Susanne M. Winterling

Susanne M. Winterling
Through the looking glass
5 February – 5 April 2010

Opening: 4 February, 7 p.m.

Waldstraße 3
D – 76133 Karlsruhe
+49 (0)721-28226

www.badischer-kunstverein.de

For her solo exhibition “Through the looking glass” Susanne M. Winterling has developed several site-specific interventions that extend across all exhibition levels of the building. They contain a wide range of media: from photography to film, collages and objects all the way to architecture-related installations. With cinematographic and sculptural sensitivity, she arranges these different materialities into new and surprising constellations which react pointedly to the spatial situation of the exhibition space.

Winterling’s new installations are closely linked to the history and architecture of the Kunstverein. The viewer’s gaze is directed to the various insignia and traces of a bourgeois self-definition to which usually no attention is paid or which otherwise remain hidden beneath the many layers of construction alterations. Winterling’s interventions enter into a playful, sometimes even aggressive or imaginative dialogue with the architecture. Elements of the world of cinema, dadaistic references or objects of trash lay out a concrete, contrasting image to the classical severity of the White Cube.

Connected to this question concerning the different sites, forums and hierarchical structures of the bourgeois public is a further motif of the exhibition: (female) adolescence and the threshold to individuation and self-discovery. What influence do bourgeois conceptions have on young adults and the formation of their identity? What alternative self-assertions derive from youthful protest, but also which strategies of adaptation? Jewellery, porcelain figures and links to Punk and Gothic culture are only a few of Winterling’s references to – also biographically motivated – obsessions from teenage years. The artist responds to questions concerning identity and individuality above all with the recurrent use of mirrors. The mirror not only represents a mode of social and political reflection, but also serves as an important instrument for self-investigation and self-reassurance. But the view into the mirror as a search for one’s own is always based on an image, a projection – for Winterling the crucial link for her staging of a parallel world that troubles norms and conventions.

Waldstraßensaal

“Hall of Fame”

…To Know that We Live in the Same Reality,
as Brothers Would Live in the Same House…
A research- and publication project based on the correspondence between Carson McCullers and Annemarie Schwarzenbach by Susanne M. Winterling with Passenger Books.

The exhibition is a cooperation with GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst Bremen.

Talks, Events and Screenings

07.02.2010, 8 p.m.
Concert: Jasmina Maschina & Golden Diskó Ship

24.02.2010, 7 p.m.
Film Screening: Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999) and Sonja (Kirsi Marie Liimatainen, 2006)

04.03.2010, 8 p.m.
Performance: Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Eye Act, 10 Min

10.03.2010, 7 p.m.
Lecture: Martin Büsser on Emo Culture

31.03.2010, 7 p.m.
Talk: Michaela Wünsch and Susanne M. Winterling

Curator:
Anja Casser

For further information please contact Anka Wenzel, presse@badischer-kunstverein.de