Artlab Munich

As project manager at the Benjamin Eck Gallery, I conceived, planned, and organised the exhibition format ARTLAB MUNICH, a gallery project for up-and-coming artists.

The project's aim was to give 25 young emerging artists the opportunity to present their works to gallery visitors and potential customers for one evening.

At the end of the exhibition, two winners were chosen who, due to their outstanding artistic achievements, were honoured with an official exhibition for two months in the following year at the Benjamin Eck I Gallery.

The project, conceived as a series of events, saw itself as a laboratory providing an experimental space for young art.

My curatorial goal was to create a protected environment with a "work-in-progress" character that does not bring out perfection but potential.

The art laboratory was, therefore, a free field where diverse artistic positions could meet and dialogue with each other. References between different works were just as welcome as dissonances. Both the artists and the viewers were invited to critically reflect on the works presented and to enter into a productive exchange with each other. In this sense, the presence of the artists on the evening of the presentation was an essential part of the exhibition concept.

“Je voulais faire un film”, 2017, by artist Juan Camilo Echeverri

"It took me five years to make this film. I wanted to convey the images that take place before my eyes day after day while working in a Parisian restaurant."

In Je voulais faire un film, the images of glasses, plates, lamps and light reflections follow the rhythm of a cutting machine, visually and aurally transporting the viewer’s side to the everyday life of a restaurant. Developing the Super 8 film in red wine and coffee, the images are abstracted and sometimes alienated beyond recognition.

In addition, the visual montage and the sound of the cutting machine are accompanied by voices that seem to get lost in the space of a restaurant, like conversations of evening entertainment. Simultaneously, texts from an instruction manual for a Bolex camera and a recipe for analogue film processing in red wine are recited. These recitations are intermingled with snippets of the young filmmaker's thoughts, which he jotted down while working as a waiter and later recorded.

Juan Camilo Echeverri's experimental film shows shots of objects and moments initially seeming incidental and meaningless. By developing them in red wine and thus alienating the shots, Echeverri creates kaleidoscopic, abstract formations.

These formations, together with the rhythmic movements of the cutting machine, create a meditative, almost trance-like state in the viewer.