REBECCA HORN GLOWING CORE REBECCA HORN has created an evergrowing oeuvre comprising performances, films, drawings, texts, sculptures and installations since the early 1970s. The inspiration and the force field of her work lie in the human body. She presented her first major performances at documenta 5 in Kassel (1972), and since then her works have been shown in numerous solo exhibitions, at leading international institutions, such as large retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1993), Tate Gallery London (1994), Nationalgalerie Berlin (1994), Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin (2006), as well as more recently, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2009) and the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (2010). For her work, Rebecca Horn has received many awards and honors, among them the Barnett and Annalee Newman Award (2004), the Praemium Imperiale, (Tokyo) and the Hessischer Kulturpreis (both 2010). In 2010, the artist founded the Moontower Foundation as a place to exhibit her own work. Rebecca Horn lives in Berlin und Paris. www.glowingcore-rebeccahorn.com SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATION Music by Hayden Chisholm 28.03 - 01.10.2015 LA LLOTJA PELAIRES CENTRE CULTURAL CONTEMPORANI Plaça de la Llotja, 5 · Palma de Mallorca · Spain Rebecca Horn, 2015 Glutkern Glowing core Corazón en brasas Cor en brases Im drehenden Blau des Trichters das Spiralauge geöffnet trägt die Füchsin ihr Glühen im Innern. Flügelflammen nehmen dem Tod das Schwarz. In the rotating blue of the funnel her spiral eye open the vixen carries her glow within. Winged flames take the blackness from death. En el azul rotatorio del embudo el ojo espiral abierto carga la zorra su ardor por dentro. Llamas aladas se llevan el negror de la muerte. Al blau rotatori de l’embut obert l’ull espiral carrega la rabosa la seua cremor per dins. Flames alades se’n duen la negror de la mort. Die Wunden reinigen im Feuer der Sternasche hilft die Kaktusschuhe anzuschnallen hüpfend Wolkenstufen zu erklimmen. Cleansing the wounds in the stars fiery ashes to help fasten the cactus shoes jumping up the stairs of clouds. La ceniza astral depura heridas ayuda a ceñir los zapatos de cacto ascendiendo a saltos los escalones de nubes. La cendra astral depura ferides mentre ajuda a cenyir les sabates de cactus pujant a bots les escales dels núvols. Nach Sonnen Untergang der Sturz zurück ins Gestein dem goldenen Glutkern entgegen. After sun set falling back into stone towards the golden glowing core. Después del sol derrumbe la caída de vuelta a la roca hacia el áureo corazón en brasas. Després del sol que ensorra la caiguda retorna a la roca cap al cor auri en les brases. MEASURING THE SKY FROM THE DEPTHS OF A WELL English translation: Jacqueline Todd / Castilian translation: José FA Oliver / Catalan translation: Begonya Pozo Joachim Sartorius Rebecca Horn’s art presents us with a succession of unsettling allegories of human existence. One of the most versatile and inventive artists of our time, she works across a range of media, including sculpture, installation, performance, painting, film and poetry. Over the last four decades she has produced a highly complex oeuvre that is grounded in and bound together by an ongoing meditation on metaphysical issues and a deep existential desire. It is the desire to fathom the nature of man, his powers of perception, his capacity for suffering and his ways of dealing with beauty, death and mourning. By sharpening our senses, Rebecca Horn teaches us who we are. Even in her earliest works, this desire to comprehend mankind is accompanied by a world-related longing – a yearning to push the boundaries of experience, to extend one’s own being, one’s own body, to the point where it brushes up against the world and the cosmos. The central installation in La Llotja unites these borderline experiences in a captivatingly beautiful sculpture. Peering down into the rotating floor mirrors, viewers feel as if they are falling almost 20 metres into the depths of a well shaft. Looking up, they are swept up in a vortex towards a blue light. Man stands between heaven and earth: here, the fall into the bottomless chasm; there – in the updraft of swirling light – the ascension. This vertical sculpture, rising from inside the earth up to the golden blue of the firmament, is surrounded by sixteen sculptures that create a horizontal plane of a human scale which continues and modifies the interaction of opposing forces: vulnerability and harmony, threat and resurrection. Set behind golden basins filled with water, these sculptural signs with their human dimensions reveal the self in the mirror and cast flecks of light like wandering souls around the high vaulted space. These sculptures are each crowned by a skull: the cast-iron model of one of the capuzzelle (‘little heads’) Rebecca Horn came across in the catacombs of San Gaudioso in Naples while conducting research for her installation Spiriti di Madreperla. In late 2002, 333 of these skulls pushed their way through the paving stones of the Piazza del Plebiscito, linking the world of the dead and their ritualistic veneration to the 77 shimmering mother-of-pearl halos that hovered above the square in the midnight-blue sky. The capuzzelle have accompanied Rebecca Horn for many years and to many different locations – Berlin, New Delhi, Maribor and Moscow. The installation here in La Llotja is the culmination of this long journey, over the course of which the capuzzelle have evolved into beings – symbols not only of our individual confrontation with death, but also of a lifeextending force, as protecting spirits similar to a wall around the earth’s glowing core. This impression of a protective barrier is emphasised by the attributes of the sculptures – the golden antennas and prickly pear cacti that exude an exemplary spirit of defiance with their spiky forms. If there are three features which are particularly characteristic of Rebecca Horn’s art – the interaction with the place in which it is situated, the auratic space it generates through dialogue with the viewer, and the reuse of sculptural objects as part of an almost alchemical process – here in La Llotja in Palma, all three of these are implemented in an artistic idiom that is both highly distinctive and truly memorable. What are we – we who feed on great mysteries – without the dead? The intersection of vertical and horizontal lines, combined with the rotating mirrors in the centre and the revolving mirrors in front of the skulls, create a magical space of sacred beauty that captures the notion of salvation in a flitting yet beguilingly complex image.