After a one year sabbatical, Cosima von Bonin returns; the thing is, she is only a ghost. Please relax. She is just waving at us from the other bank, from a pirate island in the Caribbean. She is waving at us poor landlubbers, who are stranded forever. She is now in the wonderful realm beyond capitulation, beyond the fear of failing. Only the cute Rorschach tests hint at the sounding out of the soul. Long since all turned into emblems, and reaching five fathoms deep under the surface of the sea, they are leading their own lives – marine creatures within the octopus’s garden.

Here there exists no triumph. Here everything is just spooked. The dimensions of paintings, arrangements, installations – the excessive impetus by which all of this is set in motion, the fuel which drives the engine, the unrestrained power that urges the things along – it is never ever an expression of the “great gesture”, of the will, of the intention.

All this always emerges at the threshold of just doing nothing, at the threshold of deception. For Cosima von Bonin knows exactly that it is only what we acquire by devious means that will make us happy forever. So the mise-en-scène of Cosima von Bonin’s exhibitions resembles the ghostly conspiracies of the materials she uses.

It could maybe happen one day that all the things she has made use of over the years have it up to here with being under her yoke and – in an underhand fashion that is part of their nature – will revolt against Cosima von Bonin.

Whatever – she who anyway is no more than a ghost can know no fear of a possible revenge.

Dirk von Lowtzow