Plan B – Kunst Raum Stadt 26.05.2000 — 05.06.2000

Valérie Belin’s photographic series presents perfectly composed arrangements of Venetian mirrors and glass objects, generating endlessly fractured mirror spaces. A microcosm of highly ornamented emptiness unfolds within these images. Belin’s photographs were shown in the Burgtorpassage, whose glass decoration and urban vacancy formed a comparable spatial ensemble.

In the works of Valérie Jouve, also presented in the Burgtorpassage, urban desolation contrasts with the exaggerated emotional presence of figures displaced within these environments.

For Plan B, Marin Kasimir developed a panoramic photograph measuring approximately 3 × 30 metres, merging situations from Dortmund and Paris. The work examines the differences and similarities between the two cities, as well as the images and expectations associated with urban life.

Decoration is also central to Claude Closky’s wallpaper works, whose patterns are assembled from fragments of cosmetics advertising. Images of liquidity, splashing, and overflowing are transformed into a sterile all-over surface. For this work, a section of the passage beneath the main railway station was covered with wallpaper. Another work by Claude Closky consists of video projections in which a thumb relentlessly moves up and down, rating trends such as “coffee” and “energy drinks,” “hang gliding” and “bungee jumping,” or “art as fashion” and “fashion as art.”

Bernard Lallemand’s display-case installation Une vie de rêve at the same location evokes similar contradictions between sterility and liquidity. Three rotating mannequins present accessories designed to prevent the release of bodily fluids, allowing them instead to circulate entirely within the body.

In his video works, Franck Scurti explicitly engages with urban displays. Chicago/Flipper, for example, combines a rapid camera movement through Chicago with the aesthetics of computer games. The city appears from the perspective of a pinball. Heineken Vision, a simple recording made through a filled beer glass, similarly creates an artificial urban interface.

Natasha Nisic and Herbert Schwarze work with conflicting images of belonging and home. Schwarze created a temporary karaoke club in which sentimental songs of local identity overlap with less attractive images of Dortmund’s urban backstage areas and with the idealised visions produced by city marketing.

At the library, Alain Bublex presented his long-term project Glooscap: a real-fictional city whose “history” and “evidence” are assembled from historical and contemporary fragments of various cities. It functions as a retrospective, hybrid prototype of Western urban development.