Johannes Kahrs A Drunken Boat

"A drunken boat"

The title of the exhibition is taken from the "ships of fools" in which, down the ages, "mad people" in Holland and Germany were shipped off into exile, without knowing where they were bound. In a way, "A drunken boat" is a metaphor of this; even if the works in this show are based on real documents and documents taken from fictional works, what they represent is already part and parcel of another world, another reality, and the collective memory. Each one of these works goes beyond the subject or event from which it has been inspired: a painting or drawing, no longer a real moment or situation.

Johannes Kahrs' visual research is expressed as much by the techniques of painting and drawing as by a medium like video. Johannes Kahrs' video works have been shown in France first at the Almine Rech gallery in 1998, then as "A-h scratch" (1998) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyons, in 1999, "Fuck you OT-Depression" (1999) (then in November 1999 at PS1 in New York), as "A-h scratch" again (1999) at the Contemporary Art Centre in Sète in 1999, and at the FRAC Pays de la Loire in 2001, again as "A-h scratch" (1998). His latest audiovisual work, "Tonight" (2001) was exhibited at the Serralves Foundation in Porto, Portugal, in the summer of 2001.