Film & Video (Film & Video)

Clemens von Wedemeyer has imagined a trip back in time at Breitenau. Starting with events that happened there from 1933 to 1945, the German artist has composed three stories that reach the years of the women’s reformatory, in the 1970s, with a different protagonist for each era. A work that attempts to bring out the “pathology” of the site, as the artist tells Bert Rebhandl, and at the same time its “unforgettable” status as a black hole in the history of Germany, that sucked up innocent lives for almost a century.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Percent for Art is seemingly concerned with “art enrichment” by state or city arts agencies role in it, managing the artist rosters, maintaining public art collections, commissioning artworks, selecting installation sites, among other things for aesthetic and cultural enhancement in both public and private real estate developments. For some, it’s also an opportunity to have desperately needed revenue to counter the displacement of artists and preserve a city or state’s creative spirit. The work, with its serial repetition of percentage signs across six separate bright red panels, appears as splashy retail signage for no apparent sale.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Silberhöhe , directed at Halle, located in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), is the name of a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, which was built in the 70’s and could accommodate more 40,000 people. The opening of the film presents us with a dramatic process that transforms the documentary image. The lack of human presence makes creates a strange atmosphere in the film.

Photography (Photography)

In Stilleben mid Zierlauch ( Still Life with Aluminum) Annette Kelm utilizes visual juxtaposition to bring together a gridded aluminum backdrop, a pot with a vaguely indigenous pattern on it, and two purple dandelions. The aesthetic dissonance between the mechanical, gridded aluminum and the grainy clay pot signify an interaction between systems of visual production, furthered by the aluminum grid’s inward tilt, visually apparent due to the grid pattern’s convergence at the top of the photograph. Contrasting the stark slant of the grid, the pot sits on a level surface, while the two tall stems protruding from it run at a non-parallel angle to the grid.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Untitled is a work on paper by Martin Kippenberger comprised of several seemingly disparate elements: cut-out images of a group of dancers, a japanese ceramic vase, and a pair of legs, are all combined with gestural, hand-drawn traces and additional elements such as a candy wrapper from a hotel in Monte Carlo and a statistical form from a federal government office in Wiesbaden, Germany. Text cut out from a Newspaper spells out in German “Egg hunting in the Bavarian forest” and an additional piece of text reads in all capitals “BIN DABEI DU AUCH” (“I’m here too” in English). Together, all the messages and geographies from the separate elements suggest an alternative, highly stylized portrait of the artist; in this case, a fragmented, fluid, and itinerant sense of identity.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

7″ Single ‘Pop In’ by Martin Kippenbergher consisting of a vinyl record and a unique artwork drawn by the artist on the record’s sleeve. In the foreground of the album’s cover, a drawing of an empty, round vessel is framed underneath the text “POP IN”, suggesting an invitation to listen to the record, a nod to pop music, or perhaps a literal proposal to enter the vessel or the work. In the background, partly hidden by the round form, Kippenberger’s hand-drawn self portrait glares back at the viewer.

Installation (Installation)

Martin Kippenberger’s late collages are known for incorporating a wide range of materials, from polaroids and magazine clips to hotel stationery, decals, and graphite drawings. Untitled is a collage on paper work by Kippenberger that typifies his everything-goes approach: a barely discernible, sliced image of Michael Jackson’s face is overlaid and woven with strips and triangular shapes from a different source into a single composition. Blue tones come from torn out pages of a book where fragments of illustrations can be seen.

Photography (Photography)

Wolfgang Tillmans initiated the ongoing series Faltenwurf in 1989, representing compositions of unused clothing, with special attention paid to the ways in which they drape and fold. The title is taken from a Germanic term used in the context of art history, designating classical drapery. In this particular photograph, Faltenwurf (Stairwell) , an assortment of various colored clothes lay tangled on a set of stairs, as a sculpture of abstract forms.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Die Siedlung is a filmic documentary about the recent shift in housing developments in Leipzig-Grünau in former East Germany and its consequences on some inhabitants. It complements von Wedemeyer slightly earlier and more artistic film Silberhöhe (2003) which decried imposed Modernist living model. In Die Siedlung , a voiceover describes and criticizes the different sites on view while the camera moves slowly past a vast abandoned 1930s Nazi army barracks which has yet to be converted or demolished, the building site and wastelands for the new private single family housing area, a constructed pond and finally the 1960s or 70s communal blocks of flats.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

These two images come from the series called “State of Control” which Kilpper made in the building formerly occupied by the Stasi in Berlin. As a symbol of the past there could be none more powerful than this. By carving into its floor, Kilpper laid bare its history by making images of its occupants and political figures associated with that period of history.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Eight opens with a close up of a painting by Hubert Robert of the Chateau de Chamarande where the film was shot. This work acts as a key to the unfolding film. In Eight , the camera tracks back and forth, proceeding from room to room, closing in on each motif, lingering and then passing on without ‘comment’, as a surrogate for the spectator’s gaze.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

These two images come from the series called “State of Control” which Kilpper made in the building formerly occupied by the Stasi in Berlin. As a symbol of the past there could be none more powerful than this. By carving into its floor, Kilpper laid bare its history by making images of its occupants and political figures associated with that period of history.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In New York City’s Chinatown, subject Suat Ling Chua’s morning exercise is to practice the hula hoop. When Christian Jankowski first saw this woman he immediately got the idea to shoot Rooftop Routine . In the short video, Chua leads the group and dictates the movements that each participant has to repeat.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history. In 1995, OJ Simpson—a well-known American football player—was accused of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Based on the courtroom footage, Ezawa uses his signature style to create an abstract and graphically simplified echo of what happened in the room.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock. At first glance, due to the oversimplified silhouettes Ezawa employs, the connection between his animation and Namuth’s film may not be obvious. However, when seen side by side, Ezawa’s piece is a faithful reproduction of the scene—up until a point in which his sequence begins playing in reverse, effectively unpainting every brushstroke.

