Lisl Ponger & Tim Sharp | Dreams of New Worlds

A system of references and intertextual relations made up of pictorial and object elements that comment on one another, which Lisl Ponger has developed into a museum of its own at the Secession, finds its counterpart in our gallery. Here the photographs themselves are the exhibition display, and the objects depicted in the staged pictures communicate across and through them. As the imaginary centre of this visual polyphony, Lisl Ponger draws on a figure from Mexico’s more recent popular mythology, Death in the person of a woman: La Catrina. She is a female skeleton, opulently dressed in the fashion of the pre-revolutionary era, who originally served as a caricature of the morbid ruling class.

The second factor organising the references in this exhibition is Mexico itself. This country on the border with the USA stands, in an ideal-typical way, for the consequences of the colonisation of Latin America and for the social-revolutionary transformations that continue into the present. So it may come as no surprise that Indian(er) Jones appears in two different roles, neither of which shows him as a “Good American”. In the last two photographs, which conclude the cycle of the four-part Indian(er) Jones series, he becomes visible as the bearer of multiple roles. Hernán Cortés, the conquistador, is regarded as a symbol of European expansion. He has numerous revenants – Indian(er) Jones among them – who struggle for resources, land and power and, as in the last picture of the cycle, venture a little dance with Lady Death. Picture panels with political slogans and pictorial references lead from this photograph to the other pictures shown in the exhibition.

The photograph “The Romantic Space between Hope and Reality”, modelled on a double portrait by Frida Kahlo, brings together two figures who shaped the history and art of Mexico as well as the content of the exhibition: Emiliano Zapata, one of the main protagonists of the Mexican Revolution at the beginning of the 20th century, and Diego Rivera, who with his “murales” found an original style that is immediately associated with Mexico. His murals are conceived as a grand historical narrative and were also intended as a means of conveying political content. In our exhibition, Lisl Ponger and Tim Sharp take up both political and historical content and the means of representation used: multi-part works, slogans, a wall newspaper (Tim Sharp) and objects of great symbolic power.

Another, subtle alliance with death is taken up by Tim Sharp in his two objects “The Bottom Line” and “Naming the Game”. Internationally operating companies subject the country’s resources – mineral wealth, land, agriculture, fisheries, transport and industrial projects – to a money economy that excludes the majority of the population from these riches and pushes parts of the indigenous population into illegality. Mexico is a stage on which extremes collide harshly and the colonial past is perpetuated by a neo-colonial financial system.

Calculating reason, reckoning with an abacus made of dice and another made of skulls, dreams of the New World. The political reality of Mexico and its social-revolutionary past have already created numerous other dreams of new worlds that press towards becoming reality – for instance as the new Zapatista movement. This, too, finds expression in the photographs in the exhibition, and even Indian(er) Jones, risen from Hollywood’s dream world, has to come to terms with it.

The aftershocks of the tremors and upheavals that accompany “The Vanishing Middle Class” extend into our gallery, and Tim Sharp’s objects function as seismographs that make audible not the jingling of money but the chattering of bare skulls’ teeth.

Lisl Ponger at the Secession: The Vanishing Middle Class