Nina Könnemann: BLOCKEN / Further Reductions

In May 2025, Haus am Waldsee is presenting a comprehensive solo exhibition by the Berlin-based artist Nina Könnemann. In her work, Könnemann explores how people behave in public spaces, focusing on marginal areas, everyday behaviour, and subcultural dynamics. With precision and astute observation, she documents movements shaped by latent social conventions. Her camera often captures the transitional zones of public occurrences: spaces on the periphery of festivals, demonstrations, sports events, and the traces people leave behind at such mass gatherings. Könnemann condenses these seemingly insignificant moments into filmic reflections on unnoticed social mechanisms, creating portraits of contemporary life through unofficial narratives.

Under the title BLOCKEN, the ground floor of the Haus am Waldsee features a new series of video works developed through a decentralised, collaborative process. Unbound by a fixed dramaturgy, the images unfold in real time—capturing, for instance, the final moments of a marathon or the last ski lift rides of the season. Recording, selection, and editing are closely interwoven, drawing attention not only to the event itself but also to the conditions of its cinematic capture. Upstairs, Further Reductions presents new works from Könnemann’s ongoing sculptural series Lithic Reductions—delicate ceramic pieces whose shapes recall prehistoric tools. Engaging with the subculture of ‘knapping’—a community of hobbyists who recreate Neolithic artifacts while speculatively reimagining modes of Stone Age thinking—these works explore the threshold between deliberate shaping and spontaneous form-finding, tracing a fragile interplay between material memory, improvisation, and cultural projection.

Whether by turning her gaze towards fleeting gestures at the margins of public events or by staging seemingly archaic objects that oscillate between past and present, Könnemann shows how perception and meaning are bound to processes—of friction, translation, and condensation—that typically unfold beyond the main lines of sight.

Nina Könnemann (b. 1971 in Bonn) lives and works in Berlin. Her recent solo exhibitions include presentations at Gandt, New York (2023), Lars Friedrich, Berlin (2022), mumok, Vienna (2022, 2019). High Art, Paris (2021), Montos Tattoo, Vilnius (2021), and House of Gaga, Los Angeles (2018). Her work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including at Fluentum, Berlin (2024), FRAC Lorraine, Metz (2024), Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2022), Kunsthaus Glarus (2021), Francesca Pia, Zurich (2020), and Belvedere 21, Vienna (2019). Her performative video works have been presented at Treize, Paris (2023), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017), Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2016), and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017).

Curated by Beatrice Hilke. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be published by Bierke Books.

Press contact: Erik Günther, e.guenther@hausamwaldsee.de, T +49 (0) 30 801 89 35, hausamwaldsee.de.