Natalie Czech's exhibition entitled without words would at the Bonner Kunstverein revolves around the question of the quality of things and people and the possibility of a description. The book pages of Robert Musil's unfinished magnum opus Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930 - 1942) are arranged in a cascade to form a room-filling installation. If you take a closer look at the pages, you realise that the adjectives are missing from the sentences. Numerous acquaintances have crossed them out on the pages at the artist's request. The paradox here is that the removal of the adjectives produces the greatest possible freedom in the attribution of qualities: the more omission, the more projection. Czech pursues negation as a constructive variable: the exhibition title without words would also addresses the absence as such with the first word and syntactically leaves a few words missing. It is up to the reader and exhibition visitor to fill in the gaps introduced by the artist. Czech has set herself the task of making the invisible visible. Czech deposited light-sensitive paper in numerous art depots of museums and galleries. The settling dust, fixed and developed, became a witness to the passing of time and a circulation of particles fixed in a moment that never completely rests. The former master student of Thomas Ruff used a process here that comes very close to the invention of rayography, named after Man Ray. The imagery is created by the traces left behind by the incidence of light on photosensitive paper, a physical process of which the viewer is hardly aware in the age of digital photography. On display are pictures composed of 25 paper surfaces on which deposited dust is depicted as white fluff on a black background. The sequence of the assembled images follows the length of time that the individual slide frames were exposed to dust. The fine shading in the now almost monochrome image characterises different time sequences. This is the time during which numerous works of art spend their existence in the art depot. The deposition of dust symbolically conveys not only time, but also the presence of artworks that were once intended for the public and purchased, but are now manoeuvred into oblivion for various reasons. With the exception of Czech's collages of dust paintings, visitors to the exhibition have absolutely no idea of their existence.

For Seb Koberstädt, sculpture takes centre stage. For his final exhibition of the Peter Mertes Scholarship, entitled Filzlaus, Seb Koberstädt has designed two sculptural interventions in which personal themes as well as themes of subculture, high culture and architecture come to the fore. The former student of Tony Cragg and Hubert Kiecol makes extensions and fixtures in his surroundings his own by scrutinising them for their randomly chosen functional and aesthetic validity and suitability using sometimes subversive means. Seemingly incompatible objects, materials and found objects are joined together in a precise working process and fused into an object or construction of strangely fragile beauty. Two deer antlers, for example, become an oversized candlestick whose functionality appears to be of secondary importance. In addition to construction, deconstruction and reassembly is another artistic strategy that Koberstädt utilises in different ways. Posters, made from varnished photographic prints, are often the starting point. In a room-filling installation at the Bonner Kunstverein, he applies this strategy in two ways. An angular form previously constructed by him from black and white surfaces serves him in a photographic self-portrait as a kind of full-body armour, from which only the feet protrude. The resulting self-portrait is further processed as a poster by Koberstädt by separating it along the edge structure of the armour in a defined manner, painting the resulting fragments with pigment and varnish and then reassembling them. The reassembled posters are in turn put together to form a huge architecture, a roof, a façade or a tarpaulin, the possible function of which can only be recognised after the actual installation in the exhibition space.