Asta Gröting
1 May – 13 June 2010
Opening: Friday, 30 April, 7 pm
Chausseestraße 128/129
10115 Berlin
Germany
T +49 30 2807020
F +49 30 2807019
nbk [at] nbk.org
Gröting, born in 1961, now lives in Berlin and teaches at Hochschule der Künste in Braunschweig. She studied at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie under the influence of Joseph Beuys. Since the 1980s, her sculptures have enjoyed international recognition, and beginning in the 1990s her work expanded in terms of media use, now incorporating video and performance.
Terms from Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984) have been etched into the exhibition space’s black glass façade. They represent various indicators of the life-styles of workers, businessmen, and teachers.
In her sculptures, the most varied materials are used, such as pearls, magnets, bronze, glass, cable, or motors. The work Käfig (Cage, 1995) is a floating cube made of 2,000 pearls, which are hung on nylon threads. In so doing, despite a minimal use of material a large volume emerges. In Einen Funken Leidenschaft (A Spark of Passion, 2008), every few seconds a spark leaps between two cables that are installed in a 2cm large hole in the wall. Gröting’s sculptures combine what is apparently visible and the invisible, and explore human corporeality. Gröting’s sculptures have a social dimension, for they place our physicality in a broadened discourse about the development process of our life, that takes place in the realm between the self and the community and allows new forms of subjectivation to emerge.
In the filmic block of works The Inner Voice (1993-2004), Gröting developed a video series with ventriloquists around the world using texts written by oneself and in collaboration with select authors such as Tim Etchells and Deborah Levy. The dummy, in dialog with the ventriloquists and the audience, reflects the unsaid, the suppressed as well as the trivial. In the foreground of this series are everyday psycho-social acts as artistic material, contrasting with the materiality of the sculptures.
The live performance Abbaya (2010) by Asta Gröting will take place daily from May 1 to June 13, except for Mondays, between 4 and 6 pm.
Curated by Marius Babias
Book series “n.b.k. exhibitions”
In cooperation with Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, a catalog is published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 200 pages with color illustrations, German/English.
Program
Thursday, May 6, 2010
7 pm Sculpture Today
Discussion with Ruth Noack (freelance curator and writer, curator documenta 12 [2007], Berlin) and Jan Hoet (artistic director, documenta 9 [1992], Brussels) Moderated by André Rottmann (chief editor Texte zur Kunst, Berlin) Thursday, May 20, 2010 7 pm Exhibition talk with Sophie Goltz (communication/education n.b.k.)
Thursday, June 3, 2010
7 pm Artist talk with Asta Gröting (artist) and Marius Babias (director n.b.k.)
Sunday, June 13, 2010
from 5 pm Cooking performance with Hocine Bouhlou, Sebastian Stöhrer (artists, Frankfurt/Main) from 7 pm Concert with Dirty Mirrors (Frank Lutz, John Miller, Aura Rosenberg, New York/Berlin)
n.b.k. Showroom
Gruppenbild 2
Discoteca Flamig Star, El valar del gallo negro (Buthe–Turm–Börse), 2010
May 4–June 11, 2010
n.b.k. Video-Forum
Video Of The Month 2
Barbard Golshiri, Jalqx, 2006
May 4–June 11, 2010
Opening hours
Exhibition
Tuesday-Sunday, 12am–6pm
Thursday, 12am–8pm
Showroom/Video-Forum
Tuesday/Thursday, 2–8pm
Wednesday/Friday, 2–6pm
Contact
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein n.b.k.
Chausseestraße 128/129
10115 Berlin, Germany
T +49 30 2807020
F +49 30 2807019
nbk@nbk.org
Supported by
