Mehmet and Kazim Akal – known as the artist duo “Kissing Cousins” – expand the painterly process by integrating virtual reality technology as a tool in their art. Their red and white dominated visual world leaves the canvas and continues in digital space: through expansive installations, digitally painted images and animated VR videos, they take painting out of the two-dimensional surface and their painted figures and motifs become animated plasticine that moves and seems to come to life. The Lenbachhaus collection includes works by Mehmet & Kazim and, at the invitation of the museum, the two are showing a selection of their red-colored videos as part of Various Others.
The cousins’ hip-hop and graffiti-influenced aesthetic radically disrupts the historicist style of the Palais Montgelas in the Hotel Bayerischer Hof – the temporary exhibition space. The videos, which only last a few minutes, show two similar figures that appear to have grown together at the arms and are in different situations, such as under water or on a horse. The two figures represent the “Kissing Cousins” themselves and appear constantly in the paintings, drawings and videos by Mehmet & Kazim. In this way, the humorous references to art-historical role models, themselves and the art world are put on display for a weekend in the opulent Bayerischer Hof.