Dutch studio Atelier Van Lieshout has unveiled its greatest installation to date: a giant artwork village at the Ruhrtriennale arts festival in west Germany .
A showcase of more than 20 pieces from the art and layout studio, dating back to the late 1990s, has been installed in the grounds of the event’s Jahrhunderthalle conference centre, forming an art “settlement” about the hall.
Named after the well-acknowledged Western movie The Very good, The Bad and The Unsightly – also the identify of a 1998 mobile art lab by the studio – the pieces with each other form an artwork village that will serve as a focal stage for the festival and a retrospective of the studio’s work.
Dutch theatre director Johan Simons, who also serves as artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, invited Atelier Van Lieshout to contribute to the festival, which requires area across the Ruhr area in west Germany.
Set across the course of 6 weeks, the Ruhrtriennale brings together artwork, theatre, dance and music, and final 12 months attracted more than 50,000 site visitors.
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Integrated in the showcase of pieces is Atelier Van Lieshout’s 2005 BarRectum – a massive-scale recreation of the human digestive technique that doubles up as a meeting area and bar.
The Head Claudio & The Head Hermann – a pair of giant heads, placed horizontally on the ground – is also on display, alongside 3 pieces from the studios AVL-ville – a utopian village state developed in the port of Rotterdam in 2001.
Far more recent artworks include Black Madonna, which demonstrates an axe-bearing mother holding her little one, and two monumental canons that draw on techniques created from the previous century of weapon design and style.
The festival marks the debut of new large-scale developing function Domestikator, which depicts an intimate encounter in between a four-legged and two-legged cubic figure. This will serve as “a totem, a temple and a beacon” for the complete artwork village.
“Domestikator symbolises the electrical power of humanity more than the planet,” Atelier Van Lieshout said in a statement. “It pays tribute to the ingenuity, the sophistication and the capacities of humanity, to the power of organisation, and to the use of this power to dominate, domesticate the organic setting.”
“The act of domestication, even so, usually leads to boundaries being sought or even crossed,” the studio extra. “Only a number of taboos remain, and it is these taboos that the Domestikator seeks to deal with.”
Set up by Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout in 1995, Atelier Van Lieshout has presented a various variety of tasks above the years – from a sliding sofa system for furnishings brand Lensvelt, to a six-bed capsule hotel that was obtained by Brad Pitt.
The studio recently presented a hybrid cave dwelling and pool home at Layout Miami/Basel 2015.
Ruhrtriennale 2015 opened on 14 August and continues till 26 September.
