“Not being able to understand the things that so often elude and fascinate and all the time until the rupture and even after the rupture, which will not be a real rupture, still in fact. Facing this in a friendly way initially, with curiosity. Wanting to understand, wanting to observe, wanting to feel what language is doing, what conception of the world is being created, what other things are being constructed. Sensing one’s own boundaries in thought, touching them. Feelers. Simply shifting that boundary. What cannot be thought or simply cannot be thought yet. Paying attention to this. Opening up to the unknown, to emptiness. Simply catapulting oneself over it, writing, thinking, dreaming. Or music. Singing. Dancing. Or whatever. Plants. Substances. Breathing. Sleeping. Painting. Wanting to live in truth and to be in the world, fully. Concrete work on reality. Wanting to step over it and beyond. Inconsistencies. Still no guides. Becoming world oneself. Perhaps finding a language while searching, perhaps for the unknown, the not yet conceived, the utopia.”

Jan Erbelding is an author, photographer and conceptual artist. His artistic practice is predominantly text-based and takes the form of performances, spatial installations and his own publications. Erbelding combines personal experiences and ideas with historical facts and figures, literary references and socio-political commentaries in order to create poetic narratives. For Haus der Kunst, the Munich-based artist has written a new text work that revolves around the life and work of the French philosopher Simone Weil. In this room-encompassing installation, spoken fragments of the text can be heard over loudspeakers, creating a dialogue with the printed text, which is kept on a bookshelf. In the poetic and narrative installation Still No Guides (2022), visitors are presented with an interplay of different levels of perception: hearing, seeing, feeling, and reading. Visitors are invited to pause and empathise with the life and work of Simone Weil as narrated by Jan Erbelding.

Curated by Luisa Seipp and Damian Lentini