Artist's book.
Paul Spengemann creates creatures and has them tell stories. For
spin jump crawl climb dream bite hunt, he has developed a character that uses the thread it spins to share its emotions with us in short scenes. For his laser show, Spengemann brings simple line constellations to life, directing our gaze to what is often overlooked and drawing our attention to what is too often ignored. With the sharply focused light of the laser, he recounts the experiences of the creature, which not only spins, jumps, crawls, climbs, bites, and hunts, but also falls into dreaming, revealing its fears and desires.
One moment a sharp image, the next the spun, swirling structures of light fall victim to their fragility. Is it all just a dream? Or is something being caught here? Even if the figures seem somewhat clumsy, the thought of the web as a structure waiting for its prey to get caught and stuck leaves a feeling of unease.
With Nico Anklam, Marius Goldhorn,
Rodrigo Hernández, Sofia Lemos, Lisa Petersohn, Merle Radtke, and Sabrina Tarasoff, seven authors have now taken the web-spinning creature and its behavior as their starting point, picking up fragments of Spengemann's work and spinning his thoughts further. The seven texts are juxtaposed with Spengemann's line constellations. In the form of a flip book, the creature appropriates the book. Webs are spun across the pages and fall back down again, masks are put on and discarded again.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at Kunsthalle Münster in 2024.
Paul Spengemann (born 1987) studied film and fine art at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg and at Goldsmiths College, University of London. In 2016/17 he was awarded the Bundespreis für Kunststudierende, the Art Cologne Award for New Positions and in 2018 the Columbus Förderpreis der Deutschen Kunstvereine. His work focuses on the examination of different image-making processes, especially in the field of moving images. He meticulously studies not only their technical possibilities, but also how they can trace the world or create visual realities. He often uses the virtual in his work as a tool for visibility and participation, in the sense that a laser show is projected onto a building in a public space, a animated shadow of a dragon settles in an abandoned store, or a video call from a trouser pocket seems to reach the museum by chance. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and film festivals around the world.
