Andreas SlominskiDas Ü des Türhüters

So now, portable toilets – Works by Andreas Slominski (*1959 in Meppen), of whom the art magazine Monopol once relished pronouncing that he is “really a seducer,” have been on view in countless museums of contemporary art since the early 1990s. For many years his bicycles belonging to homeless people, laden with all their worldly goods, stood leaning against the wall in sprawling museum halls, while various makes of animal trap, set up and thus primed, from small ones for the mouse to large ones for the wild boar, instilled considerable respect in visitors. In 1996, for the Skulptur.Projekte Münster, Andreas Slominski placed a bicycle inner tube around the mast of an ordinary street lamp: “He did not, however, do so by throwing the tyre up and looping it around the lamp post, as is usual in the well-known children’s game. Instead, Slominski had construction workers lift out the lamp, laid the tube around the post from below and had the street lamp put back in place.” This form of “roundabout actions” long determined his artistic practice, in which the practical benefit bore no relation to the effort expended. Accordingly, the website of the Skulptur.Projekte states that “the astonishment and the amusement at the roguish convolutedness were the real gain of the action.” Andreas Slominski studied art at the HFBK in Hamburg from 1983 to 1986 and, after a professorship in Karlsruhe, has been Franz Erhard Walther’s successor there since 2004. Especially for the Deichtorhallen he has now developed a room-filling installation with publicly deployable portable toilets – “the human being in the ballot box” (Andreas Slominski) – which stand for the transformative character of our cities. In the exhibition the artist will present around 100 of these mobile plastic WCs, and in a curious reversal parts of the cubicles will reappear on the wall as pictorial objects. The interior fittings of such mobile WCs as well – urinal, toilet seat, paper roll holder or ventilation pipe – will be arranged on the walls like colourful panel paintings or in the space. Andreas Slominski has been invited to hold solo exhibitions by numerous renowned institutions worldwide, among them the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Fondazione Prada, Milan, the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, and the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht. In 1997 he took part in the Biennale in Venice; from May onwards the charm of his objects, with their Mephistophelian view of the world, will spread through the Deichtorhallen Hamburg.

Exhibition:
Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 14/5 – 21/8/2016