Kompression af et Kunstnerkollektiv

Fukvenue's reporter besøgte det tyske kunstkollektiv OKDog ved åbningen af deres udstilling i Salon 75 d. 1 december. Konceptet gik ved navnet "Compression" og skulle, som navnet antyder, rumme kollektivets 10 personers kreative udfoldelse på meget lidt plads (4x6m). 

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Raman: "So, we got this opportunity by our, now dear friend Theo, to come here to exhibit for as long as we want which happens to be two weeks. So we decided that we would come here and spend one and a half weeks creating the exhibition in the very place we are and just coming with just a basic outline and concept and not more"

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What is the basic idea of this "Compression of Salon 75"?

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Raman: We, as a collective, formed for the purpose of making the magazine for the Honeyland Festival and through this process of making this magazine for the festival first, and then understanding how we could be a collective we had our trials and preparations and felt like we didnt really have a clear idea of what our identity as a group was. 

So we thought we would use this opportunity of this, rather small exhibition place where we woukld be cramped in with 10 people to have this compressed, both timewise and in terms of the space, experience of being a group and what it means to work as a  group.

 

Raman: What happened is, we came here with our materials, with some pretty conceived concepts and then just started creating. In the process of creating we found a both a visual language as well as the underlying thematic of this cultish group that celebrates these somewhat godish figures and retells the story of these figures through different medias.

 

What has been the respective weight of the aesthetics and the group's interaction?

 

Lucas: You can say that the purpose of this exhibition has been group therapy in a very positive way. If you've been a part of the creation process it's been a very conceptual piece but visually you can see it if you want to see it but it's also just standing for itself. But its creating some sort of emotion, some atmosphere and whatever people get out of it. But for us it's basically been about finding out who we are, and it's been an experiment seeing what happens when people connect.

We have a certain vision, taste, interest that we share, but nonetheless we are all these separate, artistic personalities.

Whatever mixture of several of the people, something different comes out. (…) There's a very basic thing i think about this exhibition which is very important to me, is that we didn't care about whatever people think about it despite what we maybe think about it or what we get out of the process. Because i think that a basic problem that's around in general is that people always want to impress and always want other people to like things. I think a very important thing for an artist is developing something for yourself and boiling in your own soup (…) And seeing where this leads and not caring about what this means to other people. So i think this "doing it just because we want to do it and feel like it's important" as the main reason for it is a pretty important aspect of the whole thing.

 

Was there any criterias of succes, and are you satisfied with the outcome?

Raman: The goal for succes was the process. So we wanted to achieve every layer of collaboration that we could imagine, which totally worked out. There were pieces where multiple people would work at the same time and parts where groups would form and then dissolve again and where you would hand something to someone else to see what they would do about it and in that sense both as i see the central piece of this is actually the communication and the collaborative process. The outcome is a little bit like an imprint or a photography: it represents what the process was moreso than it being the measurement for succes. Nevertheless, at least for us, a lot of what we felt and what we wanted to do is also in here. For example the fact that all of us are in some way or another trained illustrators, meaning that we communicate either through singular pieces of work in very concrete concepts or through a series that has a certain structure. But in here, none of the pieces really stand on their own. All of them need the other pieces to communicate what they're communicating.

The whole room is a piece, not the singular pieces in the whole room.

The outcome is to me, aesthetically as well as conceptually very amazing.

 

Lucas: What happened is, that there is no serious artistic persona standing on itself, but, at least to some point, giving birth to some serious collective artistic persona. Like Raman said, he did a lot of things that he wouldn't have done by himself. So there's a reflectiveness going on all of the time.

 

What was the frame of following the same visual language?

Raman: One of the earliest thoughts on this process was, that the factor of communication in a group, may it be an artistic group or a society, as soon as you become or identify yourself with a group, communication is not only a medium, it's actually a message. It's what being a group is about. Through this thought process, what happened very fast is, that we would work towards each other's pieces all the time without setting guidelines, just following along what the others had done. So you redraw the shape that somebody else did. So you are re-interpreting. Re-verbalizing. Re-visualizing the thoughts of the other people, and by that sheer nature it's like the strings of the thoughts get woven into each other and becomes this pattern that is dense enough to become this fabric of multiple thoughts

 

So you didn't have any practical frames of how to work together before you started?

Lucas: We played some games in the start to get into the flow of working together where Raman would bring a block of sticky notes (and some of them are actually exhibited over there) and some of us would decide to draw something and passed it around, and then the next person would continue. This was to get warm and fresh with the way of working.

 

Was that also a project to put yourself aside for the sake of the collective?

Yes it was quite a bit about killing the ego. This ego thing and what is happening with it in the end

 

What is the receiver's role in seeing this room?

Raman: This was a very internally conceptual project, and communicating this concept was not the primary focus. The viewer is like the last link in the chain, re-interpreting what has been re-interpreted by us several times already.

 

Where are you heading towards now, as a collective? And how has this project changed your direction?

It randomly happened to us that we are going to do stuff like this, twice for now. One thing is an exhibition in Madrid that we're having in April. This is, like Salon 75, also a very small space owned by someone at our age. We are also going to do an artist residency for two weeks at Krabbesholm Højskole. The basic goal is to go on with what we've been doing here but keeping what we've have learned in our heads and trying to push what we can do as a collective even further. The next thing for the collective might be communicating more. Maybe having a more certain topic that we're going to focus on.

 

OKDog Collective has made 4 exhibitions in Hamburg and has recently formed the Honeyland Magazine for the Honeyland Festival 2017.