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16/5/2014

Five exhibitions

Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg

›eser‹
Judith Raum

“Eser” is Turkish and means “work / creation”. On one of Judith Raum's journeys along the Baghdad Railway, during conversation a Turkish gardener used the word “eser” – not, however, in order to describe the historical infrastructural achievement of German engineers, but the essence of a tree.

“eser” is the fifth exhibition as part of the series “Einzelausstellung: Nicht alleine” ( solo exhibition: not alone ), and shows various chapters of Judith Raum's artistic research, which she has been conducting on German economic colonialism in the Ottoman Empire since 2009. The starting point of her comprehensive research is the situation of the domestic weavers in Upper Franconia at the end of the 19th century. Starting from an examination of this extremely precarious entrepreneurship, the artist pursues the threads of former trade networks and geostrategic interests, drawing on the example of the building of the Anatolian Railway and of the Baghdad Railway from 1888 onwards. The major infrastructural project was funded by Deutsche Bank and built with German know-how. The financiers' primary concern was the railway's profitability. Accordingly, besides the railway's construction their interest was turned towards tapping into raw materials sources and markets for German products – besides machines, the cloths manufactured in Upper Franconia, for example. However, Anatolia's agricultural modernization was also drawn into the company's focus.

In her exhibition, Judith Raum combines sources from the Historical Archive of Deutsche Bank on German agricultural engagement in Anatolia and on employment conditions at the railway with her subjective look at the present situation along the rail route in Anatolia. Places and projects that are mentioned in historical correspondence and photographs determine the routes along which Judith Raum travels through the Anatolian landscape by train. The focus of her observations lies on the question of how economic interests in around 1900 to the present day are registered in the material world, and what momentums of resistance against rationalization and control are evident in local conditions. Alternative forms of contact, playful and apparently unplanned moments, considerably determine her own tactile and choreographic dealing with the surfaces and structures that she works on. The result is dyed widths of fabric, steeped in traces of existence, or cobbled-together assemblage objects; these are on display in the exhibition in conjunction with original documentary material from archives and photos of journeys. Raum's poetic and simultaneously tactile dealing with the everyday traces of history takes a look at the improvised and the disjointed, and, in the Hall and the Atrium of the Heidelberger Kunstverein, translates it into a room-related installation in which the different levels of her research are, on equal terms, condensed into one narrative about the complex contact between two cultures.

Judith Raum undertook her travels into the Anatolian Plateau and the Taurus Mountains together with the artist Iz Öztat. The close dialogue between the two artists is also at the origin of the simultaneous presentation of their works at the Heidelberger Kunstverein.

Judith Raum (born in 1977 in Werneck) lives and works in Berlin. She studied Free Art along with Philosophy, Art History and Psychoanalysis in Frankfurt am Main and New York City, USA. Numerous international exhibitions and publication projects since 2005. From 2007 until 2011 Judith Raum taught at the Berlin University of the Arts and was scholarship holder at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences there from 2011 until 2013.

Curated by Susanne Weiß.
With the support of the Einstein Foundation Berlin and of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

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EMPORE:
UNDO, REDO AND REPEAT
a TANZFONDS ERBE project by Christina Ciupke and Anna Till

The project “undo, redo and repeat” examines five dance positions from the 20th century as reflected by those by whom they are taught and interpreted, remembered and managed, kept alive and disseminated. The dancers and choreographers Christina Ciupke and Anna Till pursue the question of how knowledge about past dances by Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss, Dore Hoyer, Pina Bausch and William Forsythe reaches us.
Irene Sieben, Reinhild Hoffmann, Martin Nachbar and Thomas McManus are invited to reflect, in their own form, on the history of dance and on their position within the same. As contemporary witnesses and protagonists, they have either dealt with the legacy of each of the above choreographers or – as dancers or assistants – been in direct contact with them. In “undo, redo and repeat” they now become, as nodal points of a transfer of knowledge and experience, protagonists in a process of reconstructing fragments of the dancing legacy.

