Oskar Klinkhammer
Oskar Klinkhammer, Meerbusch (Germany) 1985
Period of residence: september – october 2016
Winner of the Baden Württemberg-Catalunya Grand 2016
Oskar Klinkhammer is a post graduate student at Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) and holds a diploma in media art. He studied art history at Heinrich-‐Heine-‐University, Düsseldorf and media art at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG), Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan.
Klinkhammer works multi and interdisciplinary, but preferably in the media of sculpture, painting, video and film. For his works he uses electric motors, found objects, steel, glass, peepholes, surveillance cameras, and video mixers. Klinkhammer leads the viewers gaze into small, private realities that are simultaneously capable of reflecting and describing large, complex connections. By directing the gaze with the help of tools of surveillance technology, not only various types of hierarchies of the gaze are revealed and investigated, but also its often attained association with the panopticism points to a social critique of surveillance. The transmission of the actually existing world into the mediated reality can be understood as an ironic link to social attitudes and propaganda and the attempts to establish truth within a morbid society of comsumption and control. Perversion, compulsion, neurosis and fetish of patriarchy and the artifices of everyday life are disclosed.
Viewers see images of decadence, of the beauty of death and the absence of vital energy, symbolized by machinaries that propel the specimens. The incomprehensible is magnified, surveilled, and projected, affording insight not so much in a scientific or technical sense as in the form of a subjective experience. The action and the figures are not deciphered; they refer to their own growth and decay. A farewell to earthly doings.
Some shows: The Kinetic Circle, Anitchambre, Düsseldorf, Germany (2016); Jubiläum,
Kunstverein, Radolfzell, Germany (2016); Relation Dose Effect, Luis Leu, Karlsruhe, Germany (2016), por-‐bling-‐inter-‐fist-‐form, CONTAINER.jetzt, Düsseldorf, Germany (2016); LET ME WRAP YOU IN MY WARM AND TENDER LOVE, Sushila Malloy, Karlsruhe, Germany (2015); GAKUTEN, Tokyo Big Sight, Tokyo, Japan (2014), eX14, Lunetto, Fukuoka, Japan (2014); GEISTERBAHN, Galerie UNK, Landshut, Germany (2012); bling-‐ bling-‐ding-‐ding, LOTTE, Stuttgart, Germany (2012), BLACK CHAMBER, Tanja Goethe, Düsseldorf, Germany (2012), YOUNG AT ART, Raum für junge Kunst, Zürich, Switzerland (2011); VIDEO ETC., National Center for Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia (2011).
