Karlskaserne Ludwigsburg, 2019. Installation views: Daniela Wolf, 2019

CAMERA AUSTRIA international #144 Features my recent works about Growth  at the Forum section. Check it out HERE

Wenzel Stählin
PLUS ULTRA 27.06.-15.09. 2018
Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart
Higher, faster, further: In the muscular growth of the own body through sports,the self-display in social media or the perfect flesh of a ripe fruit, the boundaries of optimisation seem limitlessly expandable. Based on the industrial and territorial accomplishments of modern times, the paradigms of neoliberalism suggest growth as something that knows no constraints. In his photographs, Wenzel Stählin a different aspects of this social and economic ideal. His work grasps the subject on different levels. His series „Wachsen“ (Grow) (2018), shows images from fitness- and bodybuilding fairs that Wenzel Stählin visited between 2017 and 2018. The series represent an immediate photographic view on the sceneries: Flower-bouquets, mostly orchids, decorate the booths and dominate the foreground of the photographs and interact with (trained) bodies behind them. This interaction opens various layers of interpretation: The orchid represents an image of idealized beauty as well as a sociohistorical narrative as an imported product from America to Europe.

„Non plus ultra“ (Nothing further beyond) was an ancient latin motto, said to be inscribed in the legendary pillars of Heracles that were located between the Strait of Gibraltar and Northern Africa as a warning for travellers. They marked the end of the known world and furthermore the limits of the antique-medieval cosmos. With the discovery of the „new world“ (the american continent), the first tropical examples of the orchid were brought to Europe, symbolizing the territorial expansion of the West. With the conquest of America, the „Non Plus Ultra“ was overcome for the first time.
King Charles V (1500-1558) chose „Plus Ultra” (further beyond) as a principle of his global expansion and overcoming of the antique world view. Through his discovery and conquest of America, the expansion of his rule shaped the beginning of modern age on the one hand, as well as the history of eurocentric world-definition on the other hand. The orchids in Stählin‘s works embody the ideal of „Plus Ultra“ and thus support the products of fitness fairs: The ideal of a perfect human body, moulded following antique principles, demanding: There is always more to do, a step further to go.
To add another layer to his work, Stählin re-locates his observations of social and economic phenomena into his studio. He transfers impressions of the fitness-fairs into in a controlled environment and projects his observations into arrangements and compositions. In the series „Form“ (form), (2018), he focuses the body (never the face) of a young thai-boxer. Freezing her movements with the camera, her exercises turn into poses.
Through the arrangement in the studio, Stählin breaks with the analogies to the scenes on the fitness-fairs.

The arrangements of fruits, which appear in different series through the exhibition, catch the viewer‘s eye. In some of the pictures in the series „Form“, Stählin refers to classical still-life. The boxer stands in a vertical pose next to a concrete-column, on which a sliced mango is placed. The mango is turned opened into a spiky form and presents a surprising inner shape of the fruit. Again, it is the combination of plant and the human body, which
points to the ideals of growth: The perfect version of everyone is promised to lay hidden within each of us. You just have to bring it out.
This picture is subject to the 2018 series „Inner shapes“. The work consists of contact-prints using a tablet computer and analogue photographic paper, and stickers. The work shows bodies, still-lives or selfies that people posted on instagram, using the hashtag #growth. The post under the picture with the hashtags used, form the title of the sheets.
Stickers of sliced, peeled and cut-open fruits are placed on the contact prints. Like analogue emojies, they relegate to the neoliberal mantra of the million dollar industry of self-improvement: you are a work in progress, your true self lies underneath the fat, under your wrinkled skin, behind the traumata of late capitalism. „Plus Ultra“: Since Charles V, the legend of Heracles has been implemented into the Spanish coat of arms. The two vertical pillars and the banner „Plus Ultra“ developed into the iconic, modern Dollar-Symbol $. No other symbol is a better representation of the paradigm of neoliberal capitalism. Higher, faster, further.
(Lea Mönninghof)