FICTION OF A NON-ENTRY

Mischa Leinkauf

PYLON-Lab is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition “Fiction of a Non-Entry” by conceptual artist Mischa Leinkauf, opening on Friday, January 31st at 6pm.

In his artistic practice, Mischa Leinkauf deals with boundaries, rules and architecture and investigates how they restrict and limit space. Through his interventions, Leinkauf provokes situations that cause temporary irritation and open up spaces of possibility for recoding.

The works presented in the exhibition Fiction of a Non-Entry at PYLON-Lab deal with questions about the freedom of art and the artist as well as their scope of action and reflect an intensive examination of how public space is defined, symbolized and structured. The video works present strategies how such orders can be irritated and systems infiltrated.

Mischa Leinkauf studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne from 2005 to 2011 and is represented by the Alexander Levy Gallery (Berlin). His work as a solo artist and as part of the artist duo Wermke/Leinkauf has been presented in numerous international exhibitions and festivals.

The exhibition is kindly supported by Kulturstiftung des Freistaat Sachsen, by Landeshauptstadt Dresden – Amt für Kultur und Denkmalschutz and by Ostsächsische Sparkasse Dresden.

Symbolic Threats (2015)

Fiktion einer Nicht-Einreise (2019)

On the night of July 22, 2014, Mischa Leinkauf and his colleague Matthias Wermke climbed the Brooklyn Bridge in New York and replaced the American flags with two white flags. The video Symbolic Threats, captures the ambivalent reactions of the media, politics and citizens on the events: The action is described as “poetic” by some and interpreted as a “national threat” by others. Speculations about the background and motives behind the action have been intensively debated. Shortly after the turmoil, the artist duo published a press release in which they publicly acknowledged the action and described it as an art project that “stands in the tradition of uncommissioned art in the public sphere“. The project was also intended to celebrate the “beauty of public space”, as the artists stated in ensuing interviews.

As an intro to the exhibition, Symbolic Threats represents a discourse on how public space represents and symbolizes the architectural structure of an underlying order system.