42
Ralf Tekaat
Exhibition: 10th until 31st May, 2013
Finissage and artist talk: 31st May, 7 – 9 p.m.
Opening hours: Tu-Fr 2-7 p.m. and Sa 2-5 p.m.
The installation Fortytwo is about the goal to run the Berlin Marathon (42 Kilometers) in September. Currently the artist is 42 years old. He connects the obsession of running with his obsession to do art, especially his obsession of doing pencil drawings. There are several paralells between drawing and running: they have a uniformly continuous rhythm. Both ways are not very fast. And at some point it is as absurd to run 42 kilometers as it is to make pencil drawings in a scale of two by three meters.
It is about Marathon, about "The Happy Ending of Franz Kafka's Amerika" by MArtin Kippenberger, Amerika (or AkireMA) as a Metaphor of Hope and Glory, about MArtha and MArter (torture). Of course, it is also about “the answers to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything” (If you’ve read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you already know that the answer to said questions is ultimately 42). So he is expecting to become enlightened, at the end, somehow.
The 42 drawings out of the performance "Less than four hours", which he did each in a time of 5 minutes 30 seconds, what is his estimated time for one kilometer to run the marathon in less than four hours are now in the installation.
