Katarina Zdjelar: Towards a Further Word
Luise Schröder: Figures of Remembrance
February 8–April 27, 2014
Opening: Friday, February 7, 7pm
Bielefelder Kunstverein
im Waldhof
Welle 61
D-33602 Bielefeld
Germany
www.bielefelder-kunstverein.de
From February 8 to April 27, the Bielefelder Kunstverein is presenting two solo exhibitions by Katarina Zdjelar and Luise Schröder.
Katarina Zdjelar
Towards a Further Word
Katarina Zdjelar’s artistic practice consists of videos, sound works, books as well as curated exhibitions. Her works involve embodied responses to historical and geo-political constraints placed on individual or collective desires. She explores the cultural abstraction of familiar codes, the effects of translation as well as the socio-political and economic overtone of a musical score. Furthermore Zdjelar investigates the becoming physical of spoken words, the voice as an actant and the act of speaking within and without a defined group or community. For example, the familiar in a foreign language, the moment when a musical performance preserves its rehearsed traces, or a speech training aimed at shedding a personal accent coincide both as her main topic and as material. Through moving image and sound, Zdjelar impressively captures these processes of appropriation.
Katarina Zdjelar’s first solo exhibition in a German art institution concentrates on a specific selection of works from the last six years. The artist is showing a total of six videos as well as a recent text piece. Zdjelar’s works formulate visual-acoustic speculations to social, political or psychological questions of our day. Within the exhibition, they are made visible through the embodiment of language and music.
Katarina Zdjelar, born in the former Yugoslavia in 1979, lives and works in Rotterdam (Netherlands) and in Belgrade (Republic of Serbia). She studied at the Piet Zwart Institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy, at the Belgrade Centre for Contemporary Theatre and Performance Art and at the Belgrade University of Arts. Most recently, the Museum of Contemporary Art Artium (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain) (2013), the Galerie Stadtpark Krems (Austria) und SpazioA (Pistoia, Italy) (both 2012) have shown her work in solo exhibitions. In 2013, Zdjelar was represented by works in group exhibitions in, among others, the Total Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul, Korea), in the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (Dortmund) and the 5th Moscow Biennial (RU).
Curator: Thomas Thiel
Luise Schröder
Figures Of Remembrance
In her photographic works, videos, publications and art mediation projects, Luise Schröder confronts the ways in which the past is instrumentalised for present-day politics as well as the extrapolation of historical myths and their meaning for identities and communities. Central to her concerns is the question as to how far official commemoration is influenced by political, social and medial developments. Here, the artist is particularly interested in national cultures of remembrance, but also in global forms of commemoration, their ritual character and iconography. She investigates both their presence in space, as memorials, and the way the media stage and communicate them. In this vein, the artist has dealt in her works with, among other things, the myth of Dresden, the world’s biggest statue of Jesus in Świebodzin (Poland), as well as the memorial The Victory of the Red Army over Fascism by Vincenc Makovský in Brno (Czech Republic). For Schröder, the past is not a closed book but it remains open and directly connected to the present. Through her own images, the artist sets up against political myths and their reproduction a critical stance on history and the culture of remembrance.
The exhibition Figures of Remembrance at Bielefelder Kunstverein is the artist’s first solo exhibition in a public art institution. Luise Schröder presents her latest multimedia installation, Die historische Front (2013), alongside two topical groups of her work from recent years.
Luise Schröder, born in Potsdam in 1982, lives and works in Leipzig. Until 2013, she was studying photography and media art at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts. In recent years, Schröder has taken part in numerous group exhibitions, among others in the Brno House of Arts (CZ), the Gera Kunstverein (both 2013) and the Gallery EIGEN+ART (Berlin/Leipzig), the Leipzig Kunstverein and the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (all 2012). Alongside numerous other distinctions, the artist won the C/O Talents Award in 2012 and most recently the City of Zwickau’s Max-Pechstein-Förderpreis.
Curator: Anna Jehle
Exhibition support
The exhibition of Katarina Zdjelar is kindly supported by the Mondriaan Fund.
Publication
To mark the exhibitions, a 28-page brochure was published (German/English). In April 2014 a publication including a further discussion of Katarina Zdjelar’s work will be released.
Press
For press requests, please send us an email via kontakt [at] bielefelder-kunstverein.de or call us on +49 521 17 88 06. High-resolution press images can be downloaded from our website: bielefelder-kunstverein.de.
