Marie-Christine Schoel: Enfolding/Unfolding

The VI PER Gallery warmly invites you on December 12, 2018, at 6:00 PM to a lecture titled Covering/Uncovering: Metaphors of Exhibition and Exhibition Practices.

Visiting an exhibition is often an experience that completely absorbs you, even if you belong to those who feel distant from art or are even deterred by a certain artifact. It is a sensory experience during which the observer is generally not allowed to touch anything. Material objects intertwine with each other and with the depths of that very specific space of the gallery. The observer (who is endowed not only with eyes but also with a suitable body) is invited to drape themselves in this drapery of thoughts and references.

Sometimes the meaning is obscured and hidden at the very end, in that shadow which could just as well be an optical illusion. We find ourselves in the darkness, where the veiled meaning lies. Other times, the given meaning is revealed right before our eyes – it is as if the curtain suddenly rises, revealing a stage on which we unexpectedly find ourselves. There we see what has been hidden behind it all along, although we did not see who raised the curtain for us and brought us to this moment of exhibiting and viewing, leaving us ourselves exposed. For this moment, we draw the curtains to hide from the scorching sun that enters through the windows of the Beirut hotel, where we have time to recover from that insight.

Marie-Christine Schoel teaches and works as an assistant at the Department of Art History at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster. After obtaining her diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, she is now focusing on the topic of environmental exhibition formats in the history of feminist exhibitions in her dissertation. For the presentation of her research in the context of the current exhibition at the VI PER Gallery, she received a travel grant from DAAD in collaboration with Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität.

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