Christina Cuipke and Anna Till want to find out how accurately they keep alive their knowledge of choreographic methods for themselves and for others, in order to pass it on. This knowledge is personal. It is not catalogued in archives or libraries. It is fragile and based on memories that are subject to constant changes. With every single contemporary witness Christina Ciupke and Anna Till embark on the process of such a passing on of choreographic material.
For the exhibition on the Gallery, interviews, photographs, archive material, performances and first-hand interpretations are brought alive and made accessible. “undo, redo and repeat” is additionally being presented to the general public via a project archive (www.undo-redo-repeat.de) as well as in the form of a performance, which will celebrate its première at the Sophiensaele, Berlin.

A production by Ciupke / Till GbR in co-operation with the Heidelberger Kunstverein and SOPHIENSAELE, Berlin. Promoted by TANZFONDS ERBE - eine Initiative der Kulturstiftung des Bundes and sponsored through subsidies by the Governing Mayor of Berlin - Senate Chancellery - Cultural Affairs.

The performer and choreographer Christina Ciupke works and lives in Berlin. She develops her projects with artists from the field of dance and other arts. In 2013 she earned a Master of Arts in Choreography (AMCh) at the Amsterdam School of the Arts.

Anna Till lives and works as a choreographer in Dresden and Berlin. She studied Contemporary Dance, Context, Choreography at the Inter-University Centre of Dance (HZT), Berlin, and prior to that Applied Cultural Studies at the University of Lüneburg. Her dance pieces have been shown, among other places, in Berlin, Amsterdam Rennes, Leipzig and Dresden.

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Studio:
VAZAHA – Young Film Art from Madagascar
presented by Rudolf Herz and Julia Wahren

Dancing lemurs, crazy New York zoo animals, pepper and vanilla. And the unique nature. Absolutely worth seeing and massively under threat. What do we know about Madagascar? Usually no more than that. The great unknown island. And off its shores, as the German folk song goes, we have “the plague on board”. Step onto dry land there today, and you'll find a diverse culture which, despite political despondency and utmost poverty, is constantly in motion. Madagascan film art is no exception. A glimpse at the current creativity of young film-makers is provided by the exhibition “VAZAHA”.

Rudolf Herz and Julia Wahren met the film-makers in the summer of 2013, when they recreated the expedition of the Madagascar researcher Joseph Peter Audebert. In around 1880, Audebert conducted research on the island's fauna and published reports about the country and its inhabitants: rare ethnological sources from a period before the island became a French colony. Audebert was a “Vazaha”, a “white foreigner”: his gaze is full of curiosity and the spirit of research – but also Eurocentric and arrogant. Herz and Wahren wanted to know how today's Madagascans artistically comment on Audebert's reports. In conversation with the film-makers there commenced an exciting inter-cultural discourse, which is set to lead in 2015 to an extensive exhibition at Munich's Museum of Anthropology.

The studio exhibition “VAZAHA” at the Heidelberger Kunstverein marks a stage in the project's development and introduces this partnership's directors:

Luck Razanajaona: “Le Zébu de Dadilahy” (2012)

Mamihasina Raminosoa: “La Bulle” (2008)

Sitraka Randriamahaly: “Hazalamabo” (2011)

Harimalala Rason: “Traversées du Tunnel” (2012)

Rado Andriamanisa / Colby Gottert: “Raspberry”(2012)

The diversity and idiosyncrasy of the short films are a thrill; they develop their own narrative forms, are powerful, artistically poetic or socio-documentary, and open the gaze onto unknown myths and the still too little-known living conditions in Madagascar.

Rudolf Herz, a freelance artist with a focus on cross-media projects, lives in Munich. Studies in Art and Art History in Munich and Hamburg. 1994 Rome scholarship from the Germany Academy Villa Massimo. Most recent solo exhibition: Marcel Duchamp – Le mystère de Munich, Architekturmuseum München (2012)

Julia Wahren, freelance author, director, and musician, lives in Munich. Studies at the Hanover University of Music and Theatre and at the University of Music in Detmold. 2000 Alexander Award for Journalists.

