From 9th March to 5th May 2023 the MAAB Gallery, located in the centre of Milan, is exhibiting I MUST SLEEP, PLEASE, an installation between photography and assemblage by the German artist Susanne Kutter.
She was born in West Germany in 1971, studied sculpture and videography at the University of Münster, won the Förderpreis for promising young artists awarded by the Academy of Fine Arts, and continued her studies between Paris, New York and California. She has taught at the University of the Arts in Berlin (UdK), the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe (HfG) and the Bauhaus University in Weimar.
Her work often deals with the catastrophic relationship between nature and culture and the loss of safety and intimacy in everyday life. Using various media and formats, in her installation I MUST SLEEP, PLEASE she installs rescue blankets, wood and concrete panels, neon and photographs in lightboxes.
This work, conceived and realised especially for the MAAB Gallery, focuses on the precariousness of vision and the relationship with otherness.
In a poetic and touching way, LESS HOME Part 2 pushes us to spy on the images of the makeshift shelters of some homeless people from the slits of black boxes suspended from the walls.
The construction of the lightboxes, resembling that of a bunker, allows the spectator to observe and at the same time to take shelter, to keep a distance from the precarious reality of those who have nothing, and build themselves a shelter on pavement using materials salvaged from rubbish and waste.
But it’s precisely the question of the fragility of living and the dreaded possibility of losing all the security, painstakingly built up, that makes Kutter's exhibition a moment of harsh confrontation with those existential themes that we often prefer not to resurface.
In LESS HOME Part 1, the audience observes with a sense of bewilderment the tents, a primary form of shelter built with thermal blankets offered to first aids, and reads disoriented the despondent phrases of famous people (Michael Jackson and James Dean) whose idyllic existence is imagined, written on concrete supports with neon or soot.
Susanne Kutter's work sensitively stirs up the process of analysing personal and collective behaviour and stimulates a strong inner awareness.
The MAAB Gallery, present in Milan since 2013, was founded in Padua in 2009 by Michael Biasi.
DMM
for DareClan