RAY Masterclass
held by Anton Kusters
SOFT PROOF
As W. G. Sebald writes so masterfully about time, memory and identity in The Rings of Saturn - “... it [is] frightening how little we know about our species, about our purpose and our end ...” - there now appears a generation completely and intimately connected with the entir world all at once and - rightfully - worried about the most personal up to the entire human condition and our planet.
The precious energy of twelve students from four art schools connecting for the RAY Triennial reminded me of Mike Kelley's Educational Complex, a combined scale model of all art schools he attended, crucially relying on what he could not remember to the re-fill his own blanks.
Like the protagonist traveling through time towards that always escaping memory in Chris Marker's exquisite La Jetée.
It seems we spend more and more time looking back and looking forward, admids the blanks we construct along the way. But there is no escape from the present. It is all we have. As Sebald demonstrates, it might be prudent that we drop quotation marks and multilayer the narrative. Embrace complexity. Eschew simplification.
Our world desperately needs those that speak genuinely, and listen intently.
Anton Kusters
photos by Tatiana Vdovenko & Lorenz Kerkhoff