Dennis Rudolph
The Portal TV
8. Mai – 28. Juni 2015

Lichthaus Arnsberg presents the solo exhibition by Dennis Rudolph "The Portal TV".

In Rudolph's exhibition, Lichthaus Arnsberg becomes a film studio. The stage, spotlights and bluescreen turn the Lichthaus into a Californian desert on YouTube. His performance "The Portal TV" stages a TV show and charity raffle in which visitors to the opening can win works of art by Rudolph. Before the performance, the artist will have his own stand at the weekly market on Gutenbergplatz and at various locations in the city to promote his participatory project - the construction of a monument to the western world in California City.

California, sea, sun, palm trees, Hollywood - is this paradise? Many clichés of the western world are reflected in Rudolph's portal project. His artistic research takes him from the "City of Angels" Los Angeles to the Californian desert. There he finds the failed urban planning project California City, founded in 1958 with the aim of one day competing with Los Angeles. Large areas of the man-made city are still uninhabited today - a disaster or "pure hell" for major investors. But for Dennis Rudolph, this city is an exciting place to think about dreams, utopias and their realisation. On a hill in the desert near California City, Rudolph wants to build a gate that symbolises the transition to paradise or hell. A gateway to eternal happiness, with the accompanying uncertainty about the outcome of the endeavour.

Rudolph approaches the subject of paradise and hell in his own way. Heaven and hell are concepts that can be renegotiated in our purely worldly times. In everyday life, for example, the term changes from its original religious context to a banal and kitschy one. People like to advertise paradise and scare people off with hell. Rudolph also uses similar marketing strategies with his long-standing project "The Portal".

Geographically speaking, California represents the end of Western civilisation, which, with its prosperity and social security, is considered a paradise. Rudolph visualises the fact that this is also an illusion with his portal by adding images of missing American children, among other things. For Rudolph, these children, caught between life and death, are a sign of duality, of the contradictory legibility of his gate.

Dennis Rudolph was born in Berlin in 1979, where he lives after studying in Beijing, St. Petersburg and Rome. His works were most recently shown at the Moscow Biennale for Young Art in 2014, at KW Berlin (Painting Forever) in 2014 and at the Munich Opera (Der Ring des Nibelungen) in 2013.

An exhibition organised by the Cultural Office of the City of Arnsberg in cooperation with Kunstverein Arnsberg e.V.