In COOP, the artists show five curtains as a photographic installation. In their dialogue both artists found a working strategy for themselves: Stubenvoll reacted on an existing photo series of Kneip Velescu. Kneip Velescu photographed herself in front of her studio wall. The wall of her studio contains various phases of her artistic process framed by lines of blue tape. The life-sized scale of her body in the photographs reflect the constant demand on contemporary artists to present her*himself including her*his own body. This finds its expression in the use of social media as well as in the urge towards revealing the ‘creative’ process. Through the act of collaging Stubenvoll amended body parts, mostly hands, in black-white photography. Stubenvoll took those parts of photographs from the book ‘The Art of Sensual Massage’ (1972) by the American author Gordon Inkles showing him and his friends performing erotically charged massages. The photographed hands respond equally to the body of Kneip Velescu as to the body of work in her studio. At the same time the multiple layers of collaging create an excessive aesthetic of image overload. Stubenvoll’s editing of the photographs takes them from soft and erotic into more dark and violent imagery acting on Kneip Velescu’s body.

D&D'S PROBLEMATIC POODLE by Daniela Kneip Velescu and Daniel Stubenvoll blurs the line between dialogue as an active and comment as passive form of collaboration, between interior as curtains and exterior as public presented art, between erotic and violent relationships and between collaboration and power. In the exhibition space of COOP, the curtains function as room dividers breaking the rectangular form of the space as well as connecting elements between the other works.

D&D's Problematic Poodle
Collaboration with Daniela Kneip Velescu
COOP Pavilion on Bangkok Biennial
Text: Muriel Meyer

D&D'S PROBLEMATIC POODLE (Lip), Pigment Print and Paint Marker on Oilcloth, Shower Curtain Rings
D&D'S PROBLEMATIC POODLE (Neck), Pigment Print and Paint Marker on Oilcloth, Shower Curtain Rings
D&D'S PROBLEMATIC POODLE (Shoulder), Pigment Print and Paint Marker on Oilcloth, Shower Curtain Rings
D&D'S PROBLEMATIC POODLE (Trunk), Pigment Print and Paint Marker on Oilcloth, Shower Curtain Rings
D&D'S PROBLEMATIC POODLE (Foot), Pigment Print and Paint Marker on Oilcloth, Shower Curtain Rings