SKITS. 13 Exhibitions in 9 rooms

After the restoration of its roof, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden reopened its upper floors by presenting SKITS. 13 Exhibitions in 9 Rooms, a solo exhibition of the artist Michael Müller.

Sixteen tons of fire-dried quartz sand, hundreds of metres of pond foil, several square metres of white and pink carpet, several tracks of translucent red plastic foil, an aquarium with two Mexican albino axolotls and 50 blind albino cave miners. In addition: 600 white tiles, numerous tons of different types of wood, 200 plates of damp clay, art works by Art & Language, Jan Brueghel the younger, Angela de la Cruz, Jochen Dehn, Rolf-Gunter Dienst, Willem de Kooning, Jonathan Lasker and Vlado Martek, in addition to Michael Müller’s own drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations and videos: these are some of the materials and works of his exhibition.

The first part of the exhibition title—Skits—describes a short speech act that is used in hip-hop music. It is a deliberate interruption, often parodic, of the closed content form of a respective hip-hop album. The second part of the title—13 Exhibitions in 9 Rooms—is supposed to provide information on the subject matter of Müller which appears to be logical in view on the considerable material he has gathered for the exhibition. As varied as this inventory may seem, as varied are the motives Müller presents in the nine rooms of the Kunsthalle: literature, language, writing, music and dance, mythology and nature, religion and their rituals, gender identity or clothes up to the operating system of art are covering the range of his topics.

Within the meaning of this extraordinary use of effort and material, Müller’s exhibition inventory has to be enriched with fifteen dancers, ten musicians and two DJs. They performed the four-hour performance Third Rehearsal for Nietzsche’s birthday party, 2313 with drums, violins, a cello, a piano and clarinets during the opening night.