Jan Tichy – Weight of Glass

Weight of Glass is the first solo exhibition of Chicago-based artist Jan Tichy with Galerie Kornfeld in Berlin and opens concurrently with Jan Tichy: Installation Nr. 29 (Neues Rathaus), the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. Both exhibitions feature the new real-time neon work German Nature (2016), which uses light to register the new languages introduced to the German landscape with the arrival of over one million refugees. Kunsthalle Osnabrück will publish an accompanying catalogue with texts by Prof. Dr. Barbara Kaesbohrer and Dr. Robin Schuldenfrei.

Following his work on the exhibition design for Education of Senses at the Loyola Museum of Art in Chicago in 2012, Tichy was granted access by the Moholy-Nagy estate to four original film fragments shot by László Moholy-Nagy in London in 1936. Moholy-Nagy, one of the Bauhaus masters, stayed briefly in London after fleeing Germany before emigrating to Chicago. The eighty seconds of abstract black-and-white footage were created for H. G. Wells’s visionary science-fiction film Things To Come. Only a few seconds of Moholy-Nagy’s abstract vision of a glass city appeared in the final film, within the sequence depicting the rebuilding of the city of “Everytown” as a utopian future after wartime devastation. Moholy-Nagy was not credited.

Working with Moholy-Nagy’s techniques of reproduction, multiplication, flipping, and layering, Tichy reconstructed the eighty seconds of footage into a panoramic three-channel work with a duration of five and a half minutes, creating a new urban landscape that belongs equally to both artists.

Galerie Kornfeld, which presents the German premiere of Things To Come 1936–2012, invited Tichy to reassess his Chicago-based interpretation of Moholy-Nagy from a Berlin perspective. In winter and summer 2016, the artist spent three months in Germany researching the Bauhaus periods in Dessau and Berlin while also responding to the country’s current social and political situation, ultimately interweaving the two.

Installation no. 30 (Lucia) (2016) and the single-channel video Negatives Missing (2016) follow recent research by Robin Schuldenfrei on the fate of the photographs of Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy’s first wife. Lucia Moholy documented the Bauhaus from its beginnings but was forced to abandon her glass plate negatives in Berlin when fleeing the Nazis in 1933. The weight of this glass today carries the symbolic weight of the possessions that displaced people must leave behind. The 330 glass negatives, never returned to Lucia Moholy, still retain their imagistic potential when activated by light.

Installation no. 30 (Lucia) is a single-channel video projection onto 330 glass plates, filling the gallery space with reflections reminiscent of those created for Things To Come: an architectural fragment of “Everytown” and the promise of an imagined architecture.

The exhibition also includes two photographs taken during Tichy’s first and most recent visits to Berlin (1989 and 2016), as well as two photograms that evoke the darkroom beneath the Bauhaus Masters’ Houses in Dessau. The video 100RAW(2008) was created as a direct response to Production: Reproduction, a key theoretical text by László and Lucia Moholy. The work presents the first one hundred photographs taken by Tichy after arriving in Chicago in RAW format, accompanied by sound produced when the same files are opened as audio data.

Jan Tichy (born 1974 in Prague) is a contemporary artist working at the intersection of video, sculpture, architecture, and photography. His conceptually driven work is socially and politically engaged. He studied art in Israel and earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is currently Assistant Professor in the Departments of Photography and Art & Technology Studies.

Tichy has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the MCA Chicago, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and CCA Tel Aviv. In 2011, he initiated Project Cabrini Green, a community-based artwork that illuminated the final high-rise of the Cabrini Green Housing Projects during its demolition. Since 2014, he has been working on the long-term, NEA-supported Heat Light Water Project in Gary, Indiana. His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Israel Museum (Jerusalem), Magasin Stockholm Kunsthall, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Recently, his video Things To Come (1936–2012) was shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York as part of Films To Come: Moholy-Nagy and the Moving Image.