NO MATTER HOW BRIGHT THE LIGHT, THE CROSSING OCCURS AT NIGHT
Sept 3-Nov 12, 2006
Opening: Saturday, Sept. 2, 2006, 5 9 pm
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststr. 69
10117 Berlin
From September 3 to November 12, 2006, KW Institute for Contemporary Art presents the exhibition No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossing Occurs at Night, an exhibtion in collaboration with the Berlin artists Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Judith Hopf/Deborah Schamoni, and Ines Schaber, curated by Anselm Franke. We would like to cordially invite you to the opening on Saturday, September 2, 2006, 5 9 pm.
This collaboratively developed exhibition features works by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Judith Hopf/Deborah Schamoni, and Ines Schaber, all addressing themselves to various aspects of the spectral. It is less a case of rendering specters visible than a question about the circumstances of disappearance and invisibility in other words, the relationships brought forth by the specter, the withdrawal of the status of reality, and the conditions for transformation: the spectral destabilizes given relationships between real and unreal, present and absent. No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossing Occurs at Night is also an exhibition about the specters of art: the phantom power to represent all, mediation as conjuration and banishment, animated bodies, subjective prostheses, and the impossible necessity of a realism of the specter, a realism of absence.
Ines Schaber speculates on a latent activity within the photograph and its ability to travel through space and time. Using photographs of Pennsylvania workers as her base, she follows images from a series taken for the National Child Labor Committee in the 1910s by Lewis Hine, a pioneer of social documentary photography. These images become the point of departure for a trip through todays hardly recognizable mining country landscape. There, stored in a former limestone mine, exists one of todays largest commercial image archives, Bill Gates firm Corbis, which offers over 70 million images for sale online, including some from Hines series. The overlap of these two moments poses questions for photography as the agent of something that is able to travel, multiply itself, appear in various places, and speak with its surroundings.
Judith Hopf works with the specters of bourgeious society. How do the attempt to control, the defense against pathological anxieties, and – following from these the ideology of complete transparency, inscribe themselves on the body and on the faculty of imagination? Apart of her installation, a new videowork, developed and realized with filmaker Deborah Schamoni will be shown in the exhibition. The video deals with the representation of specters in the institutional space. Therefore they do not investigate the presence or absence of the spectral as search for a usable ritual or codex of form that would make it possible to assign places to specters as representatives of the repressed in which they might yet remain visible.
Natascha Sadr Haghighian investigates with Stefan Pente in various collaborations societal constructions of inclusion and exclusion. How it is decided when someone will be granted member status in a civilized community? When is someone perceived as present and addressable through their voice, image, and concerns? How does one lose this status and when is it withdrawn? In the consideration of various societal dynamics and representation schemes, it becomes clear that the construction of the status of the person and the associated rights themselves produce exclusion. Who possesses this status and why do others fall outside of it? If you are not a person, then what are you? The mechanisms of presence and absence are questioned in conversations and installations.
Along with the exhibition will appear a 220-page reader from the publishing house of Walther König, Köln, with contributions and dialogues by and with Ines Schaber, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Stefan Pente, and Judith Hopf, as well as Avery F. Gordon, Anselm Franke, Nicolas Siepen, Sladja Blazan, Thomas Keenan, and Michael Taussig.
Curated by Anselm Franke.
The exhibition was made possible by the support of the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Berlin.
Parallel exhibitions at KW:
JEN DENIKE
Photographic and video-based works by the young American artist Jen DeNike will be presented from September 3 to November 12, 2006 at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Jen DeNikes photos and videos are both portraits and stereotypes, addressing essential themes like individual and society, role models and social control, cult and obsession as well as their physical, sexual, and sometimes also aggressive forms of expression. In her most recent work the artist looks at stereotyped behaviours among American adolescents at the typical and familiar rituals and power play, at the elements of theatricality, rivalry and aggression implicit in them and also at what lies behind, namely, the aesthetics, eroticism and occasional ruthlessness and cruelty of adolescent fantasy worlds.
MIKA ROTTENBERG
Like Jen DeNike and Aaron Young, Mika Rottenberg belongs to a young and vibrant New York art scene that is gaining increasing international attention. Her video installations reflect and comment on global themes like cultural identity, economy and work in the postindustrial, globalized age, all in a curious and absurd manner. Her most recent work Dough (2005/06) departs from film in real space and depicts a perpetual dough-making machine operated by a female workforce in beige uniforms who, through various physical idiosyncrasies and the incorporation of diverse body functions, become a direct part of the grotesque circle of production. A claustrophobic situation is produced, which acts like the center of an uncanny but terribly familiar universe.
AARON YOUNG
From September 2 on, KW will present a site-specific project by the young American artist Aaron Young. In his performances, videos, and sculptures, Young replicates social situations in public space, whose outcomes he himself often cannot control. For Berlin, he will realize a work entitled “IPO” (25 offerings) (2006).
We would like to thank the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, for their generous support.
Opening: Saturday, September 2, 2006, 5 9 pm
Dates: September 3 November 12, 2006
Opening Hours: Tue Sun 12 7 pm, Thur 12 9 pm
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststr. 69
10117 Berlin
Further information:
Markus Müller l Maike Cruse Phone 0049 [30] 2434 59 42 press@kw-berlin.de
