Jakob Gautel

Exhibitions

2025-02-01T13:50:00Z

First exhibition of the project at the Centre Culturel Français in Jakarta, January 1997, photo: Dodo Karundeng, Antarafoto

Maria Theodora in the exhibition Icônes, Kerguéhennec art centre, 1999

Maria Theodora in the exhibition Genius loci, Hôtel Fontfreyde, centre photographique, Clermont-Ferrand, 2012, photos: Aurélien Mole

Maria Theodora, hanging at the MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine, 2012

Maria Theodora in the exhibition Situation(s) [48°47'34'' N / 2°23'14'' E], MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine, 2012

Catalogue Situation(s) [48°47'34'' N / 2°23'14'' E], editor MAC VAL 2012

Maria Theodora at the exhibition Ja. Aber (Grenzen-Los - Frauenperspektiven), Orgelfabrik Karlsruhe, 2013

Maria Theodora in L'Effet Vertigo, presentation of the MAC VAL collection, Vitry-sur-Seine, 2015-2016

Maria Theodora in the exhibition Çanakkale Art Walk: Homeland, BBK Osnabrück Kunstquartier, 2017

Maria Theodora at MAC VAL, at the exhibition The Ideal Genre, Vitry-sur-Seine, 2025

The series Maria Theodora has been shown in 1997 at the Centre Culturel Français de Jakarta (invited by Yves Ollivier), in 1999 at the art centre Kerguéhennec, exhibition Icônes (curator Denys Zacharopoulos) and at the Atelier sur l'Autoroute, Saint-Denis, in 2006 at the Musée Zadkine, Paris (curator Noëlle Chabert), in 2012 at the Hôtel Fontfreyde, Clermont-Ferrand, exhibition Genius Loci (curator Garance Chabert) and at the museum of contemporary art MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine, in the exhibition Situation(s)[48°47'34'' N / 2°23'14'' E] (curator Frank Lamy), in 2013 at the Orgelfabrik Karlsruhe-Durlach, in the exhibition Ja. Aber (Grenzen-Los - Frauenperspektiven), and in 2015-2016 at the new presentation of the MAC VAL collection L'Effet Vertigo, and in 2017 at the Kunstquartier BBK Osnabrück, as part of the Çanakkale Art Walk : Homeland (curator Christian Oxenius), in collaboration with the Çanakkale Biennial (curators Beral Madra, Deniz Erbaş and Seyhan Boztepe). The book Maria Theodora has been presented at Lignes de Vie, MAC VAL, 2019. The series is again on display in 2025 in the presentation of the MAC VAL collection Le genre idéal - En principe, une tentative d'épuisement.

Winda Kelly, who posed for the Maria Theodora series and played in the Batavia 1996 video, in May 2025 at MAC VAL!

Publication of the catalogues Situation(s) [48°47'34'' N / 2°23'14'' E], 2012, L'effet Vertigo, 2015, and Le genre idéal - En principe, une tentative d'épuisement, 2025, all edited by MAC VAL.

→ Collection du MAC VAL
→ Situation(s)
→ L'Effet Vertigo
→ Çanakkale Art Walk 2017 : Homeland
→ Le genre idéal

À propos de « Maria Theodora », entretien avec Jakob Gautel (25/09/2015) *
by MACVAL Productions

https://vimeo.com/144606835

Apparition

2016-05-22T16:34:28Z

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Maria Theodora, embodied by Lisa Rueda, appears during the Museum Night at the MAC VAL museum of contemporary art, Vitry-sur-Seine, May 2016.

