Kerstin Cmelka
with Manuel Gorkiewicz, Mario Mentrup, Hanno Millesi and Mandla Reuter
Atrium
Marie Lund
Flush
30 January–6 April 2015
Opening: Thursday, 29 January, 7 pm
Badischer Kunstverein
Waldstraße 3
D-76133 Karlsruhe
Germany
info [at] badischer-kunstverein.de
Kerstin Cmelka
with Manuel Gorkiewicz, Mario Mentrup, Hanno Millesi and Mandla Reuter
Friday, 6 March, 8.30pm
Performance by Kerstin Cmelka
featuring Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann, Hanno Millesi and Mario Mentrup
Pasadena Projekt in concert
(Mario Mentrup, Claudia Basrawi and Nikolaus Woernle)
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 with video, photography and performance. Her works often depart from popular models of theatre, art and film, which Cmelka adapts and repeats.
The exhibition centers around the “microdramas,” a series of works that she has been producing since 2008: short dramatic fragments, interviews and songs, in which the artist re-stages familiar theatre dialogues, clichéd scenes from feature films, 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. The presentation 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 by Cmelka to integrate single works into her installations, the very ones in which they were involved as actors, advisors, mentors, or friends.
Curated by Anja Casser
Kindly supported by the Austrian Federal Chancellery.
Mikrodrama #11 is presented in cooperation with Kunstverein Langenhagen.
Kerstin Cmelka (b. 1974) lives and works in Berlin.
Atrium
Marie Lund
Flush
Flush is the Danish artist Marie Lund’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. The exhibition focuses on a new series of sculptures, Torso (2014–2015), which is accompanied by further recent works.
Lund’s practice is a genuinely sculptural one, even though her works clearly undermine conventional notions of sculptural form and materiality. Lund is more interested in the transformation of the material, how it is initiated 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.
The artist concentrates on the surface of an object, which communicates between the interior and the exterior like a delicate membrane. The canvases in Stills (2014) are used curtains, faded by sunlight over the years. In the central work Torso, Lund consistently continues her interest in the relation between 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. They are conceived as both separate sculptures and as pedestals for smaller objects from the series The Very White Marbles (2009-2014), Casts (2014) or Hand Full (2014). Playing with these presumed discrepancies between material and form, body and surface, figurativeness and abstraction is paradigmatic for Lund’s complex concept of sculpture.
Curated by Anja Casser
Marie Lund (b. 1976) lives and works in London.
Talks & events
“Writing through loss and residue as an attempt to remember”
Lecture by Pieternel Vermoortel
Wednesday, 11 February, 7pm
The Song and Dance Exercise
Performance by Kerstin Cmelka
Friday, 6 March, 8:30pm
featuring Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann, Hanno Millesi and Mario Mentrup
The True Horrorfilm Has Not Yet Been Made
Pasadena Projekt in concert
(Mario Mentrup, Claudia Basrawi and Nikolaus Woernle)
Brunch & artist talk with Kerstin Cmelka
Saturday, 7 March, 11am
Artist talk with Marie Lund
Wednesday, 25 March, 7pm
