulfil three wishes, he now tries to find the site of the disappeared ship, a theme which originally appeared in the gallery Michel Maccarone New York. With the help of an eternit-console he makes telepathic contact with three horse brains in Skorbo, Denmark. Based on the outcome of a horse race the number combination on the betting slip reveals the whereabouts of the ship in Poland. The voyage now leads from Skorbo over Warsaw, to a labyrinthine river and moor landscape on the eastern border of Poland. There is a house with concrete blocking all of its apertures from the inside. The search continues in the dark interior, infra-red photographs capture clues, and cartographic drawings document the route. Finally, an architectural model of a fictive new building by the largest Polish life insurance company, PZU is discovered. The traces lead inside of this, where stone walls separate the rooms into four levels. By way of an elevator the last level is attained, there the eye is captured by a wall covered with tatters of pornographic pictures. Upon closer inspection, new clues are found: underwater exposures of the vanished ship.
As the last narrative moment in the exhibition they hint at the end of the story, but a mask constructed out of fine slivers of wood enables the viewer to immerse himself in the next level of reality, whereby his own subjective realm of imagination continues the plot.