In the beginning there was the word.

In the summer of 1989, 17-year-old Mirko Reisser and two friends sprayed the five letters RIGHT on a distribution box. The term alone is a provocation. After all, property damage is anything but “right” – at least from a legal perspective. Today, 35 years later, Mirko Reisser still writes his name DAIM in the style of classic “graffiti writers”. At the same time, however, Reisser redefines writing to a certain extent by transforming his pseudonym into complex sculptures.

Sometimes this is to be understood literally. Reisser has already made forays into sculpture, carving the word DAIM out of wood or casting it out of concrete - and in this way transferring the two-dimensional medium of writing into three-dimensionality. As a rule, however, Reisser creates an optical illusion of physicality when he paints his name on canvases, in exhibition rooms or on house facades. In doing so, he plays with light and shadow so virtuoso that the impression is created that the beams, curves and curves are nested into one another to form complex figures Polyhedra would leave the surface and actually protrude into space.

The fact that he writes his name repeatedly - in keeping with the idea of writing - but at the same time has long since set the rules of writing for himself again and again, is one of the exciting ambivalences in Mirko Reisser's work. Like the fact that he... still works with a spray can, but at the same time he has long since composed his pictures and applied them in numerous layers like a classic painter. When he writes the name DAIM today, on the one hand he obeys the blueprints of the letters. At the same time, however, he deconstructs and reconstructs them until it is no longer possible to recognize the structures as sequences of letters.

In his own unique way, Mirko Reisser explores the boundaries between surface and spatiality, between typography and architecture, between legibility and abstraction.

Rik Reinking has accompanied Mirko Reisser alias DAIM since 2001 and has acquired numerous works and groups of works from all creative phases for his collection. Based on this long-standing relationship between artist and collector, it is now possible to trace Reisser's unique path from an active street writer to an internationally sought-after artist.

An accompanying catalog to the exhibition can be purchased at WAI and online.
Paperback, German / English, 128 pages.
20 x 26 cm. 25 €, ISBN 978-3-9824951-0-1.

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Considering the often polarised fragmented identities that we perform and how to bring the interiorised authentic self and the exterior constructed self together. The goal is to examine socially constructed patterns of behaviour, create situations in which the participants break or transcend the internal feedback loops that control their own actions, and address the power structures we inhabit and perpetrate.

Filippos Tsitsopoulos (1967) is a painter, installation, media and performance artist who explores the limits and the interfaces between performance and painting since the 1990s. His practice engages the spectator/participant to a “new” form of theatre that integrates performativity as a catalyst of our daily life. Theatrical conventions and props are applied to his visual practices such as masks made from living materials including animals or plants. His video installations have been exhibited at a variety of distinguished venues and contemporary art institutions including:

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MAY 2024 - JANUARY 2025

ALEX MCQUILKIN

SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN

Unnoticed under a heap of clothes, a teddy bear lies on the floor of a closed wardrobe. In front of him, in that very wardrobe, two teenage girls stand facing each other, bashfully chewing their fingernails and nervously scuttling from one foot to the other. It is only as a muffled babble of voices that the party going on outside comes through to their unusual venue where both of them try to hide their hesitant interest in their counterpart.

For seven minutes they stand avoiding each other’s gaze, seven minutes that, according to the rules of the game, are supposed to be seven minutes in heaven…

"Actually, it’s really an awful game", Alex McQuilkin explains the popular party entertainment that involves two persons being locked inside a tight room and left to do whatever they please for the duration of the indicated time. However, the intimacy that is supposed to be effected in that forced situation does not arise in Alex McQuilkin’s video “Seven minutes in heaven” (2004), instead revealing the inner conflict of the girls who, trapped under the pressure of living up to the expectations of a wild exchange of body fluids, sink into wavering inactivity.

The conflicts and pipe dreams in teenage girls’ everyday life are the great theme around which the works of the young video artists Alex McQuilkin (*1980, Boston) centre. Through her protagonists, she tells intimate stories about the search for identity and the desire to be someone special – stories which offer the viewers immediate identification points but still leave them standing slightly embarrassed in front of the monitor.

from: Von Himmel und Hölle und dem ganz normalen Wahnsinn by Katharina Klara Jung, 2006.

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