Sentimental Journey
with Felix Lindner
Galerie Waidspeicher
Erfurt 2020
With thanks to Susanne Knorr and the Kunsthalle Erfurt
Opening Performance Lorenz Lindner
Sentimental Journey is an ongoing dialogue in exhibition form between Felix Lindner and Helen Britton, shown in Munich 2018 and Erfurt in 2020
Artists statement:
What is it to observe something that for one of us is so familiar and the other so exotic, when the two are friends for 20 years? To stand together at a Christmas market all those years ago, at the beginning of our friendship, where a glass bird triggers in one a long forgotten memory and the other says, “I know the factory where those birds are made”.
We come from opposite sides of our planet with such different histories; cultural, historical, political, geographical. These external forces make so much of what we are and how we see, but not everything. There are the personal choices; how to react, interpret and select what to show. This is simultaneously a result of context and of something else too. The unique stories we carry within us and the stories we see in materials.
How does context impact, how do we deal with it and how does this reveal itself in what we choose to bring across the bridge from the private space of the studio to the public space of the exhibition?
What do we reveal about history and about ourselves with this activity?
What do we transmit of our experience?
Trawling the ruins, the shards, the rubble of history, selecting materials and forms that release an emotional impulse we tell a story here with this work – not a story of excess, of bounty, but of poignant observation.
We are both searching for traces of a lost past, making these traces visible, fixing them in these works, creating with the language of the chosen materials a story that connects past and present, culture and history, geography. The forests of Thüringen, the city of Erfurt, the great shifts in modern German history, gentle and brutal, freedom, loss, globalization, it’s all in there, whispering, rustling, glinting.
The stories told are the stories saved, they live on not only in words but in materials and the people that can hear them speak.
