The
Art
of
Emergency

Dorothea Koch

Other work (selection)

23 Dinge / 23 things






In February 2021 Dorothea Koch and Alexander Mayer distributed a letter in the mailboxes of the Rosentraße in Lübeck asking for the loan of a thing from the personal possession of the residents. A total of 23 things were borrowed from 14 residents, and Koch and Mayer worked with them until the exhibition was set up at the end of April. Questions such as:

"What relationship do we have to everyday things?", "Are things also eye candy?", "When does it hurt your eyes?", "Things and materiality - why do we have stones in the household?", "Are things more taken to heart under corona conditions?", "What happens to an object when it is presented outside its original context?", "Does the relationship to the object change when you take on a different perspective, when you put on different glasses?".

For corona reasons, the exhibition had to be shown in a shop window. It was sponsored and supported by the Possehl Foundation and the Kulturfunken Lübeck.


Resonanz und Wunder / Resonance and wonder

At the invitation of the exhibition venue Artenne Nenzing in Austria, Dorothea Koch and Nicole Noack spent several months researching objects from the attic of the house. The results of their research were shown as a spatial installation at Artenne in 2019.

On a table in the exhibition space lay various objects from the Artenne's attic depot: Pieces of wood, buttons, old drawings, a conductor's cap, mended stockings, newspaper pages, and others.

Dorothea Koch and Nicole Noack encountered these objects with the gaze of strangers to the place. They have created new orders and connections, shifted levels of meaning and categories, and left enough room for absurdity.

On two walls, different text levels (factual texts, personal texts, quotations, book excerpts) were combined with photos, drawings, photocopies, and small objects to form an imaginary network. The associated connections between wall works and objects on the table were facilitated for the visitors by small attached numbers. Nevertheless, it was not the quick deciphering that was important here. Connections should be found and not searched for!


Forschungsgruppe V.F –
ein fortlaufender interdisziplinärer Werkprozess /
Research Group V.F -
an ongoing interdisciplinary work process

How to write a biography? - Jacques Le Goff (1989)

As a result of an inconclusive internal discussion on renaming the former Viktoria barracks in Hamburg-Altona, the artistic research group V.F was formed. Since February 2017, it has been researching the fictitious identity of V.F (Viktoria Fuchs/Victoria Fox/Vicky Fuchs), whose constructed life story has parallel references to the barracks and Hamburg's history. In a first step, the research was based on a timeline from 1878 to the present. Discursive collections of biographies, predominantly of women, were created within this period, partly by linking them to the names Viktoria or Fuchs. Complex themes such as biography and the search for traces, memory versus recollection, re- and reconstruction of identities/biographies and history play an essential role. The project is to be understood as an ongoing interdisciplinary work process. Members of the research group V.F (Dorothea Koch, Alexander Mayer, Nicole Noack et al.) work in the former Victoria Barracks. In 2017 and 2018, the research group showed first results in the exhibition "100 Fragen an V.F""100 questions to V.F". The thematically affiliated performative house tour "Das Leben soll mich treffen wie Wetter ohne Schirm“ through the former Victoria Barracks was conceived by Dorothea Koch.

From the opening speech by Nora Sdun (Textem-Verlag)

... It is always a question of which story is told by whom, and above all which is not told ... which empty spaces open up, or close up ... The research group has now thought Vicky Fuchs into such a blank space, whereby the "space" in the word "blank space" is just not a place where one could put something safely and for a longer time, because terribly or miraculously, this space / the blank space is constantly shifting and ghosts around between the historically proven facts, between which there seems to be a lot of space, depending on the point of view. ... (the phantom) Vicky Fuchser seems to be an accumulation of disparate, contradictory, incommunicable elements. Held together only by the relentless but also reliable unwinding of time (even if the shifting spaces in between are not stable, time is reliable - at least in this project). And of course the inventors of Vicky Fuchs know this. How would it be the other way around, how would it be if we believed the narration? If you believe in Vicky Fuchs, a mediating omnipotence works, reconciling all contradictions and impossibilities and making everything suspicious self-evident (such privileges all believers have, no matter if you believe in Vicky Fuchs, unicorns or gods).