Peles Duo Process

An artist's book published in celebration of Peles Duo's twenty years of work.

In 2005 Peles Duo 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.

Peles Duo (formerly Peles Empire) is a collaboration between artists Katharina Stöver (born 1982 in Gießen, Germany) and Barbara Wolff (born 1980 in Făgăraș, Romania) and was founded during their studies at Städelschule in Frankfurt with Wolfgang Tillmans and Michael Krebber. They began their collaboration in 2005 by opening an illegal bar in Frankfurt's red light district. They have been running exhibition spaces as part of their practice in different locations ever since (London, Cluj, Istanbul, Los Angeles, and Berlin since 2016).