Upper floor
WESSEN GESCHICHTE / WHOSE (HIS)STORY
Andreas Bunte, Mircea Cantor, Diango Hernández, Andree Korpys/Markus Löffler, Gabriel Kuri, Little Warsaw, Victor Man, Silke Schatz, Haegue Yang
Ground floor
Luis Jacob
Habitat
12 January – 23 March 2008<br>
Opening Friday 11 January 2008, 7 pm
Kunstverein in Hamburg
Klosterwall 23, 20095 Hamburg
phone +49-40-33 83 44
fax +49-40-32 21 59
Tuesday – Sunday 11 am – 18 pm
Thursday 11 am – 21 pm
hamburg@kunstverein.de
http://www.kunstverein.de
WESSEN GESCHICHTE / WHOSE (HIS)STORY
The international group exhibition Wessen Geschichte / Whose (His)Story brings together works by young artists who explore the pasts of their respective home countries in a range of ways. Among questions addressed by the exhibited works are the following: How are the different aspects of (auto)biographical and of national significance related? How does public media discourse deal with social, political, and cultural issues of the past today? What role does historical context play in contemporary art production?
The exhibited works reflect problems of collective identity in an era of economic and cultural globalization, among other things by exploring the upheavals taking place in eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Individual experience issuing from personal involvement in such processes invariably plays an important role. Whilst a number of the artists taking part in the exhibition no longer live in their home countries, they still sometimes view historical developments they were exposed to in their youth as constitutive of their current work. Yet not only transcontinental events are featured. The exhibition confronts the history of the German Federal Republic, presenting works that deal, for instance, with the phenomenon of the “Deutscher Herbst.”
Apart from their involvement with concrete political situations, the works handle topics that surpass issues of nations and states: interpersonal conflicts, material and abstract ideals, and the need to take the complexity of historical events into account are some of the stimuli behind works exhibited in Wessen Geschichte / Whose (His)Story. The strategies employed range from the decidedly analytic and scientific to a more intuitively atmospheric involvement with historical facts. Sometimes a highly subjective, personal view of history is opposed to official history. Imagination and facts can constitute a productive opposition when, for instance, a distancing strategy is brought to bear on real events by means of irony and alienation.
Participating artists: Andreas Bunte, Mircea Cantor, Diango Hernández, Andree Korpys/Markus Löffler, Gabriel Kuri, Little Warsaw, Victor Man, Silke Schatz and Haegue Yang
Curated by Yilmaz Dziewior
Luis Jacob. Habitat
The artist Luis Jacob (b. 1971 in Lima) lives in Toronto and works in a range of media such as video, photography, performance and action in public space. Apart from his work as an artist, he is involved in activist circles; he also writes theoretical texts and works as a curator. It was above all his participation in documenta 12 that introduced his work to a broader audience.
In the context of his first solo exhibition at a German art institution, titled Habitat, Luis Jacob is showing two works that can be read as metaphors for de-hierarchization, coexistence, and universality. A habitat in anthropology designates a geographical region as dwelling place or settlement area of a particular population group. Biologically, a habitat considered as a characteristic dwelling place or location may consist of several biotopes. Conversely, a biotope may support several habitats. In this sense the exhibition title references a potential community of individuals living with or alongside each other.
The installation of the same name, Habitat, was realized in 2005 at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and combines six interconnecting areas. The first confronts the viewer with a series of ceramic objects presented under Plexiglas as in a museum. An adjacent living room-like area serves as meeting point; another area is reserved for yoga and meditation; a fourth contains a DJ mixer and keyboard; a fifth area is devoted to the contrast between hard and soft, and a final area is for reading and sleep. These six installational spatial compartments induce visitors to not only contemplate the work but to enter and use it. Habitat touches on active doing, seeing and being seen, interaction and performance.
The second extensive work, representing a new part of the series Album, also involves a range of social and cultural backgrounds. Based on photographs taken from various publications–news magazines and other journals, art books, encyclopedias–Album VI comprises a frieze of sheets on the exhibition space walls, each sheet associatively combining a number of photos. The conceptual arrangement of photos on each sheet connects that sheet to the subsequent one. Perceived in succession, the series comprises images from diverse contexts so that viewers recognize different themes, including the social space of architecture, interior design and the symbolic space of artistic practice. In association with other images a narrative form arises that is distantly related to the original context of the pictures.
Curated by Meike Behm