JENS LÜSTRAETEN, SABINE SCHRÜNDER | The Ocean Never Blossoms

Opening: Friday, 27 June 2008, 7 p.m.

Exhibition: 28 June - 26 July 2008

In their first artistic cooperation Jens Lüstraeten & Sabine Schründer devote themselves to the various facets of the term longing. The multipart installation The ocean never blossoms combines video loops, with photographs and processed objects, spinning a dense web of abstraction, narrative and sensory perception. 

“Come into my life!” This sentence is spoken repeatedly by actors on a theatre stage, as a solo or as a battle of words. A young man burrows frantically in the ground, another searches obsessively for something beneath the bark of a tree. Lüstraeten and Schründer use staged video sequences as an artistic method to extract a sense of existential lacking from their subject matter and at the same time to visualize its possible suspension or reversal. Subtle concentrations of shifting emotional hues are the outcome. 

Sealed with gold leaf and no longer playable, the cassette entitled “2nd Disco Mix 88” becomes an intimate relic of memory to the eye of the beholder, symbolizing each individual's personal soundtrack from a specific era. The photographic approaches combine monumentalized emotion in the form of a giant concrete ship with miniature, fleeting black and white images of ordinary events. The construed public gesture of the concrete sculpture comes face to face with Sabine Schründer's challenging and interpretative perspective, while the private character of Jens Lüstraeten's images is generated by the direct and quiet view of the incidental. 

The consciously interwoven and associative design of the exhibition, and the mix of several mediums, point to the complexity of the term longing. Far from wanting to decode or contain the term, the intention of the artists is to engage with the diffuse and the intangible. To paraphrase a line from Marcel Proust: longing makes all things blossom, possession drags them down to dust.