KUB Arena
KAMP KAYA feat. KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch, Debo Eilers, Kaya Serene) & Guests
August 27–30, 2015
Kunsthaus Bregenz
Karl-Tizian-Platz
6900 Bregenz
Austria
For this year’s summer program, KAMP KAYA, New York-based artists Kerstin Brätsch and Debo Eilers are invited to present their collaborative project KAYA. The title of this ongoing work refers to a real person: Kaya, the (by now) 19-year-old daughter of one of Eilers’ childhood friends from Texas. The collaboration with Kaya began in 2010, when she was 14 years old. Since then, she has served as the departure and focal point of their exhibitions, performances, and interventions. Kaya has appeared in photographs, collaborated in the productions as a painter, and has been a participatory performer, playing the guitar or painting a silicone mold of Eilers’s body during their shows in New York, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Kassel.
Kerstin Brätsch and Debo Eilers both consider their own practices—painting and sculpture—not only as a medium, but as the subject matter and the base material of a conceptual and multidisciplinary work. They are interested in continual processes of displacement, variation, and reproduction, appropriating digital imaging as well as art historical styles. Within their collaboration with Kaya, they elaborate on the possible creation of a third body and therewith the potential extension of their sculptural and painterly investigations. What happens if painting or sculpture literally became a body? Above being triggered by the interest in youth and youth culture (aka growing up, becoming gendered), by involving another person with her own background and personal history, KAYA is at once a means of exploring an unknown territory, an approach to embrace the unpredictable, and an opportunity to diffuse classifications while challenging notions of authorship, originality, and exchange value.
The KUB Arena embodies the unfamiliar, presenting a program that consistently questions the art institution. It is the place within Kunsthaus Bregenz where art enters into a dialogue with alternative modes of cultural production, probing new spaces that enable contemporary art to be experienced in unconventional ways. On the occasion of KAMP KAYA, the KUB Arena will temporarily abandon the museum to explore various locations around the town and its vicinity instead. Kaya will be visiting Bregenz between August 27 and 30, on her first trip to Europe, to spend some summer days by the lake with Brätsch, Eilers, and other invited guests. Together they will interact through everyday activities, occupying various sites along the shores of Lake Constance, the peak of the Pfänder, boots on the lake, the cable car, and the public space in Bregenz. The audience is invited to join this summer camp and gain insights into this collaboration while participating in the appearances, performances, discussions, screenings, and talks.
With contributions by Daniel Chew, Protektorama WorldWideWitch (aka Johannes Paul Raether), and Michel Vvolta. Further guests of KAMP KAYA include Eva Marie, Shanti Matulewski, the artists Sonja Gerdes, and Yael Salomonowitz, as well as Francois Huber, Robert Keil, Paulina Nolte, Viola Relle, Kristina Schmidt, Johanna Strobel, Raphael Weilguni, Frauke Zabel, and Laura Ziegler from the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.
Curated by Eva Birkenstock
For detailed program information, please visit www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at.
