Philip Kojo Metz, The Black Kwadrat, Installation view, © KWADRAT-Gallery und Fotos by: Markus Georg
PHILIP KOJO METZ
THE BLACK KWADRAT
KWADRAT, BERLIN
11.11.2018 - 07.12.18
A monolithic Black Box is filling up the space of Kwadrat gallery. It is almost impossible to walk in but for a narrow corridor that let the visitor surround the mysterious object.
Philip Kojo Metz ’s third exhibition at KWADRAT crisscrosses several forms of art. It also builds a multilayered structure which reminds a bit of the Chinese box system. It starts from Malevich to finish with the poet Alexander Pushkin, via the use of Social Media. Philip Kojo Metz, a German-Ghanaian artist resident in Berlin, focuses on overdrafts between forms of arts and topics with a strong performative attitude.
Near to The Black Kwadrat sculpture, there is a black hollow room. In fact, the two installations, the full box, and the empty space are complementary.
Visitors take place in the middle of the black room to get a photo portrait. This image is then posted on Instagram.
The Black Box installation is an homage to Kazimir Malevich, the Russian painter who lived at the beginning of 1900 and revolutionized the idea of Painting ( and Art ) with the Black Square, literally a black square painted on a white canvas.
Malevich’s paintings were a statement: painting as a representation of nature was over. The media of painting was free by the necessity of representing something.
It was the time to move in a new direction: abstract painting. That’s where it starts Modern Art.
Now, the Black Kwadrat is ironically provoking a possibility of change too. The social experiment, with the Instagram, it shows the possibility to free the Art from certain ‘social’ constrictions. Differently, from other art projects which used Instagram as an experimental channel, for example, Richard Price or Amalia Ulman, Kojo Metz’s project works like a magic tool that swallows the visitors to project their virtual self into the web.
Near the black walls, it is hanging a painting: a piece of wall with a gunshot hole in it.
The gallerist Martin Kwade told me that the idea was to shot a wall inside the gallery, but of course, this was not possible. The shooting is a direct quotation to a Pushkin short novel, The Shot, which is connected to the tragic duel that caused the writer’s death.
The last deathly shot eternalized him while the shooting in the gallery is harmless but delivers the visitors image into the perpetual flow of social networks.
In front of the Black Box, the visitor is almost a primitive hominid in front of the Monolith in Kubrick’s movie “2001: A Space Odyssey", from the novel of Arthur C. Clarke.
In the original story, the strange object came from nowhere, from the depth of the space. No one knows what it is and no one knows what is it for. But it does something: it triggers the primitives men to use the weapon.
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