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"For her solo exhibition FOSSILS OF FUTURE, artist ALINE SCHWÖRER creates a hypothetical future scenario inhabited by hybrid beings imitating archaeological objects. SCHWÖRER's works take shape in sculptures that borrow or mimic their forms from nature, blurring the boundaries between the familiar and the imagined.
In the exhibition space, the sculptures together form their own independent ecosystem, constructing an almost dystopian narrative of a possible future. By mixing ceramics with found objects and juxtaposing them with cowhide, wax or epoxy resin, the works strengthen the relationship between the artificial and the natural and reflect on the debate about genetic manipulation, the climate crisis and environmental pollution.
SCHWÖRER sculptural narrative, challenges our thinking about the use of artificial materials and their potential repercussions for the future, thereby prompting us to reflect on the consequences of our reliance on artificial substances. Rather than mere criticism, SCHWÖRER's works offer poetic representations of the intricate interactions between people, environment and time in order to open up perspectives on the intricate complexity of our contemporary existence."
"Joanna Buchowska is an outstanding artist who has embarked on a remarkable artistic journey: she traded traditional painting tools such as brushes and oil paints for paper and glue. After decades of engagement with classical painting, she naturally gravitated towards the realm of paper art.
What once served as a sketching tool has now become an integral part of her creative process. Buchowska’s paper works have evolved into standalone pieces that deserve recognition in their own right. Utilizing various magazines, of which she possesses an extensive collection, as well as different types of paper such as handmade silk paper, Buchowska creates her paper paintings. The paper is often torn rather than cut, and the repetitive act of tearing and gluing imbues the surface with a patina. The artist complements the paper with acrylic, ink, colored pencils, and other materials, breathing life into her works and imbuing them with texture, depth, and visual interest.
In her paintings, Buchowska often engages in a dialogue with her preferred Old Masters, paying homage to their legacy while infusing her own unique style and perspective. She also explores specific themes, such as the investigation of crime scenes (2018-2019) or the appreciation of female scientists (2021-2022). Additionally, she is particularly fascinated by the interplay between architecture and nature, where the rules of statics are barely or not at all observed.
Form and color are at the core of Buchowska’s artistic exploration. Initially, there is a loose sketch. The artist has a vision of what she intends to create and does not approach the work spontaneously. Spontaneity emerges more in later stages of the development process of a paper painting. The initial sketch often undergoes significant variations as Buchowska welcomes the fluidity and evolution of her work.
Joanna Buchowska’s artistic journey showcases her passion for paper art, her ability to engage in artistic dialogues, and her fearless exploration of form, color, and thematic concepts. Her unique approach and dedication to her craft make her an artist who continuously pushes the boundaries of her own creativity.
At the exhibition “à bout portant” (French: Up close), you can engage with Joanna Buchowska’s work up close. Her pieces invite the viewer to explore the fascinating world of paper and its diverse expressive possibilities."
"With Future Archeologists Christoph Keller revisits the subjects of his own past as a trained hydrologist. The three-channel video installation presents an artistic survey into the environmental conditions in the Owens Valley on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada in California.
Point of departure and formal center of Keller’s video installation are three filmic perspectives shot over the vast landscape of the now desiccated Owens Lake.
The Owen Valley and the surroundings of the lake was once flourishing, and its indigenous Paiute people maintained complex irrigation systems. In 1913, an aqueduct to provide for the city of Los Angeles was constructed, diverting Owens valley’s waters and letting the lake dry out in just 15 years. Subsequently, the area became infamous as a source of dust pollution. In the early 2000s an extensive landscape transformation programwas launched in some parts of the former lakebed, seeking to alleviate the development of toxic dust clouds travelling as far as Los Angeles. This dust mitigation project is in the focus of Keller’s filmic inquiry.
Keller's three-channel video installation presents the Owens Lake landscape from an aerial viewpoint. The video on the right channel moves in spiraling sweeps across the landscape, the central video relentlessly follows along the main supply road of the dust mitigation project, while the footage on the right channel moves in steadily sweeping movements toward the center of the former lake with disconcertingly beautiful vistas of mountainous terrain surrounding the dry lake’s plain. As the camera travels across the mesmerizing landscape, we hear a conversation between Keller and a geologist, accompanied by a constant digitally generated glissando music, carefully calibrated to create a mixture of aesthetic detachment and dystopian realism. The images of the ecological desolation are subtly compounded by the dialogue which reveals—in what sounds like mild-mannered understatement—the breath-taking futility of a monumental industrialized process developed to contain the effects of anenvironmental destruction in perpetuity.
Keller’s work carefully draws from a dialectical aggregate of wide-ranging references: literary and pictorial representations, science and science fiction, colonial histories and community politics, timelessness and timefullness of the landscape.
Christoph Keller’s practice constitutes an examination of the history of science and of the way in which knowledge is gathered and organized and how this organization in turn influences our thinking. For Future Archeologists, the artist's training in hydrology constitutes the subtext for Keller’s continued exploration of specific areas of scientific inquiries and their consequences in wider cultural and philosophical contexts as well as the real-life repercussions such discourses can entail."
"The Life of Michael Dressel tells an extraordinary German-American artist's biography. Born in East Berlin in 1958, after a failed escape attempt and two years in the GDR penitentiary, he experiences a few short but intense years in the wild pre-wall fall West Berlin. Even before the fall of the Wall, he finds himself on the West Coast of the USA and makes Los Angeles his new home. There he works for years as a sound editor for numerous Hollywood films, some of which have won Oscars and Golden Reels for sound, including the last sixteen Clint Eastwood films, resulting in his appointment to the Oscar Academy. Throughout this time, he regularly commutes between the two metropolises - at home in both cities and equally familiar and foreign.
