Hotel Marienbad 003: Savage.
You will have what you want sometime soon

Opening: July 05, 2008, 5 - 10 pm

It's not uncommon to find safes in hotels—they protect the wealth of the dear guest from theft. But what if the safe has been stolen and the guests become thieves themselves?

Lay partiality aside, and answer me: is theft, whose effect is to distribute wealth more evenly, to be branded as a wrong in our day, under our government which aims at equality? Plainly, the answer is no: it furthers equality and, what is more, renders more difficult the conservation of property. There was once a people who punished not the thief but him who allowed himself to be robbed, in order to teach him to care for his property.

(Marquis de Sade)

The Scottish artist Savage (born 1978 in Glasgow) compliments the Hotel Marienbad as its third guest.

Situated in the main building of KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Hotel Marienbad opens up possibilities beyond the white cube by offering a poetic space for highly diverse modes of presentation and performance formats. Eluding all attempts at defining it as either a private or a public space, it is both useful space and artistic platform. Whether they present an exhibition or host an evening event is up to the guests, who do not pay for bed and board in the usual way. Instead, the accepted currency are artistic interventions that subject the place to permanent change. Thus each guest leaves traces which combine to form part of a collective process that is reflected in the steadily rising figure of the room number.

The exhibition is curated by Susanne Pfeffer.

Supported by Dornbracht Culture Projects and the Friends of KW Institute for Contemporary Art.