Ben Schumacher at Kunstverein Braunschweig

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

For his first institutional presentation, BEN SCHUMACHER has turned the exhibition space of the Kunstverein Braunschweig into a cheese storage. The installation consists of 32 wheels of cheese placed onto a shelving system as well as seven carved wooden objects that look like cut wheels of cheese. The installation is complemented by a seven-part series of new paintings by SCHUMACHER.

The exhibition is accompanied by a text written by JONATHAN GEAN which tastes like a sermon under fermentation. Here is a short excerpt:

Could Cheesus be here in Braunschweig now, already among us? How can we recognize the form of a thing which must in certain respects be entirely unlike all others which have come before? Thankfully, the fruitful work of certain theologians provides us with the clues by which we might make an accurate identification. Candidate cheeses would be capable of self-consideration at greater depth than is common, through which they may recognize their own substance as metaphorically pregnant and widely analogously applicable. This scenario therefore provides useful images by which we might symbolically divine the potential nature of the spiritual becoming of the self-revelation, were it to take place here, through which Cheesus would come to recognize its own divinity, suspended between the nebulous chaos of whey and the singular radiance of the curd. The thought of Cheesus would contain the world, expressed here as a tensed glance linking the rigidity of structure to a heady formlessness.