On Human Level

2024

Church, wax, silicone molds

With this ambitious project, Christian Gonzenbach transposes an industrial activity into a place of worship: the making of material objects within a fourteenth-century church built for the life of the spirit. The human being is that productive species that shapes tools and objects — a production today grown excessive and empty of meaning. And so it is in an outsized, empty church that the artist stages this activity, in a cyclical form of production, destruction and renewal. Through the industrial process he questions our productive frenzy, its beauties and its limits, but also our own materiality: our appearance and disappearance on this earth, and the meaning we might give them.

The Dominican church of Krems, built from the thirteenth century, lost its religious status in 1786 to become, by turns, a shop, a factory, a theatre, a museum and a warehouse. Restored from 1994, it now belongs to the Kunsthalle, which shows a major contemporary art exhibition there each summer.

Stepping inside, one seems to enter a factory abandoned — or rather paused, as though activity might resume at any moment: machine tools, works in progress, finished or botched pieces stacked on pallets or left in a corner. It gives off a vernacular, utilitarian aesthetic, where everything is built out of necessity, without plan or wish to please.

Rather than finished works, the exhibition offers a process, immersing the visitor in an atmosphere of making that stirs curiosity and emotion. One discovers a place off-kilter — a spiritual centre devoted to material production — whose output is hard to make out at first glance. An immersion in a coherent yet absurd world, the project reflects our own productive frenzy back at us.