Bendana | Pinel Art Contemporain is delighted to present Niklas Goldbach’s second solo exhibition “Everything in its right place” at the gallery.

Standardization and inimitability, containment and individual freedom, ostentation and understatement are only some of the antagonistic issues that create the kind of socio-psychological conflicts around which Niklas Goldbachs work revolves. The interaction between psychological settings and the urban as well as the natural environment shaping our contemporary living conditions and mind sets are often in the center of Niklas Goldbachs work.

For the first time, the exhibition brings together two of Goldbach’s most recent work series: the video-installation cycle “The Nature of Things” (2010-2014) and a selection of his extensive photographic series “Everything In Its Right Place» (2013). With this selection, the artist’s research on the ambiguous tension between the individual’s desire for uniqueness and modern society’s tendency to enforce conformity are juxtaposed.

In the video installations “The Nature of Things”, the protagonists are either tied to a tree, a metal pole or a wooden post. Dressed in the uniform of an “urban archetype” (Niklas Goldbach), the protagonists bear their misery in front of man-made cultural landscapes: the countryside of Västerbottom, a rural region of North-Sweden, the Garzweiler surface mine in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia and the German “Devilsmoor”, a former turf mining region which got re-cultivated and is now a recreation area.

Referring to the representation of St. Sebastian and shot as a tableau vivant in real time, the tied young men have to suffer their bondage for hours. Goldbach records a wide variety of behaviors, attitudes and expressions that characterize some of the most aching feelings and challenges a person can experience during his existence.

While in numerous of Goldbach’s previous video works his often duplicated protagonists seem to be trapped among themselves in structures of control and discipline, the extensive photo project ”Everything In Its Right Place” (2013) focuses only ostensibly on the topology of repetition and homogeneity: ”Everything in its right place” is a series of 78 photographies of carob trees, taken on a plantation on the Balearic Islands in Spain. In times of modern food production, Niklas Goldbach focuses anachronistically on the aspect of biodiversity and presents individual character portraits of economical plants.