Joe Ovelman !


Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery is pleased to announce Joe Ovelman’s second solo show
with the gallery. “For Whites Only” is an investigation into race and culture in America. Ovelman confronts racism and questions identity.

“For Whites Only” will feature Ovelman’s largest participatory project to date.
“Rosa Parks 381” includes 381 Polaroids of the artist, taken and signed by 381 individuals who could self-identify as African-American. The number in the title commemorates the number of days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and is inspired by the James Baldwin quote, “I’ll be black for as long as you tell me that you are white”.

“Regi”, 2005 is a video in which the paid subject, chosen for his African decent, stands naked and confined to one end of a room for 8 hours, the length of a typical work day. The video was shot in Porto Seguro, Brazil, a historic slave-trading port.

Also on view: “7 Gold Lynchings,” miniature, bound figures sculpted in wire;
“Twelve Drawings,” anecdotes of racism from the artist’s life; and a compilation CD, “Nigga in the Title,” featuring twenty-four songs whose titles include the word nigga.
Ovelman asks, out of 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 12 months a year, when am I white?

  • :::::Oliver Kamm:::::
  • :::::Joe Ovelman:::::

    • Mario Ybarra


    Mario Ybarra Jr.’s exhibition titled, Bring me the head of… will consist of a mixed media installation including painting, sculpture, and video exploring cultural notions of martyrdom. Ybarra’s often politically charged work investigates cross-cultural Mexican-American experience and connects with broader social contexts and through the use and reinterpretation of popular culture.

  • :::::Anna Helwing:::::

    • Gitte Schafer


    Opening Gitte Schafer friday january 19 th.

    Gitte Schäfer
    Skarabäus
    January 20th – March 3rd 2007

    Opening Friday January 19th from 5-8 pm

    It is a pleasure to present the German artist Gitte Schäfer’s second solo show at the gallery.

    Collecting, sampling, copying, integrating, assembling and rebuilding, Gitte Shäfer’s work process starts at flee markets. Or looking through old books and magazines. Her installations of sculptures, drawings, and paintings are a unified whole where each little part has a long history of its own. One drawing is a remake of a drawing her grandmother did as a young woman, showing farmers coming home from the harvest. A found head-collar of a horse that is twisted in a very beautiful movement is simply hung on the wall. And the sculptures start off with for example an old spinning wheel or an old leatherboot, ending in a strangly shaped mineralstone or a porcelaine hand. Or an old oak basin on long slim legs contains green eggs.

    Like a visual and physical poem of surreal metamorphoses, walking in Gitte Schäfer’s installations unfolds the imaginary stories of things. Stories of bygone days and long lost persons and places. Reminding us of something familiar from our childhood, the summer house, a journey, an old tavern once visited, and yet impossible to place exactly in time. The treasures of scrap and discarded objects once part of somebody’s life, has been saved from the bins and insured a new existance. Now as art objects, past is made present and future.

    Gitte Schäfer tells a story of beauty and wonders in the cast away trash. Not unlike the scarab beetle (the title of the show Skarabäus is German for scarab): though rolled and born in a ball of dung, it emerges shimmering and glamourous with its shiny green and black back. The Egyptians immortalized the scarab beetle as sacred. They believed that it represented their sun god, Ra, who rolled the sun across the sky and buried it each night. The scarab beetle became so sacred that it was put on unique stones to wear as jewelry. The scarab shows us that magic and beauty can sometimes be found in the most unlikely places.

    Gitte Schäfer (b. 1972 in Stuttgart, lives and works in Berlin) currently has a solo show at FRAC Bourgogne. In 2006, she showed solo at Chez Valentin, Paris and received the German GASAC award.

  • :::::KIRKHOFF:::::