Prevention is the magic word of our time. It promises to improve our living conditions and broaden our opportunities. We subject ourselves to preventive measures in all aspects of our lives and living conditions, try to minimise risks, immunise ourselves against problems: "Better safe than sorry" is the watchword in an ever-faster changing world. People see their lives as a project which they themselves can optimise permanently. Sex, age and origins are increasingly unimportant, lifestyle and life planning are the decisive factors. The concept of what people normally are has changed to what they could be.
The permanently shifting boundaries inherent in optimisation create an existential directional uncertainty which conflicts again and again with the desire for certainty, the wish to prevent and provide for. Change puts values in question, sets moral principles aside. What is real? What am I? And what do I want to be?
Eckart Hahn creates images of change: he takes crystal, the symbol of uniformity and homogeneity, and encloses it in clay, a crystalline material but one which is soft and hence malleable. Anything which is done to its structure means destroying what exists, what we are perhaps used to and have long known; but it also creates what is new, unfamiliar and unknown. These images can be read as metaphors for finding new forms, as a call to transform to something which, while not yet offering us security, opens up an opportunity to unmask the fear which horror scenarios create as a source of power: the hand clenched in a fist turns into a triumphal arc, the most dangerous animals in Africa combine to give a crystal-like sculpture. The light breaking in the crystal with its rainbow colours hints at symbols of peace and reconciliation.
The CCC Clay/Crystal/Color exhibition presents many new works by artist Eckart Hahn for the first time and makes the narrative of change which we need to see what exists differently impressively.
- Claudia Emmert , Director of the Zeppelin Museum
