Ben Rivers: Islands / Katja Novitskova: Dawn Mission

Ben Rivers
Islands
In his first institutional solo show in Germany, Ben Rivers (*1972 in Somerset, England, lives and works in London) focuses on secluded parts of the world and its population groups, which he examines in regard to their isolated and utopian socialization.

Rivers’ films combine landscape and portrait shots with ethnological methods and elements of travel documentations. His filmic essays focus on people and life plans in marginal regions of our civilization and beyond our societal conventions. With cinematic means, Rivers repeatedly distances his films from their utopian fiction and grounds them in a reality, in which environmental phenomena such as El Nino, polluted oceans, and also the global trade routes have an impact on supposed paradises. The exhibition Islands consists of three large-format video installations that convey the narrative dramaturgy of the works into the gallery space and offer the audience a haven separated from their daily lives; all three works employ a spatial and temporal distance in order to reflect upon our own here and now.

Ben Rivers has been the recipient of numerous prizes including most recently the EYE Art & Film Prize 2016.

The exhibition is a cooperation project with the Triennale di Milano and the Camden Arts Centre. With the kind support of the Culture Department of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the British Council.

Katja Novitskova
Dawn Mission 
In her first major solo exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Katja Novitskova (*1984 in Tallinn, Estonia; lives and works in Amsterdam) ventures into the frontier areas of visibility.

In the present age, almost all aspects of our surroundings and our lives are recorded every second. The obsession with collecting data has long gone beyond the limits of our planet. High-sensitive cameras, drones and space vehicles, electron microscopes, telescopes and infrared recordings provide image data beyond the visible spectrum of humans. Yet we still need our eyes to evaluate the collected flood of data, because image analysis programs operate much less reliably. It is precisely in this tensional field of translation that Novitskova intervenes with her works, conveying the phenomenon to the gallery space. Her sculptures and installations stand in the space as visual echoes of their own origin and employ superimpositions and recontextualizations to create a poetic narration on the end of invisibility in the age of surveillance.

Katja Novitskova will represent Estonia at the Venice Biennial in 2017. She is amongst this year’s nominees for the Prize of the Böttcherstraße in Bremen and the Nam June Paik Award 2016.

With the kind support of the Culture Department of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, and the Mondriaan Fonds.

Press contact: presse@kunstverein.de / T +49 40 322158