Reflection on daily experience in the world of stars and Hollywood studios and awareness of their ultimate inadequacy played a special role in his photographic work from the beginning. How many people are there who came to Hollywood full of dreams and hopes and who now eke out an existence in the shadow of the "dream factories"? "On Hollywood Boulevard, the so-called "Walk of Fame", a never-ending spectacle full of tragic, comic, absurd and sometimes dangerous situations takes place. In this environment I find human scenarios that are often timeless and point beyond the concrete place." (MD) That Michael Dressel's work is often classified under the rubric of social documentary only incompletely captures his concern. Without question, social commentary cannot be separated from photographs of people, many of whom have been marginalized by poverty, illness, drugs, or strokes of fate. For Dressel, however, this is only the superficial first layer of his pictures.
What makes a picture a good picture, he says, is the visualization of a more fundamental level that is effective and valid regardless of the place and time of the photograph, regardless of the class, race, origin, or age of those portrayed. The exhibition pursues this idea and shows photographs from Berlin for the first time alongside the photographs from Hollywood and Los Angeles. The 9-hour time difference between the two cities represents more than just different time zones: "When I come to Germany, I often feel like I'm coming from a social future..."
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"Anna Lena Grau and Anna Mieves set up an experimental arrangement in the greenhouse super bien! using fossil and mineral materials.
The work bones and all is created along sculptural, form-shaping processes. Within the interplay of negative and positive, an excavation site is grown in which temporal levels intertwine. Forms are erected and fluid again under the influence of elevated temperatures. The playing field of production shows itself simultaneously as a ruin, in which bare, sweaty and dusty artifacts are uncovered as direct witnesses of action."
(Anna Lena Grau & Anna Mieves)
"Disruption as an impulse generator.
Susanne Piotter's small, almost handy objects cast in concrete and entitled Artefakte (artefacts) are reminiscent of miniatures of utopian-futuristic architectures whose originals may be abandoned or no longer exist today, which may never have existed. Their staircases leading to nowhere, the open roofs, the closed or jagged façades are reminiscent, as it were, of architectures that were discarded in the design process because they turned out to be unrealisable.
The processuality and changeability that characterise the objects' appearance also determine the process of their creation. Susanne Piotter does not think of her objects in terms of their final appearance, but rather from the negative mould, which she constructs from building blocks and Styrofoam and later pours with liquid concrete. The finished object does not necessarily emerge from the mould. Rather, many of the artefacts are composed of two or three individual parts cast in concrete. The artist keeps trying out different possibilities until she has found a satisfactory solution. Her approach is one that accepts failure, even consciously planning for it from the outset.
(Excerpt from the catalogue text "Like Greetings from a Past Future - Susanne Piotter's Artefacts as Reflections on Architecture and Urban Change", by Rahel Schrohe, 2022).
Harriet Groß's installation Interference records the phenomena of amplification and extinction that arise from the phase shift of visual and acoustic waves when they encounter obstacles. Any kind of ordering grid - in this case the metal gauze woven from lines - not only creates "disturbances" in the physical realm, they influence all our processes of perception and learning. Which grid filters pass through our impressions? Which ones sinter into our memory? Which superimpositions shape our understanding of the world and our future actions? The interference of events demands a change of perspective, as is also the theme of the play with the lenticular prints.
The seemingly rigid system of the metal grid is here consciously contradictory to the first material expectation in soft overlapping folds attached to the wall. Depending on the perspective and the incidence of light, the loosely drawn systems of lines on it create a deepening of their colour effect, like overtones with a certain amount of noise. A visual rhythm, a shimmering emerges and transforms the structures into soundscapes. A polyphonic texture of competing events is thus created throughout the exhibition space. Wire drawings and wave oscillations, like the strings of an instrument, create the polyphony of a three-dimensional soundscape in the viewer. Interference as a score for the new."
"In the solo exhibition Die Hände mit den Füßen fassen [Grasping the Hands With the Feet], Dana Lorenz explores how biographical experiences, social background, and trauma actively inscribe themselves in the body and leave behind their traces. The body thereby becomes an independent and interdependent infrastructure.
The artist’s own biography is the starting point for the expansive installation, which comprises an assemblage consisting of objects, readymades, photographs, and a sound collage that is expanded through an artist book with text, a personal glossary, and an image archive. Having grown up in a working-class milieu in post-reunification East Berlin, Dana Lorenz’s work focuses on experiences of social exclusion and participation, in which moments between shame and resistance become individual ordeals.
How do social exclusions form bodies? How do processes of discrimination manifest themselves in light of class and sexuality as well as the resulting emotions and affects in bodies? How is the perception of bodies shaped by our social position?
These considerations are based on the artist’s examination of class as a social construction as well as questions of class origin and class membership, which are directly linked to both individual and collective bodies (of experience).
In a sensitive, but also humorous manner, Dana Lorenz negotiates the body as a grasping, touching, holding, biting, fighting, grinding, sticky, soft, resilient, billowing product of society, which at the same time is also its agent.
With the dialogically interrelated works, the center of which forms an outsized medical mouth guard – an expression of deeply rooted and resistant tensions – Dana Lorenz creates an installation that testifies to proliferating connections between biographical memories and personal coping strategies, linking them to the politics and aesthetics of the early 2000s and the present. Dana pursues different consistencies, plays with ambiguities, and thereby creates moments of liberation, rebellion, and physical unruliness. So-called bad feelings are reinterpreted and make clear that our actual strength is to be found in vulnerability. Die Hände mit den Füßen fassen [Grasping the Hands With the Feet], thus becomes a queer and feminist infrastructural critique of the body and its structural and transitory environments."
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