Exhibition Mehmet & Kazim
VR-Video installation in the context of Various Others
When:
Sat, May 10, 2025, 11am–5pm
Free admission
Duration:
May 10 to May 11, 2025
Meeting point:
Hotel Bayerischer Hof, Fürstensalon, Promenadeplatz 2-6, 80333 München
9.30pm: Live soundtrack of the videos by Markus Oehlen
When:
Sat, May 10, 2025, 11am–5pm
Free admission
Duration:
May 10 to May 11, 2025
Meeting point:
Hotel Bayerischer Hof, Fürstensalon, Promenadeplatz 2-6, 80333 München
No registration necessary.
Mehmet and Kazim Akal – known as the artist duo "Kissing Cousins" – expand the painterly process by integrating virtual reality technology as a tool in their art. Their red and white dominated visual world leaves the canvas and continues in digital space: through expansive installations, digitally painted images and animated VR videos, they take painting out of the two-dimensional surface and their painted figures and motifs become animated plasticine that moves and seems to come to life. The Lenbachhaus collection includes works by Mehmet & Kazim and, at the invitation of the museum, the two are showing a selection of their red-colored videos as part of Various Others.
The cousins' hip-hop and graffiti-influenced aesthetic radically disrupts the historicist style of the Palais Montgelas in the Hotel Bayerischer Hof – the temporary exhibition space. The videos, which only last a few minutes, show two similar figures that appear to have grown together at the arms and are in different situations, such as under water or on a horse. The two figures represent the "Kissing Cousins" themselves and appear constantly in the paintings, drawings and videos by Mehmet & Kazim. In this way, the humorous references to art-historical role models, themselves and the art world are put on display for a weekend in the opulent Bayerischer Hof.
On Saturday, May 10 at 9.30 pm, Markus Oehlen will play live with a modular synthesiser to the images in the videos – with electronic sound. Oehlen and Mehmet & Kazim have already toured the world with their joint performance and are now celebrating a revival with a twist at the pompous Bayerischer Hof.
As part of the "Unconference" on the night of 10 to 11 May at the Bayerischer Hof in cooperation with Various Others
