An Art project by Ottjörg A.C.
Vernissage:
Fri., 8.11, 7–10 pm
Opening hours:
9–24.11.2024, Wed.–Sat. 3–6 pm
Artist Talk:
Fri., 22.11, 7 pm
The exhibition is curated by Dr. Helen Adkins
In 2007, a relatively quiet time for Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories, the artist Ottjörg A.C. used original classroom desk tops, which had been scratched and engraved by pupils, to put through the printing press. The resulting large-format etchings tell of the hopes and fears of young people from schools in Beirut, Haifa, Jerusalem and Ramallah.
The exhibited intaglio prints are part of a global project on the school desk top as a social and aesthetic storage medium for teenage speechlessness. This extensive project was realised between 2006 and 2016 under the title DeskXistence. It involved 48 schools in 18 cities across five continents. The work on the printing press was carried out locally or in the region. Ottjörg created a total of 618 etchings. Each print is the size of the school table top from which it has been made.
The carved “scholarglyphs”, made by adolescents in Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories in 2007, show that the urge to express oneself on the surface of a school desk is similar, wherever the school is located. In 2024, these etchings hold a new meaning.
Schools and classrooms are closed rooms within closed spaces: on the way there, freedoms are given up and discipline is standard (discipulus is Latin for pupil). In the classroom, knowledge is moulded into ideas of a promised future. For the moment, the pupils meander between attentiveness and dreams. Their future is housed in a virtual space, even when school claims to offer a solid base and a secure foundation for the future. Feelings of hope and anguish, alignment or resistance are fellow travellers on the path of decision making.
The prints are impressive testimony as to how situations in different places are carried into the classroom and manifest themselves there on the pupil’s table tops. In 2024, the question arises as to what is happening with the dreams, with the future of young people when the walls of their schools can no longer impart safety? When schools are destroyed, offering neither protection nor resistance, will fear narrow perspectives or broaden horizons? Where is it all going?
