© Michaela Melián / VG Bildkunst
Locke Pistole Kreuz, 2004
Slide projection with sound
2 Slide projectors, 160 slides, soundtrack
Installation view, Kunstverein Langenhagen, 2004
Photo: Michaela Melián
Locke Pistole Kreuz, 2004
Ink on Paper, 42 x 56 cm
15 June 1972, Michaela Melián’s 16th birthday and also the day on which Ulrike Meinhof was arrested in Hannover-Langenhagen, forms the starting point of Locke Pistole Kreuz. From it an Internet search machine generates a host of cross references that progressively ramify: via topographical descriptions, city maps, and freeway interchanges, the search machine arrives at the Kestner Society in Hanover. Johann Christian Kestner’s pistol, which Goethe’s lovesick friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem used to shoot himself, leads to a lock of hair from Charlotte Buff, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s unhappy love, model for Lotte in The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Johann Christian Kestner’s wife, before moving on to more freeway interchanges, and Ulrike Meinhof’s fatal noose. The result is a rhizomatic meshwork of (hi)stories, both private and political, and found images that serve as the basis for drawings. Transformed to negatives, the projected drawings in the slide installation Locke Pistole Kreuz phase slowly into each other as in an animated cartoon. The white lines stand out against the darkness. Gray tones occur only in the short transition phases between two drawings. The uniform rhythm of the slide projection is echoed by the music, a processed excerpt from Mary Lou Williams’ Taurus (Zodiac Suite) played as a sound loop parallel to the visual loop.
Locke Pistole Kreuz, 2004
Slides