Saâdane Afif Là-bas.

Saâdane Afif (b. 1970 in Vendôme, lives and works in Berlin) is showing the multimedia work Là-bas. at Kunsthaus Glarus, an exact copy of the work Ici., which is being shown concurrently in the Leopold Hoesch & Papiermuseum in Düren. In this conceptually imagined mirroring, Saâdane Afif reflects upon the contemporary significance of ‘here’ and ‘there’.

Two identical models of the original Düren station lamps with loudspeakers, synchronous announcements and railway station signage mark the determinate and indeterminate local specifics of Düren railway station. Here Afif is connecting very precisely with his recurring themes – distance, time, context-specificity, repetition, interpretation, and also sound. Like Düren, Glarus is a place on the periphery like many others, with its own characteristics and those typical of the periphery. The synchronous transmission of the station announcements of Düren station (mostly a transit station) in Kunsthaus Glarus brings an echo of a comparably peripheral place on the edge of Germany to Glarus and sparks speculation about simultaneity and the everyday, identity and origin as well as fiction and reality, the projection of desires and an existential state within the local and global structure. Themes that are repeatedly reflected in countless novels, song lyrics and art, and to which Saâdane Afif invited authors, artists and art critics to write a poem or a song lyric. These poetical texts become a part of the exhibition and add collaborative, associative and always subjective commentaries, and hence further layers of interpretation, to the installation. Afif thus makes visible the collaborative dialogue that lies within the origins of any art work. This communal energy as a working method constitutes one of the cores of Afif’s works. He is always in search of the essential nucleus, the fleeting and indefinable essence of things.

Afif’s dialogic practice employs strategies of appropriation, the ready-made, the elimination of authorship and the relationship between original and reproduction. Là-Bas. has been shown at 8th Berlin Biennale for contemporary art (29 May – 3 August 2014) and finds another new - this time rural - context at Kunsthaus Glarus in which questions about local contexts are raised.