Galerie Adler featuring Laura Kuch @ subzones

Laura Kuch - Text

Heiner Blum

Playing with the operating software
About the works of Laura Kuch

Should you drill a hole into the ground of your rowboat to see what’s underneath; saw the branch off while you’re sitting on it to ﬁnd out what will happen? You don’t play around with basics of existence, but if you do so it’s gonna be really exciting like in the works of Laura Kuch.

She relaunches slavery, even though it’s just for a short while: How does it feel to rent a human being? In one’s imagination it may be really tingling but in reality it rather sucks, because the rental property gains the upper hand over the situation and tears his master off a strip: who wants to be powerful ends up in his own mess.

The ones you want to be beautiful take a look into the mirror but seldom they are really satisﬁed. Laura Kuch helps and provides us with nice faces in form of projections that we can put on our own faces. Both, the “beauty“ and the “own“ merge together and what comes out are real zombies – exactly like in real life.

So maybe you better exchange something of your own: The service station “one-to-one“ offers the opportunity to ﬁnd a different, better life and exchange it with the approval of its owner: the complete existence or maybe just your parents or you simply start with your clothes.

Who can’t bear this calls for his mum and is being recorded by Laura Kuch. The calls for the mother echo in an installation in the staircase of a department store and drag the unsuspecting passer-by down to the depth of its own childhood.

When the child grows older and does not want to be a child anymore the worried parents listen on the door and between brute guitar sounds they get the new message: “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” is the password for cutting loose. Laura Kuch loops the sound passage from “Rage Against The Machine” and pumps us in a hypnotic suction between wanting everything and negating everything.

She builds a love machine with two video tracks and two ﬂat screens. By headphones we receive the magical three words. We can experience every protagonist twice: at the beginning of hoping and at the beginning of resignation. The messages clasp and cannot hold on what’s already lost long ago and lost again…

So maybe then you prefer to scream: will-less, for no reason, just for the sake of it? For a video installation the artist asked several people to really lose their inhibitions and what Mr. Munch didn’t know yet: It feels really good!