Work Description

This artist book is published on the occasion of Peles Duo’s artistic practice spanning almost twenty years. In 2005 Peles Duo (formerly Peles Empire) began their collaboration by opening an illegal bar in Frankfurt’s red light district. The space featured wallpaper made of A3 colour copies reproducing, nearly to scale, a room of the 19th Century Peleș Castle, located in the foothills of Romania’s Carpathian Mountains. Peleș Castle is an historicist castle as each room is a copy of a different architectural style, which appears to anticipate postmodernism nearly one hundred and twenty years before it started. The same act of copying or translation that birthed Peleș Castle carries over to the artist’s own approach to studio production. What is realised in three-dimensions for one exhibition becomes the two-dimensional source material for the next period of production. The transition of material from 3D to 2D is simultaneously the content and material for their work. The process becomes, temporarily, the work. The act of copying is more important than the copy itself. Peles Duo dissect and reshuffle the supposedly original meaning of somewhere, something or someone, in order to question what time and culture has made of it.