In the video works presented in Unease | Oasis, Kurt Hentschläger registers the collective unease of the current moment, reflecting on the antinomies of contemporary culture and probing civilization’s discontents.
A close-up image of a mushroom is marked by menace and decay as flies crawl over its surface and a distorted synthesizer throbs on the soundtrack. A seemingly solid form proves to be an all too close-up image of undulating flesh. A zombified head struggles to break free from a geometric grid. Bodies spastically convulse or swirl helplessly through a void without horizon or ground. Hentschläger’s work is riddled with anxiety. He saturates his audience viscerally in light and sound, at times with overwhelming intensity, confronting them with the material immediacy of their affective responses and the difficulty of getting any symbolic distance on them.
At the same time, and for this same reason, Hentschläger’s work provides something of a refuge from the impossibility of the everyday - an oasis, where one can explore these affective intensities, and the conflicts and contradictions that inform them, unpacking their paradoxical pleasure-in-pain and loosening the grip of their hold.