Markues (en)

The Watch

29.9.2024, GDR Watchtower at Schlesischer Busch

Disemboweled washing machines lie on the floor of the exhibition space like shipwrecks. Robbed of their domesticity and function, their reinforced side panels, perforations, and apertures stand out as meaningless decorations. On these wrecks, watercolors have settled like polyps. Markues proposes a formal view of these objects and the drawings upon them, which seem as if they could extend in all directions, liquefying before the viewer’s very eyes, flowing beyond the edges of the paper, and spilling over the washing machines.

Jellyfish are exposed to the currents of the sea and have little ability to determine their direction. Like the medusas that a jellyfish polyp forms by dividing itself into new segments, the ornaments in Markues’s watercolor series The Troubled Waters of Ethnic Heritage are separated from their origins. The forms in the drawings are borrowed from Westerwald and Bolesławiec pottery, as well as from carpets, curtains, wallpaper, and playing cards, superimposed in translucent layers like washed-out ceramic glazes in pale blue, violet, gray, and green tones. Markues directs the viewer’s attention to the ornamental, transforming its supposed uselessness into a method of painterly questioning. The works resist clearly defined stylistic or geographical determinations, but they are reminiscent of the decorations found on functional objects in working class environments, which are often chosen out of necessity rather than considerations of design. While individual decorations may have once been symbols of distinction, they are now erratically accumulated symbols without status.

Instead of an authentic illustration of their own biography, Markues deploys a double displacement: the expectation that the artistic production of minorities should consist of marketing their own biographies is only apparently fulfilled by the drawings, while being unrestrainedly exaggerated by their individual titles. The titles are marked as quotations, though their exact source remains unnamed. They stem from the milieu of those who were forcibly resettled in Germany between 1945–1950, who, by positioning themselves as ‘Heimatvertriebene’ (displaced persons), uphold a melange of nostalgia and resentment and conceal their entanglement in the crimes of National Socialism behind woeful tales of their own resettlement. The watercolors cannot be explained by way of their titles, however. They stare back stonily when suspected of identitarian fantasies.

How does one deal with ethnic heritage when throwing it overboard is impossible and affirming it is out of the question? The Troubled Waters of Ethnic Heritage describes such a situation. Through the deployment and superimposition of quotations and ornamental forms, the works manage to find a sense of possibility in the lack of homeland by leaving ethno-nationalism behind. For despite all their ambivalence, the titles have the potential to call to mind various migrant testimonies. The specific context of the quotations as well as the painterly ornaments appear so dissolved that they cannot be conflated with individual experiences nor used to relativize them.