What happened to the barber in mythology will sooner or later happen to us. We think we will burst if we are not able to tell anyone what bothers us. Let’s be honest, it doesn’t matter whom we tell. On the phone, in a taxi, on the couch we dig a hole in the head of the person opposite us and speak into it. Granted, this does not solve our problem, but we feel lighter for having told it.

Full of holes, like someone who often finds himself in the position of the listener, is our reflection, gazing back at us out of six square black basins of water, each a meter long, in Victor Kégli’s work “King Midas and His Donkey Ears”. These complaining voices coming out of the loudspeakers attached to white “rushes” as tall as a man – do they address us? The reeds whisper to one another things blurted out by the troubled and burdened, which we all are sometimes: they are the life sounds of whining and complaint. The wind blows from the fan, coming from the outside and between, scattering the whispers, driving out the thoughts that have eaten their ways into our heads. It disturbs the ritual, even as it ensures fresh air at the same time. Seemingly disconnected from the symbiosis of the hole and the complaint, it introduces what we miss most in our need, namely, movement and lightness.

And is there not something consoling in the voices of the 96 reeds? As seriously as we take them individually, they are inevitably comical as a choir. Victor Kégli does not make fun of them. He shows that the need to talk is a human need: that our voice is one of the countless voices the wind and reeds relate. (Tanja Schwarz)