Works by Cashmere Radio, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (MX), DAS INSTITUT (UK/US), Honey-Suckle Company (DE), KAYA (US), (Music For) Eggplant (FR), projektKLUB (DE), SUPERFLEX (DK)
Curators: Jule Hillgärtner, Nele Kaczmarek
Assistant curator: Raoul Klooker
June 21 – August 25, 2019
Kunstverein Braunschweig E.V. Haus Salve Hospes, 38100 Braunschweig
Photos: Stefan Stark
Groups focuses on collaborative work, which is shown in various formats and themes. Artists join together, form collectives, and cooperate to realize complex projects. The exhibition Groups can also be regarded as an appreciation of a way of working that contradicts the idea that art per se is to be traced back to individual authors: “In the beginning of a movement an event transforms an
I into a We.” (Wittenburg / Voss)
It is important to leave the concept of the artist subject behind in order to be open to different collaborative models. As a result, the process-based work of the Honey-Suckle Company, founded in the mid-1990s, encounters installations and durational performances by (Music For) Eggplant. While Colectivo Los Ingrávidos creates experimental films in response to sociopolitical injustices, projektKLUB produces its own social spaces that are repeatedly activated in the course of the exhibition. KAYA and DAS INSTITUT are two configurations associated with the artist Kerstin Brätsch that regularly involve third parties in their projects, similar to the Danish trio SUPERFLEX, which is constantly developing new tools for participation.
In Groups, the contours between the individual and the community are blurred. It is not uncommon for projects to emerge from the work in and with the group that change over time; only in the course of a – sometimes performative and participatory – process do they gradually become visible.
GUEST ROOM: CASHMERE RADIO
As a commentary on the exhibition, artists are invited to make use of the space originally used as a guest room in the Villa Salve Hospes. As part of Groups, the radio station CASHMERE RADIO is developing a new program that takes up the gesture of hospitality.
Participating Artists:
Cashmere Radio
Cashmere Radio is a collaboratively operated radio station based in Berlin Lichtenberg. The founding idea of the station is “to preserve and further radio and broadcasting practices by playing with the plasticity and malleability of the medium” (Cashmere Radio). The radio studio is regularly open to the public so that the audience is able to listen to the programs live on location and to participate in the creation of radio itself. Musicians, composers, radio makers and artists are encouraged to experiment with and interpret the various possibilities of the medium. Be it via live music concerts, lectures, DJ mixes or readings, the Cashmere Radio studio manifests itself in various forms of cultural activity.
Beginning in 2015 artists and curators invite guests to exhibit in the Villa room that was originally used as a guest room. Cashmere Radio is curating a program for Groups specifically adapted to the location. The translation between digital and analog received programming is thematized by means of a series of low power locally organised pirate radio receivers built by members of the Cashmere Radio collective that also function as transmitters in the space. The radio program Chronopolis picks up on the fleeting and intimate moment of live radio as a unique listening experience of fragile time which seems to have been lost in the constant availability of today’s “on-demand” programs. A generative piece by Hugo Esquinca and Lukas Grundmann can be heard, which processes the live stream of Cashmere Radio in real time, takes it apart and reassembles it. Also incorporated is a video work by MSHR, an artist duo made up of Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper who were guests at Cashmere Radio with an artist residence. Their work meshes sculpture and circuitry through digital and physical space, constructing cybernetic compositions of sound, light and form. In addition to the exhibition, Cashmere Radio will present
a live program at the Kunstverein Braunschweig on Thursday, August 22.
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, an anonymous collective based in Mexico, explores the political potential of experimental filmmaking. By mixing abstract, documentary, and archival sequences and highlighting the materiality of analog films, Los Ingrávidos are developing a new language of political protest whose form is a deliberate departure from the conventions of commercial film and television productions.
Trilogy depicts violence against Mexican women from three different perspectives. Coyolxauhqui refers to the Aztec sun goddess of the same name, who is torn to pieces by her half-brother Huitzilopochtli, according to the myth. At the same time, the film recounts the abduction and disappearance of women in contemporary Mexico. Dry Blood speaks from the perspective of Mexican daughters, and assembles discolored and expired film footage of an International Women’s Day demonstration together with sound recordings of a feminist speech during the uprisings in San Salvador Atenco in 2006. Have You Seen? (Mother’s Day) shows a demonstration by the mothers of kidnapped activists on Mother’s Day, one of the most important family holidays in Mexico. In response to the 2014 mass kidnapping of 43 students in Iguala, The Sun Quartet emerged as an abstract composition of four elements: the first part depicts the Aztec sun stone as the source of youthful protest, while the San Juan River is represented in the second part by flowing demonstrations. Fire, as a recurrent motif of the third part, combines cross-fades of rural and urban views with poems and protest songs, which ultimately lead to a polyglot murmur of voices in the fourth part, memorializing the trauma of mass kidnappings and political murders.
