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..I think I shall be reincarnated as Joachim Brohm. (I could even keep my initials.)

He’s a well-known (in Germany) photographer of industrial wastelands and marginal zones and the exhibition in the Kunsthalle in Mainz is worth a look.

They’re a bit like this (not exhibited) effort  – apparently uncomposed pictures of the grim bits of cities that most people would rather not accept as reality. And the sort of stuff that would go undocumented if it weren’t for artists like him.

“This”, being the Mainz docklands that are going to spring to life with flash apartments and buzzing restaurants as soon as a) the banks will unfreeze some credit and b) people have the money and confidence to buy them.

There was some other stuff, too.

Sarah Mock (now if THAT name doesn’t tell you something..) treated us to a brown packing paper igloo in which a film ran, featuring a buxom wench wrapped in – yes, brown packing paper – detaching the head of a stuffed turtle with a saw made of …. Right.

Best of all was the top floor.

I seriously thought that they were doing some repair work after storm damage, with window frames filled with insulating batts.

It wasn’t until I had a prod around that I discovered that they …er… actually WERE the works of art.

Confirmed by the alarms going off….

27 Jan This entry was published on 27 January, 2010 at 12:00. It’s filed under Mainz and tagged arty-farty, kunsthalle. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.