Beyond the comfort zone

For their exhibition Beyond the Comfort Zone at Oriel 6&7, artist-duo Manon Awst and Benjamin Walther introduce a new body of work which has been developed over the course of a three-month residency at Project Fortschritt, a newly-established project space for emerging artists in Dresden.

For Awst & Walther, the ‘Comfort Zone’ represents the ordered and monitored space of our daily living that ensures the smooth functioning of society. Through a series of luminous sculptures, compelling drawings and disturbing installations, the artists investigate the boundaries of this Zone within an individual and social context, confronting the viewer with the creation and employment of fear and violence by the operating power. Through brutal material transformations and forceful juxtapositions of scale, Awst & Walther reflect on the harsh social conditions that are often overlooked in our society and exaggerate their effect on the human psyche through mirroring the inner private sphere onto the outer public space within the gallery.

Over the last three years, their collaborative efforts have developed into a unique inter-disciplinary approach to art. With strong backgrounds in the fields of architecture, theatre and fine art, their investigative creative process often takes the form of intense performances and insightful installations that respond to vital political and philosophical discussion. Based on their own togetherness and actual life-circumstance, their work explores the notion of freedom and survival in our contemporary society, which embraces the abyss of the human mind and its capacity to formulate its own system of coordinates within a firmly pre-determined world.

Past work includes a public artwork entitled Digger that took the post-industrial regions of Ruhrgebiet in Germany and Swansea in Wales as points of departure to explore the potential of neglected energy resources. Through an intensive, collaborative working process, the communities were confronted with themes of power, participation and progress.

Their recently published catalogue Island Utopia documents an artwork that was staged as two performances during Autumn 2007 carried out at Swansea Museum, UK and Zollverein in Essen, Germany. Inside the two plots the audience witnessed the creation of a new being (Intruder) and the transformation of an existing being (System Being) for a new world. By using notions like ‘System Being’ and ‘Intruder’ the performances carve out the very moment when we realise that our environment, our social hierarchy, politics, our existence is constructed and alludes to our inclination to deconstruct it in our minds and design an alternative to it. In essence, the work took on the utopian dilemma by providing a permanent corrective to our perception of being trapped in our world.

Their work was recently featured in Platfform tri/3, the third in a series of publications by Wales Arts International that explores contemporary performance practice, as well as in The Utopian, an online publication devoted to seeking out the most original and challenging ideas in contemporary politics, art and culture.

Upcoming exhibitions include Survival of the Fittest at Galeri Caernarfon and Unfinished Realities at the Hannah Barry Gallery in London.