Ayşe Erkmen
Drei Lilien Bad

Ayşe Erkmen and René Block met at a symposium on Joseph Beuys in Istanbul in 1991 and worked together three years later for the exhibition Iskele in the ifa galleries in Stuttgart, Berlin and Bonn. After the print portfolio Orient/ation, which also contained a contribution by Ayşe Erkmen, the edition Drei Lilien Bad 2002 was the first edition with the artist published by Edition Block itself. The edition is based on Ayşe Erkmen’s installation of the same name for the exhibition project 40 Jahre: Fluxus und die Folgen, the third part of the Fluxus trilogy (1982/1992/2002) in Wiesbaden. Like most of her works, Erkmen’s installation was created in a direct confrontation with the respective location and its architectural and cultural characteristics, enlivening it with a moment of ephemeral movement. In the so-called Quellenviertel in Wiesbaden, in the basement behind the “Schwarzer Bock” spa hotel, is the so-called “Drei Lilien Quelle” – a former Art Nouveau spa with a fountain, which was locked due to its desolate condition. Erkmen had the room drained and the missing areas on the tiled walls replaced with commercially available tiles, whose bright turquoise color contrasted clearly with the faded old tiles. The long-closed fountain was made accessible to the public for the duration of the exhibition, and the spring was able to let its mineral-rich water, up to 70° hot, flow back into the basin-like basin, where it filled the room with steam. Erkmen had an olfactory shower gel produced for the quietly bubbling fountain, which produced lily-scented soap bubbles emitted by a small machine. The shower gel was filled into 200 ml bottles designed by the artist and printed in white lettering. Around 200 were sold in the context of the exhibition for five euros each – the edition was created from the unsold bottles. A total of twelve bottles of the shower gel in bright green color are lined up on three levels in a white lacquered and glazed box.
Text: Eva Scharrer