Art

A scruffy caravan is pulled by a ’70s Mercedes through the streets of Münster, Westphalia. We see it travel up and down German high streets and flyovers, pull into rural roads and disappear into forests, before being abandoned on a bit of farmland. The sun goes down. The film ends.

Garcia Torres’ film ‘My Westphalia Days’ is somewhere between a Wim Wenders road movie (‘Paris, Texas’ with a caravan) and a video for Kraftwerk’s joyfully monotonous krautrock anthem ‘Autobahn’. Like Wenders’ film about the lost four years of an amnesiac who emerged from the desert, ‘My Westphalia Days’ recreates the lost four days of conceptual artist Michael Asher’s caravan sculpture, which vanished from the Sculpture Project Münster last year, only to be discovered at the edge of a forest days later. With a tongue-in-cheek approach and dry humour, Garcia Torres creates playful narratives around the forgotten conceptual piece, leaving just enough information to attract curiosity while allowing space for the free association of new meanings.

For the second piece in the show, ‘What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger’, Garcia Torres applies a similar technique while weaving a closer-knit narrative around his conceptual objet trouvé. Conceived as a slide show with text, he tells the story of Martin Kippenberger’s attempts to establish a museum of modern art on the Greek island Syros. Starting off as an antiquated presentation of idyllic tourist shots of the island accompanied by factual subtitles, it slowly develops into a captivating examination of Kippenberger’s forgotten work and Garcia Torres’ own attempts to rescue it from oblivion.