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Kosen Ohtsubo and Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham: Flower Planet
February 1–April 21, 2025
The artists Kosen Ohtsubo and Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham share an unusual approach to ikebana and an interest in how one person enables the work of another. With Flower Planet, Kunstverein München presents two artists in ongoing dialog with each other who create fragile sculptures that challenge us to see the earth as a living entity and not as territory to be owned. Working with living material, their practices confront us with questions of being in and with this world, processes of decay, and the elusive nature of human control.
The Japanese artist Kosen Ohtsubo is one of the most important practitioners and teachers of the art form of ikebana. Traditionally, the ikebana arrangement is intended to bring nature into the human habitat through precious plants, arranged in such a way to represent the cosmic order. In the 1970s, however, Ohtsubo became well-known for his use of everyday materials such as vegetables and waste, sourcing materials from supermarkets or garbage containers. His works give a subversive and completely surprising form to the elegant materials that have, for centuries, made up the art of flower arranging. “I want to explode the idea of beautiful ikebana,” says Ohtsubo, resulting in bathtubs becoming vessels for bodies and flowers, entire junkyards becoming entangled in sprawling arrangements, or fashioning elaborate torture devices that split trees in half.
Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham is concerned with the relationships inscribed in the production and life of things. They understand ikebana and working with living matter as acts of negotiation. A negotiation of time, space, material, and of human interrelations. In 2013, Oldham first saw Ohtsubo’s work in a book, followed by years of correspondence and training in Japan in an intensive teacher-student relationship. Parallel to their training as an ikebana master, Oldham began digitizing the majority of Ohtsubo’s extensive photo archive from the last fifty years, alongside teaching the practice and giving lectures on its history and development. These acts of mediation and concern for the visibility of Ohtsubo’s practice became a medium for Oldham to negotiate questions of collective authorship and appropriation, (il)legibility, and acts of advocacy.
The title of the exhibition Flower Planet refers to the name Ohtsubo gave his ikebana workshop and describes a simple yet complex idea: understanding the world as a readymade, and all existing materials and ecosystems of plants, animals, and people as ikebana. The practices by Oldham and Ohtsubo do not imitate an idea of nature but rather reproduce the artificiality of human concepts of it. Their understanding of ecology and conceptual art practice is an urgent component in the current state of our (surrounding) world. In moments of disorientation, improvisation, and appropriation, the works make us aware of the fragility of our coexistence.
Writers Residency
The Writers Residency takes up the tradition of the town chronicler and offers a temporary space for writing. The program is aimed at authors and critics, as well as artists whose practice is based on writing. The fellow from October to December 2024 was manuel arturo abreu, a non-disciplinary artist working with what is at hand, in a process of magical thinking with attention to the ritual aspects of aesthetics. During their residency, abreu continued their ongoing research on various figures of religious diaspora in a broader context of the encounter between Germany and Africa. Previous residents include Laura McLean-Ferris, Joshua Leon, Taylor Le Melle, and Quinn Latimer, among others. The next resident for the period from April to June 2025 will be announced soon.
Schaufenster
Schaufenster is an onsite and online series simultaneously presenting video works in the two permanently accessible spaces of the institution—the window display at the Hofgarten and the website. Over the past months, the series presented works by Sadie Benning, Sondra Perry, Patty Chang, and Nicole-Antonia Spagnola. Currently on view is Michael Turner’s A Portrait of Dodie and Kevin, a pensive, personal glimpse into the relationship of two avant-garde figures anchored in the New Narrative literary movement. The three-minute silent video provides a kind of record of how and where daily life happens, relative to oneself and others.
Director: Maurin Dietrich
Curator: Gloria Hasnay
Assistant Curator: Lucie Pia
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