With the solo exhibition If You Know, You Know. by Patrick Fabian Panetta (*1977, Stuttgart), the Kunstverein Friedrichshafen provides insights into an artistic practice which derives from structural issues, spatial or even social situations and thus finds its form. An intensive examination of art as a system and the analysis of its components is a constant point of reference in Panetta’s work due to the fact that it’s precisely this system he is inevitably confronted with as an artist. The approach to understand art as an analogy or model, which can be used to describe numerous mechanisms and structures of our reality, leads in Panetta’s practice to the consequence of using the underlying structures of systems, thus also those of art, as working material.

Following this logic, the source material for If You Know, You Know. is the Kunstverein in its physical and cultural-political self-understanding. Beginning with the reinterpretation of the working and exhibition space and their architectural functions, to the alteration of the lighting conditions, to interventions in the Kunstverein’s corporate design, figuratively speaking, a double floor is created on which the works are installed.

These works are two newly produced video installations, which in turn againrefer in form and content to the underlying material – the architecture as well as the core function of an art association to exhibit art. Patrick Panetta thus makes visible not only the conventions of exhibiting itself, but also the convention and conditionality of what is exhibited.

The origin of these considerations was the staircase that connects the lower exhibition space with the upper one. In its massiveness, it dominates the entire spatial structure, and since it is almost impossible to prevent interaction between the staircase and the exhibited works, Panetta decided to exploit the motif of the staircase in the form of endlessly strung together film sequences of staircase falls. L’esprit de l’escalier (2021) is an allegory of failure and a digital image of the spatial situation between sculpture and caricature.

On the second level on the upper floor, the usual expectations of an exhibition are not fulfilled either. The situation is more reminiscent of a waiting room. But here, too, the viewer gets to see a video (Mixtape 2002 -2021), which is a compilation of shortened versions of individual video works from the last two decades that stand on their own. Most of the videos used are in series, were parts of installations, exhibitions and video screenings or are fragmentary attempts or potential raw material for future works. The individual parts of the exhibition fit together like words in an endless flowing text. They can be compared to an essay that approaches a subject from many sides without trying to grasp it completely.

If You Know, You Know.

Text / Curator: Hannah Eckstein