Oil, egg, salt and stir. "

Looks like silence? With the exhibition "Silences" is trying the French cinema legend Marin Karmitz as an art curator - and designed with a jukebox, a beach scene and a glass igloo is disappointing confusion.

 

Misleading is the title. "Silences" - silent, still on top in the plural, promises the show, and already here is a hidden confusion. Because in truth it whimpered between the works, characters in the half whisper, whisper number combinations speakers, videos, sound spread from a U.S. pop music jukebox drips. Does not even a siren?

The tour through the narrow, artificial maze reinforced the acoustic confusion. The environment acts as a menacing, urban environment, between the four, five meter high panels are narrow gorges, usually dipped in aseptic white. The scenery almost reminiscent of the expressionist films of the twenties, the path between the works, such as a switch between total, Halbtotale and sudden Naheinstellung.

No coincidence: The exhibition is the brainchild of Marin Karmitz, 70, of his professional biography began as a cameraman, shot short films and later as a producer, distributors and cinema owners reüssierte. His chain of MK2, with rights to more than 400 international titles, is one of the most successful in France. In 2005, Karmitz the management to his son - and almost simultaneously came the vision of an exhibition.

"I wanted to establish connections between film, video, literature, painting, music and visual art," says Karmitz, with this idea of the cross when the former Director of the Strasbourg Museum of Modern Art in "surprisingly positive response" was - long before the beginning of the year by President Nicolas Sarkozy to the General Delegate of the newly created Council for artistic creation "was appointed.

The ground floor of the building floor, next to the historic city of Casemates received Karmitz an area of 580 square meters - and completely free hand for the selection of works by 15 modern artists. "I have a rare degree of trust and generosity increases," says Karmitz. Especially as the city of Strasbourg, the project looked without skepticism. "We have here a man free hands, neither artist is still a painter, not a critic, not even a collector," says the Director General of the municipal museums Joelle Pijaudier-Cabot on the experiment.

Also by the film producer (Kieslowski's color trilogy) to the museum curator changed Paris, it was a "decision is not without risk", even if the man cinema in 1966 with a film about a piece of Beckett's attempts to film and video stage language to unite . Still standing Karmitz, later with a short, play movies and protest domestic and international prices finally into specialized manufacturing moved in front of an unusual problem: "Where is the substance crystallizes what works choose what era of presence at the center? What story? me before I arrived as a director without a script, "says Karmitz in Strasbourg," and only to the extent where I gathered the works, was also the match, cross-conception. "

"It's like mayonnaise"

Is characterized by the attempt to artists in relationship to. "It is a reflection of some artists, the beginning of the seventies began to seek the silence through the screen - to words, sentences, scraps of language. I have chosen people who overcame the silence with film, video, sound installations. "

"Silences", Karmitz and built by the architect Patrick Bouchain, starts with a lock, in the letters from plush (Annette Messager) the word "Ciineeemaa" form and in the vanishing point to a scare piece ( "One Laughing at the Red Ball") Juan Munoz lead. Then the visitor emerges into the half. Between open chambers, rooms, boxes - small refuges for the productions of the works: "One space per Oeuvre, a specific volume, Karmitz comes from the film, it was quite natural for him to work in the right light," says Bouchain.

The visitor encounters among others on the leisure of an American nightmare beach staging (Martial Raysse, 1962/2007), to a Glasiglu by Mario Merz (1969/1991), passed an almost appear as an emergency exit door (Robert Gober, "Door with Light Bulb ", 1992). Then he loses in the "Labyrinth" by Ilya Kabakov and Emilie - a maze in the maze ( "My Mother's Album", 1990) - and suddenly sees himself surrounded with Christian Boltanski's masked figures, disturbed passers between the rows, the short sentence Tatters murmur. Will be dismissed with the frontal view of Georg Baselitz ' "Three heads with snail" (1966) - a disturbing, provocative finale.

The result is a cohabitation of various works between time and space in a territory "(Karmitz), which is not immediately opens.

"Yes, it takes a little time to access to find, but it will work Marins bridge," says Christian Boltanski. "It's like mayonnaise - oil, egg, salt and stir it takes to succeed in the sauce?"

"Silences," in the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art "until 23 August, 26 October 2009 until 10 Januaar 2010 in the Berardo Museum in Lisbon.