Michael Beutler’s (b. 1976, Oldenburg/Berlin) work is not only produced locally in Gwangju’s Daein Market, it is also part of the infrastructure of the exhibition. DAEIN SAUSAGE SHOP is a workshop inside Daein Market where Beutler has built up several wooden machines that turn fruit netting and paper due to be recycled into “paper sausages.” They are called “sausages” because the paper is wrapped inside the fruit netting to form brick-like units. These sausages are then transported from the market to the Biennale exhibition hall, where they become the material for the walls of a zone in Gallery 3 that contains works pertaining to the strand “labor point of view.” The first sausage project was at Atelier Calder in Saché, France, in 2013.
Beutler’s constructions function as a playful and inventive critique of the standardization of work processes and materials. His projects often emerge from vague, fluid situations that in turn allow for new structures to emerge, through a distinct and inventive DIY spirit. And from then on, everything might be and can be questioned, redefined, and rearranged. Beutler makes his own tools, and often utilizes inexpensive and recycled materials for new purposes, or purposes contrary to their intended one. In the sixth edition of the Gwangju Biennale in 2006, Beutler created Inchworm Bridge, a bridge inside the exhibition hall made out of bamboo, water hoses, wood, and plastic panels amongst other materials. His projects often seem to replicate and pick apart the original structure simultaneously. They ask of all other architectures: Why should we behave like this? How could things be done differently? Why should we not be always in the process of beginning again? And so it is in this radical instability that alternative, new possibilities emerge. KVM + MW
self-presentation:
Coming from a large village near a small provincial town, where I actually spend a lot of time making things in a afternoon art school for teenagers called Klex, I had a bit of a shock when I entered the library of the Städelschule in Frankfurt for the first time. Being surrounded by art books I wondered how I would find my way through there. I had chosen art, I believe, because it was an election of more options and basically a non-choice. I always believed that all would be possible and being in the studios of the school pretty much left to my own visions I could very nicely dwell on what caused problems, combining that with the experience I had from working as a model builder, making art for my professors, hanging out with the other students, and seeing many exhibitions as well as browsing book by book through that library. So the Städelschule in Frankfurt was certainly the frame in which I found what I pretty much still do today. Making tools, building situations, and working with people next to me.
