Diagonal Horizon

With works by Mahya Ketabchi, Nicole Khadivi and Alexis Gautier.

11 March to 14 April 2022

Diagonal Horizon is the fourth exhibition in the series of exhibitions The German School at the Goethe-Institut Irland. For this exhibition, the students presented recent works in film, audio, sculpture, and spontaneous spatial intervention.

Mahya Ketabchi’s Fragile landscape (2022) is a conversation between sound and drawing, forming a sonic landscape exploring the proximity of multiple senses. Witness with no eyes (2020) is a sound piece that takes as its subject three artworks by three different artists, using oral description of each work to explore what the Greeks called ‘Ekphrasis’, the oral narration of an artwork, drawing out its immanent capacities. A third work by Ketabchi, Braubachstraße (2021) is a photographic document of a street installation in Altstadt Frankfurt, adjacent to the city’s Museum of Modern Art (MMK).

Nicole Khadivi presented a new film work titled Neither an Overview nor a Close-up, which combines arresting visual footage of animal specimens literally pickled in jars, from several museums including the vast basement storage of the Swedish Natural History Museum, paired alongside a complex and engaging monologue which is unmistakably the voice of a gruff older Swedish gentleman. The monologue he recounts however, has a less typically Swedish origin, as it reiterates a comment Khadivi received whilst scrutinising an archive of photographs of her family, both before and after their migration from Iran to Sweden in the wake of the Iranian Revolution.

Alexis Gautier is based in Brussels but more often works with artists and craftspeople – often from Asia or elsewhere – to produce artefacts that bear witness to the complexities of globalisation, colonialism, and artistic practice. He provokes encounters and dialogue, reflecting on the notion of exchange and value, as well as on authorship and the protocols of exhibition-making.

For Diagonal Horizon Gautier has developed three site-responsive interventions. For Bibliomancy (2022), Gautier used the fragment of a book found in the Goethe Institut library (Speculations about Jakob, Uwe Johnson), fragmenting the text extract over 61 doors dividing the institute in rooms and corridors. Two others gestures are equally dispersed throughout the building, including a series of charcoal drawings displayed on the institute’s information boards (Fabulations, 2022), as well as a series of porcelain works (Door Hinges, 2022) responding to the ceramic fungus works of Bernard Schneider, which were kept on the wall since the previous edition Ein Loch weben of The German School exhibition.

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