The research trip was founded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation

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FOYER:
conducted in depth and projected at length
Iz Öztat und Zisan

“Conducted in depth and projected at length” is an untimely collaboration between Iz Öztat and Zisan that attends to the coincidence between the imaginary potential of a river island and the destiny of Adakale, an actual submerged island in the Danube River within the borders of present-day Romania. Drifting between various courses of time – the time it takes for the river to claim its bed and for an island to emerge, the time required for an island to become a territory, the time one devotes to being possessed, the time invested in taming and interrupting the flow of water until an island is flooded, the movement of articulating a drifting island in the present, the vision of a future which reconstructs the island as a tourist attraction, the linguistic time dedicated to imagining otherwise – Iz and Zisan search for something missing.

Upon encountering Adakale in 1915 as a de jure Ottoman exclave in the Balkans and a site of projected imperial longings, Zisan was inspired to write her utopian fiction titled Cennet/Cinnet (Paradise/Possessed) Island. Located on a river that acts as a border between two nation states, the autonomous Cennet/Cinnet commune relates to time as being possessed, to gender as shades of blue, to resources as commons and to family as a meandering passage. Zisan's text, sketches for Cennet/Cinnet (Paradise/Possessed) Island and selected documents relating to Adakale from Zisan's Utopie Folder are exhibited.

Iz Öztat's journey leads to an absent island, since Adakale was submerged in 1968 due to the construction of Iron Gates Dam. Iz engages with the present that surrounds its absence and depicts a drifting river island articulated collectively. The channeling séance held somewhere between the absent island of Adakale and Zisan's Cennet/Cinnet (Paradise/Possessed) Island is a manifestation of the dialogue between Iz and Zisan, which accompanies the exhibition in the form of a publication.

Iz Öztat (1981) has been collaborating with Zisan, who appears to her as a historical figure, a channeled spirit and an alter ego. Zisan (1894-1970) left Istanbul in 1915, fleeing from the Armenian Genocide. She crossed paths with the European avant-garde as she drifted with political commitments, coincidences and obscure obsessions.

Mit freundlicher Unterstützung der SAHA Association.

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cafeteria:
Ghost | warrior
Joscha Steffens

How does modern warfare function in times of simulation? Where does the playing end, and where do things start in earnest?

The photographs by Joscha Steffens are no conventional war photographs: they show a game with the game of war, as it occurs on a weekly basis in some out-of-the-way homestead in the Federal Republic.
The photographed warriors are career soldiers or wannabe career soldiers, gathering on weekends for “softair” battles in order to take a digital death, increasingly alienated from them, seriously again in a playful way. The reality of our present-day wars has itself long since transitioned into a war simulation, in which computer freaks stand their ground as today's heroes. By re-simulating the simulative reality of war in analogue war games, these “nerds” express an existential plight, a lack and a need: they have unlearned dying – although, symbolically, they are already dead, the realness of death has been lost to them. They range between these two deaths. They are “Ghostwarriors”.

The exhibition was preceded by the photographic volume "Ghost / Warrior" with the text insert "On the Combative Spirit of Photography" by Florian Arnold – an analysis of the representation of post-modern war in simulation.

Joscha Steffens (born in 1981 in Waiblingen), who grew up in Heidelberg, studied Media art at HFG Karlsruhe from 2003 until 2008 and Visual Arts / Artistic Photography at HGB Leipzig from 2008 until 2011. During studies, a six-month stay at the École Nationale Supérieur de la Photographie in Arles (2006). Scholarship holder of the Study Foundation of the German People. Since Winter Semester 2012 on the postgraduate programme of KHM Cologne.

Image: Christina Ciupke, Reinhild Hoffmann, Anna Till © Lotte Chabrowski
PRESS CONTACT

Heidelberger Kunstverein
Yasmin Meinicke
Tel. | + 49 6221 184086
Email | presse@hdkv.de

Heidelberger Kunstverein
Hauptstr. 97 | D-69117 Heidelberg
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