Installation, sculpture, drawing, video: Jan Kopp’s work is characterized by the deployment of a wide range of languages and media. Das endlose Spiel (“The Endless Game”) makes play with the notion of experience, setting up a relationship between science and the sensory as it combines the Foucault pendulum with a mise en scène whose chance and randomness lead the visitor to reflect on his own experience. Here Kopp summons up nature’s laws and the mystery of the cosmos in a work whose nodal point is situated in the contact area between spheres and marbles, at the junction of the cosmic and the random.
This exploration of individual experience’s links to the rational and the sensory is part of an artistic project focusing on the issue in the context of a society where space-time relationships have become relative. Das endlose Spiel is thus a representational space, a stage onto which cosmic energies continuously project anodyne events that collectively concretize reality taken as our field of experience. The work challenges the visitor as to the nature of both his role and his participation: he can take part in this interplay of tension between the visible and the sensory only by making his way along the ellipse of “Das endlose Spiel’s” platform. For the installation is governed by the dual centrality of the ellipse, a stylistic device whose foreshortening effect compels the visitor to mentally reconstruct what the artist passes over in silence.
Jan Kopp was Born in 1970 in Franfurt/Main. He lives and works in Paris and Berlin.
Olivier Grasser, Curator
English Translation: John Tittensor
The exhibition comes off in cooperation with the city of Sélestadt (F) – the partnership city of Dornbirn – and Fonds regional d’art contemporain d’Alsace (Frac Alsace). Many thanks to Zimmerei Olivier Beer, Fa. Schusserland, city of Dornbirn, Land Vorarlberg and Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur.
