Andreas Slominski: Das Ü des Türhüters

Dirk Luckow (Herausgeber)

So, now we have portable toilets
Works by Andreas Slominski (* 1959 in Meppen), considered »a true debaucher« by art magazine Monopol, have formed part of the collections of numerous contemporary art museums since the early 1990s. For quite some time now, his bicycles laden with the belongings of homeless people have been leaning against the walls of sweeping museum halls; various kinds of live animal traps, from small ones for mice to big ones for wild boar, instilled a sense of awe in museum visitors. In 1996, for Skulptur.Projekte Münster, Andreas Slominski placed a bicycle inner tube around the mast of an ordinary street lamp: »However, he didn't take the easy way out, by imitating the usual children's game of throwing the tire over the top of the pole. Instead, he had construction workers lift the streetlight out of the cement; he then placed the tire around the pole from underneath, and then had the construction workers replace the lamp back in the pavement.« This form of »complicated actions« has long determined his artistic practice, where practical use is completely disproportionate to the effort expended. Accordingly, the website of Skulptur.Projekte states that the »real payoff is the astonishment and amusement over the mischievous intricacy of the actions.« From 1983–1986, Andreas Slominski studied at the Art HFBK in Hamburg and became in 2004, after a professorship in Karlsruhe, Franz Erhard Walther’s successor. Specifically for the Deichtorhallen, he has developed a large-scale installation with portable toilets – »human being in the voting booth« (Andreas Slominski), reflecting the ever-restructuring character of our cities. The artist will present about 100 of these mobile plastic toilets in the exhibition DAS Ü DES TÜRHÜTERS (The O of the Doorkeeper), and in a peculiar inversion, parts of these cubicles will be displayed as pictorial objects on the wall. The interior elements of these mobile toilets – urinal, toilet seat, toilet roll holder or vent pipe – will also be arranged like colorful paintings on the walls and in the space. Andreas Slominski has been invited for solo exhibitions by many prestigious institutions around the world, including the Kunsthaus Zurich, the Fondazione Prada, Milan, the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, and the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht. In 1997, he participated in the Venice Biennale, and from May this year, the charm of his objects of Mephistophelian worldview will be revealed at Deichtorhallen Hamburg.Exhibition:Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 14/5–21/8/2016