Anja Luithle’s Maschinentheater (Machine Theatre) is the home of borderliners. Skirts jerk around without women to wear them; feather dusters dance without hands to direct them. Moreover, her work gives inner life to pots, handbags and shoes through motorised and computer-controlled systems of varying complexity. The mechanical motion element acts as a spark of life, making her art human and realistic. This is how Anja Luithle lets everyday objects float, dance, sound and march.
The observer assumes an active role in this process. He transforms the objects, humanising them as they turn into a canvas onto which he can project his imagination and feelings, memories and longings. The designs of his imagination can change with his personal mood and disposition of the day. It is also the observer who sets the objects into motion by his movement in the room or by clapping, waking them from their frozen-mute stillness.
The machine figures, obeying the system that controls them, end their movements after a specified time. The activities that follow a controlled and well-trodden path thus have a beginning and an end. Perhaps they embody symbols of a life’s journey. Even against the background that artworks are artefacts, incapable of embodying living beings, the artistic orchestration should be interpreted as offering a conscious experience of the time and space of life.
From a text by Heiderose Langer

PRIVATE VIEW :
Friday, 27 October 2017 6 PM - 9 PM

mpefm GERMANY art press release