JORINDE VOIGT & MICHAEL SAILSTORFER - CHARGE/d

CHARGE/d brings together Jorinde Voigt and Michael Sailstorfer in a rural shed in Wiesen and is conceived in dialogue with the oak planting and basalt stele set to honour Joseph Beuys on the same day. The exhibition asks how energy and attention become form: how instructions initiate processes, how living systems collaborate with matter, and how the choreography of looking and moving shapes a shared experience. Rather than a conventional white-cube presentation, the shed functions as a threshold between everyday use and a space of deliberate perception—affirmed, before one even enters, by masks by Sailstorfer mounted outside, both a welcome and a watchful presence.

Inside, Sailstorfer’s Batterie works think with Beuys’ Capri-Batterie (1985). Where Beuys staged an image of electricity and limitation with a lemon and a bulb, Sailstorfer translates the question of “charge” into a material and temporal sequence. In selected iterations, objects are cast in beeswax, placed in active hives, and finally translated into bronze. Honeycomb structures accrue on the wax as the colony labours; the subsequent cast fixes this biological time as surface memory. The works render energy as relation rather than output—an interplay of instruction, organism and alloy—compressing transformation into a compact sculptural loop. The masks, in turn, extend the ritual dimension of entry: reduced, stylised features become an instrument for attention, quietly recoding the encounter as one of presence and reciprocity.

Voigt’s drawings approach Beuys’ social sculpture from the register of notation. Working with lines, vectors, rotations, graphite and gold, she composes scores for temporal and social phenomena: the present as a field of micro-energies; situations tracked as orientations and speeds; rhythm—after Elias Canetti—as a corporeal and political force; attention as a vector that modulates what comes into form. What may at first read as a dense network of marks resolves into legible structures of movement and focus. In proximity to the day’s procession—water drawn at the stream, the walk to the hill, the setting of tree and basalt—Voigt’s drawings become instruments to read the social pulse of a temporary ensemble without reducing it to data.

Together, the works negotiate authorship and collaboration, immediacy and duration. The shed’s working architecture situates them between storage and display, between the practical and the symbolic. CHARGE/d sits alongside “Verschoben – Skulpturen im öffentlichen Raum,” the summer project that traced a temporary sculpture path through the village from the Kunstverein up to the culture hill. Read with the oak and basalt—inscribing a permanent path into the landscape—the exhibition articulates two tempos of commitment: what surges for a day and what endures for decades. CHARGE/d bridges these tempos by asking viewers to register transformation, to let attention act, and to consider how shared gestures become form.