OUTSIDE ZWISCHENRAUM: SPACE BETWEEN - HAMBURG KUNSTVEREIN
Hordaland Art Centre contributes to an exhibition at the Hamburg Kunstverein this autumn. Participating artists are Oliver Bulas, Nick Evans, Julia Horstmann, Alon Levin, Cato Løland, Ingrid Lønningdal, Ciara Phillips et al., and is curated in collaboration with Annette Hans (Hamburg Kunstverein) and Jamie Kenyon (Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow). The exhibition is created on site in Hamburg Kunstverein during a residency for the artists, and the audience is invited to an exhibition in constant change and an evening programme put together by the artists and curators.
There are unknowns we know of which means, we know we don’t know. Like knowing that we don’t know how many people live in Lebanon, since the last time someone counted was in 1932.
A residency model, also known to the fields of science and academics, is when professionals stay for a substantial amount of time in an environment related to their work, or are challenged to reveal interests in a place other than home. Mostly offering time and support, these periods of research allow practitioners to investigate channels of their ‘discipline’ that were previously neglected. Freedoms, or constraints set up possibilities of explorations into the unknown.
Artists, unlike those engaged within other fields; to some extent cut-loose from presumptions of the possible, often stumble on developments through a balance of chance and conversation. Discoveries become possible when artists leave the beaten paths of the comfortable and accepted.
Inviting a number of artists to inhabit an art institution for a set amount of time is to invite uncertainty and the unknown into the exhibition space. In omitting any presupposed thematic coherence between the works in this exhibition, we know that the artists' urge to create and participate will become apparent, and art will happen, but at the same time we know we don’t know what creation, participation and works they will make happen. When we use the word “happen”, we do so deliberately, since the exhibition you are now being welcomed into is surrounded by a residency platform which has been part of the process prior to, but still is part of, the exhibition. Thus the artists are present within the framework of the exhibition. The possibility for them to influence the exhibition during the time it is available to the public too is possible only due to this residency platform.
So, there are two kinds of uncertainties: one is not knowing how this situation would manifest within the Kunstverein before the artists started to work, and still don't know exactly which facets it may show over the next few weeks, and the other being the artworks themselves. The uncertainty of the artworks is intrinsically linked to the unexplainable as they have an un-dissolvable ability to resist. The residency model, and this exhibition project, thrive on this, as well as take into account the transitory character of an artwork. We aim to experiment with these moments of uncertainty in this format when things may turn out completely different than one would have thought.
With an exhibition and a public programme we use the specificities of the residency model to focus on the artistic process itself. We are not out to dramatically reveal the artists in this exhibition project, but rather make public the artistic process which is informed by time, discussion, research and physicality. This is in no way a new approach to exhibition-making, but it is a method which we believe can withstand repetition. In a historical string of exhibitions we can see how artists approach their own work in the process of making as well as how they relate to the exhibition space as a public space. By making this repetition, we can also ask questions of how the art institution and the public’s way of relating to contemporary art change. What was controversial in 1969, for example, might not be today. What can be done today might not have been possible back then.
By setting up the structure which is Zwischenraum : Space Between there will be no conclusion, many discussions between the artists may be sustained no longer than a moment between discussion and evaporation, some might materialise. The exhibition seeks only to reveal some of these occurrences to the audience, We hope to welcome both, development and the visitors, back to the Kunstverein several times.
15 October, during the opening
Oliver Bulas Holding something beautiful transitorily
16 October – 19 November
Poster Club Hamburg will develop as collaborative project over the course of the exhibition. Initiated by Ciara Phillips
16 – 24 October
A wooden bicycle against a background of masterpieces
Alon Levin and Mihnea Mircan (independent curator, Bucharest) will pursue their ongoing dialogue next to Alon Levin’s work in the exhibition. The dialogue’s physical or even performative side will generate a growing collection of documents and images which will be re-organized in a publication, like the documentation of a show that was / wasn't.
21 October, 7 pm
Gavin Wade, Lecture on Eastside Projects in Birmingham
28 Oktober, 7 pm
Oliver Bulas Tropical Dances
1 – 11 November
Norwegian artist Cato Løland will process the existing exhibition and spatial situation at the Kunstverein during his short-term residency.
4 November, 7 pm
Sung drafts: Bruno & Michel are smiling with Skipperrr open their studio to the public for one night
11 November, 7 pm
SKULPI - A Magazine Presentation with Hella Gerlach, Julia Horstmann and Roman Schramm
18 November , 7 pm
Institute for Colour (Norway) cordially invites everyone to Going-away-Celebrations
25 November, 7 pm
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Oliver Bulas (b. 1981, lives in Hamburg) studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste. Since 2008 he has been running WCW-Gallery in Wilhelmsburg, Hamburg together with Björn Beneditz, Martin Blumenthal and Jan-Peter Heusermann. Bulas is interested in social situations and their aesthetic dimensions. For his recent performance/installation Un Demanche Somnolent in an underpath in Marseille (together with Clara Buchholz and Isabella Stellmann) a setting with red curtains was created and drinks were being served. He makes use of the current exhibition as a mindset and takes aspects within the institutional framework as a starting point for aesthetic assumptions. At the Kunstverein his work is present not so much in material works but more in situations that he suggests. During the opening he presents Holding something beautiful transitorily. For October 28th at 7pm he announced Tropical Dances and on November 4th at 7pm the music partners Bruno & Michel are smiling with Skipperrr open their studio to the public for one night.
