Nina Hoffmann
Ich brauche wenig Wirklichkeit (I Need Little Reality)
28 June–28 September 2014
Joint opening: Friday, June 27, 6pm
GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst Bremen
Teerhof 21
28199 Bremen
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–6pm,
Thursday 11am–8pm
T +49 421 500 897
Nadira Husain
Beugen Strecken (Bend Stretch)
28 June–14 September 2014
Künstlerhaus Bremen
Am Deich 68 – 98
28199 Bremen
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 2–7pm
T +49 421 508 598
With Ich brauche wenig Wirklichkeit (I need little reality, sourced from an interview with Heinrich Böll) the GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst opens the first institutional solo show of Berlin-based artist Nina Hoffmann. Hoffmann’s artistic work revolves around human desire. What do we desire and why? Do the objects of our desire exist in factual reality? Or do we tend to pursue mere ideas and projections? Where do the borders between reality and projection/ideal lie? How are they defined? Is it possible to render them visible? Hoffmann is interested in the narratives of everyday life which are common to us all: our daily routines, our aspirations, the factors that shape our perceptions, the courses of action that we pursue to fulfill our desires…
Ich brauche wenig Wirklichkeit stages different aspects of desire and plays through various “narrations of love” (Nina Hoffmann). Approaching love as a defining element of everyday life—indeed a Leitmotif of human existence—the exhibition explores the expectations and ideals with which we fetter love, the disappointments with which it presents us, and the clichés of advertising, film and the boulevard press which weigh so heavy upon it. Working across the mediums of text and photography, film and installation, ready-made and slide projection, the exhibition has been carefully adapted to the GAK’s space.
Our relation to images is conditioned by the various pictorial conventions of Western culture. Nadira Husain (born 1980 in Paris, lives and works in Paris and Berlin) addresses them in her work, albeit decidedly not from a traditional Western male perspective. Her generally figurative pictures display the influence of both Indian miniatures and the feminist theoretical discourse. This atypical combination results on the one hand from an exploration of Husain’s own Indian roots as well as from her reflection about current social and political structures on the other.
In her first institutional solo exhibition, titled Beugen Strecken (Bend Stretch), the artist dismantles the classical articulation between frame and painting, motif and background. Picture and frame are accordingly no longer directly connected, visual elements are fragmented, ornament and main figure taken apart. The pattern’s proliferation and dissemination through the exhibition space dissolve the usual connections between wall, frame and image with the intent to reassemble these components within a different dynamic. Nadira Husain’s formal research reflects tension fields that are emerging within today’s society amid a desire to emancipate from traditions and the yearning for them.
The exhibitions at Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst and Künstlerhaus Bremen are respectively supported by:
