Whose Propitious Garden Is This?

Having long departed from supposedly clear-cut divisions between his preferred modes of artistic practice – painting, filmmaking, and writing -, Stefan Hayn’s work now spans more than two decades of slowly passionate and often unsettlingly disidentificatory inquiries into the ties that bind the self to and isolate it from today’s societies. His foray into different artistic subjectivities – as painter, filmmaker, documentarist, theorist – may seem willful at times, and yet it is never merely a play of attitudes.  From work to work, Hayn never settles on formalised narrative habits – he has devised a whole range of ceaselessly changing theoretical, practical and unassigned tools that more often than not have one thing in common: they appear as daring experiments with a kind of post-heroic self-exposure (as an artist, as a political, historical, utopian, mental and corporeal being) that serves specific purposes, perhaps with the most discernible focus on questioning individual and societal modes of image-making.

Next to watercolours taken from the process of making his film “Malerei heute” – in which a long-term observation of billboards in Berlin’s public realm forms the backbone for a riveting narrative/analytical monologue – this exhibition offers the rare opportunity to study Hayn’s new paintings, extending motivic and referential branches to his latest film “Straub” (also projected as part of the exhibition) and its inherent discussions of historical truth and the fabrication of images (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet being as important as references here as the literary works of Robert Antelme) – and to one earlier (“Fontvella’s Box”) as well as one even more recent film (“Dahlienfeuer”) presented in different display situations, calibrated according to their specific contents and diegetic modes. It’s not “painting or film”, it’s “painting and film”.

Excerpt of the text by Clemens Krümmel