CLEMENS KRAUSS ‘Depot’ performance in museum storage at Kunsthalle Rostock

June 1, 2021

Clemens Krauss is currently undertaking a unique performance at the Kunsthalle Rostock, happening inside the storage and technical reserve of the museum, where the visitor alone meets Clemens virtually in a psychoanalytic session. Here he explores the human being, who collects, preserves and relocates their experiences, compared to the storage of a museum.

“Human beings deposit, human beings archive”

Curator Tereza de Arruda explains, “The Kunsthalle Rostock is structurally in a process of restoration. The institution has an extensive storage and technical reserve to preserve historically important artistic works. The building changes, enlarges, renews itself, at the same time as the Depot and archive have simultaneously to preserve their contents.

In this context, Clemens Krauss realizes the performance “Depot.” It takes place in a space, actually separated from the exhibition area of the museum – in the storage and technical reserve. The artist conducts individual psychoanalytic sessions with visitors of the Kunsthalle daily (also on weekends) between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. The participants in this project enter the Kunsthalle Rostock, which is currently closed, alone and meet in the storage with Clemens Krauss, who is digitally present from his Berlin studio on a large screen and a camera over the entire period of the performance.

In the project “Depot,” participants and the artist meet each other not as patient and therapist, but as equal contributors to a meta-level exploration of interrelated content. The transformation phase of the present context reflects its current situation at the Kunsthalle. The warehouse of the institution becomes itself a place of displacement where storage space housing an organic correlate of the phenomenon of the unconscious. Krauss’ interventional, participatory performance can be located into the tradition of Joseph Beuys.”

Duration: May 27^th until June 6^th 2021

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The Kunsthalle Rostock is funded by the Hanseatic and University City of Rostock and the Ministry for Education, Science and Culture of the State of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania

Health Partner: Klinikum Südstadt Rostock

Cultural Partner: NDR Kultur