back   Pavel BÜCHLER Installations 12/05 – 02/09/2007 Büchler was born in the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and moved to the United Kingdom in 1981. A key mode in his practice is the way he invests objects with storytelling, making the objects speak in a way that changes their effect on the spectator. He works with old technology, audio recording, light and the material and mental presence of texts but all with a focus on how we give things meanings that do not belong to them in the first place.  Büchlers’s work evolves around two fundamental concerns: the leftovers of modernism and everyday materials. He uses icons of our recent cultural past from Kafka to Beckett to Warhol to distil and compress history and to give it new currency in the present. His question seems often to come down to a simple one: “How can I reconfigure this artwork so that it works right here and right now, in our world?”. His answer is usually spare, almost parsimonious in its use of material. Other work uses found material as its inspiration and is excessive, almost grandiose in scale. The exhibition Büchler sees the role of art as a catalyst to make things strange that at first glance might look common or insignificant. By finding meaning at the margins, he draws our attention to the potential of the small scale to say important things about our current world. The work List / Previous Correspondence is huge, stretching over many walls of the exhibition rooms. It registers all the impersonally personalised junk mail that one person may expect to receive in four or five years. As the audience passes along the rows of letters, trying to spot names added or subtracted from the list, they might start to get involved in imaginary little narratives of names related to where they work or live. What are these people doing lending their identities to something so trivial? What the cleaners saw found There is a small edition of books produced by Büchler called What the Cleaners Saw Found . Produced as a series of very modest publications, the edition gathers years of experience with the bureaucratic insanity of working in an art school. Initially generated for ideological reasons, they long since took on a life of their own, becoming self-serving elements of an independent officialdom that constantly feels the need to justify its existence. Escape is impossible but by beautifully turning their tools back on them, Büchler assures us that a kind of second hand creativity is just as joyous and irritating as the original. Publication The exhibition is accompanied by the new publication Absentmindedwindowgazing bringing together a series of overlapping texts about Büchler’s work and a thorough documentation of the exhibition. Contributors to the publication are: François Boucher, Nick Crowe, Jiri Drasnar, Charles Esche, Andrew Hunt, Joan Key, Chus Martinez, Paul O'Neill and Philippe Pirotte. This publication is for sale in our Museumshop. ISBN/EAN: 9789086900763, €19,95. The exhibition Pavel Büchler is in cooperation with Kunsthalle Bern and Frankfurter Kunstverein. back