calendario eventi  :: 

X

28/1/2015

Two Exhibitions

Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe

Curated by Anja Casser

Kerstin Cmelka
with Manuel Gorkiewicz, Mario Mentrup, Hanno Millesi and Mandla Reuter

Badischer Kunstverein presents the artist Kerstin Cmelka in an extensive solo exhibition. Cmelka works primarily in the media of video, photography and performance. Her works often depart from popular models of theatre, art and film, which Cmelka adapts and re-stages. The exhibition centers around the micro-dramas that she has been producing since 2008. These are short dramatic fragments, interviews, and songs, in which the artist re-enacts familiar theatre dialogues, clichéd movie scenes, talk shows, or private conversations with people from her immediate surroundings, and treats them with subtle distancing effects. Here Cmelka is director and actress at the same time, skillfully alternating between the characters. Various constellations of power in art and life are unmasked in a socio-critical manner; however, rather than becoming representations of staid stereotypes these structures are re-activated as productive forms, often in a humorous way.

Starting from these existing works, Cmelka expands her interest in the techniques of professional acting – or what is commonly regarded as such – in the exhibition at Badischer Kunstverein. A new photo series deals with the “song and dance” exercises, an element of “method acting,” in which a coach animates the actors to intone a song which they have selected and to combine it with spontaneous movements. A new performance premieres on a specially constructed stage, in which various performers alternate – as in a cabaret – between acting, carrying out coached exercises, and giving a concert. A newly conceived sound piece presents a “song and dance” exercise in the format of a canon.
The exhibition also becomes an opportunity to seriously address collaboration or complicity within Cmelka’s practice.The artists Manuel Gorkiewicz, Mario Mentrup, Hanno Millesi and Mandla Reuter have been invited to integrate single works into Cmelka’s installations, the very ones in which they were involved as actors, advisors, mentors, or friends. Cmelka’s installations and partner-works thus enter into a process of mutual adaptation.

Kerstin Cmelka (*1974 in MödlingAustria) lives and works in Berlin.
Her solo exhibitions include Mikrodrama#11, Kunstverein Langenhagen, Surviving a shark attack on land, Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde; Kunst und Lebensform, Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz, and Art and Life, Lunds Konsthall, Lund. Her works have also been shown in the following exhibition spaces: Taylor Macklin, Zurich; Kunstwerke Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Kunstverein Lingen, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2nd Moscow Biennale for Contemporary Art, Moscow and Busan Biennale, Busan (South Korea).

----

Marie Lund
Flush

Lund’s practice is a genuinely sculptural one, even though her works clearly undermine the conventional notions of sculptural form and materiality. Lund is more interested in the transformation of the material, how it emerges through artistic intervention or becomes evident in the objects themselves through years of use. A permanent process of taking form and giving form is what characterizes Lund’s approach. For the series The Very White Marbles (2009-2014) the artist acquired traditionally crafted busts on Ebay, removed their facial features and thus returned the sculptures to their raw material. The Casts (2014), newly created for this exhibition, undergo a similar transformation from the figurative to the abstract. In this work Lund casts the back sides and hollow interiors of the plaster figures from the Royal Danish Cast Collection in blue wax. This results in abstract forms, where the figurative characteristics of the sculptures – like noses, eyes, and mouths – can still be faintly recognised on the surfaces, but they also show traces of the original working process – the modeling of the sculptures from the inside.

The artist concentrates on the surface of an object, which communicates between the interior and the exterior like a delicate membrane. The canvasses in Stills (2014) are used curtains, where the colour has faded irregularly due to years of direct sunlight shining upon the draped fabric. What remains is the replica of an object, the use of which has been burned into the material like an over-exposed photograph. In the central work Torso, Lund consistently continues her interest in the relation of volume and surface by combining soft imprints of fabrics with the hard materiality of the concrete cast. Various sweaters are placed directly in the cast and removed again after the setting, whereby remainders of the fabric still adhere to the concrete. The scale and volumes of the resulting works are reminiscent of the form of furniture pieces, cushions and, mats. They are conceived as both separate sculptures and as pedestals for smaller objects in the exhibition. Playing with these presumed discrepancies between material and form, body and surface, figurativeness and abstraction is paradigmatic for Lund’s complex concept of sculpture.

Marie Lund (*1976 in Copenhagen) lives and works in London.
Her latest solo exhibitions include Dip, Laura Bartlett Gallery, London, Statements, Art Basel, Drums, Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Back Pack, Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City, and Clickety Click, Croy Nielsen, Berlin. Her works have also been featured in exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Krefeld, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Sorø Kunstmuseum, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Kunsthalle Mulhouse, De Vleeshal, Middelburg, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Nomas Foundation, Rome, David Roberts Foundation, London, Kunstverein Braunschweig, The Swiss Institute, New York, and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco.

Image: Kerstin Cmelka: from the series Circumstance and Circumvolution, 2015

Opening: Thursday, 29 January, 7 pm

Badischer Kunstverein
Waldstraße 3
D-76133 Karlsruhe
Germany

stampa

permanent link