Presence of phantoms of which we are the flesh.
Frédéric Lormeau

Many thanks to Marie and Sylvain Rueda, to Stéphanie Airaud, Antonie Bergmeier, Alexia Fabre, Valérie Labayle, Frank Lamy and the MAC VAL museum team.
Photos : Jason Karaïndros and JG

→ The MACVAL Museum Night on TV

The video of the performance Apparition, camera Guillaume de la Forest Divonne, is shown at the Garden Party, MAC VAL's anniversary weekend on June 14 and 15, 2025, at the performance projection Forever Performing. The compilation is by Antonie Bergmeier.
→ Garden Party

Projection of the video at MAC VAL, June 2025

Photographs

2012-07-22T12:06:59Z

Series of one sepia photograph and 120 black and white photographs

Costume : Baby Jim Aditya
Textile research : Lanny Suryo Kusumo
Heartfelt thanks to Farah Riziani Rachmat, Florent Stoffer, Jerry Thung et Barbara, Retty Hakim, Winda Gracias, Hanny, to the Centre Culturel Français and the Goethe-Institut Jakarta and to all friends and participants.
Produced within the programme Villa Médicis hors des murs, AFAA (Institut français), French Minstery of Foreign Affairs.
Collection of the artist, Neuflize Vie collection and collection MAC VAL, musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, France.

In a famous passage of La Chambre claire, Roland Barthes describes the quest to find the “real” face of his deceased mother by scrutinizing family photos. A similar impulse has driven Jakob Gautel to produce Maria Theodora. This work is the result of autobiographical research as well as the reflexion of what a photographic image can actually reveal to us. The point of departure is Gautel's research on the childhood of an ancestor's exotic origins. Maria Theodora was born of mixed blood, to a German father and an indigenous mother in colonial Indonesia around the middle of the 19^th century. The Gautel family has kept fragments of this great-great-grandmother's personl diary, and most of all a photograph taken shortly after her arrival in Germany when, as an adolescent, she was obliged to leave her mother and the country of her birth to come with her father to Europe. These incomplete documents raise numerous questions about the story of this young girl. Through them, we are also left guessing about the faceless fantom of Maria Theodora's mother.
The artist has tried to elucidate this mysterious story with a book, a video and a photographic project. For the latter, Gautel took the original portrait of Maria Theodora as a starting point, reenacting the setting with Asian and European models. The alternation between women of different origins conveys the double nature of Maria Theodora's mixed origins. The slightly stiff poses also evoke the young girl's difficult posture, taken between two worlds. More importantly, the multiplication of these photographic reconstitutions is for the artist a way of digging deeper into the story of his ancestor's image. But the mosaic portrait conceived diffracts Maria Theodora's image even more. Her real nature continues to evade one, leaving the mystery of her photograph fully intact.

Larisa Dryansky 2006
Text for the book Photographies modernes et contemporaines. La collection Neuflize Vie, Flammarion, 2007

Batavia 1997

2009-08-26T17:02:15Z

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Filmed in Jakarta, within the work on the project Maria Theodora, with support from the Jakarta Goethe-Institut, the Centre Culturel Français in Jakarta and the French embassy's audiovisual service.
Produced within the programme Villa Médicis hors des murs, AFAA (Institut français), French Minstery of Foreign Affairs.

This film, shot in contemporary South-East Asia, takes its title from Jakarta's former name, and is reminiscent of its colonial past. The video shows Maria Theodora, played by Winda Gracias who, like a ghost, is revisiting the places in which she spent her childhood and youth. In the background, the present social reality of the city emerges.

The video was created as a limited DVD edition to coincide with the date of publication of the book Maria Theodora, in 2005.

"Batavia 1997", Jakob Gautel 1997
by Jakob Gautel

https://vimeo.com/13798015

Artist's book

2009-07-27T16:03:30Z

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Edition au Figuré and FRAC Haute-Normandie, 2005, with support of the Centre Culturel Français Jakarta, the Goethe-Institut Jakarta and the banque Neuflize.

256 pages, 121 photos, texts,
graphic design Johannes Bergerhausen, Cologne,
indonesian translation Florent Stoffer, Paris,
editorial monitoring Elisabeth Milon,
print Heinz W. Holler, Karlsruhe.

