November 15, 2013
MKM Museum Küppersmühle for Modern Art

Entitled “I CAN BECAUSE I WANT WHAT I NEED”, the “Art Submarine” is a collaborative project initiated by the artist Andreas M. Kaufmann and the image scientist and art historian Prof. Dr. Hans Reck. A new acquisition to the Ströher Collection, the art work was installed in front of the MKM museum in Duisburg’s Inner Harbour in the autumn of 2013 and has now been incorporated as an “external exhibit'” into the MKM’s permanent collection. Previously, the sculpture had been premièred during celebrations of the European City of Culture RUHR.2010 on Essen’s Lake Baldeney. In honor of the new presentation at the MKM, the submarine sculpture has now been completely refurbished and the approximately 8-metre-long and 3.2-metre-high collage reworked and redesigned by the artist-scientist duo.

For Andreas M. Kaufmann and Hans Ulrich Reck the submarine represents a body of visually encoded knowledge, which is at times both visible, and, by virtue of its capacity to submerge, invisible. In equal measure it symbolises the camouflage and deception deployed by the military, the politicians and the media, together with invisible power and violence – the levels of interpretation are manifold here.