The Narrow Ridge

Laura Sundermann & Krzysztof Honowski

Kunstverein Leverkusen, 26 - 28 August 2022

The Narrow Ridge stretches out into the water. It is a step closer to the sea, falling apart somewhere where we cannot be. Beyond it the almost unexplored region, a known unknown.

In Laura Sundermann and Krzysztof Honowski’s new video installation the rooms of the Kunstverein Leverkusen are charged with fragments of elsewheres. The artists’ diaristic videos fictionalise the encounter with nature, staging moments of repose and wonder that occasionally slip into absurd pulp fiction. Sometimes they are also interrupted by the news, and sometimes a body appears in the gallery space itself. With these intimate sketches the artists present the experience of the inbetween-consciousness of the everyday, the third-mind of possibility that accompanies us at all times and is only put to bed by our violent relationship with time. Does everything have to be a loop? Does having a technological prosthesis for most human functions mean we have to live our lives through them? If experience is only finite, then it can only be goal-oriented. However, even at our most despairing we know that something will be left behind, maybe a warning, a whisper.

The Museum Schloss Morsbroich and its park serve as a stage, a site of memorial, and a time machine for this multi-channel work, inspired by Ann Quin's 1972 road-novel Tripticks and Thomas Mann's 1924 novel The Magic Mountain. In both texts, fiction falls apart and reveals a confessional, with the authors seeking and mostly beautifully failing to define their relationship to time, landscape, and what makes humans tick. The Narrow Ridge is, just like these texts, a meditation on contradiction, of life on the edge of the thin-between.

The first Performance was on Friday, 26.8. at 19:30, while the second Performance was on Sunday, 28.8. at 12:00.