Candida Höfer: Nach Berlin / Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space

Candida Höfer
Nach Berlin

Curator: Marius Babias

Candida Höfer is one of the most renowned German photographers with an international reputation. Her extensive oeuvre has been exhibited in museums worldwide and is represented in important collections. Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) presents numerous new photographs and projections by the artist.

Three projections, specially arranged for the exhibition, are showing photographs by Candida Höfer in superimpositions. This includes a range of images from the well-known series "Türken in Deutschland" (Turks in Germany) from 1979, which compiles everyday scenes from the lives of Turkish “gastarbeiter” in the 1970s in, among others, Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin. Two further projections—Memories 2016 and Berlin 2016—reflect the artist’s ongoing examination of sites of public life and building structures, as well as, in her most recent works, of color, plane and form, and their dissolution.

The more recent photographic works, presented on walls and in showcases, consist of abstracting detail shots, e.g. of roadsides, interior designs, textile interior elements or floor and wall surfaces. The varying formats of presentation in the exhibition, as well as the shift from static to moving image point to the multiperspectivity in Candida Höfer’s work. The title of the exhibition is a quotation from the movie Emil and the Detectives (1931), much valued by Candida Höfer, which, due to its cinematic portrayal of the city of Berlin and its surprising twists and turns, until today captures one’s imagination. Nach Berlin (To / After Berlin) can also signify the expectations of the visitors, who are meant to be disappointed—as in the film—because there are no photographs of libraries, for which the artist became famous. Instead, one can experience new perspectives in the artistic development of Candida Höfer—from wealth of forms to basic forms, from the view on the multifarious whole to the concentration on the abstract detail and from the static to the moving image. The exhibition gives an insight into a practice, which the artist has developed and which is complementary to her previous approach. At Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, these recent works are specifically put into relation to each other in order to explore how it could go on “after Berlin”. Nach Berlin stands for a new beginning of the artist, who opposes the expectations and looks for new artistic ways.


Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by an artist’s book in the series "n.b.k. Exhibitions“ published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne.


Program art education

Thursday, December 8, 7pm
"Der fotografische Blick"
Panel discussion with Doreen Mende (curator and theoretician, Berlin / Geneva),
Michael Oppitz (professor emeritus in ethnology, University Zurich and head of the Ethnographic Museum Zurich),
and Katharina Sykora (professor in art history, Braunschweig University of Art),
moderated by Anselm Franke (head of visual arts and film, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin)
In German

Thursday, January 19, 7pm
Emil und die Detektive
Screening of the classic from 1931 (director: Gerhard Lamprecht, screenplay: Billy Wilder),
followed by a talk with Kasper König (artistic director Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017),
moderated by Marius Babias (director n.b.k.)
In German

Sunday, January 29, 8pm
Jan St. Werner
Concert


n.b.k. Showroom
Rosa Barba
The Color Out of Space

Curator: Kathrin Becker

The work of Rosa Barba represents a practice of artistic filmmaking, which goes far beyond the moving image. Her film installations and objects associate image, language, text and apparatus and generate a new pictorial materiality. Barba particularly examines industrial cinema and in her conceptual practice observes and questions its stagings, its formats, gestures and messages by removing them from their original context, creating and presenting them in a dazzling new manner. The two-time participant of the Venice Biennale at the n.b.k. shows the cinematic sculpture The Color Out of Space (2015). It includes footage of stars and planets, which the artist has shot in 2014/2015 in collaboration with the Hirsch observatory at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Additionally, Barba interviewed artists, writers and astronomers about the speculations of cinema and astronomy, including Ingrid Wiener, Barbara Hammer, Jean-Pierre Luminet, Matthew Newby and Oswald Wiener, and, in collaboration with the composer Jan St. Werner, combined these voices in a dense sound collage. Barba uses contrast in media and historically specific architectural contexts to think through how we describe—technically and speculatively—what exceeds our perception.