In the course of their artistic collaboration, Matthias Böhler and Christian Orendt are increasingly concerned with the tragic, comic or absurd political and ecological consequences of mankind’s influence on the fate of its environment. The exhibition “The Wild, the Furless and the Spirit of the B.U.D.” circles around a narration about a fictitious supernatural vessel, the “Benevolent Utopization Device” (B.U.D.). The story was originally invented for a large eponymous installation commissioned by the Neues Museum Nuremberg for a group show in early 2020. The current exhibition further advances this fiction with further works.
In the course of their artistic collaboration, Matthias Böhler and Christian Orendt are increasingly concerned with the tragic, comic, and absurd political and ecological consequences of mankind’s influence on the fate of its environment. As their distinctive artistic approach to this issue, Böhler & Orendt have adopted a method that could be described as hybrid media storytelling. Freely using various mixed forms of graphic, digital, sculptural, and performative techniques, as well as scenographic and model-making practices, they create an ever more complex cosmos of installative narratives that are often intertwined or built upon one another.
The exhibition The Wild, the Furless and the Spirit of the B.U.D. revolves around a narrative about a fictitious supernatural vessel: the Benevolent Utopization Device (B.U.D.). The story was originally invented for a large eponymous installation commissioned by the Neues Museum Nuremberg for a group exhibition in early 2020. The current exhibition further advances this fiction through additional works.
The newest of these works—a series of overpainted digital photo collages entitled The Sweet Certainty of Deliverance from the Darkness that Surrounds Us—forms the core of the solo exhibition at 68projects. In nine vibrantly coloured painterly depictions, the artists tell a quixotic tale: how humans lost their affiliation with their animal kin after falling from the tree of life; how this loss led to an unnatural aspiration for dominance and destruction; and how, ultimately, animalhood was given the opportunity to remove the furless bullies from the planet they had previously shared.
Guided by a miraculous spirit, the animals learn how to build a mysterious phytomorphic capsule capable of absorbing the entire human population of Earth at once, before departing toward an undefined destination—far away in time and space.
The other works in the exhibition are either directly derived from this narrative or echo its dark, anthroposceptic undertone. The cyborg-like video sculpture B.U.D. – Personal Unit appears as a technical device containing a condensed version of the “Spirit of the B.U.D.” The work Hôpital des Abeilles, originating from the series Against All the Cares of the World, presents a dollhouse-like architectural model that depicts—lovingly and seemingly naively—how sick honeybees are cared for by diligent wood-ant nurses.
In Arborous Rescue Endeavor 3, part of the installation The Lichterfelde Club of Hope, a piece of dead wood is placed inside an abandoned display cabinet from the currently closed Berlin Botanical Museum, assuming the role of a slightly neglected and obviously hopeless intensive-care patient.
Matthias Böhler (born 1981 in Aachen) and Christian Orendt (born 1980 in Sighișoara) have collaborated as Böhler & Orendt since 2008. They studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg (both), the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Böhler), and the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig (Orendt). They have been living and working in Berlin since 2019.
They have received numerous awards and grants, including the Bavarian State Art Advancement Award and a work grant from Stiftung Kunstfonds. Their works have been exhibited at institutions such as Kunst-Werke Berlin, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (Charleston, South Carolina), and the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn. Their works are included in public and private collections, including the Neues Museum Nürnberg, Kunsthalle Göppingen, Kunsthalle Schweinfurt, the Birner + Wittmann Collection, and the Leif Djuurhus Collection.
Permanent outdoor installations by Böhler & Orendt can be found in the Park of Wildbad Rothenburg and in the courtyard of the Bavarian State Office for Statistics in Fürth.