This books retraces the life of Maria Theodora, the great-great-grandmother of the artist, half german, half indonesian, who was born in 1845 in Palembang in Sumatra, and died in 1913 in Weimar, Germany. This book is the result of several journeys to Indonesia between 1995 and 1997, within the programme “Villa Médicis hors-les-murs”, AFAA (Institut Français) - Ministère des Affaires Etrangères.
Maria Theodora is an artist's book, the central part of a manifold work developed around the figure of Maria Theodora.
This book is a collection of one hundred and twenty photographs, one hundred and twenty portraits of women attempting to embody the figure of Maria Theodora as shown on a photograph that the artist had found in the family archives. This sepia photograph, dated from the 1860s, shows a young woman of sixteen or seventeen : the artist's great-great-grandmother. Other objects and documents which belonged to her have survived until today. But of her Indonesian mother Djinio, nothing is left, except the resemblance and thus remembrance on the face of her daughter. The story of these women is as tragic as it is mysterious.
Within the artists residency programme “Villa Médicis hors les murs” of the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Jakob Gautel went to Indonesia to find traces of these faraway and fantastical existences. He came back with a diary, which is, at times, a violent document about the difficult situation of a country, retracing the general state of agitation animating his research. It was the research itself that brought Djinio to life again, as she had vanished from all archives. Djinio can only exist through his words, those of her daughter's diary relating the moments of separation with her mother, and through these one hundred and twenty other women, Indonesian and European, photographed by Jakob Gautel in the same pose, the same dress, the same setting as Maria Theodora. Everything in this book, text and images, calls for Djinio, and yet it is her hollow absence that pervades.

Elisabeth Milon 2005

→ Johannes Bergerhausen

Absences

2009-07-27T16:02:06Z

Muséee Zadkine, Paris, within the programme of the Mois de la Photo 2006
Curator Noëlle Chabert, assisted by Catherine Lanson

Photography, artist's books, film, unedited video installation... As a narration with several voices, Maria Theodora / Absences leads us on the traces of an artistic itinerary from Indonesia to Europe, enriched through a continual back and forth between the past and the present.
Based on a family legend and on colonial reality, Jakob Gautel, as always attentive to the precarity of things that characterizes his work, transposes the banal tragedy of a human destiny into a unique and poetic experience.
The intimist setting of the Musée Zadkine, chosen by him for its sense of oblivion as well as of memory, is the perfect location for this encounter with the figure of Maria Theodora, transformed into a manifold oeuvre, a quest, and with the experimentation of the unedited video installation Absences, especially created for this exhibition.
On a proposal of the artist, the garden has been transformed into a landscape reminiscent of Indonesia by the gardeners of the Parcs et Jardins de la Ville de Paris.

(Excerpt from the presse release)

Publications :
Maria Theodora, artist's book, edition Au Figuré and FRAC Haute-Normandie, with the support of the Banque Neuflize, the Centre Culturel Français and the Goethe-Institut Jakarta, 2005.
Batavia 1997, limited DVD edition, 2006.
Absences, artist's book in form of a folded zigzag, “carte blanche pour textes nocturnes” to the writers Ios Karaïndrou, Claire Legendre and Henri-Alexis Baatsch, after and based on the nocturnal panorama by Jakob Gautel, edition Paris-Musées, 2006.

→ Musée Zadkine

Before being shown at the Musée Zadkine, the photo series was also shown at the Centre Culturel Français Jakarta, in 1997 (invited by Yves Ollivier), at the Centre d'art contemporain de Kerguéhennec, in 1999 (curator Denys Zacharopoulos) and at the Atelier sur l'Autoroute, Saint-Denis.

Absences

2005-12-31T23:00:00Z

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In the installation Absences, created for the exhibition at the Musée Zadkine in Paris (curator Noëlle Chabert, assisted by Catherine Lanson), the artist reflects further on the notion of presence-absence, experimenting with an unedited video device.

The installation was created using nocturnal video images where the camera roams and meanders from one light to another, seemingly searching for, and never finding, something (or someone). Through a double projection, the white screen becomes alive with these nocturnal scenes only when a visitor enters into line with the projection rays. His own presence reveals the image and makes the work exist.

(“The spectator makes the picture”, said Marcel Duchamp.)

"Absences", Jakob Gautel 2006/07
by Jakob Gautel

https://vimeo.com/14138856