If Everything is Connected, Everything is Vulnerable

Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) announces the completion of the scholarship programme Braunschweig Projects 2019–20. Featuring the works of Sajan Mani, FRAUD, Sangun Ho, Bethan Hughes and Alina Schmuch in a two-part exhibition at HBK gallery titled If Everything is Connected, Everything is Vulnerable (FRAUD & Sajan Mani: Octoebr 21–30, 2020 / Sanggeun Ho, Bethan Hughes & Alina Schmuch: November 4-13, 2020)

Sajan Mani, an intersectional artist from South India, has recently received artistic research grant from Berliner Senat, Braunschweig Projects Scholarship and Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship. His critically acclaimed solo show Alphabet of Touch><Overstretched Bodies and Muted Howls for Songs is a pioneering attempt to voice the problems of caste oppression and social history of rubber.

During the scholarship, Sajan has recycled the thrice produced German film Das Indische Grabmal and Der Tiger von Eschnapur, rediscovering Indianness as an ambiguous cultural construct made in Europe and assembled in India.

FRAUD (Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo) is a duo of artists-researchers, who develop modes of art-led inquiry into the extractive gaze of the European Union’s institutions and policies. FRAUD has been recently commissioned by the Contemporary Art Archipelago, and the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial and their work has been shown at Fotomuseum Winterthur, the 57th Venice Biennale and the Whitechapel Gallery, among others.

With gánigos made of glass melted from Gran Canaria’s Hesperian beaches, Jable Pardo - Viele Grüße aus Canaria develops a critical spatial literacy into the illegal mining of sand in Western Sahara to adorn the Canary Islands, a testimony to the collapsing of extractive operations, the weaponizing of archaeological evidences, and tourism-led development as propaganda during Spain’s Francoist Regime.

Sangun Ho is an artist who records what he sees or hears. Since 2012, he has been working on the ongoing project Hosangun Reproduction Office in which he listens to people’s views and dreams and reproduces them. He has participated in a number of group exhibitions at ACC Creation (KR) and SeMA (KR), and published the books Spring Summer Autumn Winter and Detached View. Recently, he received the Braunschweig Projects Scholarship and contributed to Art Sonje’s Web platform, HOMEWORK.

During the scholarship, Things I’ve seen, Things you’ve seen creates a place where the eyes of the people he has met and his views on the city are depicted.

Artist and researcher Bethan Hughes presents Hevea: Act 1, the first in a series of works investigating the relationship between natural latex rubber—a vegetal substance intertwined with the rise of capitalism, modernity and imperialism—and humanity. Using archival material gathered from the Berlin Botanical Garden as a point of departure, act 1 brings together machine-learning animation, print and sculpture to tell a story of how rubber creates an elastic continuum between past and future, nature and culture, ritual and function.

Hughes is co-director of the AV platform, Poor Image Projects. In 2020, she received a PhD for her thesis, Against Immateriality: 3D CGI and Contemporary Art.

Based on documentary photography and its extension in the medium of film, Alina Schmuch develops publications and photographic installations. Her current project revolves around the technological development of water infrastructures. She is working with imagery that is used to monitor the interconnected waterways above and underground—from a historical archive of the Ruhr Area as well as photos shot by inspection robots nowadays. Her work has been shown at ZKM Karlsruhe, Museum Folkwang Essen and the 15th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, among others.

The HBK is an internationally orientated art university with the right to grant doctorates and the right of habilitation. With 1000 students in Fine Art, Design, Aesthetics and Art History as well as Media Studies, the HBK is one of the largest art academies in Germany.

On the occasion of Braunschweig Projects the HBK announces several scholarships in Fine Art and Sound Art to be awarded on behalf of the Federal State of Lower Saxony. These scholarships are funded by the State of Lower Saxony and part of the programme for the support of emerging artists at the HBK.