Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union

Matti Braun

SELECTED WORKS BY Matti Braun

Matti Braun
Untitled

2010

Dyed batik silk, paint

58.5 x 48.8 cm

Matti Braun
Untitled

2010

Dyed batik silk, wooden frame, paint

58.5 x 48.8 cm

ARTICLES

Matti Braun, October 2003, by Catrin Lorch

The main hall of the Kunstverein Freiburg is full of water, from which the museum’s mighty pilasters rise like the modern furniture in the director’s villa in Blake Edwards’ 1968 comedy The Party. The 1930s building, with its huge ceiling window, seems to straddle a natural pool after Matti Braun lined the floor of the former baths with sheeting and filled it up. The black mirror of the pool is interspersed with circular slices of tree trunk, allowing daring visitors to cross the hall by jumping from one to the next. The title of this piece, and of the exhibition - S. R. - stands for Braun’s inspiration, the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. But the exhibition also explores science fiction, the visual poems of the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, Steven Spielberg and the dark waters that carry culture from one continent to another.

For over two decades Ray worked on a science fiction screenplay about an alien stranded on earth. The opening shot was supposed to show a golden spaceship antenna rising slowly out of a lake. This plot was successfully brought to fruition by Steven Spielberg as E.T. (1982) - while Ray’s original project failed owing to, among other things, dubious American negotiators and scriptwriting fees that never made it to India. As the catalogue mentions, Ray also visited the set of The Party, and started to have doubts as to whether Peter Sellers was the right choice for the lead: ‘S. R. flies to Hollywood and checks into the Chateau Marmont on June 1st 1967. Columbia is interested in the movie project. Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen both want to play the American engineer. In the home of Ravi Shankar, S. R. finds Sellers sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front of the Indian musician imitating his sitar playing.’ Quotations from Rudyard Kipling, poems by W. B. Yeats, an excerpt from the screenplay of F. W. Murnau’s Tabu (Taboo, 1931) and advertisements for ‘Original Duchamp Ready-mades’ add extra layers to these obscure connections.

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Source: frieze.com