Chapters of Violence: Power & Control

© 2023, Max Eicke
MEDIUM

An installation with 30 mixed media artworks in rooms

YEAR

2023

LOCATION

Galerie Weisser Elefant (now: Kunstraum Mitte), Berlin

MATERIALS

Mixed Media

‟The trauma is present.”

© 2023 Max Eicke

The artist is present.

With this announcement, galleries, art associations, and museums invite visitors to openings and hope to attract more public interest. But the artist is present anyway through their art. A question is much more urgent: who or what else is present? Ghosts of the past? For example:

© 2023 Max Eicke
The artist’s experiences result from power structures created by the culturally programmed imbalance between men and women. These power structures, in turn, are based on collective traumas, which are the exhibition’s target. The trauma is present. Power structures, especially those that promote gender inequalities, exist everywhere. They are camouflaged in patterns that culture and society reproduce.

Narratives of assault, emotional blackmail and structural abuse of power.

This is what „Chapters of Violence“ brings to light. The artists Veronika Christine Dräxler and Patrick Alan Banfield initiate a joint process of reflection and reappraisal at Galerie Weißer Elefant, which deals with misogynous structures in the exhibition business that go far beyond the boundaries of the gallery spaces. A process is conducted from multiple perspectives: female, male, and institutional.

© 2023 Max Eicke

Personal experiences of trauma are related to inherent social conventions and hierarchies presented in the exhibition „Chapters of Violence“. The exhibition is a glimpse of the process of disclosing collective traumas that led to the construction of the same institutional frameworks within which the exhibition itself takes place. At the same time, the combined works of Dräxler and Banfield examine the inherent ambivalence of the symptoms of social trauma:

© 2023 Max Eicke

What is the relationship between toxic masculinity, softness and vulnerability?

At whose expense can a healing process take place, and who „pays“ for it – in both an economic and emotional context? The exhibition is an installed arrangement that integrates all individual works and spaces into an overarching concept.

- Markus Boxler, curator
© 2023 Max Eicke

Maintaining the balance of power.

In the process of staging it became clear to Patrick Alan Banfield and Veronika Christine Dräxler that they needed to have full creative control over at least one individual room, rather than designing all the ten rooms together. To maintain the balance of power.

© 2023 Max Eicke

The "Trophy Wife Room" by Veronika Dräxler is composed by her private furniture, belongings and photographs from an Ecuadorian Holy Site of Mother Mary founded by a close family member and the Bavarian Missionaries Museum Archabbey of St. Ottilien, mixed with belongings from a befriended huntress, filled with the sound of a Remix of "Bang, bang my baby shot me down". Taxidermy, champagne and designer brands: the residence of a woman with elevated needs - as opposed to the "Man Cave" by Patrick Alan Banfield that houses both the horny teenage boy and the ego-shooter's pleasures.

© 2023 Max Eicke
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