Ariane Mueller’s “7 rue des Grands Augustins,” 2023, a series of eight acrylics on canvas, celebrates the joy of painting while also conveying a more complex message. In an oblique commentary on the Spanish Civil War, Mueller calls back to Picasso’s Guernica, 1937. Rather than reproduce aspects …
In David Cronenberg’s film Crimes of the Future, the plot unfolds in a hypothetical setting where humans no longer feel physical pain. Instead, they grow new, unknown organs that are then surgically removed. In this scenario, the body gets opened up in order to show, …
Gabriela Acha: We started this conversation one year and a half ago, in the frame of the Ars Viva Prize 2021, which you won along with Rob Cross and Sung Tieu and it feels like life as we knew it had shifted dramatically ever since. In 2019, I visited your exhibition „Dwelling“ at the Kunstverein Braunschweig even before that, before the pandemic. I want to look back at this moment in time to set a frame of reference for your work, as the questions you bring up, such as the existential anxiety caused by information overflow, lack of control and mindless consumption, only became more relevant with time.
In her 2014 article Sex and Wheels for the Guardian, Zadie Smith revisits at J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash. Following on the writer’s perception of his work as the “first pornographic novel about technology”, Smith reflects on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement that language is better understood through its use, and not …
Stereotypes about modern Germany have long centered on the allure of the Autobahn and its license for limitless speed. In the exhibition “Wohin?” (Where to?), Young-jun Tak disseminates and rearranges this trope in order to dismantle the popular constructs of German national identity. [ read …
In 1946, Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) declared that conventional forms of representation had been exhausted. The following year, the artist founded Spatialism, a movement that dispensed with the traditional emphasis on illusion and illustration and instead condensed light, time, and space into a minimal gesture—in Fontana’s case, the slice of a razor through monochrome surfaces.
It is difficult to think of a more iconic collaboration between artists and department stores than the one that went on for decades at Bonwit Teller, which commissioned emerging and established artists to design their window displays. The standpoints and approaches were as varied as …
The spiral has been used as a symbol since the beginning of recorded culture. In Celtic mythologies, for instance, spirals denote elevation to higher levels of consciousness. Popular iconographies based on Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian mythology, on the other hand, combine the spiral with a straight …
In their essay ‘The Guild of the Brave Poor Things’(2017), artists Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos ponderwhether true privacy is still a viable reality. This is an especially pertinent question for McArthur, whose own impaired mobility requires her to maintain proximity to others to carry out basic daily tasks and for whom the question of visibility can equate to a ‘life or death situation’. It is likewise a concern in the digital realm, from which in seems any familiar notion of intimacy has been extinguished. The six filmic propositions in Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen’s current group show, ‘Closer’, expand on this vision, presenting screens as portals that allow or deny access to personal narratives.
Sara Sadik’s fictional narratives portray the Maghrebi youth (whom she refers to as beurness) in Marseille, the city to which she belongs. Rooted in a local perspective, her scripts, films, and performances tackle wider issues, such as the politics of identities and behaviours that lack …