Astrid S. Klein
dal 9/7/2015 al 5/9/2015
Segnalato da
9/7/2015
Astrid S. Klein
Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg
Disparaitre dans la nature to decamp, to desert, to evaporate, das Weite suchen, verduften. The multilingual title of the exhibition signifies different forms of flight, disappearance, and transformation. A desire, a necessity, an act of living creatures aimed toward survival?
The Heidelberger Kunstverein presents the first comprehensive solo exhibition by Astrid S. Klein, offering insight into the diversity and breadth of her poetical-critical research, reflection, and action over the past ten years. Klein's transdisciplinary artistic practice involves film, text, sound, performative interventions, and public events. The exhibition highlights the artist's unique dialogical approach in investigating relations between the Global South and North.
The multilingual title of the exhibition signifies different forms of flight, disappearance, and transformation. A desire, a necessity, an act of living creatures aimed toward survival?
Moving into other spaces and transforming: Astrid S. Klein has been initiating artistic dialogues for ten years. She explores, through informative and poetic research, the relations between the West and the non-Western world—the violent history linking them together and their social realities.
Describing the process of her own "creolization"—an identity in flux—she questions the meaning of her West German, European heritage in the face of flowing, circulating identities. Essential and unique to her artistic practice are formats of dialogue, through which she engages in polyphonic, multilingual productions of knowledge with her counterparts from Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and their diaspora. The works deal with their complex mutual history and a present able to embrace possible collaborative forms of agency.
Accelerated transformations like migration, shifting provenance, histories, and localisations—going hand in hand with the radical transformation of social and ecological environments, capitalism, and the digitalization of all lifeworlds—are impelling both society and individuals into a world of flight. How can an artist make a difference here?
Astrid S. Klein seeks out cultural producers from real and imaginary transnational places, inviting them to engage with her in a performative process of negotiation. Learning situations, the experience of displacement and encounter, the related surprises and misunderstandings all help the artist become oriented within the current age of global transformation, while navigating this realm via shared reflection.
At the Heidelberger Kunstverein, Astrid S. Klein allows a narrative to unfold in five "volumes" and the related live formats of her Quartier Flottant. Each "volume" gives a glimpse of a thematic complex in which individual works have been created and are currently negotiated.
Image: Astrid S. Klein, Powder of Rainforest Giants, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.
Press Contact: presse@hdkv.de
Opening: July 10 / 7 pm
Heidelberger Kunstverein
Hauptstr. 97 Heidelberg
Hours: Tuesday–Wednesday noon–7pm,
Thursday–Friday 3–10pm, Saturday–Sunday 11am–7pm