Installation (Installation)

The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations. Verging on a form of fetichism, his shoe collections are a case in point and indeed, for some exhibitions, he even asked gallery employees for their shoes. Against authorship and the commodification of art, he never gives titles or dates to his works which have infinite edition possibilities.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964). Ezawa uses his signature cartoon-like style to remix and reenact these crime scenes, leaving only the artworks as “real” objects (as they are depicted in the films), rather than illustrating them. Reversing fiction and reality in an unexpected way, this gesture invites the viewer to question the reliability of the visual footage.

Installation (Installation)

The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations. Against authorship and the commodification of art, he never gives titles or dates to his works which have infinite edition possibilities. This mise en scène of found kitchenware also exists with a rounder and flatter plain modern white porcelain teapot.

Installation (Installation)

The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations. Hats and photographs are regularly part of his appropriations and arrangements. He famously made numerous trips to England in search of old photographs when he was an antique dealer, and then worked in a gift store with his wife when he left the art world in the 1980s.

Photography (Photography)

Gutmann’s photographs Untitled Nob Hill and From the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge are some of the oldest pieces in the Kadist Collection and serve as historical anchors for many of the more recent works. Distinctly modernist in style, the photos depict two of San Francisco’s most recognizable sites—the affluent neighborhood of Nob Hill and the iconic Golden Gate Bridge—through extremely estranged angles and balanced compositions. Moreover, these two images are representative of Gutmann’s work inasmuch as they epitomize two of the photographer’s visual obsessions: the automobile and the city of San Francisco.

Photography (Photography)

Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis. Starling found photographs of a hang dating back to 1929, taken by Albert Renger-Patzsch, the German New Objectivity photographer. Firstly, he researched the artworks that were presented then which for the most part had been restituted or acquired by private collectors after the war.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Situated in German-occupied Belgium at the end of World War I, Y ou Make Me Iliad by Mary Reid Kelley focuses on the story of two. characters: a Belgian prostitute working near the frontlines and a young German soldier charged with monitoring the brothels. Harboring literary aspirations, the soldier goes in search of material to complete his novel.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Berlin Remake ( 2005) combines extracts of East German films with images filmed by the artist in Berlin. While staying in Berlin, the artist found the locations where the official films were made and she juxtaposes the two in a synchronised double projection. Therefore on one screen there is Berlin between 1945 and 1989 and on the other Berlin in 2004.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s story follows a poverty-stricken family during the German depression, as the central character, Frau Hausmann, is forced to impersonate her late husband to procure his job as a nightwatchman to support her two children. Despite her exceptional performance during the job, and even after receiving public commendation for catching a thief, when eventually her identity is discovered during a factory accident she is forced into a precarious existence where she resorts to selling herself to get by.

Painting (Painting)

During a residency in 2009 at L’appartement 22 in Rabat, the artist traveled in Morocco and Senegal on the traces of the German sculptor Arno Breker. On this occasion he learned about batik, a fabric printing technique which originates not only from Indonesia but also from Senegal. It is also widespread in Africa.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

From among a cloud of fake smoke we see a heavily pregnant Cohen wearing a bikini and golden stilettos with lace-up straps wrapped around her legs, grasping onto the frame of a modified car as its loud hydraulic system clumsily moves it up and down. Pregnant with her first child at the time of the shooting of this video, the car featured in Hydroforce is an aging East German Trabant that the artist transformed into an American El Camino lowrider over the course of a decade, and which features in several of her works. Challenging the politics of the idealized and sexualized female body and the stylized car, Hydroforce establishes a metaphorical connection with her own identity: as a woman, a mother, laborer, and a migrant.

Painting (Painting)

Masks is a series of abstract paintings by Simon Fujiwara that together form a giant, fragmented portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s face. Masks (Merkel F6.1) was created in consultation with Merkel’s personal make-up artist; it features the special makeup that Merkel wears for HD cameras applied onto canvas. The image has been magnified to a near-microscopic level, rendering an ambiguous skin tone across which the makeup’s denser patches produce an abstract composition.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ken Okiishi’s work Being and/or Time consists of every image taken with Okiishi’s iPhone over the period of three years in his hometown of New York. Flickering in chronological order at 24 images per second with 25,000 images in total. A visual diary of the digital age it simultaneously stages the city itself as a time-­image continuously remade by its own resident-­users.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Addressing the legacy of colonialism, The Guestbook by Musquiqui Chihying and Gregor Kasper is a slow-paced, black-and-white film exploring the German colony of Togoland, now the Republic of Togo. The guestbook in question—a thin, battered copy that Do Do, the Togolese protagonist of the film, finds in Berlin’s State Library—is filled with the signatures of colonial-era explorers. The plot follows Do Do as he seeks out Treptower Park, where the JAZZ musician Kwassi Bruce was once exhibited in a human zoo in the first German Colonial Exhibition.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Martha Colburn’s film, Western Wild … or How I Found Wanderlust and Met Old Shatterhand , about the famed German author Karl May weaves together a mixture of stop motion animation, travelogue and biography that generates a kind of sensory wanderlust. Conflating past and present, the film investigates issues of identity and representation, as well as violence and war. The artist considers imagination as an invitation to dream, in order to disrupt the limitations of the everyday context and widen her viewers’ horizons.