Spring program

Kunstverein Braunschweig is pleased to announce its spring program.

Luís Lázaro Matos: Hotel Dodo
March 11, 2023–May 21, 2023

Hotel Dodo presents Luís Lázaro Matos’ research on the nature of the Mauritius Islands. What began as a tourist trip evolved into a contemplation on natural resources, the extinction of local fauna, and their colonial roots and backgrounds. A sequence of large-scale immersive spaces transformed the ground floor of the Villa Salve Hospes, for the Portuguese artist’s first institutional exhibition in Germany.

Matos’ interest lies in the juxtaposition of architecture and fiction. It focuses on how intimate and social processes shape the way space is constructed and experienced. The artist often incorporates storytelling as a means to construct not only pictorial and spatial arrangements, but also to address social norms, political agendas, and queerness. In Luís Lázaro Matos’ figurative installations and paintings, humor and drama are always close together. However, his works are not only light-hearted and humorous; they also manage to convey complex ideas that address current social and philosophical issues and shape contemporary ways of life. Matos’ fable-like installations allows him to develop narratives that focus on the psychological characteristics of the human being as opposed to its external appearance.

Curator: Nuno de Brito Rocha

Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic*: Active Intolerance
March 11, 2023–May 21, 2023

Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic* works with video and sculpture, performance and photography and creates her* artistic works through long research processes. For her* first solo exhibition at a German Kunstverein, the artist presents major works from her* oeuvre, as well as new works produced especially for Braunschweig. These works deal with prison labor, case studies of Austrian and German corporate and collection histories and the racist legacy of the colonial Habsburg monarchy. The exhibition entitled Active Intolerance exposes mechanisms of social exclusion and the ongoing urge to incarcerate in familial as well as in institutional spaces. It approaches abolition as a queer project, based on a demand for ‘active intolerance’ towards all institutions that depend on the idea of punishment, confinement and detention. Active Intolerance is thus directed against all carceral systems, such as normative kinship relations, colonial gender systems and patriarchal conditions of production.

The Guestroom holds a contribution by the “Gedenkstätte in der JVA Wolfenbüttel.” The memorial center has brought to light that during the Nazi era there was a dense network of external commandos, places of forced labor, execution and burial sites that was deeply rooted in society and permeated the urban area of Braunschweig.

Curator: Benedikt Johannes Seerieder

Arijit Bhattacharyya: From Forests We Are And Forests We Will Be
March 11, 2023–May 21, 2023

Arijit Bhattacharyya is an Indian artist who works with installation, textile works, drawing and painting, film, performance and cooking. Most of his works emphasize the collective as well as the experience and the search for interaction and dialogue. The works are collaborative projects involving various local communities from the artist’s social environment in Germany and his native India. In this sense, the resulting artistic works are collective works and are usually experienced together during talks, lectures, performances or workshops and thus activated.

From Forests We Are And Forests We Will Be is Arijit Bhattacharyya’s first institutional solo exhibition. New works by the artist will be exhibited in the Remise of the Kunstverein, serving as a starting point for a series of workshops and lecture-performances, conceived and carried out together with the artist.

The project is conceived in collaboration with Binita Limbani, Shibayan Halder, Suvojit Roy, Soumik Ghosh, Swagata Bhattacharyya, Santanu Dey, Sourav Das, Sk Atiar Rahaman, Joydip Bagui, Prosenjit Ghosh, Arijit Achariya, Arup Halder, Subradip Ojha, Sujon Ojha, Sumon Ojha, Somansu Ghosh, Joy Malik and Mokai Ali Mallick.

Curator: Nuno de Brito Rocha

Events
Lecture performance, How Political is (y)our curry
March 30, 6–8pm, with Arijit Bhattacharyya

Workshop, Future of Food, 2023: April 6, 6pm
Part 1, with Arijit Bhattachryya

Curators’ tour on Active Intolerance: April 13, 6pm
With Benedikt Johannes Seerieder

Bicycle tour: April 27, 6–8pm
To external labor sites of the Wolfenbüttel prison under national socialism

Workshop, Future of Food, 2023: May 4, 6pm
Part 2., with Arijit Bhattachryya

Online conversation: May 10, 6pm
On economic exploitation and social exclusion in prisons, with Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic*

Workshop, Future of Food, 2023: May 11, 6pm
Part 3, with Arijit Bhattachryya

The exhibitions have been made possible by: