Painroom: Misery is a Butterfly

VIP is the Berlin based collaboration of a group of Leipzig artists: Lysann Buschbeck, Grit Hachmeister and Kathrin Pohlmann. The have been active in together since 2003 and work in various media, including performance, collage, installation, and photography.

The painroom is a continuously growing archive installed in the style of a Victorian salon, which consists of photographs, drawings, photocopies, objects, texts, Internet printouts, newspaper pictures and articles, imagery on pain. The VIP artist group has been collecting them since the start of their collaboration and by now it comprises more than 600 items.

There is a weeping in the world,
As if the good lord had died,
And the leaded shadow, which falls down,
Weighs heavily like a grave.
Come, let us hide more closely…
Life lies in the heart of all
Like in coffins.
You! Let us kiss deeply –
A craving is knocking at the world,
From which we will have to die.

Else Lasker Schüler

In 2003 we started to collect these pictures, things, articles, letters and still more pictures Everyday we come across them and they tell us their stories – Unattractive ones. Beautiful ones. Sad ones. Distateful ones. Miserable ones. Wishful ones. Brutal ones. Despaired ones. Horrible ones. Disquieting ones. Painful ones. Angry ones. Hopeless ones. Loving ones…

And so we have given them space.

These archives of discovered newspaper and internet pictures, articles, letters, diary excerpts, photographs and small object, thus growing now for seven years and which we call among ourselves room of pain, constitute an artistic long-term project. So far it has been exhibited in four different places and rooms thus assigning the respective state of affairs. So the first presentation in Dresden-Hellerau in 2003 comprised approximately 80 pictures and the last one as yet in Biberhaus in Hamburg in 2007 already 600 pictures and several objects.

The visitor enters a room and looks at a multitude of pictures. They are hanging on the walls painted in dark-red, closely together, apparently in random order, in different sizes and frames, some unframed, next and above each other – looking at the opposite wall. The view wanders around the room.

Approach now! Look!

One’s breath is taken away at once. Memories start to come back, partly understanding – or else perplexitiy. Dispiritedness starts to spread. Helplessness. Perhaps.

Pacing off the pictures now. Roaming view. Agitated. No orderly arrangement in rows. No dicernable logic. And so much. Incredibly much. Stopping – reading. Keeping going and more and more of it and then again of something else.

Some of the visitors get sick.
Some get sad.
It is very quiet. Almost devout.
Nobody talks…

Lysann has recently said: Like the water in the water. It is about the merging of longings, of life and ideas. About bundling the big world in a small room…

The world comes along painfully and so do its pictures, for this is what they talk about. But also of the longing that in every sort of failure and suffering there is seemingly hidden some sort of beyond.

In this way the material selected entirely subjectively by us is completed by own drawings, texts and photographs. This is obvious to a greater or lesser extent. But it is important. For us, too, we are responsible for these longings and this presentability of pain. What are pictures capable of? What do they provoke? What do they bring along and what do they conceal? And what do the observers conceal? They also bring their context. And they are also part of a collective memory of pictures on which we touch and on which we gnaw. We do not know them all – these pictures of which there are so many more. Because us, too, we know about our origin, our position and about our view. To this we now expose the contemplator. Without comment. Without meta-level. The profane material is dignified and receives a place/room. Most of the time a framework, too. A second life in life.

Kathrin Pohlmann