DAS INSTITUT
The artists Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder have been running DAS INSTITUT as a collective artistic project since 2007. As an “import and export agency” they imitate companies’ transaction chains and produce paintings, prints, performances, services, and entire fashion collections, as well as continually involving third parties in their collaborative work. For their interdisciplinary practice as DAS INSTITUT, Brätsch and Röder fuse their respective disciplines and artistic styles in order to produce a new visual language and collective authorship.
The double portraits shown here were created after Alejandro Jodorowsky did a tarot card reading for the artists in 2014. As Brätsch and Röder lived in different cities at the time, they sent each other individual black-and-white copies of their faces by post, and then copied their own faces onto the other’s portrait. The collective portraits were thus created, each modeled on different motifs from the Major Arcana tarot cards, and at the same time portraying a physical fusion of the individual artists into one collective subject. The tarot images alternate seamlessly with framed works from the 2015 DARK CODEX series, whose black silhouettes are also based on the artists’ bodies, and perform mystical and talismanic rituals and gestures. The abstract colorful shapes in the background of the images are reminiscent of microscopic views of human body cells and of psychedelic color patterns, while in the foreground female figures form nonverbal and mysterious signs and symbols.
Honey-Suckle Company
For the exhibition Groups, the Honey-Suckle Company is restaging fragments from the project Eswerde (shown at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and in Berlin, 2003). The Braunschweig installation transforms the Spiegelsaal (Room 7) into a sound space with an instrument spanning the entire length of the room at the center, the large-format Raum-Hurdy-Gurdy, which can be played by several visitors at the same time. Rotating harps that play mechanically and the pavilion construction of wood and fabrics open up the space as a stage and memory board for the experimental productions that the group created as part of Eswerde. This also includes a documentary on the collection So Last Season, for which Honey-Suckle Company produced designs made from clothing donations that they termed “recession clothing”.
The film, which was created as part of Eswerde, is presented at the Kunstverein Braunschweig for the first time as a projection to be viewed from several angles. Then as now Eswerde addresses coming together in communities and ritual as a collective experience. Traces of the original ritual become blurred and the restaging can be charged with new meanings. The relationship between individuality and collectivity as an existential question of being that is being negotiated resonates like an echo into the present and reflects alternative communal experiences and lifestyles to the viewer.
In addition to the works displayed in the exhibition, the associated band NOHE NOSHE performs at the opening evening at Kunstverein Braunschweig.
KAYA
KAYA is a collaborative art project by New York-based artists Kerstin Brätsch and Debo Eilers. The coalition is named after the daughter of a close friend, Kaya Serene, who also acts as an unknown third member and sometimes appears as a muse, collaborator, or performer. As KAYA, the participating artists combine their respective independent working methods into a multimedia practice that attempts to take painting and sculpture to their limits. A recurrent theme in KAYA’s works is the preoccupation with youth and youth culture based on topics such as fashion, gender performance, and physical aging processes. The group makes use of ritual and collective processes in the production and activation of their work, often in dialogue with non- Western forms of spirituality. One example of this is the collection of T-shirts KAYA produced for two performances in 2015. Photos of previous KAYA works were ironed onto the white cotton shirts, before they were decorated with a variety of sculptural and digital-looking details – including vinyl wire, aluminum, Velcro – to be worn for several days during the KAMP KAYA events. The T-shirts were then turned into relics by Eilers and Brätsch and, using epoxy resin, urethane, and objects such as wigs and belts, made into solid forms reminiscent of mutated and contorted bodies. Alongside a sound work by Nicolas An Xedro, KAYA’s _OraKle Paintings (Catacomb Mirrors) also include wishes collected from children participating in a workshop held last year. As a result, the paintings by KAYA are transformed into expansive sound and light installations. Also on display are Painting Tools and Necklace, relics that were used to activate or “heal” KAYA’s _OraKle Paintings during Healing performance for a sick painting.