Nick Evans (b. 1976, lives in Glasgow) graduated from the BA programme at Glasgow School of Art in 2000. Evan’s works often balance awkwardly upon plinths and stands. The sculptures developed at the Kunstverein are based firmly in the process of their making, repeated forms strive for an autonomy from each other and their groundings. The bases primitive imagery, designed to support the work, operate equally to complete and undermine suggestions of an entire body. His sculptures oscillate between the possibilities of authentic expression and the limitations emposed by the material encounter, developing an antropomorphic relation between the artist, the work and the viewer.
His recent solo exhibitions include Anti-Autonome at Mary Mary Gallery Glasgow, Use History Autonome at Washington Garcia, Glasgow, and Primary Structures at Inverleith House in Edinburgh.
Julia Horstmann (b. 1974, lives in Berlin) graduated from the MA programme of the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg 2005. She is interested in issues of architecture, visibility and space, for example notions of showing and hiding that become apparent with the increased use of glass as building material in the early 20th Century. Another aspect of interest to Horstmann are conceptions of room organisations, her series of room dividers constructed for the exhibition dictate how the view negotiates the gallery space as well as how the works are read from various points of view. The wall drawings, which spatially structure two different perspectives with the exhibition, combine with the metal screens to reveal varying readings of the exhibition. Recent solo exhibitions include Variable Geometries at Artothek, Cologne, Klirren, at Overbeck-Gesellschaft, Lübeck and The Setting and The Stone, Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne.
Alon Levin (b. 1975, lives in Berlin and The Hague) graduated from the MA programme at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 2002. Subsequently he attended post-graduate programmes at Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht and Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. His work evolves around his interest in abstract symbols and how they can be accomodated, related here within are questions of how to negotiate between the past and the future. What power do they have, what are their implications and what is their potential for men? Levin utilises structures reminiscent of archives, libraries or sometimes even pedagogical devices which hold simple paintings to questions what possibilities these bear. His work The Everything of an Almost Future presented in the exhibition is accompanied by a ten-day dialogue (16 – 25 October) in which he will engage with independent curator Mihnea Mircan (Bucharest) about future perceptions of artistic practice in the past and the present day. Recent solo exhibitions include The Object as Never Seen Before (Who Said the World Was Round) at Art Amsterdam with Stroom Den Haag, Art for the Masses at AMBACH & RICE, Seattle and Postponed Modernism at KLEMM'S, Berlin.
Cato Løland (b. 1982, lives in Bergen) graduated from the MA programme at the Bergen National Academy of Arts and Design in 2009. Since 2009 he has also co-directed the artist run space Entrée together with Randi Grov Berger. In his works he subverts the use of existing materials. His works are small scale and are usually to be found in odd places in larger group exhibitions. In his latest works he has been experimenting with the visual effect of cardboard in fluorescent colours usually used to announce special offers in shops or used by the public in demonstrations. By making modest signs with no writing on them and leaning them against the wall, he has previously created interventions in space such as the works titled Stop and Go, Red, Green and White corner and Red repetition. Between November 1st and November 11th Løland will intervene with new works made especially for the setting which unfolds at the Kunstverein.
Ingrid Lønningdal (b. 1981, lives in Oslo, Norway) graduated from the MA programme at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2008. Her artistic practice alternates between drawing, photography and text, and circles issues of architecture, subjective history and the transfer of knowledge. In her first solo exhibition Bauen, wohnen, denken at Tegnerforbundet, Oslo, Norway this year, she presented a series of water-colours under the title Compass, Protractor, Ruler and Scissors. Through close readings of existing buildings this work visually discusses how reality is represented and how artists construct images.
Institutt for Farge (Institute for Colour) is an artist collective consisting of Silje Hogstad, Steffen Håndlykken, Ingrid Lønningdal and Elizabeth Schei. The Institute for Colour was formed in 2006 as a reaction to the termination of a subject area of the same name at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo. The termination was a typical consequence of the streamlining of institutional models in Norway since the mid 1990s. Being the last class at this particular institute, the students created an autonomous educational programme and later adopted the name of the institute. Through a number of exhibitions, workshops and collaborations the artist group has questioned issues of autonomy, the role of theory in art practice and art pedagogical models. Among their projects are Are There Any Tickets Left? (The Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, Oslo, 2010), Manufacturing Today (Kulturbunker Dora, Trondheim, Norway, 2010), Common Lands (public art project in Bjørvika, Oslo, Norway 2009) and LIAF jr. (Lofoten International Art Festival, Svolvær, Norway, 2008). At the end of the residency, on November 18th at 7 pm, Institutt for Farge invites us all to Going-away-Celebrations.
Ciara Phillips (b. 1976, lives in Glasgow) graduated from the MFA programme of Glasgow School of Art in 2004. Her work deals with ideas of language, design and production through printmaking, photography and installation. Phillips investigates the readings of visual imagery and their status various forms of communication.
In addition to her individual practice Phillips runs Poster Club, a process and making-lead collaboration project initiated in October 2008, currently made up of seven Glasgow-based artists working across disciplines. The group comes together on the grounds of shared belief that conceptual concerns are effectively aired through the process of negotiation involved in hands-on decision making. Over the course of Zwischenraum, Ciara will be extending the project to develop a collaborative programme as Poster Club Hamburg at Kunstverein, Hamburg. Recent solo exhibitions include Optimism and its signs, Atelier am Eck, Düsseldorf and Every Woman a Signal Tower, Glasgow Print Studio.