The physical world meets the metaphysical at Asta Gröting’s show “TOUCH and Ghost” at Carlier | Gebauer in Berlin.Gröting is a contemporary artist, film maker - and a ventriloquist - based in Berlin. She is also a professor at the Braunschweig University of Art.Gröting’s exhibition consists of three rooms, each dedicated to one artwork. The artist invited her colleagues, family members and other people significant to her to participate in the titular “TOUCH” (2015, single channel 4K video projection). The video installation shows Gröting tracing the outlines of people’s faces, thus creating a sort of portrait of the participants with her hands. The video is an intimate portrayal of interpersonal relationships.The room next door presents “Buddy Big Mountain” (2015, single channel video projection), a monologue of a Native American dancer and ventriloquist, who recalls his upbringing and artistic career in a moving speech. Big Mountain’s hands are the most mesmerizing part of the video, as if telling a story of their own.Body also plays an important role in sculpture “Ghost” (2015, silicone, polyurethane), exhibited in the third room. Three figures of people seem to be cut in half, exhibiting the insides, which, paradoxically, have the outlines of clothes imprinted on them. The sculptures investigate the intricacies of human relationships, presenting the ways in which the body inadvertently reveals often repressed or unconscious emotions.Gröting’s works on display at Carlier | Gebauer are concerned with the physicality of one’s being, and its connection to one’s psyche. The hands play an especially important role as means of communication between people, but also abstract signifiers, drawing on one’s subjective language of memories and experiences.Asta Gröting’s “TOUCH and Ghost” runs at Carlier | Gebauer, Markgrafenstrasse 67, 10969 Berlin, through February 6, 2016.
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