(Music For) Eggplant (FR)
(Music For) Eggplant is a French-Swiss based collective of artists and musicians, as well as a noise pop band. In addition to numerous albums, they regularly publish video works and put on performances and live improvisations, which are in turn quoted in subsequent photo prints or on fan shirts. The productive forces of their artistic practice are chaos, delusion, and the destruction of existing structures. With a carefree DIY aesthetic, a lot is produced, recorded, discarded, reproduced, and revised. Following the principles of Dadaism, arbitrary, random gestures and actions are given considerable space. The newly designed work How do you reset your mind? Aus allen Testamenten sind die Blumen geboren is on display in the Remise. The point of departure for the process based work, which is continuously changing and evolving over the course of the exhibition, is a collaborative film project based on funeral and burial ceremonies. Each member of (Music For) Eggplant was first asked to write their own will. The results culminated in new compositions and sound collages that will be shown alongside funeral rituals in a durational performance throughout the opening weekend. There is a selection of video works on view in rooms 10 and 13 of the Villa Salve Hospes that provides an overview of the group’s work from recent years.
projektKLUB
In the center of the Kunstverein courtyard there is a fire pit, which is lit on certain occasions: then the campfire crackles, things get cozy, there is talking, cooking, and dancing. Everyone can sit on the benches assembled around the campfire in a variable arrangement. The fire pit is placed on a concrete base that corresponds to the floor plan of the smaller room in the Remise. This functioned as a warehouse at the time of the creation of the Villa Salve Hospes and its outbuildings, and does so now for the sitespecific installation by projektKLUB: equipment is stored here that is used for the so called “Ereignisse” (events). In addition, the wood needed for the fire in the courtyard is stacked in the foyer of the villa (in French “foyer” originally meant hearth, a combustion point, from the Vulgar Latin to Latin “focus,” meaning fireplace, hearth). The first point of welcome is – all the more invitingly – shifted outside: there is no longer a door obstructing access, including and excluding.
To put it simply, projectKLUB’s piece developed for Groups is about encounters, their potential and their imperatives. At the same time, the concept of the installation, which connects these spaces, reflects the structure, dynamics, and working methods of the group, which works together as a porous collective. There is no definite, exclusive circle of people involved, but rather a regular pool of artists who decide whether they are going to contribute or not from project to project. This is not only a practical answer to the questions that artists have to ask themselves in the divide between economics and idealism, especially after completing their education. projektKLUB also operates with an attitude that is romantic and political in equal measure: “When it comes to our political objectives, we can learn something from what seems so obvious to us in love. After all, both are a matter of mutual recognition, interaction, and unification.” (Margarete Stokowski: Untenrum frei, 2016)
Events:
ESSEN, REDEN, TANZEN
projektKLUB: ESSEN (eat)
Dienstag, 02.07.2019, 19 Uhr
projektKLUB: REDEN (talk)
Samstag, 17.08.2019, 19 Uhr
projektKLUB: TANZEN (dance)
Samstag, 24.08.2019, 19 Uhr
SUPERFLEX
Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen, and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen have been working together under the label SUPERFLEX for 26 years, developing so-called “tools” that help them explore, comment on, and counteract the economic and social structures of our present. The resulting works regularly combine a critical gaze with playful gestures. One example for this are the vibrant rainbow stripes of Euphoria Now which are based on the colors of the Euro banknotes. The eye-catching posters glued to the wall here illustrate the dichotomy between the monetary union and the community of values that characterizes the European Union. Furthermore, the lettering invokes the anti-war movie Apocalypse Now (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola, in which war is portrayed as an event that is only bearable under the influence of drugs. Through the color gradient in the background, SUPERFLEX aim the poster’s motif at that which arguably has the most addictive effect on our society: money.
SUPERFLEX respond to the near-omnipotent influence of international financial markets and speculation with a cynical twist in their work When The Leeves Broke We Bought Our House. When property markets experienced a brief significant drop following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, SUPERFLEX purchased a house in Denmark, since the temporarily low interest rate saved them $20,000. The photograph of this very house is in turn up for sale for $20,000. In case the photograph is sold, the same amount will be donated back to the people of the Lower 9th Ward Village in New Orleans—the place most affected by the devastation and flooding. The second version (Miami) is a speculative work, anticipating future natural disasters – and their economic potential. Miami is in a place at high geographical risk and will be greatly affected by climate change and the potential rise of sea levels. Hence, the house depicted in the second photograph is not documenting a purchase already made, but predicting one that could happen.
RAHMENPROGRAMM:
OPENING AND SUMMER PARTY
Friday, June 21, 2019, from 7 pm
CONCERT NOHE NOSHE
Friday, June 21, 2019
PERFORMANCE (MUSIC FOR) EGGPLANT
Friday, June 21, 2019, from 8 pm
Saturday, June 22, 2019, 2 – 9 pm*
Sunday, June 23, 2019, 2 – 5 pm
*Braunschweiger Kulturnacht
EREIGNISSE PROJEKTKLUB
projektKLUB: ESSEN (eat)
Tuesday, July 2, 2019, 7 pm
projektKLUB: REDEN (talk)
Saturday, August 17, 2019, 7 pm
projektKLUB: TANZEN (dance)
Saturday, Ausgust
LIVE PERFORMANCES CASHMERE RADIO
Thursday, August 22, 2019, all-day