Jakob Lena Knebl @ Palais de Tokyo, Paris

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Georg Kargl Fine Arts is delighted to announce the exhibition Doppelganger! by Jakob Lena Knebl and Hans Ashley Scheirl at Palais de Tokyo.

Jakob Lena Knebl & Ashley Hans Scheirl, view of the exhibition Doppelganger!, Palais de Tokyo, 19.10.23 – 07.01.24. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Aurélien Mole

Doppelganger! by Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl

  • October 19 – January 07, 2024

  • Opening: October 18

  • Palais de Tokyo, Paris

Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl’s exhibition takes the form of diverse installations, islands of light that invite the public to explore “spaces of desire”, in their words. They create an immersive setting with carpets and mirrors through which the visitors become part of the show. The scenography draws on the codes of art, design, literature and socio-cultural phenomena while tending towards the humorous and the grotesque. The installations presented confuse values, they generate a series of tensions and affects that lend the most recognisable of their sources of inspiration an uncanny effect that is both unsettling and intriguing.

Rough concrete, gloomy corners, inextricable interlacings and bracings at walls and ceilings and numerous columns lend a background to staging our works. The cellar evokes the subconsciousness of a building. A liminal place, a heterotopia that can be associated with sub- and countercultures. We turn the basement of the building into an uncanny scenery for the ghosts of the Palais and its visitors.”

References from Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace to Barbapapa, Hans Bellmer to Luigi Colani, Hector Guimard to contemporary cyber aesthetics are interwoven to create protean works and beings, whose transmorphism pushes back the boundaries of good taste and representations of identity. The artists enter into a dialogue with each other based on the prefix “trans”: transmedium, transgenre, transmateriality, transcontext – a playful interchange between contemporary creation and the history of art and design, deconstructing the idea of identity as a whole: from mannerism to surrealism, from dark romanticism to biomorphism, and from modernism to postmodernism, opening onto a future of cybernetic existence.

Jakob Lena Knebl & Ashley Hans Scheirl, view of the exhibition Doppelganger!, Palais de Tokyo, 19.10.23 – 07.01.24. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Aurélien Mole

FOTOCULT Blog by Glaphyra Gusenbauer