Project Presentation
The presence of power, tight cycles, hierarchical structures and the opacity of executive methods. A multitude of video screens aligned on opposing sides, each showing a shot of a machine: one rotating endlessly upwards, the other endlessly downwards.
Machine is part of the project Age of an End / Item One: Mechanisms of Power. Part two of Item One, entitled An Informal Meeting About Nothing in Particular can be reviewed on Anti-Utopias here.
Age of an End (overall topic)
An End can be perceived as both an opening and a limitation, implying both a relief and an alarming ultimatum. It may signify limited resources or political leftovers, synonyms for destruction, and at the same time the beginning of transformation. How this is perceived is highly relevant, especially in our times of significant global changes, be it political, economical or ecological.
The time we are living in could be considered an Age of an End, and we, as Benten Clay are focusing on the grey zone between different modes of perception as well as the evasion of responsibility towards various forms of an End.
Every beginning includes an End, but we immediately lose sight of that End when seduced by the new. It seems that human kind is driven mainly by ideas of progress, political power and economical value, disregarding the fact that every invention, every political union and every natural resource has its limits and abuttals. Responsibility is not taken or easily pushed away by perceiving falsified information or by manipulating perspectives.
Exploring ignored Ends and transferring the common means of information policy onto their artistic approach serves us as a hook to roam along the sentiences of an intricate modern society. Sometimes poetic and metaphoric, sometimes with pretended scientific preciseness and sometimes critically ironic, our works show a drive for finding consolating moral survival structures for the first world in an Age of an End.
Benten Clay is an artistic corporation run by artists Vera Hofmann and Sabine Schründer with its headquarters in Berlin. Both artists see this cooperation as an extension of their previous and current work as singular artists in which they mostly work within the field of contemporary photography and video. Age of an End is the title of a long-term project in which Benten Clay explores different aspects of power, investigating socio-political and economical threats as well as environmental concerns using photography, video, installation and performance. Benten Clay’s approach oscillates between slight provocation, research, documentation and poetical discretion. Its methods embrace different roles within a societal system, playing within the ambiguous boundaries between them. Since their foundation in September 2011 they were already invited to various exhibitions and artistic presentations in Finland and Germany.
