On the first floor are photographs and video footage Gregor Schneider took in Welcome, his current exhibition at Haus Esters, Krefeld (4.5-21.9.25). The exhibition in Krefeld consists of the aftermath of the month preceding its opening, during which the Alhmam Aldaas Family - a father, mother, and two small children - were living in Haus Esters, reviving to some extent its original purpose as a residential villa designed in the late 1920s by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The Alhmam Aldaas Family are Syrian refugees who migrated to Germany after fleeing their country in 2015, the peak of the civil war in Syria and the beginning of the European migration crisis. During the family's time in Haus Esters, the place was closed to the public, and for the new residents to be provided with privacy, the fact that they were living there was not even announced (it was only announced retroactively). One could say, that their stay at the museum was marked by isolation, inaccessibility, and obscurity; qualities that preoccupied Schneider existentially and artistically throughout the decades, but in the context of the current exhibition in Krefeld, became aspects of a social-political-cultural situation serving as a reflection on the life of Muslim communities in Germany, and in Christian Europe in general.
In order to feel at home or to be able to claim the place, the Alhmam Aldaas Family decorated the rooms of Haus Esters as they saw fit, according to their aesthetic parameters and the requirements that (when fulfilled) obtain a sense of dwelling. Presenting the spatial sculpture Haus Alhmam Aldaas. the exhibition Welcome was opened to the public after the family departed the place and their pieces of furniture were evacuated, leaving behind empty rooms with curtains, wallpaper, and traces of everyday life, like the wall painting in the daughter's room, or the Quran verse in the living room. The photographs depict Haus Alhmam Aldaas on the night before their departure with the house as it was when they were living there, and the Haus Alhmam Aldaas after the family's departure. The emptiness of the rooms might raise dreadful scenarios presupposing the people residing there were gone, lost, evicted. The work recodifies Schneider's spaces of void and absence in terms of an encapsilated global social phenomenon. At this point it is worth mentioning that unlike artist like Santiago Sierra who hires the performers for his works, Schneider's relationship with the Alhmam Aldaas family members is personal stretching back to the time they arrived in Germany, and their collaboration is fully voluntary.
Haus Alhmam Aldaas continues and develops fundamental issues and motifs appearing in Schneider's work throughout the years, for example in Cube Venice 2005, and Cube Hamburg 2007, that sought to confront the European urban landscape with the presence of Islamic rituals and customs by attempting to erect a gigantic outdoor structure seemingly replicating Islam's holy edifice of the Kaaba in Mecca. Another example coming to mind is Die Familie Schneider (2004). Die Familie Schneider was a double performance installation occupying two adjacent identical townhouses, Nos 14 and 16 Walden Street in London's East End. The two interiors appeared fully identical to one another with each of their details doubled. In each house three performers formed a family - a mother, father, and child - carrying out a scripted activity in a specific room. The performers were in fact identical twins, therefore doubled as well.
On the second floor are new color photographs taken by Schneider in his Haus u r, the foundational locus of the artist's practice, located on the family premises in his hometown Mo?nchengladbach-Rheydt. The parallel presentation of Haus Alhmam Aldaas and Haus u r underlines the symmetry-asymmetry between the two and opens the inner symmetry- asymmetry the latter is based upon towards a social-political horizon. The new photographs of Haus u r convey the evolution of rooms conducted by Schneider, but also the building's entropic processes and the ways it redefined the distinction between living and dead, inhabited and empty, since its inception in 1985 and even more so after being displaced to the German Pavilion in the 2001 edition of the Venice Biennale.
The exhibition Zwischen Decke und Boden puts an emphasis on Schneider's photographic practice and the photographic logic of his spatial-sculptural work. Schneider room sculptures stem from the notion of reconstruction, they are like three-dimensional photographs reconstructing the site in which they were built, or existing structures in the world. The current exhibition at Konrad Fischer Galerie also echoes Schneider's first museum exhibition in the mid 1990s taking place in Haus Lange, the adjacent twin of Haus Esters built by the same architect at the same time, where photographs of the rooms from Haus u r, introducing the photographic DNA of Schneider's architectural-sculptural-societal project.
– Ory Dessau
