Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s artistic practice unfolds as a continuing sequence of temporalities and spaces that allow the viewer to circulate between different realities, epochs, places, narratives, genealogies, worldviews, and historical personae. Her staging produces relations between bodies, forms, spaces and temporalities, and connect the particularities of a place with personal, literary, cinematographic, architectural, and musical references. In assuming the idea that objects point to a multitude of contents, one also always assumes that certain forms of subjectivity are inscribed in them. When Gonzalez-Foerster was a recipient of a residency in Cincinnati (USA) in 1993, the artist took white pieces of clothing from the wardrobe of the Stillpass family of collectors, who initiated the residency, to use for an installation. In this context of presentation, the objects, hung up to dry on a rotary clothes dryer, became a portrait of the family. For the exhibition Out here in the wild oats amid the alien corn the artist restages the work: now it is the Schmela family that Gonzalez-Foerster portrays, in 1975, the year they moved into the Villa Lantz. In this way, the artist encapsulates the site’s temporalities – tying past to present – and provides the public space of the park with an enlivening, private moment from the past.